badestrand

It's not just goofy people. I have quite a few friends who don't want to birth children into this "overcrowded, dying world" (paraphrased). I think that's a shame and I would love if those smart and educated people would procreate - but it seems there is too much bad news out there.

> why not make the shitload of money first

Because it is very very hard to get to "fuck you"-money and passive income often isn't quite as passive as it seems.

> query that referenced n users plus their orders is probably a reporting type query

No, there are enough other valid cases, e.g. display last customers and their orders or some simple "others have also bought". In practice you will need to join a lot spontaniously and can not just defer that to a data warehouse.

From the article: "Our TCO [(Total Cost of Ownership)] includes energy, hiring a part-time system administrator, and co-location costs"

What a wonderful write up! I learned a few languages already and think about languages and their complexities a lot. Very interesting post!

I think you can easily construct other examples, e.g. "Ich trete meine Rechte, die ich, Gott sei Dank, habe, ab."

Ah, interesting, so you basically put the server side validation code into the database. And nice, it can even handle authentication.

How would an automatic system even prevent unwanted deletion of database entries or that users access others' data? Maybe I am lacking imagination but without server-side validation the practical use cases seem very limited.

> Right now the EU, despite being a single market in many respects is far from being a true digital single market

I think this is less about regulations and more about language. Most people in the EU simply don't speak english so you would have to have your marketing and sales in 20 languages which is simply not doable. A french startup just can't cold call a romanian company because they can not communicate. Yes, it gets better with each new generation but it will be decades before this is "solved".

> There are a lot of "over night" success stories from media that seek for clicks. But in reality, you'd need to wait for many years to see traction

I actually found that quite relieving from reading all the IndieHackers interviews: Many were already at it for several years and had minimal revenue for a looong time. And only after years of consistent work they got to 5k, 10k or 50k monthly revenue.

> If you cant grind it out and sell, the core of entrepreneurship, then maybe its not for you

Yes, I think it's the no 1 reason I saw solopreneneur friends fail. Most are just not willing to put the hours in. I see that people really like to dream and make big plans but sitting down consistently after work each day and actually working on all the mundane small things is a necessity many are not willing to do. The idea/business might still fail but without actually doing anything you have lost already.

It is quite interesting that everyone is so alert about privacy now and hates Facebook and Google and just ten years ago people willingly published their address and phone number in a phone book for everyone to see. Also in Germany the cities sell every citizens' personal data and nobody cares. It is quite hipocritical.

I wonder what could possibly be a use case why they would allow it and even built an API/interface for that.

>> So i just want to tell you that i've done successful rewrites! [...] It took a couple of years, the rewrite team was 2-5 times the size of the team that built the old site

So what makes this rewrite successfull? I am sure in that time you could have easily added the I18N, tests and deployment and refactored the most difficult parts of the code so that it would be more expandable and easier to maintain.

> > There are many times when it doesn’t make sense to have a null. Unfortunately, if the language permits anything to be null, well, anything can be null.

> That's not an argument. See above.

It is actually their best point, IMO. I really like how RDBMS/SQL solve this: fields hold values and you specify beforehand whether they can hold NULLs. The author is right, sometimes it does not make sense for variables to be null-able (think ID fields or usernames) but often it does (e.g. a user's avatar). Being able to indicate that would be a nice idea. C++ for example does that, as `Field x` is not nullable but `Field* x` is.

So tv stations, radio stations and some newspapers are advertising companies too?

And if Microsoft makes Windows free and displays Ads to makr revenue they are suddenly an ad instead of tech company?

And what about Google (actually Alphabet?) having multiple products out of which only a few make money by advertisement. Think of Android and Maps.

I agree and I think technology and scale also play a role. The law-tech company Atrium for example probably gets called a startup, and I think it is because it has high ambitions (nation-wide) and is tech-enabled.

I am sure that without ambition (i.e. just serving a single city) or without tech (i.e. just building one conventional law firm in every city) it would not be called a startup.

This is my mini React template for experiments, including JSX: https://gist.github.com/Badestrand/3609e7c3c88ba47bb9682a474...

It's not only language, it is also a huge cultural differences. Swedes have as much in common with the Portugese as Americans with Columbians - really not much. Also very different legislations, banking systems, difficult tax handlings and so on. How do you even handle support for 23 different languages as a startup? Do sales and marketing in 23 languages?

I never understood how people could use bootstrap with custom designs. It gives you CSS and JS for so many elements and classes so if you want it your way then half your CSS is just undoing (like `margin-left: 0` or `font-size: inherit`) their styles.

I think improvements for products can be devided into positives (e.g. brings value, new features) and solving frustrations (bugs, slow speed, bad UX, etc). By listening to all user complaints you can almost complete eradicate frustrations - which makes your product fun to use and can massively reduce churn.

Don't worry, I think tech salaries in the US are just massively higher than in Europe. I am not sure why, probably they are just in general better at capitalism, i.e. the companies extract more value from the market, engineers actually switch jobs for a better salary and demand pay raises.

See on glassdoor, developer salaries in Berlin and Paris are 45k€ (and usually no options) while $90k in Seattle.

But you can not just take any words and say it is a metaphor. I can not say "this is a walnut desk" when it isn't and just claim that it's a figure of speech metaphoring a very solid and beautiful desk. A metaphor must be widely understood as such before you can use it.

> it's a metaphor

No, "from edge to edge" and "all-screen design" are not metaphors but as concrete as it gets, and obviously wrong. This iPad may be great but these marketing texts are just straight lies.

It will be interesting to see how cities will cope with it. I am sure the amount of tourists will continue to rise significantly over the next decades - just think about much of India, Africa and South America entering global tourism. So Venice, Amsterdam, London, Barcelona, Paris, New York etc will maybe have 10 times the tourists than today and the cities will need a concept how to deal with it.

The problem is that the hooks seem to be much more restricting than setState. You can `if (condition) this.setState({x: 1})` but you can not with hooks because React keeps track and doesn't allow you to break out of a very narrow usage.

Look at the rules from the docs:

> Only call Hooks at the top level. Don’t call Hooks inside loops, conditions, or nested functions.

> Only call Hooks from React function components. Don’t call Hooks from regular JavaScript functions.

I think this will lead to junior developers to not understand the React framework but to just accept "the way to do things" and do what the docs say, without ever questioning anything.

Also comparing wealth to judge people doesn't make sense because many don't even strive for it. At least in Germany most people just want a middle class lifestyle (i.e. normal job and house) but have absolutely no ambitions for more.

> I have a hard time getting on board with the "waste" or loc argument. . The things that matter most to me are readability, organization, maintainability, etc

I think people also have different ideas on readability. Some prefer a single file with 2k lines and some prefer 40 small files in 12 folders with 50 lines each. Like the parent says you can often write the same code in 4x length, be it to prepare for future features or just to have it look "clean".

"Good code" is different for different people.

But I don't understand, why are the run times so incredibly high? 15 seconds to looks through 18k records? Should be <10ms (ignoring network latency), or what am I missing?

I can imagine real-time collaboration is an immensely interesting problem to work on.

Also wonderful blog post, actually read it in full, thanks!