jondubois

True. Also, it's about time the EU got its own Facebook, its own Google, etc... Just like the US, China and Russia.

Right now the EU is getting juiced.

The fiat economy is attention driven and fully controlled by the government so it makes no sense that EU industry should operate under the thumb of the US Federal Reserve Bank. If we're going to continue with the current government driven fiat economy, at least make sure it operates under our own government.

That would be great. I look forward to it. I hope EU regulators can squeeze them like a lemon on the way out... Squeeze them till their pips squeak.

>> Get So Good They Can’t Ignore You

From my experience this is fiction. If those who control the means of production don't like you or your personality, they will ignore you and actively work to suppress you.

This happened to me. I was constantly overlooked for promotion and ignored in spite of an impressive proven track record and being a workaholic.

After 2 years of delivering a lot of value and working like crazy, I quit the company in a dramatic way.

I was so frustrated with my job that I had a breakdown and insulted the CTO in front of the CEO before quitting. I burned that bridge because I knew subconsciously that these people had already been suppressing me a long time, that if they wanted to get revenge after I left, it wouldn't change anything; they'd already been sabotaging me the whole way through.

I was right about that because after I quit, the project's community ended up supporting me and I was able to continue my work outside of the company (I suspect my ex-bosses did try to sabotage me BTW). So yes, they can ignore you no matter how good you are and how hard you work. Members of certain minority groups within the company will understand this notion very well though it can apply to anyone. You may have to seek support from an entirely different group of people.

I think they should be allowed to talk about politics. Verbal conflict is always good. The reason why political conflicts are not resolvable these days is because there is a strong element of financial self-interest which is preventing honest and rational discourse.

On one side, some people have an interest in not accepting that their financial success is arbitrary and illegitimate. On the opposite side, some people feel that they have been locked out of an arbitrary wealth transfer and so they have a strong interest in not accepting that they're incompetent losers and that they deserve to be at the bottom of the food chain because they didn't time the market right (a highly speculative and irrational market too!). Or maybe they didn't pass the Facebook whiteboard test job interview questions several years back (which is also an arbitrary hiring process by many accounts)... So basically they missed out on a huge opportunity because of some fickle arbitrary reason.

I don't think blocking discourse is going to improve things. History has shown time and time again that preventing free speech will stop people from finding compromises. The only solution to the worsening problems will be violence.

If the elites keep suppressing speech, the result will be worse than WW2 and the elites will not stand a chance because it will be fought on their own turf... The elites won't even know who their enemy is. Their own friends and family members could be against them. They won't even realize it until it's too late.

The right thing to do is to find political solutions. I personally think that UBI (Universal Basic Income) would solve most problems. It wouldn't fix the wealth gap immediately, but it would fix the mechanism which is suspected of causing arbitrary (centralizing) wealth transfer and that would at least level the playing field.

UBI is a really good compromise. If the elites are so confident in their superior abilities, surely they have nothing to lose by leveling the playing field right?

BTW, I currently earn 100% passive income so I'm actually saying this as someone who is on the winning side... I've come so close to complete failure - I leaped over the crevasse in the nick of time; the system's fickleness and arbitrariness are crystal clear to me. I'm currently standing on the winning side of a very deep precipice and I can see legions of talented people running straight into it.

Formal proofs are useless because most systems in the real world are far too complex to be formally verified. The formal proofs for most systems would be so long and complex that they would be almost guaranteed to suffer from human error; the proofs are much more likely to have errors than the underlying code itself.

It is a tool invented by bureaucrats for the sole purpose of job creation.

If society keeps becoming more bureaucratic, soon enough, someone will invent the concept of unit testing for formal proofs... There is no limit to how ridiculous this can get. The Fed's mandate is job creation, and job creation is just what it'll do! Any job! Mostly useless jobs!

I don't believe in the term 'non-profit'. Behind any large project which receives a lot of money, there are always people who will find ways to profit from it. They will extract as much money from these projects as the government will allow... And it turns out the government will allow a lot.

