82 karma · joined June 13, 2023
(I won't start discussing the merits of copyleft itself, if that's what your "why do you care?" question was aiming at.)
Chess is already there. It's really easy to cheat. You can though analyze games after the fact and pretty reliably conclude whether somebody cheated. That's one example of server-side cheating mitigation. No matter what the client feeds you, cheaters are detected and eventually banned.
Today, many companies basically ban GPL-licensed or otherwise copyleft software projects, perhaps apart from a handpicked list of exceptions, because they don't want to deal with the hassle. MIT, fine, GPL, no. And that's pretty sad. Because it means that if write a new project you need to choose between "people will use it but it won't be copyleft" and "copyleft but a sizeable part of the community won't touch it with a 10ft pole".
Happens all the time everywhere. Money wants to maximize profits. If company A brings you 2% return and company B 5%, then the money will gravitate towards company B. It's not that company A doesn't have profitable projects, perhaps all of their projects are profitable. But just less so than company B, on weighted average. And that's not bad. A reasonable society prefers to use its resources optimally. That's where market mechanisms and society objectives align, and that's why we are embracing a market-based economy. (There are other factors than profits of course, and that's where government regulation comes in. But all else equal, the above example of companies A and B holds and illustrates my point.)
I encourage you to try a management role in a for-profit business and after a few years we can chat again.
> Also, framing my comment as a "misconception" is kinda indisgenious.
Sorry, I didn't mean to offend. I just see this line of arguments now and then and it seems to me that there is some fundamental knowledge of the involved mechanisms lacking.
Nope. That's part of the misconception here. It suffices that they are being sold for less profit than the target profit margins of the company. And that's very likely the case, given the situation with the premium-tier offering. Every reasonable company cancels projects not bringing in enough profits, since shareholders want to see a return on investment. Non-zero profit is not enough.
> You talk as if "the markets" and "the economy" are some naturally occuring phenomena that are matter of fact and non-negotiable.
I'd indeed claim that market mechanisms can be treated like natural laws, just like gravity or natural selection. You can steer them with taxes or other incentives, just like you can steer how gravity or natural selection impact you. But the mechanisms themselves work no matter if you like them or not, or if you find them "evil" or not.
And I say this as a lefty who is in favor of radical inheritance tax and such. It's important to understand the thing you try to regulate.
Sure. That's true though to different degrees for everybody participating in a market-based economy. You can call all of us "evil", but then the term loses most of its meaning.
We're not living in a dream world. The conditions you set have consequences in how people behave. Not just individuals, but also companies.
Sure, you can call it like that if you will. You are free not to buy any products from a company doing this if you don't like it.
As I explained above, they could stop doing that, but then the product would cost more. That may be nice for somebody who wants the premium product version for $280 instead of $350. But I'm sure there are people around who are fine with the simpler ("broken") one if that means they only need to pay $150. And since there are, there is obviously a demand, so it's obviously not all bad what the company is doing.
Again, if you don't like it, don't buy it. (Oh, and in this particular case, you can just buy the cheap one and do the mod. Be happy that you saved $200 instead of ranting that this is wrong in the first place. The more you rant, the harder they will make it for next time.)
This term demonstrates a lack of understanding of market dynamics.
As a company you aim for a certain profit when developing and later manufacturing and selling a product. The market has multiple segments and ideally you re-use design and manufacturing processes for multiple segments. Simply speaking, you can basically sell a single tier for $250 or differentiate by different means into a $150 tier and a $350 premium tier. In the end, people with higher quality demands will pay a significant, dis-proportionate premium. So, you can tap into that, which means the premium tier essentially cross-subsidizes the cheap tier. Everybody angry at this practice needs to understand that they couldn't just sell the premium tier for $150. They'd need to sell it for $250, or whatever the weighted mean is. Worse, they'd likely sell fewer items in total, so $280 or some such is more likely to reach the same total profit.
Really, it's not about being evil, it's about economy.
Drawing a comparison to slavery is quite shocking, tbh.
Gotta appreciate if you're working in the former. Drawback is you can't BS your way through issues. Everybody above me in the chain (which is like 4 people) could write a quicksort blindly. If anybody tries any BS they don't have their job much longer.
Well, nobody forces you to work for a company with managers like that. I personally wouldn't.
Might not be true for this particular posting.
But the criticism was that the job ad was not requiring knowledge of how to write code, and I was pointing out that the degree requirement (strict or not) indicates that that's not true.
If you don't have the required degree but can demonstrate equivalent skills, then that's fine. Kudos to the company about being flexible on the formalities side.
That typically entails programming experience, especially in Germany.
No need to be arrogant towards people outside the field. My grandma doesn't know the difference between the random IT guy that updates your Windows printer driver and a Linux kernel dev, but I'd still not call her an "intolerable bore".
(Also discussed recently on HN.)
If I have the option to choose between two gadgets, the acquiring prince of one may be far less (assuming lower quality and everything else equal) and even usage is kinda the same, modulo a bit of frustration if the lower-quality thing is not as smooth to use, but if it breaks, then cheap stuff tends to be harder if not impossible to repair, and if you can't fix it then you need to dispose of it and possibly get a replacement.
Too much hassle. If I have the money, I optimize for quality above everything else.
(Sadly, since manufacturers know this, the premium quality version usually costs disproportionally more cause market -- I'm ok with paying more. Not just a bit more, but much more.)
In other words, if this single product the company is working on succeeds, then the unit cost can be brought down so much that it's still a gold mine.
What disturbs me sometimes is that many people in software engineering approach debugging like empirical science. Run experiments, gather data, fit some curve, essentially. In the end, a program is a product of the mind. It's pure logic, and fundamentally it's understandable, unlike the real world which can at every turn have new surprises for you. We should think more and measure less.
That's why all those "I tell you about my secret to making 5 grand a day if you click the link below, for free" youtube ads are obviously all scams.
Apart from getting this upside down like others point out -- Mom sent me to daycare, which is exactly the type of specialization discussed in the article. One woman taking care of 5-20 kids instead of 20 moms doing it on their own.
As somebody living in a "Nordic country", I respectfully disagree. The municipality often pays "volunteers" for this. It's usually sports clubs and similar organisations that need funding, and instead of just pouring it into them, the municipality "hires" them to do some cleaning, for example. So, after a big event in the city, you see folks all over the place cleaning up, often times kids from soccer clubs or such, but they don't do it entirely voluntarily, they do it because that will pay for their shirts next season or their trip to the training camp in the summer.
That said, it's also common to get involved in neighborhood activities that make things nice, planting some trees, painting some 300-year-old cabin in the woods with a bunch of neighbors that do care, this kind of thing, but I've lived in the U.S. for a while as well and we did that there too. Perhaps mostly with what you'd call hippies that participated mostly, but over here in $nordic_country, it's not like it's everybody who is contributing either. There are the more bourgeios who don't contribute and the I-don't-care-f*k-off type of neighbors as well.