justin_vanw

I said concurrent execution. When being pedantic it is important to read carefully.

Being super careful about 'parallel' and 'concurrent' is super, super pedantic and pointless. They are synonyms. If two things are running concurrently, they are running in parallel. If two things are running in parallel, they are running concurrently. These are terrible words to overload with very careful definitions.

When people talk about 'concurrency' using the super careful pedantic definition, they just mean that it's possible to execute code while at the same time blocking on system calls. This isn't some kind of great feat and any language that can't do it is a toy. There is absolutely no reason to act like 'concurrency' using this definition is in any way special or worth even mentioning.

But that's not the point, is it? People get defensive about their favorite languages, so when faced with valid criticisms like "the GIL prevents you from running Python code in parallel" (which is a completely valid and actually pretty huge defect when modern computers have many cores on average) instead of just admitting the deficiency a person can be defensive and respond with stupid lectures about 'concurrency' and 'parallelism'.

I think most CPython folks are quite annoyed by the lack of concurrent execution! The GIL sucks.

If you ever ask Racket-lang folks about threads they will lecture you about concurrency vs parallelism endlessly, it's like a mantra they repeat to avoid realizing there is a problem.

A distinction isn't necessarily useful.

You have been in the industry for around 40 years and you have no personal network you can call on for referrals? You are obviously leaving out critical parts of your story.

What is the negative consequence of breaking the site for an hour? Is it "some people are a little annoyed", "nobody notices", or "customers start calling and are very upset" or even "customers file lawsuits"?

The amount of friction you add to the development velocity has to be proportioned to the potential downsides. A system that shows doctors xray images in the ER cant go down or people might die. A site like twitter can go down and slightly improve the life of its users. It sounds like you are recommending big company super risk averse solutions at a startup, which is just silly. Besides, staging environments never work, for a long list of reasons. You should be recommending continuous integration and a focus on proper unit tests.

I guess it depends on your base, but if their revenue is about $100MM/yr (which I highly doubt, companies love to outright lie, but lets be optimistic) then it's still only about $200k/employee, and their employee costs are likely $300k-$400k/employee/year, if not more in their Redwood City headquarters.

So Evernote spent that much and they didn't even make any furniture, so their wood costs were very very low. Zero even. They still spent that much money?

> This is something that can't realistically happen for a furniture plant. You can't pile up furniture up to the sky without paying your wood suppliers.

Have you ever seen $300MM worth of wood? I specifically said the owner had pumped a huge amount of money in the company.

> I MEAN IF NO ONE IS MANAGING THE DEVELOPERS, NOTHING WILL GET DONE.

What they don't realize is that if you put nontechnical people in charge of programmers, nothing will get done.

I don't think it is a problem with the VC model at all. Evernote has taken more than $300MM in funding. Nobody put a gun to their head and made them take that money. The people who run Evernote decided to go in and tell investors that they had a plan to turn Evernote into a multi billion dollar company, and that plan said they needed a huge pile of money, and the investors made the mistake of writing a check.

Evernote could have skipped those VC meetings, skipped renting the huge, insanely expensive office just off Rt. 1 by SF, skipped putting huge, expensive light up Evernote signs on that office, and skipped hiring hundreds of engineers in the most expensive place in the world to hire engineers. They could have rented a small office in a commercial park in San Jose and only hired 10 people and now they would be quite profitable. They could have done this by only taking a few million dollars in funding, and now they wouldn't need an insane valuation to exit.

> The rest of your post fails to substantiate this claim.

Re-reading what you posted I have to agree with this.

>Unsurprisingly, this is not a big problem for economic systems that do not reward profit-making.

There are few examples of such systems and they are extremely unstable, there are certainly no examples surviving more than a hundred years or so.

> Witness e.g. the fact that capitalist systems always end up realizing and attempting to solve this problem with a patchwork of laws and regulations.

All systems end up solving all problems with a patchwork of laws and regulations, except the problems that go away by themselves, or the problems that are not addressed at all.

> But the problem of social benefit being misaligned specifically with profit-making is very much a quintessentially capitalist problem.

Again, this is just a tautology. Above you effectively define capitalism as the system that rewards profit-making. So any feature of any system that is specific to profit making can only exist in capitalism in the structure you set up, so it's not a meaningful claim at all.

