oldjokes

Dude. A bunch of billionaires just got away with completely tanking the economy and getting bailed out for it. Zero people ever even talked about the possibility of anyone going to jail. Everyone got their bonuses. Nobody suffered any consequences. Literally nobody.

If you think anyone cares about any conflict of interest among the investing class you're beyond naive, you're just delusional.

I have worked at two startups now where we made the fatal mistake of being profitable. If you make this mistake then the investors will swoop in and demand you spend more on marketing and AWS infrastructure, because we're scaling up to 5 billion users of course.

Of course we started spending all the money on new people and AWS, and soon there was no money.

At one point we were dumping like $15K a month on AWS for a dozen unnecessary over-engineered toys that nobody was using. This is the real cost of AWS.

I'd love to see Amazon's data on money invested vs actual user traffic for small startups, that's got to be some of the most interesting and valuable data on earth. Forget companies, I'll bet Jeff is sitting around predicting when entire industries rise and fall weeks before anyone else based just on this data.

One does not follow from the other. Many countries are vastly reducing carbon while not investing in nuclear at all. We're already at the point where the carbon impact of energy production is negligible in many areas, there are much bigger fish to fry if you're truly concerned about carbon.

Replace "cities" with "any organization that is not tech first" and you'll still find hundreds of win 7/vista/xp machines that have never been patched, and ad-hoc network closet/cloud hybrid rigged solutions for everything.

There is literally no way to fix all this dumb fragile infrastructure without a massive government program that accepts responsibility for doing so. You need thousands of smart people going through every machine, all the software, all the systems. These people are never going to work for Baltimore or for Maersk, not in a million years.

Instead let's create a new government agency or pivot the NSA from it's dumb paranoid reactionary posture to more of a proactive NIST-style advisory role on best practices, have them hack everything domestically and start fixing things as their core mission. Make sure nobody at state or DHS or justice can subvert this new agency, they need to stand on equal footing with any company or agency.

Then hopefully pillage all the miserable smart people who are currently working at mega corps and agencies who actually want to do positive, meaningful work for a change.

Problem solved someone hire me to advise on their political campaign.

Anything short of admitting "we fundamentally screwed up, and are rethinking the poor decision to pair this engine with this airframe" as well as "we are reviewing all our design processes and how the FAA oversees every step of the process" is unacceptable. MCAS is just the horrific bloody bandage that is peeling away, it's not actually the problem here.

This probably won't happen of course, all they seem to want to do is fix as little as possible as quickly as possible while denying they ever knew anything.

If I were someone powerful like a pilot union leader I would start throwing conniption fits in public and refuse to let my people fly on Max's at all.

They are truly innovative in the sense that they finally exposed the fact that much of tech startup funding is just a ponzi scheme by pushing it all the way to the IPO with no plan to ever make money. That's a new thing, usually only microcap companies were able to pull off that scam in the past.

Get out between series A/B if you want maximum return, the only losers in these phony companies that never make money are the last round of investors who get left holding the bag.

And if you're an employee looking at stock options in a startup just say no. Stop surrendering real money for fictional money. Get a higher base salary instead. Employees with equity plans are always at the bottom of the list to get paid out.

I hope after the utter trainwreck that is Foxconn in Wisconsin every local government is being more skeptical of these corporate welfare deals.

I'm really tired of seeing fancy corporate lawyers outfox local politicians over and over again, somehow always getting a new record-breaking welfare incentive plan while structuring the contracts such that they have a hundred loopholes and never have to actually do anything for the money. This keeps happening at small and large scales all over the country, and it needs to stop.

I wonder how severe the backlash is going to be, not just for Google but all the tech giants. Our anti-trust laws were mostly written around monopolies abusing pricing power to rip off consumers, but with the intersection of data and hosting and analytics and everything else the potential to abuse people is far greater than just raising prices. And they have expanded their ability to profile and experiment on individuals worldwide, regardless of whether you create a Google account.

It's just getting scary at this point.

I wonder what "use" means here. Is it now illegal for them to log your traffic at all? I think that would be the ideal way to phrase the law, you can't even write to a logfile/dbms much less do anything with that data unless the user opts in.

We could slice 10% (maybe less) off the military budget and pay for college for everyone, forever. This "who pays" nonsense is just that: nonsense.

I'm sure the Navy would find a way to make do with a mere nine aircraft carriers.

If you're worried about freeloaders getting welfare they don't deserve then slashing the insanely corrupt grifting that goes on every day in DHS/Defense should be your top priority.

Absolutely. I am excited by the prospect of hospitals shutting down and doctors being unable to find a job, it's long overdue for them to finally come back down to earth. I can't imagine a quicker way to reform healthcare than that. It's probably our best case scenario right now with a non-functional government.

Student loans are a bit more complicated, but yes absolutely I expect to see massive defaults hurting the federal balance sheet and for schools who failed their students to start shutting down. This isn't a bad thing, it's healthy.

This is a totally valid move in my opinion, as well as just circumventing the trainwreck of a healthcare system to seek treatment overseas.

If congress continues to be negligent in its duties then this is really the only viable path forward for many people. If a large enough percentage of people bail on their student loans/medical debt then eventually dozens of predatory banks and "medical billing" companies will go out of business and then we can actually start to change things.

You can download all your data and see what they have on you here. Be warned that this is an extremely upsetting experience for many people.

https://takeout.google.com/?pli=1

You can then delete your google account under "data & personalization".

