nateabele

How many arrests does it take to chill free speech?

Push it!

I can happily pick up the torch on everything except the PCB design.

I wonder how many different federal and state bureaucracies govern the manufacture & operation of commercial aircraft.

All it would take is for one of them to require senior leadership to take a certain number of flights (per year, let's say) on each new model of aircraft they ship. This would be solved immediately.

Two nodes, and either two edges with one arrow each, or one edge with two arrows.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

That's the hypothetical half of the equation. The tangible, measurable half is how many people the FDA has killed by denying access to life-saving treatments. A number of studies[0] have been conducted on this topic.

[0] https://www.fdareview.org/issues/theory-evidence-and-example...

Indeed. Never mind the fact that all transactions take place on an immutable public ledger that’s available forever…

The drop in price has a great deal to do with improving technology not simply competition driving down prices

And this improved technology was an inevitable, foregone conclusion?

People make arguments like this as if it was some passive thing, as opposed to thousands if not millions of conscious decisions to improve turbines, airframes, and myriad other technologies, then actually implement them in real aircraft, then acquire and deploy a commercial fleet.

People made these decisions because they were incentivized to trade time and money today for material improvements tomorrow. Why do you think that might have been?

Hint: think about industries where there isn't much competition. Do we see similar improvements there, usually?

Sure, but the point is, a halfway decent type system will eliminate whole classes of errors—consequently eliminating whole swaths of things you would ever need to write tests for.

What's more, though, is that a good type system will help you 'Make Impossible States Impossible'[0]—even more behavior you don't have to test because bad behavior is simply not representable in your program.

Tests are strictly more powerful in the small, because they can be arbitrarily complex, but I would say a (really good) type system is more powerful in the large, because you get way more leverage in terms of overall program correctness.

A lot of my personal projects are in Elm (yeah, yeah, bring on the hate)—the models are really well-defined, but the test suites usually only have a handful of tests of behavior I really want to verify. Haven't even played with the property checker yet, but again, that's something that is strictly more powerful than unit tests, but you can only get it* if you have a type system.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcgmSRJHu_8

* Okay that's not really true: see clojure.spec in Clojure—but there are so few counterexamples that it's true for most practical purposes

For whatever it's worth to you, I don't think of myself as easily impressed. I saw Ted give that demo at a small conference around 10 years ago. I was impressed.

Whatever part you played in that, well done, and thank you.

I got to speak with him briefly afterwards, and to say that he had a chip on his shoulder would be putting it too strongly, but there was definitely some kind of an 'edge' there.

I've worked at a number of financial institutions including two banks.

I spent 5 years in fintech and touched over a dozen financial institutions. You're not thinking creatively enough. Plus everyone has to do KYC/AML, including two-bit money transmitter startups.

And compliance issues by HSBC et al is a direct result of a lack of proper AML/KYC systems and processes.

Hah, okay. Even if that were true, just keep walking down the menu: JPM knew Jeffrey Epstein was their customer, too.

Things this article fails to address:

1) That AML creates a massive honeypot of data for hackers, housed at institutions which historically have structural challenges with technology investment

2) The real, material downsides felt by non-criminals, as expressed by many others in this thread

3) That the sum total financial activity of criminals who would benefit from the lack of AML is likely a rounding error compared to money laundering carried out by banks like HSBC

4) The philosophical position that governments are entitled to dragnet surveil law-abiding citizens in order to combat crime

This is Hacker News. Please keep your religion out of the comments.

This is the blog post I want to read. What’s your setup for that?

It’s germane in the sense that what you’re arguing against is a rounding error by comparison, consequently, not a material argument against cash-based money laundering in any meaningful sense.

The real cop-out is that HSBC and friends launder more money for terrorists and human traffickers on a bad day than your typical local racket does in a year, and they only ever receive a token fine and slap on the wrist.

The answer is simple: identity. Insecurity comes when we find our identity in our work and our ability to do it—but our value as people does not and could never derive from it.

Think of it this way: do your friends or family care about you based on your ability to perform to a certain standard? Of course not! (At least I hope not... that's its own problem).

Once you no longer identify with your work, you're able to take the emotion out of it, because it no longer affects how you feel about yourself. When you get to that point, you'll be able to see every experience as an opportunity to learn and improve, no matter who or where it comes from, which is the ultimate goal.

As far as dealing with other people, it's a lot easier once you've figured yourself out. You're better able to recognize that everyone's on their own journey, and their ability to deliver feedback in a constructive way is more about them than it is about you. Once you internalize these things, you'll start to care a lot less about their opinion of you.

Also, from my own experience, learning to confidently look stupid (i.e. admit that I have no idea about something), has been one of the biggest and most successful hacks of my career.

In summary: You are not your work. Focus on your own journey, and unsubscribe from giving a crap about what other people think about you. Conversely, it'll earn you more respect.

