tmcb

these types of compliance efforts can mean completely redoing multiple core systems to handle privacy, wipeout, audit, reporting, per-location policies, etc etc.

Maybe the phrasing is unfortunate, but if compliance to the law requires a “redoing”, launching in that market was never a priority in the first place. That’s a completely legitimate choice, but usually companies whining about regulations are making a financial decision rather than an ethical one.

Of course not. To me, HN’s content is pretty similar what pop tech websites had 20-30 years ago.

One valid question, though, is whether or not you should add more pop tech content to your information diet. That, of course, is up to you. What makes HN such a good information source are experts actively looking for knowledge and being kind enough to share their findings here. That is something else you should consider—not the sharing part, but actively looking for it. You will consume objectively less “data”, but it will be much more meaningful.

Well, cargo cult programming is definitely a thing, and has been for a long time. It may “deliver value”, but it is not guaranteed. I believe entrepreneurs have an easier time having AI do the work for them because their value assessment framework is decoupled from code generation proper.

This is industrial-grade FOMO. They will take the jobs of the first handful of people. The moment it is obvious that LLMs are a productivity booster, people will learn how to use it, just like it happened with any other technology before.

I did read the article. I concede that I might not have understood it. Again, I never said it is wrong, but rather that it has a blind spot. I am familiar with Joe Armstrong’s work because I worked on a proprietary (and rather worse tbf) native distributed systems middleware in the past.

Actually, now I thought about it, I know exactly what irked me about the approach. I hope the author takes it as constructive feedback:

Saying "let it crash is a tagline that actually means something else because the BEAM is supposed to be used in this particular way" sounds slightly "cargo-cultish", to the point where we have to challenge the meaning of the actual word to make sense of it.

Joe Armstrong's e-mail, on the other hand, says (and I paraphrase): "the BEAM was designed from the ground up to help developers avoid the creation of ad-hoc protocols for process communication, and the OTP takes that into consideration already. Make sure your system, not your process, is resilient, and literally let processes crash." Boom. There is no gotcha there. Also, there is the added benefit that developers for other platforms now understand that the rationale is justified by the way BEAM/OTP were designed and may not be applicable to their own platforms.

No need for the snarky comment. If I am wrong, that is fine.

Of course Joe Armstrong could explain what I meant, but in a much better way: https://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2003-March/007... (edit: see the "Why was error handling designed like this?" part for reference)

My personal interpretation is that systems must be able to handle crashing processes gracefully. There is no benefit in letting processes crash just for the sake of it.

I actually skimmed the article before posting. I have some exposure to Erlang, but not to Elixir. As I’ve already mentioned, I think the author’s covering of application behavior is OK, but there is more to the tagline than meets the eye.

Maybe I didn’t make myself clear. “Let it crash” is not something that should be thought of at the component level, it should be thought of at the system level. The fact that the application crashes “gracefully” or not is not what is really important. You should design the system in a crash-friendly way, and not to write the application and think: “oh, I believe it is OK to let it crash here”.

It is very common to interpret taglines by their face value, and I believe the author did just that, although the point brought up is valid.

In order to “let it crash”, we must design the system in a way that crashes would not be catastrophic, stability wise. Letting it crash is not a commandment, though: it is a reminder that, in most cases, a smart healing strategy might be overkill.

But as a whole I'd guess that especially export-focused Eurozone members like Germany would welcome a depreciation of the Euro.

Yes, but only if it is guaranteed that their imports would depreciate similarly. Otherwise, say, Germany would devalue the Deutsche Mark but then run into the risk of importing produce from The Netherlands at a higher cost.

It does, however, not bring me any closer to understanding the "exporting unemployment" statement.

The monetary policy after the 2008 crisis forced poor countries to cut public spending so that industrial economies could be bailed out. As a metaphor, the potentially unemployed factory worker from Germany was replaced an actual unemployed public service worker in Greece.

In a capitalist society, wages would rise and conditions will improve as people are willing to pay as much as needed for health care.

People also need food, which is a labor-intensive business, and it is one of the main drivers of human trafficking in the US: https://www.ice.gov/news/releases/human-trafficking-forced-l...

Give them a shoddy paper based off a wrong Excel formula like the one they used to support austerity measures. Maybe that’ll do.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/04/microsoft-excel-...

I am not sure if I agree with his conclusion, but some economists are of the opinion that countries in Northern Europe used the euro as a political tool to protect their own internal markets by making goods produced in the poorer countries of the Eurozone less competitive. If a country’s government could previously deflate their own currency to make their exports more attractive, they cannot do it anymore since they joined the Eurozone.

If the ultra-rich don’t pay their fair share of taxes, yes.

Not the economy as a whole, but there are some aspects of the economy that are. Indeed, negative externalities can be worse than a zero-sum game to those affected.

To be frank, this whole “the economy is not a zero-sum game” argument is kind of a meme at this point.

No, sorry, I didn’t make myself clear. I said that I disagree with that take. Maybe you are not familiar with it, which is something that was raised by some people (maybe jokingly, I don’t know, but it made the rounds in left-wing social media).

I agree that the left should address young men’s struggles, namely the working class, but maybe not in the same sense you are implying. They are as responsible for their own political choices as anyone else.

[P.S.: Am I not from the US. How could I be a Democrat?]

