176 karma · joined December 1, 2014
Socials: - github.com/github.com/thecadams - linkedin.com/in/linkedin.com/in/cadamsau
--- chris at cadams dot com
But regulators have it tough; the Uber business model isn’t viable so if it was properly regulated there’d be no Uber - and since regulators represent their constituency that’ll never happen because the public quite like their affordable rides. Affordable transportation makes cities work, so public transport is taxpayer subsidised in most of the world. Another reason the price has to stay low.
For example - a monolith has strong benefits but when you reach a certain size & team size it makes sense to split out some things - but you should still keep the monolith where it makes sense. And redux state storage makes sense for 99% of cases but the org should have flexibility to let teams run things their own way if they can make their case, depending what controls your org wants to have in place to keep a certain level of standardization. It’s about finding a balance.
The author seeks universal answers where none exist. All these different approaches have survived well enough to enter the zeitgeist so they each must have merit. The fact they’re contradictory suggests the appropriate mental model is more like a flowchart with many end states, than a path that seeks a holy grail.
I also strongly counter the author’s assertion that 20 years is not enough time to see all this play out. Of my 20 years’ software dev experience, 5 were at a company that went from less than 2000 employees to over 40000 while I was there. I saw the architecture evolve to meet the challenges of growth through many orders of magnitude of scale, and saw the hiring of people who’d done the thing in other companies at the level we needed and brought the leadership to implement it within our teams. 20 years is absolutely enough time to get in one of these 5 year experiences even if the other 15 years is throwaway. To maximize your chances, go and work in SF or Silicon Valley. Yes, it does happen elsewhere in the world; but with far less regularity. If you really want to hone your craft you have to go to the place it’s happening.
Makes you wonder how many times people have succeeded at this - but of course, by definition we’ll never know.
That works for me if I’m already a customer - but the company has to keep selling to keep funding their services.
However taken to the extreme it risks the company implementing some kind of planned obsolescence to provide that funding. And it doesn’t incentivize efficiency (making the service simply cost less to provide over time) any better than a subscription model. Not sure which is less evil in the long term.
Maybe by wanting no subscription I’m just being selfish.
I recognize your point but am wary of it being supported with direct job creation numbers, as that doesn’t reflect the scale of secondary industries (ie. indirect jobs created by oil & mining may be a larger number than direct jobs created) and also, job numbers don’t reflect the scale of the companies creating the jobs.
Hope it’s a fad.
Looks like it has potential based on a quick test at home, will give it a go on the next car trip.
Hypothetically if an LSP-server existed for command line args, it could be integrated at the shell prompt to create an autocomplete popover. Even cooler, generating LSP syntax should be doable en masse as an LLM can read every single man page in one pass and add what it learns to the supported syntax.
And for generating entire commands it's possible to create a desktop app: I'm imagining it having a text field to type what you need ("a command to double the speed of a video") and then it'd:
1. generate the command ("ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vf "setpts=2*PTS" -c:v libx264 output.mp4"
2. copy the command to clipboard
3. display an explanation of each part of the command and what it does (raw markdown from the model should be fine)
4 (optional togglable preference setting) after paste is detected, restore previous clipboard content
This app could be created really fast now LLMs can code for us. And the command line generation could be done fully locally with ollama.
But has anyone found success re-establishing that fresh mind without sleeping?
Maybe meditation can help?
Stirs up competition within a cohort and there’s bound to be idea sharing between teams. YC claims to bet on people not ideas, so as another commenter pointed out, if a team pivots there’s no longer a competition.
My guess is YC also believes in simultaneous invention: the same idea coming from multiple places at once implies said idea’s time has come, while any team wanting to work on it must have already done the work to hit that forefront, making them great people to bet on.
As social beings, we are subject to a wide variety of constraints. Why do we keep acting surprised-pikachu when corporations, which aren't, are sociopathic?
The cure would be to balance fiduciary duty against other incentives. This will happen as disillusionment grows, but as it stands it'll be regulation - slow, unsatisfying, static, and disempowered.
Instead I see a future of enshittified products being swiftly replaced by solo motivated people - or small teams. Suddenly we are back to disruption. Instead of "Google sucks, all I can do is complain on my blog" you can say "Google sucks, I made this alternative give it a shot".
Especially since LLMs can code now. We genuinely can get there. Make something in minutes, pull in some of the open data that's out there and things do get really interesting.
For example. Google Maps recently started showing ads when you're driving - ick. What else is out there? OsmAnd is a maps app with high-quality OpenStreetMap data, but (without meaning to offend) its UI is not up to my personal standard. It's certain that with a few weeks of focused effort one could polish its UI and give the world a third solid maps app.
This is Hacker News, we have the skills and the right level of disrespect for the status quo, we can disrupt!
No surprises here frankly; for a public company, sticking to “don’t be evil” conflicts with fiduciary duty, and only the latter is law.
