noelherrick

As someone in flyover country, I don't think anybody in the coastal cities hates me, and I have never encountered someone from a big urban area that has treated me badly based on geography-that sounds like propaganda meant to divide people.

Self-driving cars are a solution to a problem we already fixed a hundred years ago: we fixed transit with trains.

PS: I'm not claiming that every single transport need can be solved by trains, but they do dramatically reduce the cost in human life. Yes, they have to be part of a mix of other solutions, such as denser housing. Yes, you can have bad actors that don't maintain their rail and underpay/understaff their engineers which leads to derailments, etc. I say this because the utopia of not having to drive, not caring about sleepiness, ill health, or intoxication, not having to finance or repair a vehicle or buy insurance, not renting parking spots, all that is available today without having to invent new lidar sensors or machine vision. You can just live in London or Tokyo.

I don't know why you added "Try again", especially because I intentionally specified "Individual contributors". Your response also highlights what I was talking about: unions do not hold back their highest paid members while bringing up the bottom for their lowest paid members, just as is the case for SAG.

Sports and movies/TV have unions, and those are by far the highest paid individual contributors. Tech workers just have been sold a bill of goods that they will be held back by unions. Meanwhile, tech CEOs "unionized" to make sure that poaching was held back, and by extension, compensation.

Layoffs don't work long-term, especially for healthy companies looking to cut costs (Harvard Business Review: https://hbr.org/2022/12/what-companies-still-get-wrong-about...)

Humans, including kids, are inherently social creatures, and are happiest when communing with their fellow creatures (including pets, but mostly other humans). Kids are most happy when they and their friends are playing together, and my personal belief is that they are happiest when helping other people together (so much of my childhood play was around pretending being a hero, sacrificing and risking my life for the sake of others - what if that was channeled to real world aid).

There are examples of all three that are electric, although planes are the hardest to make happen. Train electrification is so common that in English it is used in an expression: "touching the third rail".

As with the debate between cars vs. trains, semis lose out to trains by a lot, even when trains use fossil fuels. Trains rule.

Why do some of the most highly-paid people (actors) join a union and join the picket line? Even if you are high performing, joining up with other workers increases your bargaining position. Why did Steve Jobs join up with Adobe to stop poaching when they were highly sought after work places? Because even if you're a behemoth, you can be stronger in a union.

My experience has been this: if a company is funded by venture capital, my work helped zero people. If it was private/bootstrapped, somebody used and was helped by what I did, and many times was a key factor in the success of a company.

And the biggest casino of all is the stock market.

It says it in the article: it's what their business model is like. Netflix pays a bunch of money in R&D and then has a low marginal cost for each additional customer, who are on a subscription (like so many SaaS businesses). Disney, if it was just Disney+, would probably be thought of as a tech company, but Disney is also all about their intellectual property and the ways to monetize that: movies, parks, and merch.

Disney's interesting because it's not just another media company, so what category does it fit in? Perhaps it's big enough that folks are just "Disney" analysts. Speaking of hydra, how do you analyze the stock prices for companies like Sony? They make movies, music, TVs, video games/consoles, cameras (high-end for professionals), phones, CMOS camera sensors, and probably others I'm not even aware of.

SEEKING WORK

Location: SE Asia (+7 UTC)

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

I'm a software developer with over 12 years of experience, specializing in Web application development. I bring the most value in database design and writing SQL, having worked on high traffic, data-intensive applications, and I can work up and down stack. I am looking for projects and contract work at this time, though I am open to worker co-ops as well.

Email: hireme@noelherrick.com

Sites: http://noelherrick.com, http://github.com/noelherrick

Skills: Ruby/Rails, C#, ASP.NET MVC, Python/Flask, PHP, MySQL, Postgres, SQL Server

Really? I was just looking a Michelin starred restaurant and their tasting menu was 300 euros. I suppose you could pay with three different bills, but it's nice to be able to just carry one as well as smaller bills. An a flagship phone is a lot more, so if you want to buy it in cash, that's another very normal transaction that would a require a large stack that's not able to fit in a wallet.

I think GP means this: different companies call them different things, but the difference between a Sr. Software Engineer compensation and Staff Engineer compensation can be 100% in some companies.

We live in a society. If you want to build a company in international waters cut off from the rest of the world, by all means. I hear there was a nice anti-regulation company that has a boat they don't need anymore, so maybe you could take over the lease. There's a reason why we decided banks have to have be monitored and if they're insolvent they can be taken over, or why you have to IPO and provide a bunch of information to investors if you want to sell stock in your company. There's "private" transactions that create enough systemic risk so that we have to regulate them.

I don't think that's true, and I think you're revealing something about yourself vs. the majority of people (besides the fact that most folks, especially in the US, don't have enough money for an extra 0 to mean much). I think of the teachers, social workers, public defenders, volunteers, and civil servants who sacrifice greater earning potential because they believe in what they're doing.

It's like folks who claim people are motivated only by money: no, you're only motivated by money. Most folks see money as a means to an end, namely, a safe, normal life lived with loved ones.

