erikb

A) There is a lot of democratic control actually. More than employees execute I would say. In a 90k people organisation even the most powerful person has much less power than a majority of the other 89.999 people. The founders btw own less than 20%. Aaaand I also own shares. So I'm one of the guys who sets the policy for employees like me. I also go to the shareholder meeting which is held not far away from where I work. The most powerful owner is probably an investment bank. But they only care about the numbers. If "care package for employees of size $X" is spent on tennis courts or air conditioning in the office, or free ice cream after the canteen lunch, they simply don't care. So it's open for democratic processes to assign these budgets.

B) Why is democracy a prerequisit for socialism?

In some US companies it is already like that, that citizenship is a priced good. Especially since most teams are a collection of differently sourced consultants. You rarely see any real employment besides the project manager.

And yes, a lot of the stuff feels like feudalism. But from my perspective the feudalism part comes from topic ownership and titles, budget ownership and headcount more than from employment status. Of course you can't get your own budget if you are not a full-time employee, but just because you're a full-time employee doesn't mean you will ever get your own budget to manage.

Honestly, I work in a huge company (number three in comparison worldwide, >90k employees world-wide), and it feels like Socialism. We eat lunch together in a canteen. Everything we do and buy is shared ownership. There's false propaganda from the top down, and you can live a happy life as long you accept the size of your share of the cake and don't criticize people above you.

This is not meant as criticism, I actually like the lifestyle. Especially since in such a big corps there are actually resources available compared to end-times socialist countries. But if you live here in this company your whole life it is questionable why we should call ourselves capitalists.

This is not a top-down problem, but a bottom-up problem. People want to feel meaningful, so they make up stories of why their job is important, why this or that task needs to get done right now, etc. The only things that are really urgent is when you are a focus point of a political game between two managers. Then you really need to struggle, work overtime, etc. Otherwise usually nobody cares about your existence and you can do whatever you want, as long as you do it in the office building.

Honestly in some regards step 5 might be much more successful than what most people do. Most people go to their manager and complain about Wu. Then the manager does nothing. Then they complain at the bar to their friends how their manager AND Wu suck.

(Wouldn't exclude myself from that loser group, although I don't like to go to bars.)

> In an efficient market, why would profit-focused companies employ a bunch of people who by their own admission aren’t doing anything valuable?

There are lots of reasons for bullshit tasks, I found. And let's call it tasks, not jobs. Because a job is something regular that pays a monthly income, and there ARE certainly complete bullshit jobs!

One reason, as mentioned here, is process. Everything needs a process, so that it's clear (or rather that it's unclear, but more about that later) who's responsible, what needs to be done, and that there is an objective checklist to show that something is done when it's done. It sounds stupid but it makes complex things work. In a relatively big company for this chair topic a number of separate, independent units, who might not even know each others existence, need to cooperate on a task that is split in organisational, financial and temporal terms. That is hard. But with a process it's possible to get finished at some point.

The second thing is that each company that is still alive had a time of growth and a time when they where stuck. When you are stuck, you can't just fire everybody. And you can't allow people to just browse Facebook all day. So what do you do? You create bullshit tasks. That keeps the juice flowing. And if an interesting, profitable opportunitiy comes up you still have people, orgs, etc setup so you can start approaching it. It also makes sense, to some degree.

The third one I can immediately think about might come as shock to some people. We grow up with the believe that things are equal and supposed to be fair. Truth is, the world sucks and is an unfair place. Therefore power hierarchies really exist, even in the seemingly most open places. Even at the cool company you heard about and really want to work at. And what do people do who achieved some powers in these virtual pyramids? They create obstructions for the people below them so they can't follow them upstairs and maybe even take their seat. Bullshit processes, bullshit tasks, and bullshit jobs help greatly with that. This might look inefficient, but in fact might actually be the most efficient system in existence. Because it works. It worked in the stone age, in the medieval times, in modern dictatorships, and also (sadly) in modern democracies. Like the invisible hand that governs the resource allocation in free markets, power structures are always there and make things work. Maybe not like you want it, but you are also not at the top of the pyramid, right?

Alright, that's what I can think off. They do valuable things, just that the value is not obvious to you nor is the value shared with you. That's why it looks like bullshit.

Yes and so do all kids in Germany, France, Austria, Switzerland, Denmark, China, etc.

By having flat roads and the fact that bikes are cheaper than cars? I honestly don't think one needs to do much to create a biking culture. Maybe some investment and biking lanes separated from roads are needed.

The central point is the content of your data. Also incomplete datasets should still work fine with both ledger and this analytics tool. So, not sure how it could be less centralized than this.

It's loading two gifs for me.

> I would expect pipes to be connectable and nestable.

How would that look like? I mean a pipe is something where one writes data into and another loads data from in the same order it was written into. I don't see how that could be nested, or why two pipes would need to be connected.

