news_hacker

Sorry you're getting downvoted for having a healthy sense of cynicism.

It is said that absolute power corrupts absolutely.

At the foundation of the U.S., in the Federalist Papers #51 (1788) it says:

> If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary

To your point:

> I wonder if advances in technology will one day create a coalition of super powerful people who will control the world and will make the rest of humanity salves at best and completely worthless at worst.

It's hard to say we haven't come dangerously close to achieving this approximation already. Regardless of your political affiliation, there was a headline today saying that Facebook is categorizing protests formed on its platform as "dangerous misinformation". This is a dangerously powerful stance that we shouldn't take lightly.

It's common in times of crisis to dwell on "what could we have done to prevent this?" or "what could we do better"?

There are many positive actions also taking place. Not to mention brave front-liners who are helping managing this to the best of their abilities.

No one could have predicted the magnitude of this.

The best time to plant a tree was 30 years ago. The next best time is now.

And do the others not?

This is assuming that the fundamental trust in the market is still there though the global pandemic. It's hard to heal a deeper pessimism when it settles in, and the coronavirus has caused this, especially in the elderly.

I think the Fed understands stock market psychology pretty well.

I think they just didn't have a choice here.

who is bookwarrior?

One of my favorite documentaries! It didn't just give me new knowledge, but re-framed the way I view & process future knowledge.

This is a great summary / reduction of the article. I appreciated how you broke it down into groups and made the example more concrete.

I think these are fair assessments. I don't treat either or as gospel, and I'm always quick to invoke "all models are wrong, but some are useful". However, they both have some interesting insights that have helped my personal journey.

Rich Dad Poor Dad (Kiyosaki) helped me see debt differently. I grew up with the mindset that all debt is bad, it's slavery, and it should be paid off... and that money is meant to be saved. I now realize that money is meant to be deployed. Also RDPD has helped push me along to realize that debt is a tool, and like all tools there are ways to use it that can be advantageous.

Loopholes often get conflated with "tax loopholes", but I just mean to say look for all opportunities instead of the ones that are common societal narratives (those are the ones that are very easy to get conditioned by!)

A common example: when everyone was caught up in the Gold Rush, the common narrative was "strike it big by finding gold!"... however, the guys selling the shovels were better off than the average speculator. The shovels were where the money was to be made.

Another example: there are many ways to climb the career ladder at a corporation. There's the HR policy way, where they hand you a list of bullet points and checkmarks and you tick them off, put in your time, and slowly climb your way up. Or you can take a risk, maybe try out a low-risk, high-reward experiment on your own time, show proof of a highly successful outcome, get to know influencers in senior positions, and find ways to market your accomplishments. Those skills will probably get you way further.

Seek out people who aren't bitter about the "elite", but students of them.

Some good reads, although they may at first make you a bit depressed: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-... and The Developer Hegemony.

Robert Kiyosaki, of Rich Dad Poor Dad fame, has some pretty solid fundamental advice - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftBeTIDv8Vg

Agreed, what makes this worse is that the tax system is not set up to benefit those who work jobs.

- We need to apply the same principles of consumption that we do to food to information. Consume responsibly. Be aware of the sourcing. Don't binge. Know what's junk and what's nourishing. Give back to positive sources to nourish and grow them (sustainability).

- Income inequality is huge. Slavery still exists but in a misdirected, slight-of-hand way. Work or the system will abandon you and it's "your fault".

- Learn the macro-game that you are a part of and the micro-game that you are a part of. You can only ever play/influence the micro-game so focus on that, but the macro-game can give useful context.

- Look where the sun doesn't shine. When everyone's looking one way, see what they're missing.

- Virtues are important. Virtues conflict. Meekness is a virtue, but don't make it your only one.

- Wealth has three portions: financials, relationships, and intelligence. Nurture all three.

- It's difficult to break out of the middle-class. It's even harder to break out of the middle-class mentality.

- There are many loopholes to fast-track you to your goals. Live your life by the orthodox narratives, and you may miss out on something fortuitous that crosses your path.

Ah I've been looking for something like svg2jsx for a while... thanks for sharing!

It was one of those moments where I knew someone out there MUST'VE made a tool for it, but it was a discoverability problem.

Seems like all the pedants came out for this article. In good-faith I understand the principles OP is suggesting and have first-hand experience of their usefulness. But it's easier to nit-pick I guess.

Probably a good book, but it serves a way different purpose than this article which is more of a gateway drug for newbies like myself who have never worked with awk before and don't quite understand the value-add.

I really enjoyed this article, because now that I have a sampling of the class of problems that awk can help me with, I am more likely to use it. And it only took 10 minutes to get this overview. My brain is already buzzing with ideas on how I can use this with gron[1] that was mentioned a few days ago on HN.

We all need a compelling reason for a tool before investing the time for whatever Bible may exist, so "just grab" the Bible first instead isn't the most helpful advice :) But I do appreciate you flagging it!

