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And yet, MacArthur has been proven historically prescient.

A lot of the Netflix one or two season shows got cancelled when they were finally finding their legs too.

Doubt, those companies are in an even worse position - all the money that rushed in to fund them just got turned off.

The ones that will do well for the coming economic cycle are the ones that are the IBM/Oracle/Cisco tier.

Microsoft and Amazon have never had operating losses, not ever.

Google and Facebook did. But they are the product of a very blue ocean for their respective markets. The first people who did it will were going to absolutely clean up, and both of their current strategies are focused on finding the next market that works that way and get there first.

That business model isn't plausible in a high rate environment.

To add to your point, even "professional" software engineers are a lot of times in a role where they are in 9 ecosystems in an average workweek.

I've used poetry, even loved it - but without being able to control the project the only thing I can rely on is pip.

The industrial revolution moved 90% of workers out of farming, yes 90% of employment in 1870 was agricultural, literally producing calories.

We sometimes mourn for this in the form of back to the land pastoralism, but quality of life empirics suggest the industrial revolution was a benefit anyway.

Instead of luddism, we should try to find ways that the coming apocalypse of white collar knowledge work can benefit humanity as a whole, and learn from our mistakes in the rust belt.

Google does not have evidence that their outrageous salaries couldn't be cut some and still maintain the line outside of the door.

The gyms and perks are not purely a cynical ploy to make people stay later.

Google wouldn't make their employees lives miserable to increase revenue by 0.1%, because they care - the people at the top aren't literal lizardpeople.

This is where I bring in "bounded", because if that same choice would increase revenue by 100%, Google execs do it every time.

The exact lines change depending on local customs and competition (Google is a dominant market monopoly, so can afford gyms and adult playgrounds and all the really cringe Google perks) but it's also why low margin businesses have shittier working environments - there's more competition and less room for executives to care.

You have to show they actually benefit the members as a whole. Union laws in the US are extremely strong, and anti union sentiment is largely a hangover from the 70s, where features of unions limited our manufacturing sectors ability to compete internationally with catastrophic consequences for the Rust Belt.

Unfortunately when unions are weak, they are negative value - and when they are strong they are the UAW. Workers are not a firm, and structuring labor as it's own firm is known as contracting and or a guild.

I think we can give Google executives a little more credit.

They care a bounded amount.

A rough approximation of how much they care would be the rational incentives to not produce a culture of fear in the regular workforce + the amount of being nice to employees that Google can afford due to their dominant market position.

Similarly, when I shop for employers there are fringe benefits, cultural differences, etc that matter - but they aren't going to matter in the face of another $100,000 in salary.

Definitely wouldn't go somewhere else for a few hundred bucks tho.

It's not a recent myth, saying that the purpose of an organization or class of organization "is" something depends on legal and social context.

Friedman popularized the idea of fiduciary duty in the field of economics, and even popular left economists like Keynes didn't foundationally dispute that premise.

You can think it shouldn't be popular among economists for moral, aesthetic, or even empirical reasons - but to suggest somehow that the 1880s model of companies is "more correct" and assert it as truth is just as much a "myth" if you are framing these ideas about institutional purpose as "truth".

The robber barons you speak of have created the single largest reduction in poverty in human history. Most of the west, and even poor Americans are living truly historically blessed lives - and by letting the robber barons loose, the CCP was able to lift nearly 1b people to a standard of living unimaginable to Chinese people in 1970.

Capitalist thought and action is not immune to criticism, but the empirics are on capitalist ideas. Most of the common areas where Americans complain about "capitalist" processes are not capitalist under the hood at all.

I am not on coinbase's side, because the advent of cryptocurrency, should it work - will make it trivially easy to avoid nasty letter regulation as it exists today.

They are taking steps to comply with a regulatory policy that is not voted on, nor written by legislature, and failing to make their case to the people that they should own their own money.

I understand why, but it bothers me that the CEO is pro crypto, has tons of money, and yet consistently fails to fight for the user.

They absolutely have, just gotta dig.

Remember the wave of people being in hot water over tweets sent in 2008?

Taking Gebru's word seriously here is reason to discount the entire argument.

Gebru is a part of a clique that is devoted to an entirely different set of ideas around AI Safety.

The two basic movements here are: 1. Be very scared of AI development, then do capabilities research but feel bad about it. 2. Demand AI research comes with locks in them that make sure the AI can't write a tweet that would make a San Franciscan Activist uncomfortable. Achieve very little in terms of manipulating AI, but get lots of book deals.

Neither of these groups should really be trusted for hard data about the other, and more importantly - missing that piece indicates that the author is not even attempting to convince the unconvinced.

Admin tools, particularly federating admin actions in a distributed team - will never not happen. Their shape may change, but devoting time to building the first version will give you the harness you need.

Source: I am writing three services at this point that are mostly Middleware to deal with the lack of native federation for certain services we use.

HN posters are not my example of a typical customer.

The typical customer does not understand what an OS update is, or what it entails.

