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I find calendar versioning virtually useless. It reveals the freshness of one's project over much more important information such as maturity, as revealed by semantic versioning.

Imagine researching some libraries and having to decide over which one to use, say LibA v2020.01.06 vs LibB 2019.12.31. These versions tell you nothing about the projects except their release dates.

On the other hand, semantic versioning (when not abused) – say LibA v3.0.1 vs LibB 1.0.0 – reveals something useful, such as, that LibA has undergone three major revisions, so perhaps it is much more mature than LibB.

Perhaps the calendar versioning works well with already mature and famous projects – e.g. Ubuntu 18.04, etc – but for smaller projects I don't think it's such a good idea.

Comment v1.0.4-20jan06

You recognize von Neumann's superior intellect, and yet, when it comes to his politics you find his views repulsive (your comment below) and believe that he was the one with poor judgment. Hmm! Perhaps you’re passing judgement selectively and approve only of what caters to your emotions. There's more to the world than what meets the eye, or the heart.

Unlike the commenter below, I believe political reasoning is amenable only to a small degree to first principles, for complex, non-linear systems exhibit emergent behaviors not present when investigating the parts. Instead of analytical reasoning, one ought to practice more holistic thinking.

Here's an intro video on complexity, in case you're ever interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-ladOjo1QA

Have someone else – who is on your side – hold you accountable (a friend or family member). It's hard not to fall into the trap of chasing perfection when you're the only stakeholder, especially when you're also the creator.

I have started reading the first two chapters of your book and I really like it. It's well written and easy to understand. If it continues to be this wonderful for the remaining chapters I will buy it as well. Thanks for writing it.

Stability rates vary over time. But in the context of this discussion, I meant stable relative to other social arrangements.

Thus relative to the current divorce rates, I would wager that “divorce” rates among friends and other social structures are even greater.

I don’t know if it’s optimal, but it sure is intimate and stable.

Your spouse will never move to another city for a new job w/o you. Your kids won’t leave the nucleus, at least not until they’re college ready.

Unlike family, different kinds of arrangements between people result in relationships that are less committed and less durable.

So maybe if you take stability and intimacy into account, it might as well be optimal.

I guess it begs the question, what are we optimizing for? And on what time scale?

What might seem optimal for the time being, could unleash a series of unforeseen circumstances in the future.

But I guess we can keep an open mind, allow people to choose for themselves and then report back after 2-3 generations the consequences of different paths taken.

I think I was reading microservices but I was imagining services and that's why it seemed like a lot. I guess it depends on the granularity of the decomposition.

I agree, scale and automation are two important factors when decomposing architectures. I think it would be really valuable if systems could decompose themselves to some degree, based on scale and other factors, without much of an operator's intervention.

> We run one of the largest microservices deployments in the world, with thousands of services that perform billions of requests per second.

Thousands? Does one truly need that many microservices, even if you are the size of Facebook? That is a lot.

Indeed, it's not on the near horizon. I found this article illuminating:

The Case Against Quantum Computing - https://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/the-case-agains...

Small correction: The title is The Fifth Discipline.

A quick search on Google reveals that the U.S. biomedical industry spends about 3x more than the federal government [1], or about 67% of the total spending, so your claim turns out to be false.

[1] https://www.researchamerica.org/sites/default/files/RA-2017_...

> Medicine isn't like normal supply and demand.

Indeed it isn’t, and like you’ve correctly identified, demand is inelastic. But it’s still a market subject to competitive forces, provided they exist.

> If drug x is what is keeping you alive and they have a patent on it its not like you can't buy the drug.

The drug x did not emerge spontaneously. Someone decided to create it because it was a demand for it and it was an opportunity for profit.

Had the research not occurred, the drug wouldn’t have been created at all. So the way I see it, having an expensive drug (I will maybe be kept alive) is preferred to not having it at all (I definitely won't be kept alive). Plus, patents do expire as far as I’m aware.

Yes, I understand people want drugs at prices they can afford but this is not solvable by simply price fixing without generating unintended consequences.

> Most interactions with the opposite sex are emotionally draining ...

Indeed, but this can be successfully counteracted to some degree by proper socialization, and by participating in social activities alongside a group of friends, which by virtue of creating social contexts, will lower the barriers to social interactions.

People spend too much time indoors in the company of their screens, and without adequate social training, anxiety will surely present itself when one is placed in the company of real people, especially of the opposite sex.

> The problem is that you have to wade through a ton of mud to get to the gold nugget that is someone you genuinely like to interact with.

Anything meaningful in life requires some level of effort. There's no way around it.

Less sex, and more porn most likely.

I think plenty of people fulfill their sexual needs through online means these days, which is a shame because real life experiences are much more emotionally enriching, with the added benefit that if you repeatedly engage sexually with a person you really like, it could form the basis of a relationship. Whereas in the digital space, one gets no long term return on the time invested/wasted.

In most of these benchmarks [1] Swift's performance comes pretty close to that of Rust. So yeah, I would call that very fast.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20190402100249/https://benchmark...

I actually like Swift: advanced type system and compiler, clean syntax, very fast.

I think optionals are a great way of saying: “Hey developer, this value can sometimes be nil; be sloppy or not, your call.”

Any language you pick is an interplay of choices and compromises. No such thing as perfect.

An incredibly short sighted solution to an incredibly complex problem.

Trees have been around for a very, very long time; much longer than we have. Complex evolutionary forces have shaped trees and forests into their current robust configurations.