1. Advice which worked in one situation - “we tried Agile, everyone should use it!”
2. Proven stuff like code review, which you call best practices when begging your org to implement it: “please let’s do it, I can clearly see how this will improve our org.”
These 2 examples represent locations on a spectrum: let’s call it “provenness”.
The author’s problem boils down to subjectivity - everyone positions different practices in different places on the provenness axis. The upshot of that is when one person says “we should do this, it’s obvious and/or it’ll definitely help” another person hears “we tried it once, you should try it too!” and then everyone has a bad time.
Then it gets confounded by everyone calling everything best practices - no matter how long ago or unproven the practices might be.
What would be handy is some generally agreed-upon yardsticks for graduating practices into or out of best practices status, plus better terminology to cover the spectrum of provenness so more sophisticated discussions can be had that account for the nuance and we don’t all talk past each other..
But then analyst companies wouldn’t get to make their glossy 2x2 charts, so it probably won’t happen.
Looks like the OP also posed a few questions. Would love to hear any thoughts you have on those! Very curious to hear your thoughts.
In other words, barring legal implications this is the natural order of things.
Simply inventing something should not confer the right to charge as much as one wants for it for eternity, nor the right to produce as much or as little as one wants.
And you also have to have some sympathy for the problems Chinese leadership face - what are they to do, if mind boggling amounts of things must be produced just to keep up with China’s own indistrialization? Wait around for companies to fulfill orders for foreigners and soak up the leftover capacity?
Beautiful scenes!
What you’ve read is nothing more than a grab bag of rage-bait comments from a psychology expert promoting his latest book. And he put in enough breadth for each individual to find something to latch on to.
Color me impressed, dude is a master of psychology.
I’m assuming it was all done in good faith, for now at least.
They’re dates after which the manufacturer believes you won’t enjoy the product as much.
Where does “wasted” food actually go? The article claims it ends up in landfills and plowed into fields, but doesn’t give examples or evidence to back that up.
If more research is done and it’s uncovered that wasted food does have some sort of afterlife, that’s a sign of the market at work. No doubt some unwanted food isn’t used in an optimal way, but if for example, some gets turned into feedlot and others into pet food, it radically changes the narrative.
A well-researched article about broadly what happens to “wasted food” would really help. But right now it’s not clear if there’s anything here to fix.
The difference between a critic and an asshole is whether they care about your success. You can safely ignore the assholes; critics provide the same information, but package it better.
I hope you and your team succeeds in creating a competitor in this space, it's going to get really exciting.
Going to respectfully elaborate on this specific point, with full awareness that it's not core to the discussion, and that my opinion is my own and highly subjective, and that I'm not fully disagreeing but wish to point out a nuance. There are too many ways to put hidden software on a Windows system, which makes it harder to use securely than my OS of choice, macOS.
It's more difficult to audit a Windows system than a macOS system. For example, background processes can be installed on Windows in dozens of ways. Go download AutoRuns (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/aut...) and look how many tabs it has. The docs even say "You'll probably be surprised at how many executables are launched automatically!". UAC mitigates this somewhat, but it lacks granularity; it's all-or-nothing so you'll click Allow without knowing what's actually going to happen. And then you have COM registration and win32 APIs that let applications get at other windows easily. Layer upon layer of legacy compatibility make the whole system feel like a mess - at least to me.
Using macOS securely is also quite involved of course - for example auditing Homebrew's behavior when it downloads half the open-source world just for one package. But when it comes to stuff running in the background, by comparison, macOS Ventura recently added a comprehensive list of launchd agents and other daemons that run at startup; each of which can be toggled (though the UI doesn't allow you to drill into them). It's all on one pane in System Settings, built into the OS, no need for Sysinternals' separate tools.
Using macOS securely is a lot easier, in my experience. There are ways to use Windows securely, but it's a lot harder, and (I think) that makes it not worth the trouble. Using macOS securely is a lot closer to just using macOS.
That said, for any OS, it goes without saying to only install trusted software. It's possible to cleanse both OSes fully of software you no longer want, but on Windows it always feels like surgery, whereas 90% of cleaning something from macOS is dragging the application bundle to the Trash.
Might mean a little more work to help reimplement GH features in the platform of choice. Not everyone will leave.
But it'll be great for the diversity of the internet.
A few fun facts:
Constraining denominators to 4 digits (<10,000) there are NO better fractions than 355/113.
Constraining denominators to 5 digits (<100,000) and excluding multiples (eg. 710/226), 1601 fractions exist which better approximate pi than 355/113. The best is 312689/99532 which is off by 2.914335439641036e-11
Considering denominators up to 6 digits <1,000,000 and excluding multiples, there are 162,141. The best is 3126535/995207 which is off by 1.1426415369442111e-12
This was done somewhat subptimally with a potentially buggy implementation in python.
It's in a gist here: https://gist.github.com/thecadams/df3e12571294e3f7a9f5c07e91...
¯\_(ツ)_/¯