After watching him operate Twitter, it seems that he's not a good businessman or technical contributor. What he says about programming and his approach to engineering speaks of unearned confidence, and he uses the same tone to talk about aeronautical engineering, leading me to believe he doesn't know what he's talking about.

From the outside, it would seem that he's just good at PR, for his companies and for himself. Despite promoting homophobia, anti-vax, anti-labor garbage, he still manages to be the topic of conversation across the political and cultural spectrum. He's good at staying in the news cycle, even if it involves lighting tens of billions of dollars of brand equity on fire and using a since letter unmodified from a common font as a logo.

I see what you're saying, but in my experience children do not have this response unless there's a hyper-addictive product such as modern TV/video or sugary/processed food, which bypasses the normal social circuitry in young brains. I have never experienced/witnessed this kind of meltdown over pre-modern experiences, and almost always if the toddler is redirected to a socially-positive response, it works.

Not disagreeing, but these aren't just toddlers, but insecure toddlers who have never been told no and think people pushing back is equivalent to hate. A normal toddler who has caretakers who are loving and accepting does not respond like this.

I understand your point - whenever people ask what era I would like to born in (that's not the future), I always say now. I really like mRNA vaccines, the discovery and proliferation of mindfulness/meditation/mental health, antibiotics, supercomputers strapped to our wrists, etc. Even things like food have gotten better than from when I was a kid (that one could be personal).

However, just because it's good, doesn't mean it couldn't be better. I think this all the time - why can't the rich be rich without inflicting cruelty and suffering on people? You can have your millions, just give us healthcare, housing, public transit, vacation time, and fair pay, and stop dumping chemicals in the water, torturing animals, warming the planet, addicting folks to opioids, and promoting guns and the use of personal vehicles.

We don't have to imagine or fantasize about improvements the US could make - we have an example right in front of us with many social democracies in Europe. When a car backfires, the French don't assume it's an active shooter. When a Dane gets into an accident, they don't take a taxi to hospital. When your CEO gets trolled on Twitter and decides to fire 70% of the staff, you don't have to worry about it because you have an employment contract, and he simply can't.

We have to do better.

You can definitely argue that trickle-down economics was a failure. London School of Economics does exactly that.[0] I am also a bit surprised that you haven't heard the absolute despair of Millennials and Gen Z. Wealth inequality is off the charts. If wasn't for Mark Zuckerberg, Millennials would have an average negative net worth (mostly joking). This isn't a matter of complaining that you have to cut down on avo toast, it's people not going to the doctor, dentist, having to pile into small houses, always be on the edge of your car breaking down. We're the wealthiest country in the world, but folks have to start GoFundMe's to pay for healthcare. Wild.

[0] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tax-cuts-rich-50-years-no-trick...

Folks that get laid off from one industry because of productivity gains go to another one. The most dramatic example is farming, where in 1800 it used be that 90% of people were farmers and in 2000, 1.8% were employed in ag. Closer to home for many of us, there are more software engineers and we're dramatically more productive this generation due improvements in languages, raw processor power, storage technologies, open-source libraries, databases, and tools. The price of our labor has gone up because we're able to produce more.

If I read your comment with extreme charity, I think that sentiment boils down to the fact that everyone needs money to continue having food, shelter, and medical care. If I read your comment mildly charitably, it would reduce to a tautology: everyone who works for money wants money. If I read it uncharitably, meaning anyone who does sustained, hard, taxing work wants money, I would argue it's easily disproven since people do incredibly hard work as volunteers. It baffles me that tech titans rail against government and academia, and think everyone has a single-minded desire for money, when the Internet (gov't), the World Wide Web (academia), and Linux and a slew of open-source software (volunteer) powers our lives.

I'm confused by the analogy. Let's use the iconic steel mill from the industrial revolution. Even if you gave me the machines, I still need the feed stock, electricity, and a bunch of fellow-workers (Carnegie said his workers were the most important part of his business). Sure, now most folks like us can buy a laptop and an internet connection, most business ventures need a bunch of folks working together to make a company. We love to glorify the solo-prenuer, but that's pretty rare.

Industrialization was a massive success, but classical liberalism had to be reined in by governments and unions. We as a society succeeded despite it. The peons had to get gunned down by the Pinkertons so we could get sane working hours, conditions, and fair pay. Thank god for the weekend? No, thank unions.

I have this feeling folks learn about the invisible hand from Adam Smith, take nothing else from that text, and then have this magical thinking that benefits will accrue to everyone, when in fact we little people have to prevent that invisible hand from stabbing innocent people by creating the FDA, EPA, OSHA, FCC, FTC, SEC, NLRB, etc., and we have to have labor movements to get some of benefits of industrialization.

Right now, our approach to life is to motivate everyone by profit, reducing fully-fleshed people to homo economicus, devoid of any other emotion and motivation other than money, and hope that somehow, magically, that will create the best civilization.

