padobson

anonymity of digital currencies meant they were linked to terrorist funding and money laundering

It sounds like he means drug overdoses, black market violence, and terrorists attacks kill people.

But at least he knows malaria kills far more people than those three combined. He should probably get back to solving that.

This is not usually very hard to check, depending on the sport. Professional athletes at specific positions have fairly specific body types that enable them to succeed. Ask them what sport and position they want to play, and check their body types against the prototypical player at that position.

They'll always be able to point to exceptions - someone who had ridiculously high physical coordination or work ethic, but those traits are often more obvious than physical traits.

This is exactly what I thought out of college. "I'm a product engineer! I can work from anywhere. I'm going to move back to my hometown and turn the rust belt economy around with a billion dollar startup!"

As it turns out, I didn't have the talent to start such a business by myself (and based on my knowledge of startup history, no one does).

And that's why this essay nails it.

In a hundred subtle ways, the city sends you a message: you could do more; you should try harder.

YOU may be a self motivated person, regardless of environment. But your founder may not be. Your first ten employees may not be. Your investors and vendors and strategic partners may not be.

When any of these stakeholders hang out with their friends in the rust belt, they hear depressing stories. They start to look at success like it's impossible, and they come back to work the next day less energized and less motivated.

Or maybe they've got a good circle of friends, but not an ambitious circle of friends. They love their friends, so they stay out with them a little later, sleep a little less, end up a little less productive the next day and leave work earlier to go meet them. Same thing goes for a family, but with the added responsibility.

This isn't to say that friends are bad or families will hold you back. In my experience, good friendships and a loving, functional family are better than any business success.

The point is that your environment will affect your ambitions - even if you never needed help feeling ambitious. At some point or another you'll need help for something, and if your city doesn't drive ambition in that direction, you'll have to work that much harder to motivate the help you need.

I've built dozens of HTML/Flash/Java uploaders on dozens of different infrastructures, and there's always a host of issues that need to be dealt with. When a product's UX doesn't work with FTP, it requires a lot of extra engineering.

But allowing your customers to move files around with their Dropbox account completely eliminates this problem. The HTML5 File API has largely solved this (though it still exists, I still have to occasionally restart YouTube uploads. YouTube!), but Dropbox could have been the solution, and I can't imagine how many startups weren't built on top of Dropbox because they didn't want to be in the replacing-FTP business.

There may be a lot of openings around here as Detroit industry continues to modernize and the startup scene matures, but salaries are still lagging.

Some of the large companies (autos, insurance, etc) will occasionally offer higher-paying gigs, but competition is fierce and interviewing (like everywhere) is a crap shoot.

I'm currently contracting remotely with a company in the Los Angeles area, and I don't expect I'll be leaving remote work anytime soon. I expect my clients will be in LA, SF, and NY for the rest of my career.

Say, like, a site for old video games. Anyone who wants to sell Street Fighter II for the SNES submits it to the Street Fighter II auction, and anyone who wants to buy it bids on it there. There aren't 500 Street Fighter II auctions, there's just one, creating a more efficient commodity market for Street Fighter II.

Maybe the answer here is a service where people can build their own auction sites around product categories they care about. The service, the auctioneer/curator, and the seller split up the proceeds of each sale.

At the same time, non-purely technological hypotheses for rising mean-median inequality include the race between education and technology (Goldin and Katz 2007), declining unionisation (Freeman et al. 2016), globalisation (Autor et al. 2013), immigration (Borjas 2003), and the ‘superstar effect’ (Rosen 1981, Gabaix et al. 2016). Non-technological hypotheses for the falling labour share include labour market institutions (Levy and Temin 2007, Mishel and Bivens 2015), market structure and monopoly power (Autor et al. 2017, Barkai 2017), capital accumulation (Piketty 2014, Piketty and Zucman 2014), and the productivity slowdown itself (Grossman et al. 2017).

All of the non-technological reasons, to me, boil down to globalization.

I'd love to see the productivity-wage divergence chart in China and other developing countries. I wouldn't be surprised if the divergence is inverted in those places that have seen unprecedented wage growth over the last forty years.

I guess what I'm saying is that I don't think productivity and wages have diverged as much as people think, it's just that a national analysis is insufficient in a global labor market.

And I agree with you: talented people, be they managers or developers or janitors, will be able to overcome any process or planning shortfalls.

But there's no difference between what I'm describing - a project manager breaking down features into bite-size bits of work - and a developer taking on a single feature and writing down TODOs in code, on post-its, on a white-board, or in the comments of the project management software.

The difference is one of documentation and communication to stakeholders - which is the PRIMARY problem with software estimation. There are ALWAYS unknowns in software. A team leader needs to be able to go to his boss when something is falling behind and say, "We didn't anticipate this. This is the reason it's taking longer".

This is FAR superior to going to the developer and asking them why feature X is taking so long and having them compile a report from Notepad/post-its/white board scribbles. With my process, you can just pull up the project management software and find the tasks that went way over, and the developer stays almost completely insulated from management.

I'm sorry, but you haven't really worked with or had training from real-world engineering managers.

This is the worst kind of condescending ignorance, it betrays an inability for civility that I wouldn't tolerate in a colleague.

This is just another way of saying management is incompetent. There's no project management strategy that is going to overcome incompetent project managers.