> Also, consider that your comments about psychology are mostly comments about your own biases and value systems.

No, this is simply not the case. If you think that mammals don't inherently have a concept of personal property you should see how my dog reacts when the cat is sleeping in her bed. We have to spend countless hours teaching children to share, not because it is natural for them, but because what is natural for them is not adaptive to life in a society. Our social structures have evolved much faster than our biology.

So this is basically OSX but take away 30 years of human-computer interaction learnings and UI improvements.

"Capitalism" is totally orthogonal to this, any alternative to capitalism requires the use of force to confiscate carrots from one person to give carrots to someone else, by definition (replace carrots with whatever you grow on your farm or make at work all day). This sort of scheme is so unnatural to human psychology that it can only persist where there is a total lack of any criticism, which means there is no 'media' whatsoever in non capitalist countries, there is only state propaganda.

You might say "what about slavery", and you would be correct, except that this makes my point perfectly. It was illegal to teach a slave to read, at a time when the only media was newspapers and the written word. Why did they have to prevent slaves from having access to media? Because the system was so unnatural to human psychology that it could only persist while there was no media whatsoever.

So talking about 'media' in an environment besides 'capitalism' doesn't even make sense.

"there is no value in media"

So much this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_medium_is_the_message

What is reported is decided based entirely on what will hold the most attention for the advertisements. If media outlet attempts to act according to any other rule they are displaced by one which will maximize eyes on advertisements. (This is much like politicians who base every decision on getting more votes against politicians doing anything else.) The exception to this rule is when the media is directly used to further other interests of the large corporations which own it.

"Entry Level" is a euphemism. It doesn't mean "No experience" it means "Not very good so has to work cheap, but can do basic tasks with lots of supervision."

With this contraption you'll be nearly as efficient as out of the box Emacs!

>>GG Flip is a Golang library which generates the Javascript sign flip library. I preferred Go because lack of generics seemed like a good design choice.

God help us if this isn't satire.

I certainly never said either of those things, but this is a great example of why I removed the comments. If some wondering about a hypothetical future dystopia offend you this much it tells me that the thought police might come after me, so is it worth it to participate in a discussion with people like you?

I'm removing my comments since apparently engaging in a thought experiment makes me an inhuman monster.

I don't have a CS degree and I'm fairly well versed in philosophy. I suggest you take a closer look at your assumptions, it may be that you can't get to the truth entirely by quoting Gould.

Frankly it astonishes me that you don't accept that income is more correlated to intelligence today than it was when a large percentage of the population were slaves, or when people were legally bound to the land they lived on? Are you just disagreeing with everything I say out of reflex?

I didn't advocate neutering the poor, and I strongly disagree with your suggestion that we murder rich people and take their stuff.

> Intelligence isn't as strong a determinant as you claim, in either direction.

Your claim is incorrect.

http://www.emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/Intellige...

EDIT: over the course of one generation, higher intelligence leads to a dramatically higher income. In the long run, if this effect continues, this will be compounded as higher intelligence parents are also higher income parents (by hypothesis).

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This is just 'ancient astronaut' nonsense. If you gave modern people some incentive to move big stones around without heavy machinery they would figure out how to do it in a couple of months. It's just not hard to do, and people have been moving much larger pieces of stone during recorded history, so we know the techniques used perfectly well.

Lots of the obelisks in Rome are far larger than any prehistoric stones moved or worked, and we know how they did it and it's impressive. Impressive isn't the same as an unexplained mystery.

Standards don't matter, interoperability and openness are what matter. Standards are a means to that, but it's perfectly ok for one vendor to add features and do experiments, that is how progress is made, deviation/extension, adoption, analysis, and finally after all of that standardization. A standard without vendors pushing the limits is the hallmark of a dead technology.

Was this title generated by a markov model of other HN titles?

Well I guess I'll wait another 14 years before I comment again. I'm sure you'll all still be here pretending this is a real thing.

Filing a patent takes about 2 months, they've been on this nonsense for 4 years or so.

Edit: 14 years...

Why are we talking about this forever? Can't someone just make one of these, demonstrate that they don't work well in practice, and then we can stop wasting time on it?