I would push back on this, because left ideology hasn't really changed since the term was invented, and they weren't talking about transition surgery in the 1700s. It's always about removing current power structures and institutions that harm the weak to enrich and empower the few. It started with the monarchy, and today it's about corporations and the rich buying politicians, academics, reporters, artists, and religious leaders to allow and promote the subjugation of workers and the destruction of the environment for profit.

The reason the trans people are an issue is that conservatives lost big on trying to suppress homosexuals, which in turn is just a distraction from the economic inequality and general disempowerment that regular Americans face. There is a vast right-wing conspiracy that wants to keep the conversation around culture war issues instead of, you know, making sure all people have food, clean water, shelter, healthcare, and education regardless of their economic value to the market.

Claiming authoritarian censorship displays a kind of persecution complex, especially considering you're able to claim censorship and I, a rando, am able to read it. The top articles shared on Facebook feature mostly conservative voices. Reddit is different in that it has a downvote option, available to users without HN's karma threshold. You're not getting censored, you're just espousing unpopular views.

Just like with abortion, for trans kids, the doctor's office is not big enough for the kid, the doctor, and the government. People know themselves better than we think. Kara Swisher, the tech reporter, has said she knew she was a lesbian when she was 4 (or 5). Guess what, she's still a lesbian. No kid is going to choose the difficult, scary prospect of surgery or invasive meds without a strong motivation. And kids are not getting surgery that often - it's mostly puberty blockers which are not permanent. And to be clear, I couldn't find any story about a person younger than 17 getting a surgery done. These are folks just about to leave minority age.

Also, no child is getting this without parental or guardian's consent. The idea that some liberal parent is twiddling their fingers, Mr. Burn's style, to get their child to believe they are trans is ludicrous. You have to believe there's a large group of parents who are cartoon villains attacking their own kids for clout.

But deeper than that, I know that conservatives don't actually care about children because so many of them won't have a conversation around guns which actually kill children, often mutilating their bodies so much an open casket funeral is out of the question unless it's for shock value. It is the leading cause of death for kids in the US. The Utah law against trans athletes applied to 4 people. Malnutrition deaths in Utah were 1,044 for 2022. WTF.

Huh? We already do that for people - we have a court system set up to handle that. If I as an individual keep sending a suicidal person ways to commit suicide, and they do it, I can be charged for that. Yet when Amazon shows young girls suicide materiel (https://www.npr.org/2022/10/09/1127686507/amazon-suicide-tee...), or Instagram is listed as a cause of death for young women (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/molly-russell-suicide-death-cor...), we don't do anything.

HN is one of the most pro-capitalist forums ever. Literally created by venture capitalists to promote capitalism and further capitalists' aims. I visit this site because sometimes Reddit is too much of a progressive echo-chamber.

Since I have you, what do you consider communism?

I have no idea who makes the final call, but NASA has shown they too were willing to jeopardize the life of their crew once budget cuts had removed any margins for them. I'm also not saying that Elon has made bad safety calls, but what I am saying is the Elon has every incentive in the world to push past safety concerns. Worst that can happen for him is he'll have to give an apology and payout $X0m. We also have to be a bit concerned because there are reports that Elon thinks he's ensuring humanity's survival. I do not trust someone who thinks that his mission is existential despite no evidence that a standalone Mars colony is possible. Bad incentives are present for the NASA admin too: worst that can happen is perhaps having to resign. The astronauts die, their kids don't have a parent, their partners have to bury them.

What SpaceX is doing is amazing, and it is a fun show. Reusable rockets are beginning to be as cool as the space shuttle was. However, it could very well be the case the Shotwell and the engineers are actively trying to prevent Musk from making bad calls while promoting good calls (I'm not saying this was a bad call). It's perfectly reasonable, if you have a company controlled by two actors, one of them bad and one of them good, to always praise the good actor when things go right and blame the bad actor when things go wrong (caveat: I am not calling Elon a bad actor, just saying that it's not hypocritical to always blame the bad actor and praise the good actor).

But this leads to a bigger problem. SpaceX's attitude of experiment vs. drawn-out design is working (perhaps not too dissimilar to agile vs. waterfall design). Even with all that careful planning, the Space Race did kill people, we almost lost Apollo 13, and there were two distinct shuttle disasters that killed everyone on board. Even with very careful progress, we still had disasters. But, as I think this launch shows, SpaceX is going to experience similar events unless there's a incentives and structures to actually empower people with safety concerns (meaning the engineers and technicians on the ground).

Both post-mortems on the shuttle disasters are filled with something like "a higher-up decided it wasn't that big of a deal and dismissed concerns because previous red flags turned out to be nothing." Single humans can be singularly stupid. Single humans that are busy running a company, incentivized by profit margins, isolated from on-the-ground operations, equipped with a golden parachute, and wealthier than god, are even more prone to detachment from reality.

I also feel a bit bad for the astronauts that have to gamble whether these rockets are safe. Did this actually pass safety checks or is my life a sacrifice Elon Musk is willing to make? I suppose this has been part of the calculus of all astronauts since the post-Space Race era started to defund NASA, but it still sucks even if it's de rigueur at this point.