I think this is more a case of "What actually happend": https://xkcd.com/538/
1,272 karma · joined September 23, 2018
That really depends on your point of view. For the average person on HN, upper middle class income or above? Sure thing, 100% agreed. Especially in the US however, if you're not part of that group, it would have been better to live 40-something years ago. Yes, you did not have all those fancy devices and cool tools that we have nowadays, but neither did anyone else, irrelevant of income.
> the remaining problems tend to be around choke points where there is some kind of monopoly power and proper competition is missing
Irrelevant of whether this might be true for Amazon - what about health care? Telco? Public transport? Basic utilities like water, electricity?
The US is a prime example on why "neoliberal capitalism" (at least if we're speaking about it in the Reagan/Clinton sense) is a complete and utter failure - it is the only developed country with a declining life expectancy, the richest country on earth with a sizeable amount of the population having multiple jobs and still living from paycheck to paycheck.
Don't get me wrong, I get your point. But it is really important to try to take the perspective of those who are the losers of the system, and for those people the current time is _for sure_ not the best to be alive. They are so desperate, so disassociated from the current state of affairs that they're willing to listen to snake oil peddlers like Trump, that they're willing to storm the Capitol or at least look the other way when others do, to disparage Science in the face of a pandemic because the class of the educated has left them behind earlier already, so why not this time?
> Amazon got to where it is today because overall the customer experience is so much better.
Relative to what? Compared to the "old experience" of having to go to a physical store - sure. But that's a damn low bar; everyone who can write a webpage can beat that these days. Amazon got where it is today because they straight-up ate the market, but not by being the best, but by being the ones who had the capital to sink everyone else before they went belly-up themselves (for how long is Amazon actually turning a profit? Not that far back, I reckon). In short, they played the market instead of letting the market play. And that's exactly my main gripe with what I'm calling 'neoliberal capitalism' here: The way Amazon played is not a bug of the system, it's a feature. It will continue to happen, until regulators kick in and set boundaries that go beyond anything what we can call neoliberal capitalism. It might still be a 'free market', it still allows for competition, but most definitely not in the barely-regulated sense that the neoliberal capitalism envisions.
No, such is full-blown neoliberal capitalism, where the only thing that is considered worth optimizing for is profit.
Once you accept that there are other variables that deserve consideration and cannot just be abstracted by price and profit alone (most prominently customer and workforce satisfaction), other optimizations will come into play, which will reduce the amount of crap people have to deal with, and will ultimately lead for a better experience for everyone involved - except for the very few at the top, which are currently reaping all the profits.
The initial idea and the ideology behind it is really admirable, but it was done as a proof of concept and failed terribly. But instead of "alright, PoC done, does not scale, let's move on to something better", too many people can't or don't want to move on because there's too much money on the line.
I find it personally exhausting - I had a coworker until recently (he left) who was a super nice guy but completely into the bitcoin-bullshit (with zero understanding of how it works, naturally). The fact that he made significant profits with it gave him the idea that he somehow is right about it.
The bitcoin bubble and all that goes with it can't burst soon enough.
"Big, dominant" in the same sense as maybe Ferrari: Prestigious cars for a niche audience that are willing to pay a premium for the brand.
You will be fine. Just like everyone else in pretty much the entirety of the rest of the civilized world.
But just for "one-off"-scripts, JS usually does the job pretty well. For bigger scripts or scripts where I want to reuse/share parts, typescript is an option - but it comes with a few hurdles: Most of the scripts I'm talking about work with zero npm-dependencies, while typescript adds at least one.
Furthermore, I either have to take care of compiling it, or use ts-node - one more dependency; and in both cases, I can't avoid the usual es6 vs. commonJS shenanigans. It's a bit of overhead to get going; always worth it if I spend more than a few hours on a script, but I can do without if it's just a few lines that I will hardly ever see again.
Sure, doing things like http directly with node is a bit cumbersome and having a library that does some abstraction comes in handy if you're working on something that goes way beyond what you'd ever consider doing in bash. But especially for that very purpose of things where I used nodeJS instead of using bash, nodeJS always had everything I needed out-of-the-box, almost never required any dependencies.
That being said, if you re-use code, plan to share scripts etc. with other people and all these things - using something like typescript (and possibly some testing-libraries) comes in very handy for maintainability, and there you can't get around npm. But for one-off-"plubming-scripts", nodeJS had all I ever needed.
That being said, I have grown very fond of writing "plumbing"-scripts in nodeJS. The syntax is so much more sane than bash, the documentation of nodeJS is actually pretty good in my opinion, and once nodeJS is installed and available, its super easy to mash something together to get working. For small scripts, the uglier parts of JS do not really matter, and while nodeJS does have some APIs that feel a bit odd to use at times, it's at least well-documented with examples/guides all over the web.
Some folks use python for that exact purpose, but I always felt that getting something going takes me more effort than nodeJS (the fact that I'm just not fond of Python as a language might also have something to do with this).
All in all... for folks still using bash, I really recommend to give JS a try.
If you would like this world-view to undergo some critical analysis, I strongly recommend Anand Giridharadas' take in "Winners take All" (condensed in this google-talk here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_zt3kGW1NM).
He specifically addresses the negative points of the "win-win"-mentality, and in my opinion, makes a strong point that a society built on a "win-win" culture is bound to be doomed.