Also, are you available to organize so that we could bring some consciousness to the public about how men are disproportionately affected by workplace fatalities in developed countries? The condition being that we first agree on the causes leading to it.

We could start with the resources we have already found on the Internet. I can pay for the domain if you are interested.

Oh, my bad. I thought that the names and pictures of the deceased 66-year-old man and 16-year-old boy would be enough.

I guess we can brush this one under the carpet, right? Nothing to see here. Workplace fatalities are a serious issue, but not so serious to you that it is worth bridging that gap. Maybe I’m wrong. Feel free to correct me if that is the case.

On the other hand, I acknowledge that men are disproportionately affected by this issue and that it deserves serious attention from both left and right. I would wholeheartedly support their demand of better working conditions from their employers and representatives, and advise them to contact the media so that the general public can be informed of that and, who knows, maybe support unionization if their demands are not met. Do you think this is a reasonable stance, or do you see any problems with that?

Yes, that sounds like the perfect conversation starter.

If that doesn't work, which I believe is highly unlikely, maybe try incorporating elements of speech as those found in this right-wing publication, the World Socialist Web Site: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/02/27/hefl-f27.html

The OSH Act was passed in 1970. I wonder why it doesn't have "for men" in its name...

Pardon my laziness, but this is the best graph I could find on the reduction of workplace-related injuries: https://fitsmallbusiness.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Info...

This policy was very effective, in the first place. I could eyeball a 70% reduction in the period between 1972 and 2019.

Can it be reduced it even further? Probably.

Would I find it off-puting if any piece of legislation is eventually passed that addresses a hypothetical issue that is disproportionally faced by men and helps reduce it even further? Certainly not.

(I, for one, would approve of the "No More Balls Stuck in the Cogs Act".)

Well, certainly not by threatening to cut funding of humanities research grants. Otherwise they won't be able to conduct research such as this one... But I digress.

The "Violence Against Women Act" is from 1994. Most statistics of that time pointed to a disproportionate amount of women being victims of domestic violence in comparison to men. I tried to find more recent statistics, but this is a very serious topic, so it deserves to be treated with more caution. Also, this is one of the reasons why I think it should not be used as a "war on men" talking point. Do we want to solve the darn problem or use it as a weapon against political opponents?

I can’t reply to your other comment for some reason.

You got me, I did not express myself well. I should have said “working people”. I framed it as a women’s issue since you said that the solution to that would be forcing men to trade places with them.

Re: the fact that bringing up men’s issues is kind of taboo to the left, it seems more of a language problem. If you frame it as a “war on men”, that will turn people off. If you say: “look, there are many bright young guys who could be on college that are otherwise deciding to look for work because the economy is not so great”… Maybe people will listen.

Edit: maybe they will reply “EKSUSE MEE??? WHY NOT WOMEN???”. That is obnoxious, I get it. But do they have a point? If you think so, concede. If you do n’t think so, I would like to know more about it. That is what politics is about.

So will the government mandate that 50% of stay at home parents be men?

Well, obviously not. But there is always the caveat that suggesting government providing adequate child care to working women is communism of whatever. Is it feasible to have some compromise here?

And if 50/50 is the goal, where is the government push for more men in places where they're underrepresented, like university students, nurses, teachers?

This sounds like a perfectly legitimate ask if young men do really care about it. Why not contact your local representative and explain the issue in an articulate manner?

It is actually the opposite. I assume there is no inherent reason why people from other demographics with the required skills and merit cannot be found. Otherwise, there must be a reason why they can’t, and people who think that the current imbalance is perfectly good must have a pretty reasonable explanation to that. Do you have any?

I know this is not an accurate portrayal of your point, but this sounds very much like the “the left needs its own Joe Rogan” argument to me.

The problem with it is that we delegate the duties towards our fellow citizens to the talking heads on TV or in our algorithmic feeds and wash our hands on it—I say “we” because it has been happening in basically every country at this point.

If democracy has failed, as some people love to say, it was not because it was supposed to fail, but because politicians have successfully managed to replace it by the current series of popularity contests we have in place.

I’m responsible for all the world’s injustices and ethnic/gender/sexual preference defines a human.

Rest assured you are not. But this could turn out to be true, maybe in a very minor way, the moment your resentment towards this straw man becomes the main driver of your political views.

If you are eating too many carbs and you go to the doctor and he says "you should be eating way less carbs", he is not necessarily telling you to quit all carbs from your diet cold turkey.

It is safe to say that men are ~50% of any country's demographics. If you find any position of power and prestige where they are over-represented, it is safe to assume that there is an imbalance. People will come up with excuses for such imbalance, but one cannot deny that there is such an imbalance there.

I am directly threatened by their program. […] Could the left imagine being a little more democratic and making a few more concessions towards… omg, white males?

I am not from the US, I am originally from Latin America. I am considered a “white male” there. I am now living in Europe as I am a dual citizen. This kind of position is interesting to me. What is so bad about being a white male in the USA at the moment?

I’d like to elaborate further, but I want to engage in an honest conversation so I would like to hear your opinion.

Private companies' adoption of affirmative actions is not enforced by law in most countries, I would say. In the U.S., only government contractors have this obligation---since 1965 by the way, so it is not a new thing.

So, companies may opt for it but, as other management decisions, owners are free to do with their company as they like. Of course they will might face backlash from the general public, but this should not be an issue.

So, with all due respect, what the heck are you talking about?