Try starting a business without any personal connections and watch it fail over and over again while customers keep telling you how much they like your product but you just can't compete with corporations financially. If corporations were on a level playing field with everyone else and they did not have a financial advantage in terms of having front row access to cheap money printed by the Fed, or their business didn't revolve around constantly trying to destroy small business competitors, I would have agreed that it would not be such a huge dilemma.

Interesting article. It poses a huge dilemma. As more jobs become redundant, how should 'useless people' be compensated relative to 'useful people' without whom the economy could not operate?

To complicate matters, many of the 'useless people' could be highly skilled and could theoretically launch their own businesses and start competing against established businesses and take away some market share... But if the market is already saturated and consumers are already satisfied beyond their perceptual capacity, launching a business in such a saturated industry could not be regarded as a 'useful' activity in a broad sense (it's a zero-sum game). This means that being able to capture economic value (profits) from an industry would not necessarily imply that someone is useful; in fact, an increase in profits may not bear any correlation with an increase in consumer satisfaction in that industry; in a saturated market, the profits for a specific company or individual could entirely be the result of political lobbying, social scheming, or luck and have nothing to do with increased consumer satisfaction.

Given that useless people are still capable of capturing profits from an industry by starting their own business, it would be highly unethical for the incumbents (those who own the means of production in the saturated markets) to try to stop the 'useless people' from trying to compete (since that would deny them access to the same fair playing field which the incumbents themselves had benefited from in the past). Yet at the same time, it may be more efficient overall if, instead of trying to compete in a saturated market, 'useless people' would accept the reality that they are in fact useless and instead of trying to compete, they would get paid to be idle.

But if useless people get paid to be idle, then how will useful people who still need to work feel about that? Also, even for people who have useful skills, there may be more people who have those skills than there are positions to fill. How then do we choose which people should have a job and which should not? Does it make sense to select them based on skill if the skill level of the employee does not affect consumer satisfaction?

It seems like this would create an incentive for useless idle people to pretend to be or have been useful; they can't just accumulate enough money to go idle without having a backstory to go with it. Yet at the same time it is in the interest of incumbents (owners of the means of production) for these people to go idle instead of competing with them. To appease those who are still working, every member of the idle class needs an excuse (e.g. they sold their company to Google for a few million $). The economy then becomes centered around manufacturing backstories for new members of the idle class... Until the point where everything is automated and everyone can be idle.

I think the biggest problem with this story is that if we remove the market selection mechanism? What kind of alternative selection mechanism should be used instead?

I don't agree with this view. HTML with CSS can support either fixed or fluid (and responsive) layouts... So it supports all the features required by PDF and more.

I don't see a problem with giving the document creator the option to go with a fluid or fixed layout and make the software default to fixed layout.

The purposes of HTML and PDF are not orthogonal, there is a great deal of overlap.

The real advantage of PDF is that the images which are used inside the document are bundled into the same file... Whereas HTML has historically required the image files to be loaded from elsewhere which made it not portable. That said, now with HTML, you can define images with base64 data, so it could in fact replace PDF.

I don't buy into the job creation dogma. The government could pay thousands of people to push a boulder up a mountain... Then these boulder pushers can use their salaries to pay for food, healthcare and accommodation... Are the cooks, doctors and builders on the other side of the deal getting a good deal here? No. the boulder pushers got something for nothing and so did the guy who manages the boulder pushers. Society is worse off because the boulder pushers could have used the same skills to harvest food, for example.

GPS and the Internet were both invented by military, so I get that point... But that was a different time, there were different kinds of people in charge and people had more principles. When was the last innovation from the military which served the public interest?

I'm saying don't send tax payer dollars to be burned into the void of space when that same money could be used to improve the quality of people's lives here on earth. For sure it's better to waste it efficiently than inefficiently. But even better to not waste it at all.

Hurray, more government money being laundered to pay master Elon and his gang.