Mixing institutions with an education and research purpose with sport tribalism seems like a terrible idea to begin with, adding tons of money to the mix surely can't result in anything that has anything to do with education...
I actually really like their pricing model. You can buy years in advance, and they occasionally offer steep discounts (I think I bought two decades in advance around new year?). In a time where more and more services offer me no other way than some crappy monthly subscription that I cannot pay in advance and without auto-renewal, this is really much appreciated.
That being said, a lot of your points seem valid - I've started using SN quite some time ago and haven't really noticed any new features since (except for some editor-improvements). Organization is indeed something that probably could use some love, the tags do suffice for me personally (especially with that one extension that lets you create folders with tags), but barely. While I appreciate their stability with regards to UX (it looks/feels the same since forever), the features you mentioned (collapsing, rightclick-menu) would not hurt.
Their 'lack of new features' however is, as far as I understood, somewhat intentional - back when I bought it I've read somewhere on the page that they explicitly have the philosophy to also say 'No' to new features if they think it threatens their guarantee of long-term stability/support. Which I think is a very admirable stance these days where short-term-KPIs seem to dominate entire industries.
1) The energy consumption of bitcoin mining alone is estimated to have reached the levels of entire countries (Argentina was the latest country I've heard it being compared to), while actual usage of bitcoin (except for speculation) is still a fringe niche thing
2) When shown that the coins do not scale, instead of moving on to an improved version, those coins continue to grow. Instead of 'okay, proof of concept done, it does not scale, let's move on to an improved version', the bonanza just continues.
There are probably more reasons like these, but I think it would be straight-up weird if the technically versed audience of HN would disregard the reasons above as much as the current crypto-markets do.
Absolutely not. Fertility rates have been going down steadily for decades in every developed nation - when children are no longer a requirement to have someone that will care for you once you reach old age, fertility rates start to drop.
The interesting part is that it is only really going up in nations that have not yet the comfort-level of western civilizations. I don't have the exact numbers at hand but in most European countries, and I guess vast parts of the US too, the population is actually stagnant or even shrinking if immigration is not considered.
I find it infuriating how after every mass shooting in the US, the US media (at least the few US papers I tend to follow/read) scramble to get out info about the shooter, with pictures, names and background-stories. Why give such a person a platform? I do realize that it generates clicks and people love to soak up that kind of stuff, but it feels terribly wrong on so many levels.
While I do see your point (not British myself, but in Switzerland we had a few ISIS cases as well), I'd like to offer a different viewpoint as well: Our countries messed up at some point in their life - education, mental healthcare support, whatever; something went wrong when one of our citizens feels obliged to join something as heinous as ISIS. After all, we also feel like that with every other terrible criminal - murderers, rapists, etc.; our societies believe in their right to find the right path again, why not someone who joins ISIS?
Unlike the author though, I have grown to love it - not having to look at two files to understand what's going on (html/css) really felt like a big boon, especially for "trivial" UIs that just need a bit of flexbox, css-breakpoints and a margin here and there to get going. For more complex stuff, falling back on custom classes is still perfectly fine.
Also, the "html becomes a mess" argument was only an initial issue. Once you get used to the tailwind-classes, most of it becomes fairly readable - the examples of the author are, in my opinion, just as unreadable in css, especially if you're not a design-oriented css-geek (like myself).
It never ceases to amaze & depress me simultaneously.
Also, the biggest party (SVP) often uses very controversial advertisement, which I can easily imagine to be interpreted as xenophobic by foreigners (I'm Swiss myself).
Glad to hear your positive experience in Switzerland - especially now with the passing of the 'Burka ban', seeing Switzerland as xenophobic isn't something that would surprise me too much.
* Zod: https://github.com/colinhacks/zod * io-ts: https://github.com/gcanti/io-ts (for the more functional-programming-oriented)
This is going off-topic, but I really think it depends on your definition of "not to work".
If people essentially throw in low-cost placebos to cure themselves of headaches and other minor ailments, while believing that this is exactly what they need, I consider this a net-positive for society compared to giving them actual medication that costs more with potential side-effects/harms.
Obviously, the fun ends when quacks prescribe homeopathy for serious stuff that needs actual treatment (in Germany, there was a case a few years ago where such a quack tried to treat his wife's breast cancer - obviously, this is beyond what should be legal). But for minor things that aren't too big of an issue even if left untreated, letting people use homeopathy if they're into that - why not.
Maybe your opinion has more to do with how weird and dispatched from reality American politics has become and less with how the NYT wants to brainwash you, or whatever you think they're doing?
A few quotes here:
> Starting pay for the humblest burger-flipper at McDonald’s in Denmark is about $22 an hour once various pay supplements are included.
> Americans might suspect that the Danish safety net encourages laziness. But 79 percent of Danes ages 16 to 64 are in the labor force, five percentage points higher than in the United States.
If you made this argument 100 years ago I might be inclined to agree with you, but "reasonable" minimum wages (i.e.: a 40h/week job pays always enough to feed a family and a roof over your head) have been tried and tested in countries all over the world and as far as I'm aware, they're almost always a success.
The 'low skill worker' losing job opportunities because of too high minimum wages is a myth that just doesn't hold up to reality, no matter how many times conservatives afraid of losing their own bottom line or relative status repeat it.