HN user
Just off the top of my head: every engineer should have 6+ months of savings. Market isn't great but our salaries can help build those savings easy.
If I had more time, I would love to understand the fss market better and also what impact ai is having there. I don't see a Q3 earnings report from Dropbox, but as others have pointed out in other comments, Dropbox seems to have been doing fine financially.
Don't people have savings? Don't people see what's happening in the industry and make sure to have 6+ months of savings? Don't people think that putting away a small portion of their immense tech salary would be a healthy thing to do?
People often have long term financial commitments they cannot back out of, and not knowing how you'll make rent, if you can afford your child's school fees, or even maybe having to cut back on how much you eat, _is stressful_ and emotionally taxing.
I'm sure people making >200k/year and getting a 4 month severance package will be cutting back on how much they eat.
What you say is true about low or even medium income jobs. But most of the cuts are to tech workers and their managers, ie. people best equipped to manage in this kind of event.
I'm sad to see so much venom in these comments. HN of old would have tried to delve into the details and find something to learn from this.
People come in two flavors: conflict theorists and mistake theorists.
Conflict theorists think that every event is a result of power struggler. So if someone gets hurt, someone must be punished for that.
Mistake theorists think that the world is complex and sometimes bad stuff happens because most people operate with good intentions most of the time. Often, that means no punishment needs to be metted out.
To mistake theorists, conflict theorists look like ideological blood thirsty savages. To conflict theorists, mistake theorists look like enemy troops.
This is a gross oversimplification but it always shocks me to see how much more conflict theorists there are on hn now than before. So many comments here blaming the CEO or capitalism, most of which are going off extremely scant information.
How is my comment uncharitable?
The OP made strong statements with weak backing. Their statements were also placing blame. Your profile says you're an SRE--can you imagine a post mortem with that kind of attitude?
Actually, I know why. It's because they have too much money and when you have too much cash, you start splurging without thinking and then one day the chickens come home to roost.
This is an incredibly uncharitable and shallow take, on the level of that comment many years ago that said something along the lines of "what's so interesting about Dropbox? It's just rsync, I could build it in a weekend".
We don't operate in a perfectly legible world, especially more so when it comes to people. It's all bets and risks and whatnot.
If you or anyone has the power to create perfectly aligned and efficient organization, I'm waiting here to see you build large multi-trillion dollar companies. Let me know how it goes.
Is there anything behind this stance or just pure simple misanthropy?
At first, I thought this was satire, but then the joke never landed. The author cites "Modern Physics, 8th ed." but then ignores everything in the book. This posting is fantasy in the same vein as "we can have personal jetpacks for everyone by 1995."
There is a lot of money to be made in air travel. If commercial flights were cost-effective, they would be operating today at scale. It isn't a regulatory issue; it's strictly economics. If someone could demonstrate the technology the author describes, indefinite amounts of money would flow to them. It hasn't happened. It's not happening anywhere in the world.
Finally, the author talks about building massive fleets of airplanes as though it is a trivial thing. A significant portion of global fuel consumption goes to aviation today. The author conveniently sidesteps the issue of producing enough fuel and managing the environmental impact just to keep these planes in the air. Why was this even posted to Hacker News?
Yes. To elaborate, I think the effect of bans is so small that it's probably not even measurable because we have become amazingly good at distributing textual information.
That does not argue for shutting down libraries. It doesn't make an argument for what to do with libraries at all.
The question is one of magnitude, not of simple occurrence.
My argument is that de facto banning has little or no effect on accessibility. I'm sure the described book bans have decreased the probability of certain books being read, but again, what is the magnitude of the change? If I were to guess, it's so small as to be almost unmeasurable.
But is it the matter or the teacher--their own approach or lack of ability--that discourages kids from reading? It's not clear which is the case here.
My very uncharitable take, but one that I have to entertain as potentially true, is that this is the exact skill some teachers want to deprive their students of.
You misunderstand my argument but I'm not sure which part of it is confusing.
It's almost as if there are beautiful, deep lessons being passed down by people who lived before us.
I find the authors argument unpersuasive. I was one of those rebellious teenagers growing up and it was exactly in Dostoyevsky and Arthur Koestler and Umberto Eco that I found refuge and companionship. Maybe because they were so different than me and my peers, they offered me a glimpse into different ways of thinking and seeing.
> We ban books, scrutinize classroom libraries, demonize librarians, and demoralize teachers.
How true are these allegations?
For example, book banning. This source mentions that some books get banned from libraries: https://www.ala.org/bbooks/book-ban-data. But i assume all of these books can be obtained via a bookstore or online retailer. Even if someone argues that it puts books out of reach because of price, I cannot believe that since one can get used books from what for as little as $3-5, or 15 minutes of googling can give them access to PDFs and epubs to tens of thousands of public domain books or millions(?) pirated books that can be read on tablets and phones which have saturated everyone's hands.
I understand that removing books from a library is bad in principle. But pragmatically I can't see a problem with books being made in accessible.
How is increased FCP, LCP, ttvc better ux and DX? We've had hard data that decreasing page load time make for better user experience[0].
Please don't make this an Us vs. Them thing.
[0] http://glinden.blogspot.com/2006/11/marissa-mayer-at-web-20....
There's no cost to building slow, fragile, and inefficient websites.
When you build programs that run on _your_ computers, you have to pay for that. Or at least have to deal with the finance folks asking why your cloud spend increased 5%.
But if you run your software on other people's devices, like frontend devs do, there's barely any cost to that. Any negative signals need to trickle in through user reports, support tickets, and maybe Twitter posts. There's a ton of selection going on there so you're likely not getting the full picture.
Ie. It's all about incentives
If we want full employment, we should mandate people use spoons instead of shovels.
Similar experience.
Started with html 3.2/xhtml and css as a kid. Some years later got a job and did Django + jQuery, but found myself drawn into infra. A year ago I worked alongside a web dev team and decided to peek into their work--nothing made sense anymore. The amount of complexity was staggering. It seemed like they spent most of their time managing that complexity, eg. reducing build times, solving dependency problems, solving weird TS issues, handling errors in different components, etc.
In the Django+jQuery days, the emphasis was still always on what user got to see and use.
Why bring in all that extra complexity in the first place, even if it works?
Unless there's a good reason to, like long-lived sessions or a complex, updating UI, then I can't think of a reason to send a truckload of js to the user that eats through their CPU like a baby eats through a tub of icecream.
Not everyone in the world is sporting the newest MacBook and iPhone. Hell, I'm using a pixel 8 and some sites or components take _seconds_ to load (eg. Twitter search drop-down).
These are some of my favorite books about software because of how they reveal a specific human mind at work. And they're the only ones that I felt effectively taught me about design. Having books list design patterns felt much less useful than having books walk the reader through looking at code and making decisions about which patterns to apply and where
I wish there would be more books in this series.
I see a lot of mentions here of the US embargo as if it's the only factor in why Cuba is so poor.
Unfortunately, it appears to be mostly misinformation. Noah Smith lays out quite well why Cuba's poor state is mainly due to poor policy of the single party state: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/why-cuba-is-having-an-economic...
Additionally, just skimming the wiki page about Cuba's economy points out how false the embargo narrative is: Cubas top export partners are China, Spain, Netherlands, and Germany. Cuba's top import partners are: Spain, China, Italy, Canada, Brazil, and... The US.
Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Cuba
It's ironic that there's a comment here supporting the misinformation about the embargo that points out how this state of affairs lasts because of manufacturing consent while it itself appears to be a result of manufacturing consents in the theme of "America Bad"