erikb

Yes. Of course it is. I think they are not stupid either and very well know that it will happen. The first on the market has to do the experiments to get it right.

I'm not sure if discriminating against super market employees is the right way to fight discrimination.

The good things I can see with a machine super market:

- It can be open 24/7 without exploiting its employees

- It can be almost fully stocked all the time

- They don't have an excuse to "coicidentally misplace" a $1.50 label at a product that in the end costs $2.99 (every shop does this in the area where I live)

Ah I see, there's certainly a clear difference between our evaluation. If I see a whole team of freeloaders I blame the management team above them. At least in engineering teams it's super easy to have motivated teams because the people choose this career out of desire for working as engineers. Loads of freeloaders means there is no fruitful ground for motivated people to grow on. So they leave or turn into slackers, and some even might become toxic themselves. I don't blame the potatoes if they don't grow though, but either the weather or the farmer.

Usually in the early stage (when stock has no value) people get more stock. Then in the growth times people get more cash. And then when the growth slows down and one succeeded at becoming another boring behemoth people get stock again because it increases market activity for an otherwise boring stock. So I would assume that most Netflix people currently report a higher amount of cash bonuses, while the internal policy slowly shifts to more stock.

I always feel that freeloaders are not hurting me personally, so why harm them? And it's not like they bring nothing to the table, it's just less than an ambitious/motivated person would. Last but not least, and why I think most people take on freeloaders and keep them: If they switch to another company and are motivated there, it's better for them personally, but might also mean more competition on the market. Therefore better have all people slack off in your offices than give the competition the edge. Not sure if I would agree with that strategy but it has some logic at least.

> It is easy to imagine a world where those tools developed along with the computers, until programming itself became so easy that the average user would feel comfortable doing it.

I would argue it IS SO EASY. The thing is that programming itself is not a problem. The problem is he complex world the programming happens in. Programming itself even helps to reduce that complexity though by allowing you to traverse some amount of that complexity automatically.

The problem is not, that programming is too hard for people, but that people are not willing to take responsibility for themselves and hteir problems. Most people look to others for solutions to their problems. That's also why people who promise them solutions, like Jesus or Jobs, are praised as saviours, even though they are never able to fulfill all the promises, at least in the amount and dimensions that the receiver would hope for.

> It is interesting that at one point, Jobs (who could not be reached for comment) described his vision of computers

A kind of statement we haven't seen for a long time. RIP, Steve.

PS: The article didn't really explain why he thinks there was a Xerox Parc philosophy inside of Apple and how/why it was in decline, right? It basically just says, there was Xerox Parc with that awesome philosophy and there was Apple who copied some of it, but altogether was a closed system developer.

> In the smalltalk world (and Lisp machine worlds of PARC and MIT) everything running in the machine (above the microcode layer) was inspectable, breakpoint able, and modifiable.

So Linux plus maybe some elegance features?

wtf. You do know that people die from too much stress, right?

> "Not being a team player" was often code for not trying hard enough to make your lead look good.

Replace often with always. That's coded language that exactly means this. It's really hard to avoid this though.

> massive tech debt accumulation

Do you know any company that doesn't have that? Honestly I've never seen it. I've worked in a 10 people company, I founded a company with a co-student, I worked in a 50 people company, I currently work in a 95,000 people company and there's always huge loads of technical debt. Also I now often work with Google APIs/tools/frameworks as well as AWS. Also loads of technical debt, right there.

> Implicit quotas for regularly letting people go is just an insane way to run a business.

That's for sure. It's great for getting investors though.

The learning loop is very simple here. Do interviews and look for clues. If you don't see clues join. If you see clues after joining, think about how they look from the outside. Then repeat.

AFter a few rounds (2-3) people usually have enough clues that they won't join a shitty team.

For instance if the team's management is full of parasites who have no technical skills at whatever they are supposed to do, then it will be very unclear from the outside what they are actually doing. If the recruiter can't explain it, it's likely that the team has not much skill.

Another example I faced is getting the same technical task in follow-up interviews (e.g. first phone call with one engineer, then a face-to-face with another engineer, both giving the same task). It shows that the organisation is not well since the engineers didn't know about each other's interview, otherwise engineers usually share their experiences and prepare each other.

> That's what you get when you have fixed quotas for firing people, e.g. bottom 10%. After a few rounds you have some very good people left

That is not a general statement, bro. Not generally "very good people" are left, but people who are very good at achieving certain ratings. It can very well happen that for instance your top coders are actually in the bottom 10% because they don't know "how to human". People who only focus on social skills rarely end up in the bottom 10% tho. So this whole system depends on having very meritocratic rating systems or you end up actually increasing the speed of getting parasites in and normal people out.

In all honesty, if you've seen Netflix software quality deteriorate over the last few months you probably know that they are not that excellent anymore. It's always like this. As long as there's real growth, there's real talent at work. But once that stops (and they now own the whole world, where should growth come from) the Machiavellian spirits set in. And the top doesn't really care about it, since the game of staying at the top is different from the game of getting to the top. The game of staying at the top is very Machiavellian in nature.