Let's keep increasing taxes and keep printing more fiat money and give it to Elon Musk so that we can all be good slaves, giving him and his gang tangible goods and services in exchange for what is left of the magic green paper which the government gave to him for free; much of which he burned off into the void of space. Long live master Elon.

If the law keeps harming the majority of people, society will devolve into anarchy. If the law starts to not make sense, judges will allow themselves more room for interpretation and this will be the ideal environment for mafias and factions. This will not be good for corporations - Without rigid laws backed by sensible moral grounds, corporations will split up and be devoured from the inside.

I think that's the point. No one in these big corporations understands what they're doing... They don't know half of the story. But they're so large and powerful that this doesn't prevent them from succeeding anyway. That's the danger.

Also there is no incentive for anyone to understand what they're doing. It's like that saying that people tend to not understand things when good performance at their job depends on them not understanding things.

It's hypocrisy that Facebook allows religious groups, but doesn't allow conspiracy theory groups. Conspiracy theory is a belief system. Whether it's true or not is irrelevant. You cannot allow religion and not allow conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theories help people to make sense of the world, this is a fundamental human need.

I didn't see Facebook banning the Catholic church for its stance against contraception.

This article forgets to mention that right now the Fed is printing and giving free money to corporations via pretend-loans. The interest rates are so low that, in the hands of large corporations, the loans pay themselves off through stock price inflation which the loans themselves create (including future loans).

I think dominance and control do play a part in tech holy wars but it's not everything.

Power structures within tech communities ossify and the community itself can regress in their abilities. And so this means that technologies can sometimes get worse over time.

So that can create conflicts between old tech which is proven and reliable and new tech which is not proven and can be unreliable.

When companies go bankrupt these days, usually there aren't enough assets left to cover the loss for creditors - Especially tech companies whose main assets are intangible IP which loses all of its value when the company goes down.

I think this is only because tech hiring is broken and has been broken for decades.

Of course, all investments these days are a form of money laundering. Most funding is derived from loan credit which has been moved around a network of companies. The companies on the front line keep funneling the credit to big corporations and then eventually declare bankruptcy, then new companies spawn up to take their place. It's a systematized global money laundering scheme which extends all the way to the Federal Reserve Bank of the United States.

This game involves separating credit from its underlying debt obligation, collecting the credit and then letting another limited liability corporate entity take the fall for not being able to meet the debt obligation. This is basically what Carl Icahn did with Hertz - He made Hertz take huge loans from banks, then Hertz awarded one of Carl's other companies a huge multi-million dollar contract using that loan money, then Hertz declared bankrupcy. Carl gets to keep the money he received from that big contract. Carl gets the credit, Hertz takes the fall. Carl took no risks and added no value.

When you also consider that those initial loans are printed out of thin air by banks, it becomes clear that our economy is founded on legitimized fraud.

We have a system which rewards fraudsters at the expense of honest people.

What is the difference between right and wrong when the law itself encourages wrongdoing? Nobody seems to knows what is the difference between right and wrong anymore. If the law said it was OK to kill people, we would all start killing each other the next day. That's how superficial our morals have become.

I like TypeScript because it gives me an edge over my competitors. I look forward to Microsoft coming up with more abstractions to further constrain and slow down my competition and keep lowering the productivity bar in my industry - Microsoft was right when they said that TypeScript would make my life easier.

I keep seeing this idea of an incompetent government come up repeatedly.

What people don't understand is that it is precisely this incompetence which allows corporations to manipulate the government so well. Laws and regulations do not originate within governments. They originate from lobbyists who are working in the interest of corporations and other large financial interests.

When discussing the economy, some people will keep insisting that capitalism is the most intelligent collective system possible, yet when it comes to politics, they will make it seem like capitalism is the dumbest system in the world, utterly incompetent at implementing perverse economic agendas... So I guess the view must be that capitalism maximizes the extraction of value from every kind of activity except when those activities relate to the government?