The micro-tasks I'm describing go into a project management system. They are either assigned to or picked by developers who complete and document the micro-tasks on their own. Because the tasks are so small, there is almost no management of developers required.

Finally, it's trivial to find out where project estimates went wrong, because any hidden challenges are well-quarantined in the micro-tasks. If the task isn't well documented, it's still pretty easy to go to the developer and find out why it took longer than estimated.

I've contracted with a dozen startups and small businesses. Most of these companies will find a young developer charging between $20/hr and $50/hr and have them start coding on their new app/website idea and feel wildly optimistic when they see the first 80% of the project come together.

Then it's time for the edge cases, and because there aren't any senior devs on the project, handling those edge cases introduces bugs. Weeks and months pass, and the project that looked like it was a surefire success descends into development hell.

But the company never fires the developer. The developer actually quits from being over stressed. Then the company goes looking for a new developer, who tells them they'd be happy to build their software for $20/hr-$50/hr. The new developer comes on, looks at the codebase, decides all of it is crap, and recommends they start over.

The new developer finishes 80% of the project in the first week.... rinse and repeat.

The company should have hired a developer or firm with a record of success, with actual, running software out in the wild. How they achieved that may or may not line up with the ideas in the OP, but at least the company would know exactly what they're paying for.

It requires more project management, but it's much easier to quarantine problems and explain them to stakeholders.

My rule of thumb is 4 hours. If you think it will take longer than 4 hours, it should be broken down. Ideally, most tasks will have estimates of 1 hour.

That way, when a 2-hour task requires 2 weeks to complete, you can point to the specific task and its challenges. It provides an easy explanation for why the release was late, why the requirements were too ambitious, etc.

Imagine how open the highways would be if this was how everyone worked/lived.

Clear the highways. Save the planet. Work from home.

The idea of regulating on a hypothetical is insane to me. If Amazon becomes abusive, the US Government will still be able to take them. Let's not start prosecuting pre-crime because Bezos is super rich.

There's a lot more people in that walled garden now.

You make a good point, and I agree with the pragmatism of the choice, but I also believe mentorship can be a means of advancement.

The point of my original comment was to advocate for another choice - one that will both advance the mentor and their proteges. Hopefully, this will give us that better world we're looking for.

Pay and promotion is about making yourself valuable. If you mentor engineers and gain a reputation for doing so, you're effectively shaping the culture of the organization, not to mention gives you a ton of leverage with the productive employees you taught to be productive.

It makes you far less disposable. When mixed with even amateur negotiating skills, that leads to promotion and better pay.

This is essentially a synonym of the sentence you quoted

> careerwise respect of developers in the org often is not as important as respect of management

You're missing the point. By mentoring developers you become de facto management; it's willful, benevolent career advancement.

Yeah, I’m gonna bring gender into it, because I’m a woman and when women take on roles like this they often get pigeonholed into “den mother” stereotypes. That means less prestige and less prestige usually means less pay.

Having the admiration and respect of the next generation of developers at your company offers far more leverage than the nebulous prestige. If you mentor three engineers, that's three warm bodies at your company who will have good things to say when asked about you. If you do a good job, you now have a team of four capable engineers who can get things done.

What could provide more organizational political power than building a hierarchy of capable engineers that consistently come to you when they need help?

I think this works because of the unobtrusive part. Obtrusive enablement, or the protection from natural consequences, can stunt growth just as much as over-parenting.

You definitely want to protect your kids from mistakes that can end with them in jail or dead, but letting them skin their knees or suffer the consequences of being rude to peers allows them to feel the weight of their autonomy.

Better to recognize that subjection to evil and suffering are universal, and the best way to combat them is through individual growth and responsibility - something modern education is severely lacking.

[0]http://woodwarddreamcruise.com/

As an engineer and social media user, I completely agree, but it doesn't seem to be bearing out in the marketplace. Facebook continues to grow[0] (if more slowly).

So what is the HN audience to Facebook? Our we taste makers? A demographic ahead of the product curve, predictive of Facebook's imminent decline?

Or are we simply irrelevant to the mass market? Are we the people going to the art house movie theaters while the masses flood into multiplexes for the latest Marvel sensory overload spectacle?

[0]https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/31/facebook-q4-2017-earnings/

[0]https://www.google.com/search?q=INDEXRUSSELL:RUT&tbm=fin#scs... [1]https://www.google.com/search?q=INDEXSP:.INX&tbm=fin#scso=ui...

Why should a member of the bottom 70% care that the top marginal corporate rate was just cut from 36% to 21%?

If something like this is implemented, I'm curious to see what it does to prices - will a heart surgery continue to cost less than $2,000?

Healthcare seems like a supply problem to me, not a demand one. Where healthcare is affordable, demand should be stable year-to-year. It seems like what's needed is more doctors and devices, not more ways to pay.

This is why the aggregator model described in the article is relevant - the small practices will come to Amazon to plug into their aggregator and access their customers.

In that scenario, Amazon opens up shop in a state, provides cookie cutter TOS agreements to providers that mesh with the state's regulations, and providers on-board themselves in order to access the customer base.

NFL teams only play 8 home games a year, and they're usually very big - 60k-100k seats - much too large for almost any other event. These massive buildings might only be used 10 or 12 times in a year. Huge waste of taxpayer money.