Afaik this one cannot connect to Ankiweb, therefore you can't sync your status with other devices.

The iphone app costs like $25 tho.

The funny thing is one barely realizes it when one is part of the future (e.g. when using the internet to write this comment), but one also rarely realizes it when one isn't part of the future (e.g. comparing the Chinese mobile world and mobile internet infrastructure to western countries, where China is ahead for almost 2 years now).

I don't think there is anything that can be done, honestly. There are reasons for the current way of decision making: keeping the people in power who have been in power since the beginning. If the way of work changes, then also the leadership will change. And the current leadership isn't that fond of such ideas.

I'll keep an eye on how well behemots like Microsoft or Saudi Arabia can really change under new leadership and build my hope on what I'm seeing there.

I'm working in a company that is exactly in this same position, that HP was in apparently around the 80s. The thing is that these big companies one or two generations after the founders are mostly staffed with people who know nothing else. They did their university internships in this company, they wrote their final thesis in this company, and now they work in this company. Of course that makes them super loyal, but that fact also makes it impossible for them to see that the company as a whole is currently colliding with an iceberg. I mean, it will probably still exist in 50 years and make a lot of money. I even own stock in my company because I believe it's strong. But it's quite unlikely that 10-20 years down the road it will still be the powerhouse it is now. The market is not continuing as it used to, but the company can hardly turn its course. People are not even recognizing that fact and confidently continue on the same path that worked for their mentors in their corresponding youth.

I work in a completely different field and I can tell you, it's absolutely the same. I think the chance is quite high, that people in even higher positions know they can only keep their position stable by putting such kind of people in leadership positions underneath them, or this is a serious survival skill in leadership positions itself, which allows such people to stay in power and even raise the ranks, specifically because they are skilled at sweeping things under the rug. Both would be a rather disappointing realization about the world, but that's how it looks like.

The moment I see this I will stop paying them.

Is the xlib here as framework really the right backend? I have not much skill in this area so I can't say. In web development when someone claims he's written the shortest version of A and imports library B then usually the actually important code is written in B and he simply used A to configure the library to give the corresponding outputs he desires. Like "I wrote the shortest calculator ever: import Windows.Calculator; new Windows.Calculator();"

First google result already says different: http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/market-size.htm...

I woud assume it's not a term like "revenue" but more a general word. It's also not smart for your own analysis to assume a single value for it. If you write a business case for instance, it's quite smart to summarize how you size the market for your product/service as well.

If he wants goverment support he probably is stealing IP from the american side and YC is either naive or knows this very well but is willing to trade IP for cashflow.

Well, they are now an established business, the growth of US startups has dwindled. So what do you expect?

The traditional startup also doesn't really work out in China due to the government wanting to be involved. It's much more suit driven over there and not possible just with t-shirts.

China is a lot bigger market than the US. EU is slightly bigger. US is third. Maybe with extended markets (e.g. Central America and Canada for US, Eastern Europe for EU, Belt and Road area for China, US is number two). You need to consider several factors, like number of people, as well.

A big problem for the US is that it is a litle off, while most other social/cultural areas are closely connected. For instance, China and Russia might be almost as close allies as the pre-Trump US and Europe. But because Russia and Europe are so close, in fact the business dependencies between both are quite high as well. So a lot of business happens in that exchange, with high values due to the political risks. Since the US lacks such interdependencies with close neighbors it can survive better in a time like WW2 but it is harder in a long peace time like we currently have.

I have a hard time understanding what the social aspects of a photo sharing site can be. Until now Instagram also had zero appeal for me, especially with such ideas like that you can only upload pictures from phones.

Altogether such kind of searches are probably more about calming people's mind than actually finding something. Especially in this case where the human AND THE DOG went missing without traces. It's super unlikely that they both had an accident and not one of them was still alive enough to at least try to get help. Dogs and humans, due to different physics, should likely have different patterns of dangerous accidents.

Replace "edge" with any other hot term and that's your IT market. Even without demand and even without innovation a lot of stuff is changed all the time. Current systems are centralized? Well let's decentralized everything. Current systems are decentralized? Centralize. Every. Thing.

Watching it as engineer can be especially painful, because you already know that the other thing is not that much better. And more often this b.s. starts with the optimal trade-offs and turns into exactly what was carefully avoided with good architecture and decision making.

Sometimes I really think some of the managers are sitting there thinking "Yes, I know that you are smarter than me. But that is your disadvantage. Just to get some leverage I will now push for the stuff you told me to avoid again and again over the last 3 years, and you can't beat me in that approach because everything in you is fighting against this."

What research could be the research there, tho. It's a very simple principle.

I would argue, though, that having some people actually taking it seriously and starting an implementation of that is awesome, part of the joke, and certainly sometimes even the source of some really cool stuff.

And a JIT-compiler + VM so it can be used on all environments.