If it can be seen on the outside already, then that means it's growing on the inside for a few years. And your post shows that it's really like this. Sad.

> Musk now has more concentrated equity ownership of the company

You mean Musk gained control through that, not lost it? How so? That's quite different an assumption from what I expected.

Space stations will become a commodity as well.

What I mean to say is, every product that is used by almost everybody will become a commodity at some point. That is not the question. The question is

a) How long can you keep it from not becoming a commodity?

b) How can you build your business model as market leader around it being a commodity?

E.g. gas stops can be considered a commodity at this point, but the powerhouse oil companies still own the whole thing and make hundreds of billions out of gas sales. If Tesla can use their leverage and tech-know-how to get into that position for electrical gas stations they might be in a good position to take that leadership position for a generation or two in providing electricity for the cars, making more money than with actual car sales.

So for Tesla, as much as for the not-yet-existing space station business, the fact that they will become commodities at some point is more of a strategic detail than a kill factor.

Can you check the other comments in the thread and any other post about CoCs in FOSS communities over the recent 4-16 weeks?

Check out this discussion for instance: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18281676

Also note that my previous comment is at -4 already of the time of this writing, which must be done by someone who doesn't like that opinion. You wouldn't go ask 5-7 of your friends to give downvotes to that comment just because you disagree with it, right?

It was a political move from day one. As you might notice Kernel is not the only environment that adds and modifies their CoC currently. There is a group with political goals driving that effort. He wanted to see where the wind is blowing before making a move himself, as well as be flexible enough to also move into the corresponding direction.

That said, I also wonder if he moves too quickly, or if he found an agreement with other FOSS leaders.

One of these super confusing topics. At the same time as this is discussed as some kind of heroism in Germany at least there is a discussion about cum-ex trading as the robbery of the century. In some regards both are using the complexity of the law to make a profit that they wouldn't have made without nitpicking the law. But only one is considered a crime. Why? How?

If you only think in Python then packaging really might be a painpoint. But honestly if we look at other languages it's not so bad actually, very specifically calling out Golang here because it claimed exactly this topic as an initial design goal and to this day has basically failed at delivering it.

There are even languages like C++ where the community as a (w)hole has given up on that topic and instead opts for completely building every tool by building the underlying libraries up first manually.

Considering all this, who can actually beat Python at this point? Java maybe? Is Ruby still competing? How is NodeJS doing?

Currently with what I see around me (mostly Go and C++) I don't feel too bad about setuptools+pip+virtualenv anymore.

> - People expect you to care about your job.

What I think is funny about this is that the actual expoiting slave driver bosses will accept sometimes that you do what you get paid for and then go home. They won't tell you so, but if you are able to read faces you can see them smile a little with respect if you refuse to get exploited. But some of the engineering colleagues will never accept that. 24/7 is the requirement. Even if nobody, not even them, gets anything out of it.

Amazon is also not fighting for customers, afaik. If something goes wrong, they dump you instructions on how to make it a task for the local police. And then they repeat this again and again.

The goal of a spoon is to make soup eatable. The goal of a blockchain is not to burn through a shit ton of electricity. Therefore I'd argue that your points a and b are mostly side effects, and not even side effects of blockchains. If you run high quality computer games on your system you will also burn through a shit ton of electricity. If you go to another unregulated market you also get a lot of scams and get-rich-quick schemes. Blockchains not even necessitate crypto coins, they can live without it. If you for instance like Kafka but don't like that it's centralized, you could run it on a blockchain as well.

PS: I'd argue that, depending on the type of gun you use, eating soup with a gun is still easier than eating completely without any tools. And does having a spoon really makes you worse at soccer? I'm not sure the intial thesis holds. A tool can make X easier and not make Y harder.

I technology is not about anything. There are people who try to use it for good of humanity and there are people who try to use it for their personal gains on the cost of others. It's always like this. And if we wouldn't develop technology, they would still use the old ones (e.g. horse riding).

Nothing comes to a 50% page size cookie notification without an opt-out option.

And how do I know if this app itself is or is not spying on me?

You mean you read blogs where people claim that amount of profit over a span of 3-6 months.

My toilet paper at home has four layers. (Same amount of relevance)

All these "let's be more inclusive by focussing on what/how we can exclude" activities these days are really scary. You can't be inclusive by being exclusive.

30% profit. You might consider a career as fantasy author.

Same for me with monopoly. Monopoly doesn't have backstabbing that much, but certainly has alliances and some people already don't take too well to other people cooperating without them.

Also the numbered quotation format is really without indentation. If I recall correctly in restructuredText you can do the same to do quotations correctly, and you could also put in strings instead of numbers, e.g. [<Author><Year>] (might need Sphinx, a library on top of resT, or maybe a bibtex plugin).