duggan

Obviously it greatly depends on what you're doing. If you're using a relational database as a glorified key-value store for offline or batch processing of a few hundred megabytes of data, sure. Hell, just serialize and unserialize a JSON document on every run if it's small and infrequent enough ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

If you've got a successful data hungry web service with a reasonably normalized schema and moderately complex access patterns though, you're not going to be looping over the whole thing on every page load.

I assume their version involves another individual unaffiliated with government or private industry taking their hand, gazing meaningfully into their eyes, and tearfully proclaiming “I see you” before letting them through the border or into the bank vault or whatever.

Never hiring anyone who isn't a good fit or will become a poor fit is a very high bar to set.

Regardless, Salesforce is large enough that if they're not encountering your hypothetical rare scenario every now and then then it seems unlikely that many companies on planet earth meet your criteria for good hiring processes.

It also depend on what requirements your business has and who you have available. The skillets are different and they overlap in places, but one way or the other if your business is growing your operations requirements will grow.

I am hugely in favour of AWS for web startups I am involved with because 1) I know AWS very well, 2) they provide hundreds of thousands of euros/dollars of credit to startups (I think all the big cloud vendors do at this stage), 3) it's useful to have architectural flexibility, and 4) they can take on a bunch of the security and availability burden that can otherwise be very labour intensive in a small company.

Also you can pry S3 and RDS Aurora out of my cold dead hands!

Reasonable professionals can disagree – strongly – without being part of a conspiracy.

Yeah, it’s the complexity that makes the difference. There’s nothing but that to differentiate anything. You, a phone, a G class star, a comedy special on DVD. All “just” complex arrangements of matter.

People make a big deal out of those differences though, go figure!

Wordplay. I can hold your hand in my hand, is it similar to a phone?

Otherwise your line of reasoning boils down to “it exists.”

Sure, if the user can build their own phone.

Otherwise they're competing with a lot of other people interested in what the phone should and should not do.

If they own a hammer, they can do what they like with a hammer, but a phone is not a hammer. It's a complex arrangement of molecules, licenses and competing group interests.

True, the economies of scale here will really only kick in once the robotaxis can also pick up your food order en route.

I hate this sort of logic. Sounds far too much like social darwinism.

Sometimes things that are worth doing are hard.

> I suspect that this approach is strongly fueled by the unlimited VC money available in tech,

Well, I suppose we could trade anecdotes and counter-examples, but my position largely comes from my own experience rather than received wisdom (though there's plenty of that).

Instead I'll just say that I disagree, largely because because a business is a complex and shifting arrangement of various factors competing for limited time and resources. Even in a software business, software is only one of those.

Something that just about seems to work is something that has often met the threshold for "solves a real problem" while also meeting the other requirements that a product needs to be successful.

It's easy to make something that works, is well designed, and either doesn't solve a problem someone has or nobody knows about it.

To be clear, I'm not talking about how it sucked for the Irish a hundred years ago. I'm talking about the country's latent economic disadvantage from being historically impoverished.

If you're in a former empire, you can take advantage of the infrastructure and wealth built by that empire today. You get the roads, rail, architecture, city planning, industry. It hardly seems mentioning but most other countries also have significant natural resources or agricultural output with Europe-wide protected status for various industries and products.

You are also capable of driving, getting a train, or bus to any other European country. You have infrastructure built to handle millions upon millions of people.

Probably better weather too.

Look, I'm not saying Ireland is some sort of woebegone backwater but you have to understand it is a small country with limited natural resources that's more awkward to travel to than its neighbours. It has to do what it can to compete.

Ireland was one of the poorest countries in Europe 30 years ago. Explicit government policy encouraging foreign investment has made it one of the wealthiest.

I don't think Ireland needs to apologise for this; it's a small island nation that choked under colonialism for centuries. When people from former empires, with huge populations and access to continent-spanning infrastructure complain that Ireland is "taking advantage" of them, it strikes me as sour grapes at best.

Sounds like something a person living on the dark side of the Earth would say.

I used to think this, but I'm not sure google-fu is the real superpower here. I've been surprised to encounter many developers who just don't seem to be able to read and comprehend the output of a program; logs, stack traces, etc.

That's the basic — sometimes only — input to a search query. I suspect the ability to comprehend and describe a problem is a skill that translates quite smoothly to a world of prompt-based interaction.

For some reason, it's often like hearing other people's dreams, but for the obvious exception that sometimes someone will surface a ChatGPT prompt that might be useful to you.

Then perhaps consider keeping your weird sexist fantasies to yourself.

> damn, that’s a lot of social insecurity built in by default to almost every interaction and conversation

Hah, I think that's just part of being a young adult, isn't it?

I'd like to believe this works, but my experience in Big(ish) Corp is that you get the blame.

If you think you're in a position to change it and you're motivated to do so, go for it, otherwise my experience is that you're better off finding somewhere else to work.

Dijkstra's full essay[1] is a bit more illuminating, but essentially it's about how, for example, developing a system of symbols and formal language around mathematics has allowed "school children [to] learn to do what in earlier days only genius could achieve".

1: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/E...

You have to remember that the EU was created in the aftermath of World War 2. It was built to eliminate war amongst a group of countries that had warring for hundreds of years. Making it easy to leave would undermine that.

There is a procedure for leaving of course, as pointed out in other comments; that's what the UK made use of. There's no reason disentangling economies and legal frameworks that have been consolidating for more than half a century would be easy though.

A corollary to 1, however is:

Company B does the automation project. They can offer their services for a million dollars a year less than Company A. Company A is eventually outcompeted.

That's market capitalism!

Clearword | REMOTE | https://clearword.com

Cmd-F (or Ctrl-F) for meetings.

You'll see the pitch "almost no meetings!" as a benefit in hiring posts. People are drowning in meetings. The truth though is that meetings are a vital part of how a company communicates with itself. Meetings can suck - they happen with context buried in various email chains, sometimes just a mysterious calendar invite. Worse, when they're done, all that high bandwidth communication is usually lost, and the decisions half-forgotten a week later. It's hard to do meetings well!

Clearword joins your calls, automatically creates summaries of your meetings and organizes them in a searchable video library.

We're a small team (five of us so far) and you'll be joining a group of experienced people who know how to run a company, design products and write software. There's a lot of flexibility and depth in the problem we're trying to solve.

On the software side, we're using Python for most of the backend and React + Tailwind for the frontend. ML is tensorflow, pytorch and transformers.

Roles we are hiring for: Community & Customer Success Manager, Head of Marketing, Full-stack Engineer, ML Engineer, UX Designer

Would appreciate if you could apply through https://clearword.com/careers as that means it'll definitely be seen instead of accidentally disappearing into a spam vortex! Salary ranges are in the listings.

Thanks for reading!

Calling something that isn’t slavery slavery is simply incorrect, and the equivalence has been broadly dismissed by historians.

I don’t think the “Irish as slaves” idea is historically accurate[1].

Even without the Wikipedia article, as an Irish person, it’s never come up in my education or in public discourse.

1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_slaves_myth

I think that's almost the point; it's a kind of youth culture manifesto. Something like like A Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace[1].

1: https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence

When you say “if your stack was simpler” do you mean “if your problem was trivial”? I’m always interested in simpler ways to do things, but solving distributed system and data governance issues tends to involve putting things in different places.

If you think you're worth 120k to some company, you should find that company. Or found it.

I’ve been doing a manual version of this for years, creating a shell shim wrapping a venv for cli tools. This is much neater, thanks!