I've been on proton mail for a few months now and am pretty happy with it, try it out!

Is this really a valid test anymore with 50%+ of outstanding shares being held by index funds? Who actually controls the companies when shareholders don't really exist like they used to?

What does shareholder primacy even mean anymore?

"Median pay for a Bachelor's degree is below 1990 levels"

This is really something. 30 years, and we're moving backwards. This is completely unacceptable, we need to rethink the foundations of our society if we're failing so many people who work hard and play by the rules.

This is the most arrogant and condescending comment I think I've ever read on HN, you spend so many words dancing around it, just call web developers stupid and lazy instead of wasting so much space.

It's not good enough to for me to be an arrogant techno-mage looking down on those stupid commoners from my technical tower, I must now also shit on all the other lower developers I have judged to be not as smart as me, some other class of developer.

Fuck off.

To be fair to Google every company in every industry is doing this more and more. It's one of the first things that happens when a merger or private equity takeover happens- aggressively purge full time and move to temp workers for all non-core services to save some money.

Of course the companies that pay more attention to data do this more extensively and aggressively, why wouldn't they?

The army of temp workers/janitors/contractors/uber drivers convene and sleep in the same parking lots at night. It's a whole community of a semi-permanent underclass drifting around, saving the spreadsheets a few points here and there.

In related news, I'm not sure I want to be an American anymore. This is not the country I grew up in.

I really like garlic, I'll even chew up a clove raw occasionally. But good god man, 15-20 is wayyy too much, you can't eat that and be allowed in any social scene outside of north jersey.

I don't think this 99% figure is true based on my personal experiences, but even if it was accurate a few months ago it's not anymore. People sure as hell are paying attention to which plane they fly on now, because they have to.

It wasn't really a concern in the past because Boeing and the FAA didn't appear to be failing. They have impressive mountains of data that they hid behind while just operating with staggering negligence and incompetence, day after day.

I don't care how many agencies certify the max, I know way too much about it's design and how much pilots hate it now, I'm never flying on it.

This is completely wrong, and there is plenty of data that says so. Especially when you start talking about business and frequent travelers, they are notoriously picky and will cancel flights based on a plane class or even when a specific aircraft usually does the route.

https://www.businessinsider.com/americans-dont-want-to-fly-b...

"If you had a flight on a Boeing 737 Max next week, and the FAA decided to clear the aircraft for flight, given the issues the plane has experienced, what would you do?

53.1% of respondents said they would reschedule. Of those, the survey found that 18.7% of respondents would reschedule their flight only if it didn't require a fee. Another 4.4% of respondents said they would pay to reschedule their flight up to a certain monetary fee, which they then typed in. A full 30% of people would cancel or reschedule their flights, regardless of the cost to them"

One of the reasons I didn't buy a Tesla was because I didn't want Elon tweeting about my actions if something happened and I died on the road. The salesman laughed at me when I said this.

While I acknowledge this is extremely unlikely, I'm still not interested. I want to be in control of all my data, all the time, in all situations. I don't want any third party to benefit from studying my behavior, ever. If you try to build a business model around mining people they are going to start fighting back sooner or later.

I think airline cabins are absolutely the best example of a class warfare issue, especially since so many other industries are trying to copy the cabin stratification model.

If that's not a good example of different classes rubbing up against eachother and getting angry about it then nothing else on the planet is, either.

You know that coach used to be better than first class is now, right? This idea that the back of the plane is bad and horrible suffering is a new invention, a new construct of the airlines that everyone just bought into all at once.

Yeah, getting out and volunteering at a local animal shelter changed my life in numerous ways. I cringe at people my age who still live self-centered ladder climbing lives, always trying to optimize whatever metric, because I used to be that idiot too.

No you are totally right, I'm sort of aware of their power. I'm just pointing out how obnoxious it is that we just stratified online websites into the elites and the commoners and invented terms for them to make people feel as special as when they fly first class. This is a new thing that happened all of a sudden in the past few years.

It's an ugly trend taking over everything. Stratify all humans, treat the elites differently. Forget about net neutrality, we can do this within websites, within APIs, and so now we do.

I love how we're all just using this invented marketing term "influencer" as if it's actually a real thing (it is not a real thing).

It is slightly less obnoxious than just calling it "first class" vs. "commoners" instagram, but still pretty obnoxious nonetheless.

If you follow some links it wont take you long to find your favorite celebrity's personal cell phone number. I think that's kind of a story.

Right, in theory that's what we've always been told about how it works, but that is not what is actually happening. There has been almost zero correlation between unemployment and wage pressure for 20+ years now. In all industries, yes even tech.

It's just not working. Unless you're a director or exec, then your wages are skyrocketing. Everyone else is flat or declining.

The really weird thing about wage stagnation is that there are millions of jobs going unfilled, companies are so desperate for people that they can't find anyone and are just dumping cash into stock buybacks instead of raising wages.

Something is fundamentally broken in the labor market, it is not responding to supply & demand forces as it has in the past. I am not sure what terminology to use to describe what's going on now, but it's not a free labor market any more, it has been destroyed or transformed into some other construct.

This is a really well laid out comment, thanks for just spelling it out.

I hear this complaint a lot, but never really any details. What specifically are you mad about being out of reach and which metrics do you think you're worse off on compared to previous generations?

Honest question. Is it just materials and money per person? Something more?