On the other hand, 150k is an astronomical sum for most people on the planet—and no one is being forced into accepting that as a market rate, or even living in a high-rent city, particularly post-COVID.

I still don’t understand this idea that labor supposedly has some sort of intrinsic value. The value is derived from the labor being done in the context of a system created by someone else. As others have said, if you want to reap the full value of your labor, you’re free to go it alone.

Yeah, I like this and other similar suggestions. Either generic task-related icons, or if you're going to personify them in some way, use bots or something similar.

Some friends run a platform called Transloadit, and they used to use little bot icons[0] for each of their processing jobs, and that seems to have worked well for them.

[0] https://transloadit.com/docs/transcoding/handling-uploads/up...

I was ready to install it when I clicked the link, until I saw the persona thing. Feels super bizarre and it's a huge turn-off. I dunno, maybe it's just me.

One of the main roles of government is to step in where markets fail.

Because that's worked out great so far?

In every case I can think of, the government (usually because it's already captured) only ever serves to further exacerbate the issue.

It's not you. K8s' design is terrible: the combinatorial explosion of nouns to learn is specifically because the abstractions are bad. It's quintessential of an industry that self-selects for high comfort with complexity.

I should know — it's been my livelihood since I graduated from college in late 2019.

Yeah... no comment.

The real mind-hack is that people believe it's exclusively one or the other, and argue vociferously against the other side. George Orwell once wrote of the Spanish Civil War:

"Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as the heroes of imaginary victories, and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that had never happened. I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various ‘party lines’."

This has always happened, and it's still happening. Anybody remember the Ghost of Kyiv, or the 'fuck you' surrender?

No, 'everything we see out of Ukraine' is not a lie (which in itself is a false dichotomy: we've seen plenty of 'facts' framed in a way that's explicitly misleading), but the overwhelming preponderance of the evidence of the past ~year, not to mention the rest of human history, suggests that a lot of it probably is.

So, that's accurate, but doesn't correspond to the situation. At all.

'Escape hatches' are definitionally exceptions to the rules, whereas effects in React are standard practice.

Yes—and for many reasons, of which this is a teardrop in the ocean.

This is where WASI (WebAssembly System Interface) comes in.

And for just that give up all the freedom docker runtimes give us?

Constraints give you freedom because they allow you to make guarantees. Checksums, reliable test suites, and good software abstractions are all examples.

I don’t want to be forced to use go or rust - maybe I’d like to use bash, node or even the jvm depending on the problem I need to solve.

Those are runtimes, not languages. Here's a list of languages that compile to WASM: https://www.fermyon.com/wasm-languages/webassembly-language-...

IMO bash wouldn't make sense, but Java and Kotlin are there, as well as AssemblyScript, which is basically TypeScript.

Hope this makes sense and that I understood your point accurately!

I'm happy to hear all of that and, yes, I believe you did.

Docker [...] is singularly focused on the development experience, i.e. the inner loop of code/test/build, not the outer loop of deploying to production (which is largely controlled by cloud platforms and k8s at this point).

I would push back on this a bit: although it may not be a focus, and that's totally fair, deployment is undeniably part of the developer experience, particularly within the context that containers were born into (i.e. DevOps values of continuous deployment & no silos). I certainly wouldn't presume to tell you what to do, but I would suggest that Docker is uniquely situated to address developer experience from end to end.

We will happily work with anyone interested in working with us to improve the production/deployment landscape for Wasm

If you gave us a path out of containers for the end-to-end developer experience, I believe many of us would be eternally grateful. Let me know how I can help.

Hey Tim, I appreciate your willingness to engage. What I'm getting at is a bit more pointed. In terms of composability, Docker and WASM are opposites: Docker requires a stand-alone runtime, and an orchestration layer, etc., whereas a WASM module & runtime can be embedded directly into my application, into a browser, or into (comparatively) simple, time-tested tools like Apache[0].

So, to your point, the opportunity here is to provide WASM-native alternatives to existing container-specific technologies, that are more composable by design, because they don't have to deal with the complexity of trying to ape an extra operating system just to run some software.

For example, I'd love to see container orchestration be supplanted by something like a la carte Erlang-style service discovery—that's a primitive that could easily be composed with other primitives, and wouldn't result in the combinatorial explosion of nouns we see in systems like k8s / Swarm / others.

[0] https://github.com/vmware-labs/mod_wasm

Apologies in advance for a bit of a rant, but I sincerely hope the tools growing up around WASM significantly diminish the need for Docker. As an industry, we're so bad at isolation that we have to put a computer (container) inside a computer (VM) inside a computer (hardware) just to achieve any sort of sane guarantees.

Then we immediately trade any semblance of sanity for container orchestration.

(And please don't try to convince me that Kubernetes is sane. I operated a production SaaS on it for 4 years, and spent another year at a DevSecOps consultancy with 40+ CKAs—sanity and familiarity are not the same.)