They know "man, my computer freezes" and "man, I keep hearing about this vuln/oh no I got my hard drive ransom'd"

Those are the people Windows primarily has to appease, otherwise they have the problems that Linux does.

This is encouraged by the incentive structure, ship and gtfo is the way to advance.

You will never be punished for shipping, and always punished for not-shipping.

You think of it that way, the customer doesn't.

More than that, people knew that they were going to have to do technology stuff, and tech stuff was oriented more at semi technical users.

So people actually learned how to do stuff, and that in itself was fun. Whereas the current low friction set up is so difficult to fix that if the first three Google results don't work, there's nothing you can do.

More than that, people knew that they were going to have to do technology stuff, and tech stuff was oriented more at semi technical users.

So people actually learned how to do stuff, and that in itself was fun. Whereas the current low friction set up is so difficult to fix that if the first three Google results don't work, there's nothing you can do.

Coinbase is a double exception, they didn't just ask for regulatory approval for their lending product, they asked for permission to file the application.

Can't wait for the next round of crypto hype, excited to see mew use cases along with new scams.

Don't forget crime and startup business.

I ordered equipment for a company from a European seller , and because I wasn't a VC backed technology startup, instead focused on physical goods- there was no army of people to help me set up an international bank for my company. So what I did was drop them some bitcoin. Just getting the wire approvals would've taken longer.

The surprise over the $3 fee indicates just how many tricks of the light are used to hide exactly how bad finance is, then make dishonest comparisons to crypto markets.

There's an element that all the silliness of the LAN party was technically necessary for the production, and as a grassroots thing the hardship added to the buyin and culture.

Smart, well adjusted drug people will frequently point out that most common drugs they use (LSD, MDMA, MDAA, psilocybin, etc) have an orders of magnitude better risk profile than smoking or drinking. The latter is essentially socially ubiquitous.

That community has an ongoing bitterness about this double standard.

Usually though, people making this point are not advocating for heroin or meth (although there's a reasonable argument there that the drug is not what does most of the damage in those situations - krokodil is just heroin manufactured with an extremely dirty process. It's perceived as being much worse, but what's "much worse" are the impurities from using gasoline as a solvent.

MDMA and LSD in particular have the advantage of no fast, cheap ways to synthesize at the expense of safety or purity.

The issue is that it's very difficult to tell trade secrets from expertise in certain fields. In a field that is sufficiently niche, like non flagship chip production - a lot of architectural ideas are well known across the industry are but the implementation details that enable them are trade secrets. You can't "un see" these details and IP law is loose enough that you could easily reimplement those features or products for a competitor without violating IP laws because you've seen the idea before and can come up with infinite implementations.

That is not what I wrote. I wrote that the NY State courts made literal millions of these internal documents public. The community as a whole has had collectively more than a year to pore over them, with billions of dollars of risk including from major real hedge funds.

I did not say that these are "standard financial disclosures". I said that they were forced by the courts to reveal all this documentation and that so far, Tether has for the most part maintained its peg.

This should indicate to you that everyone from Wall St to Main St thinks that Tether is doing things "well enough".

Tether has issued multiple audit reports by independent accountants, and sure- they may be suspect but the way in which they are suspect is the same way every other company's financial are suspect - which, last I checked, didn't stop Lehman Bros.

You misunderstood what I am saying. I am suggesting that quants and financiers have no special, privileged access to information. You can make spooky suppositions about Tether fraud, but if millions of documents disclosed didn't reveal a fraud after the whole community pored over them - it's at least as good as any other financial product.

What happened is that crypto is very cool. There's a not unwarranted perception amongst people in the United States at least that banking regulators are conspiring (or prospiring) to create the financial meltdowns we see, and give people with the right connections privileged seats at the table when it comes to markers.

This is, to some degree, true - Quant traders in finance work with data that is literally unavailable to regular traders or amateurs but when it comes to crypto sophisticated quants and Joe Bogsly are operating on a level playing field when it comes to access.

Additionally, countries that are not the United States have chronic bank instability problems that make the current crypto collapse look like a joke. Large percentages of bitcoin transactions are conducted in Vietnam.

When a new cool thing is happening, the next step to maturity and adoption is gift.

How many rent a bike startups have you seen in your city?

Same deal, not a terrible idea, pretty cool, people flock in but there will very likely only be one to three of those companies left standing.

I think comparing the trades to the hottest intellectual profession on the planet with extremely heavy competition is extremely misguided.

The whiteboard torture test exists because there are tens of thousands of candidates and only hundreds of those actually have a pulse when it comes to developing software.

I'm not talking about implementing Kadane's or Dijkstra's, I'm talking about fizzbuzz, basic control structures, etc.

This is true and false, the "blue haired feminist" crowd tends to have the most sympathy on this topic, but has solutions or ideas that treat men as broken women - which is a major problem that most men deal with all the time.

Even in the schoolyard in a progressive area in the 90s, most teachers and social workers were women and literally didn't get it.

It's like, the exact definition of what I would call "implicit bias".