Clearly this makes no sense. Why would capitalism's efficiency at leveraging the collective intelligence stop at politics?

>> How many different possible representations of a 'thing' do you have? A json object?

Why would you design a function in such a way that one of the arguments can represent so many different things? The problem here has nothing to do with testing. The problem is that the function itself is poorly designed.

If anything, the difficulty of writing a test for such a function would in itself be an indication that the function needs a refactoring.

I have 15 years of development experience (including a lot of spare time spent on open source projects) and I also agree word-for-word.

I've moved back and forth between statically typed and dynamically typed languages many times over a couple of decades and I've come to the exact same conclusion as you. People who are equally skilled with both paradigms will prefer dynamically typed languages; simply because there is almost no added value of having static types and in TypeScript's case it's not worth the extra transpilation step and all the problems that it creates.

Accidentally mixing incompatible types is mostly a problem for junior developers. I'm much more likely to accidentally put on my pants, socks and shoes in the reverse order in my daily life than mix up incompatible types in my code.

The solution is not to add stickers all over your clothes to remind you which way is the front or what order you need to put them on; you don't need more tools, you just need more focus.

>> This feels like process immaturity or unfamiliarity.

On the contrary, I think it shows great maturity in the decision making process. Many highly experienced developers have stayed away from TypeScript for reasons like those mentioned in the article (mostly to do with the build environment, source mapping, versioning complexity, etc...) These are very significant problems and not worth the small benefits which static typing brings.

>> It isn't that hard to get $20k in funding if your idea is halfway decent - that's not the value that YC provides. The value that YC provides is in the networking and connections

It's very hard in most countries - Coming from someone who has been applying constantly for 10 years. At one point I even managed to get invited to some events and conferences where a specific seed stage investor was going and I approached him enough times at different events that I was eventually able to secure coffee with the guy; took 2 years from when I started trying to get investment. Then this investor encouraged me to apply to their incubator... Then they just rejected me. My open source project was one of the most popular in Australia at the time. I had worked on it for several years and I had a solid business strategy and I could really have benefited from $20K and any kind of support network (I was never asking for YC level business connections, just some help me get 1 foot in the door with 1 B2B customer would have been great).

BTW my project was more than 'halfway decent'. As proof, today my project powers multiple mainstream tech projects and several major blockchain projects and I'm collecting forging rewards on one of them. Did it with $0 funding and most people I met actively working against me instead of helping me. Got screwed over so many times.

I don't think my case is unusual. What happened to me is just average.

The thing is that in spite of it being so difficult to secure a mere $20K, this whole experience did not make me believe that fiat money is valuable. It did the exact opposite. So now I'm dedicating my career to the fight against fiat money.

It doesn't happen enough. Nowhere near enough. The number of companies which apply to YC versus the number which are actually accepted is a very bad ratio. YC and all other incubators combined do not represent a free market by any stretch of the imagination. They're picking winners based on some selection criteria which worked at one point in history... This funnel has been so thoroughly gamed and hacked that at this stage, they might as well invest in random companies. Does anyone realize just how hard it is to get even $20k in funding for a hard working honest founder who is not a psychopathic manipulator. IMO, anybody who can't setup a functional profitable business with $20k funding is unfit to run any company. You've got to give a first chance to more people and fewer second, third and fourth chances to charming psychos.

The tech culture of investing gigantic sums of money in a handful of hyped up projects is sick IMO. Especially when these investors already know perfectly well that only 1 out of 10 startup makes it and that it's almost impossible to predict which ones will succeed. Even Y Combinator, which is top of the top, doesn't have that high success rate in terms of number of companies.

Instead of giving this one company $2.6 billion, the investors could have invested $100k in 26k different startups. They could have literally scrolled through the list of the top 26k open source projects on GitHub and invested 100K in each of their teams to come up with any kind of business related to their expertise.

Their success rate is bound to have been better. This money was just wasted. Investors are just too lazy to interact with so many companies. Too fat and lazy to make an impact.