HN user
I am a builder. I build lots of things.
The "I am trustworthy" part is totally taken for granted and too many supposedly trustworthy people lie straight to the public face just to maintain the narrative they are pursuing.
I don't think shipping every week is a good idea or sustainable. At what point do you take away features that are no longer useful or don't work out? Or does the ball of mud accumulate forever?
One area where curation will fail is in "fancy bias". As in, the same bias that keeps crowd pleasing entertainment from winning awards.
People who are in the curation business (critics, reviewers, etc.) tend to favor things that make themselves look good to other people in the curation business. That is often opposite what the "unwashed masses" of people enjoy.
Prime example - Michael Bay movies. Michael Bay makes big, loud, entertaining movies with lots of explosions, bright lights, shiny objects, violence, and sex appeal. A "curator" is usually too snooty to recommend a movie like that.
An algorithm doesn't much care if a movie is artfully crafted, it only cares if people watch what is recommended. In the long run, an algo is more likely to give people what they want than a curator is.
If anything, curators over the long term seem to make a living telling people what they aren't supposed to like (or have access to).
One could make a case that the nation was better off when not everyone was forced into being a two income household and more parents stayed home to raise their children. Closer knit families, better long term relationships, more skills and wisdom passed down from generation to generation.
Paid maternity leave doesn't fix time apart from your children over the first two decades of their life.
Sounds a lot like "This Is The Year Of The Linux Desktop" meme articles from the early 2000's.
On a largely content based app/site, most of "scaling" comes down to caching. However you do that is up to you, but somewhere between caching at the browser layer, proxy layer, web server layer, or memcache layer, things should be fast and scalable without getting too fancy.
Some people hate pair programming. I happen to be one of them. It kills my personal job enjoyment/satisfaction and if I was coerced into pair programming too often, I would find a job elsewhere.
So, the cost of losing one or both of the programmers in the process must be considered too.
Note that this story has been told and retold for years. Whatever difference in pay he paid has more than paid for itself in press attention and marketing.
I think Kinect would have been fine if they didn't bundle it with the XBox One.
As in, it would have been a solid niche input device, but most games don't need it or benefit greatly from it, so adding $100 to the price of the console made it bad business.
There is some amazing technology there, but as a gamer it didn't make me want it. It was like VR kinda still is - a very cool niche that hasn't caught on yet.
It's okay for niche products to exist and be profitable if you don't require them to sell millions of units.
We have a collective based system, not an individual based one. So everybody goes to the same schools with the same curriculum with the same baseline opportunities.
It's not optimized for individual success at all. So the people who win are those who take individualized action above and beyond the norm.
If you do what everybody else does, you get what everybody else gets.
This model is sort of absurd. It doesn't take into account the most important factor... people.
If you made a model of the world today back in 1920, it would be comical.
Imagine you went back to say 1920 and told people that in 2020 they would be surrounded by talking televisions, phones, that we'd be sending people and ships to the moon, mars, etc. and that they could instantly talk to any person on the planet (including loved ones on the other side of the world), they would not believe you.
In the last 100 years (heck even the last 20-30) we've invented a staggering amount of new and interesting things.
In the last 100 years people created interstate highway systems, nuclear power, the internet, radio data networks, self guided weapons, self guided vehicles, robots, rudimentary AI, etc...
What if in 100 years we make fusion work (probably for space travel/war?) and then we replace the existing infrastructure with that. And what if we can do enough carbon removal or storage to solve this?
Any model that doesn't model the history altering inventiveness of humans is not an accurate model at all. It's just really fancy navel gazing.
Competitive sports(or anything else) at a high enough level is more about genetic selection than training. The training reveals and reinforces potential and is obviously necessary, but at some point anything that is competitive enough it really just showing you who found the right sport and the right training for their genetic capabilities.
In high school football there were guys who with the same amount of training could squat/bench/deadlift considerably more than everyone else. They were stronger/faster and when applied to the right sports they were on another level.
Sure, those less gifted in those areas could train hard to make up some of the difference, but not as much as you'd imagine. If you are short, no matter how hard you train you will be at a disadvantage playing basketball. If you are tall and bigger/overweight, you aren't going to win at cross country distance running.
Humans tend to overvalue magical training and undervalue the existing potential that training reveals.
Now that people in the western world have largely abandoned churches for their attitudes toward "sin" and morality, they replaced churches with corporations, media companies, and governments to dictate what is sinful in society.
Once people realize what they've done will they reject corporations, media, and government? If so, where will they turn to?
I suspect that the need for parental moralization of behavior at some tribal level is a group survival mechanism that we can't get rid of.
Regardless of whether it is the church, government, news media, social media, or some corporate policy, it all seems to end up the same from where I sit. Yet, in replacing faith with consumerism or corporatism or governmentism, it seems many people have lost a great deal of hope along the way (see the current mental health crisis for evidence).
It seems people were happier when they left this sort of moral policing to the church/temple/whatever at least they had hope in something positive to keep them going.
Note that peer groups have a lot to do with thinking problems in general. If you are poor or broke and hang out with poor or broke people, your thinking will be different.
Also, people tend to hang out with other people making roughly the same as them, which compounds the problem.
It's an invented problem based on a belief that we control the planet. Yet, if we DID control the planet, we could simply fix it.
What if the planet got warmer without our input? What then?
The real irony is if we truly did solve Global Warming, the propaganda machine would either decide we are creating carbon emissions from something else, or go create a new global crisis to panic about.
IE - the words will change, but the freak out will be the same.
Reinventing the wheel is a good idea. It's how you learn. Programmers who say "don't reinvent the wheel" don't understand how the craft of wheel making works.
University isn't utopia. Not everyone wants to live there. Also, there aren't enough university research dollars to adaquately fund AI research relative to the current demand.
This is a good thing.
I think the Google Pixel 3a is the best reasonably sized and reasonably priced phone for most people. Performance is good, camera is great, price is sensible.
Better idea... give out AOL CD's.
It's not taking a risk if you have a safety net. That is the point of the safety net, to eliminate the risk.
It is worth listening to the Dave Ramsey podcast just to understand how people spend their money foolishly. Yes, there is bad luck and lack of opportunity, and there is also boatloads of foolish spending and borrowing too.
There are plenty of people who could build wealth on the average salary in the US if they were on a budget, were reasonably frugal, and in general lived like our grandparents did say 1950-1970 or so.
Apparently nobody understands that the super rich make their income from long term capital gains treatment on stocks and this won't touch the wealth of the top 1% meaningfully anyway.
TL;DR - Buffet, Gates, and Bezos will still be stupid rich and this won't solve anything.
Lord help them when they realize that all designed things tend to look the same.
Within a particular generation, all things tend toward a familiar design. There is a herd mentality to fit in with the crowd, allowing for only minor differences.
Screens are designed to distract, not educate. A screen is a great place to learn if you are not in a classroom or if you are trying to avoid class. It's a terrible way to be "in class".
I learned this in college back when laptops were expensive and relatively rare.
The real fallacy is thinking that it is ONLY one factor and hoping that by isolating that one fact that you can prove and predict all things.
That is foolish in my experience.
They are slow because they are complex as proven by the fact that it's complex to even explain why they are slow.
Web API's happened instead.
Plenty of people can afford to retire, but they spend money like fools and then wonder why they don't have any. Read The Millionaire Next Door or listen to Dave Ramsey and you'll quickly learn that you can save plenty on a low income or go broke on a high income. Savings, income, and wealth building are in fact three distinct and also interrelated things.