[1] https://github.com/tomnomnom/gron

---

P.S. For those who liked the writing style of this tutorial, you may enjoy these other ones on the IBM website by the same author Daniel Robbins: https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/views/linux/libraryview.j...

Love the greppability and reconstructability. This should be the submission.

Exactly! This is amazing. I can search for esoteric words/ideas like "soulcraft" and instantly find a niche of interesting videos etc. to further my ideas. This is a gamechanger.

Technical whitepaper [PDF]: https://developers.libra.org/docs/assets/papers/the-libra-bl...

Details on the Move programming language [PDF]: https://developers.libra.org/docs/assets/papers/libra-move-a...

"If you wish to make apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe"

- Carl Sagan

the npm ecosystem takes this quite literally, for better or worse.

Microsoft is over $1T since a few days ago...

Thanks for writing this. Really enjoy your writing style and hope you continue to write more!

Thank you! Appreciate the recommendations and explanations. I've been wanting to approach the Gulag Archipelago but was looking to enhance my understanding of the historical context and political climate of the times first.

Does anyone have any recommendations for reading up on the Russian Revolution? Books, videos, or otherwise.

What's wrong with being comfortable though? Why should one be dissatisfied with being satisfied? Is satisfaction ever OK? And if so, when? When can you know for sure that you've actualized your full potential? Is it even something that's knowable? This seems overly omniscient to me.

I see this fearful, regret-filled ethos driving a lot of my peers and the western culture at large and I worry about the mindset it instills in people. I know it's well-intentioned and comes from a perspective of the human potential being the highest form of sovereignty. A wasted life seems like the biggest crime. And comfortable has somehow come to become synonymous with wasted.

I'd argue for the cultivation of meaning as a replacement to this search for "finally good-enough" potential actualization, but that's me.

Some clarifying info on how the poem is the most misread & misunderstood poem in America, for those interested (it's actually an ironic poem about self-deception to avoid regret rather then a "triumphant self-assertion"):

> Frost’s poem turns this expectation on its head. Most readers consider “The Road Not Taken” to be a paean to triumphant self-assertion (“I took the one less traveled by”), but the literal meaning of the poem’s own lines seems completely at odds with this interpretation. The poem’s speaker tells us he “shall be telling,” at some point in the future, of how he took the road less traveled by, yet he has already admitted that the two paths “equally lay / In leaves” and “the passing there / Had worn them really about the same.” So the road he will later call less traveled is actually the road equally traveled. The two roads are interchangeable.

> According to this reading, then, the speaker will be claiming “ages and ages hence” that his decision made “all the difference” only because this is the kind of claim we make when we want to comfort or blame ourselves by assuming that our current position is the product of our own choices (as opposed to what was chosen for us or allotted to us by chance). The poem isn’t a salute to can-do individualism; it’s a commentary on the self-deception we practice when constructing the story of our own lives. “The Road Not Taken” may be, as the critic Frank Lentricchia memorably put it, “the best example in all of American poetry of a wolf in sheep’s clothing.” But we could go further: It may be the best example in all of American culture of a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

Source: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/09/11/the-most-misr...

edit: whoops, someone beat me to it and already posted the link

I enjoy Palantir's Blueprint.

https://blueprintjs.com/docs/

Although the implications are pretty damn scary and I'm disappointed in Facebook, it helps to remember Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

This could possibly be a "build fast and break things" security oversight rather than a full-on Big Brother grant to external parties. We'd need more closure and proof from Facebook if this was the case.

Television and radio are broadcast mediums. Facebook is a different medium altogether and not an apt comparison IMO, since all individuals produce the content... it's a sort of "democratized broadcast content".

Facebook can and is taking responsibility over policing this content to some extent but you have to realize the two extremes the whole enterprise has to flirt with: (1) respect individual liberties but allow for the full spectrum of negative human behavior, or (2) try to play god and create a global set of moral conduct and use it to silence and thought-police those that don't comply.

I hope you can see the trickiness here and that there is no utopian panacea to easily solve this issue.

Reneé Girard has some interesting things to say about scapegoating.

> "Everywhere and always, when human beings either cannot or dare not take their anger out on the thing that has caused it, they unconsciously search for substitutes, and more often than not they find them."

Seeing the overwhelming vitriol towards Facebook (justified to a certain extent, but certainly over-indexed), I can't help but join you in this low-value conspiracy indulgence...

If Girard's prescription is true here, what really is the media so rampantly enraged about that they are seeking to continually beat the downed (arguably) dead horse that is Facebook's PR image?

* Is it an old-money / new-money thing? https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/12/facebook-rupert-murdoch-thre...

* Is it related to an increasing coastal elite / tech / income-inequality distrust with the rest of America?

* Is it a trendy common-enemy for young intellectuals to frame as the next trope for "misused, oppressive power"?

* Is it anger and bargaining from the 2016 election fallout where the unhappy masses are working through the Stages of Grief and are searching for an object where to fixate the blame to move on?