Trees are intimately connected with their ecosystems, and interact with their surroundings in both known and unknown ways. For example, it has been discovered recently that trees communicate with one another through chemical, hormonal and slow-pulsing electrical signals, including through the air, using pheromones and other scent signals [1][2]

Mother nature is complex. We do not have enough understanding of her complexity, and neither enough computational power to reliably model and subsequently change diverse ecosystems.

[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-whispering...

[2] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01C9116AK

Joe Armstrong was an exemplary hacker: passionate, practical, insightful. Erlang is a testament to this.

He kept programming and tinkering until the very end.

He’s up there with Alan Kay, in my book.

Rest In Peace Joe. You’ll surely be missed.

Here's another article analyzing their disagreement: https://towardsdatascience.com/why-you-should-care-about-the...

Indeed! It’s very easy to give advice, or in the case of politicians, make decisions that will affect millions of people when your decisions are divorced from their consequences, which is basically all modern politics.

> “So there need to be powerful forces from the top of the country that proclaim the income/wealth/opportunity gap to be a national emergency and take on the responsibility for re-engineering the system so that it works better.”

And what if the system turns out to work worse? Who shall bear the consequences of the re-engineering? Being a successful hedge fund manager, doesn’t magically make you an expert in complex systems, such as the economy.

The amount of people wanting to re-engineer society these days is staggering. The desire to make the world a better place for more people is commendable, but people need to understand the limitations of controlling complexity.

IMHO, we need to teach more people about complex systems and the limitations of top down engineering approaches to such systems, as they exhibit emerging properties unaccounted for in one’s modeling.

What we need is to give power back to the individual, decentralize the control over the economy and lower the barriers to entry, so that everyone can have an equal chance of trying their luck.

We need to evolve a better system, bottom up. See localism. [1] [2]

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Localism_(politics)

[2] https://www.academia.edu/38433249/Multiscale_Localism_Politi...

And a paper somewhat related: How Much Data Do You Need? A Pre-asymptotic Metric for Fat-tailedness [1]

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1802.05495.pdf

Iain McGilchrist discusses at length the two-sided brain in his book The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World [1]

Fun fact: He wrote the book over a period of 20 years.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0300245920

Same here!

I first came across the story here on HN, and every time someone mentions it I re-read it. It truly never gets old; only now I just got goosebumps. I think it's the people bonding part that gets me.

According to some experts, spending more time on social media and less time face to face, might result in emotional under development as the conditions for the formation of the brain circuitry in the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) are not adequately met. [1]

The OFC is not well understood, but it has been implicated in mental disorders such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, addiction, etc.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2YdpvnwtGc&feature=youtu.be...

Perhaps I’m wrong in my observation, but my overall sentiment of your comment is that you’re too eager to simplify things.

Unrelated to the above part of my comment, but:

> Without deliberate, aggressive redistribution, accelerating inequity is inevitable.

People are willing to embrace redistribution way too hastily, while ignoring higher order consequences. If we embrace more aggressive redistribution, to what extent, how effective, to what long term cost, etc?

Perhaps redistribution is so seductive because it promises some laudable social outcome while also being easier to understand than competing alternatives.

Top-down engineering solutions to complex human problems should cast doubts imho. That is not to say we shouldn't strive to solve the challenges of our society, but we ought to always be mindful of its complexity.

Tangentially related to our conversation, but I found this paper on politics + complexity [1] – albeit still a draft – helpful.

[1] https://www.academia.edu/38433249/Multiscale_Localism_Politi...

> More and more, the types of jobs that add value are the types of jobs where really only the best add much value [...] In those jobs, the very best take the vast lion's share of income because what the best produce is valued so much more highly than everyone else.

Your perspective is in agreement with studies in network science, which have uncovered that in a wide variety of physical, biological, and man-made phenomena, the network models follow a power law distribution, and as a result, you end up with situations such as, for example Kim Kardashian having 130M followers, while the average Instagram user probably has about 1-2k followers. Other similar distributions: income, research paper citations, world wide web, etc.

It appears that uneven distributions are inevitable in free human networks, or as Will & Ariel Durant once noted:

> Nature smiles at the union of freedom and equality in our utopias. For freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one prevails the other dies.

Indeed, but in the private industry there is also a different pattern in compensation, as in addition to a base salary, private employers offer bonuses and stock awards, situation which is not accounted for in the study, as far as I can tell [1]. Do unions also negotiate bonuses and stock awards? I'm unfamiliar to how they operate.

[1] https://www.bls.gov/ncs/ncbr0002.pdf

I think the paper as it stands is deficient. As I've mentioned in my previous comment, in the tech sector particularly, compensation is a combination of salary, stocks, bonuses, etc.

Unless it adopts a more rigorous methodology, the paper paints a limited picture. [1]

For example, according to PayScale, Google pays on average $15,030 in annual employee bonuses (anywhere from $1,000 to $80,000), and for comparison, Facebook pays $12,860. These numbers will have a significant effect on hourly compensation.

Unfortunately, statistical analysis is tricky to get right, and plenty of papers contain errors and omissions, and I'm not necessarily saying that's the case here, but one ought to be aware. More on this topic, in case anyone is interested – Statistics Done Wrong [2]

[1] https://www.bls.gov/ncs/ncbr0002.pdf

[2] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1593276206

> Here's a fact about unions: Average union wages are 18% higher than non-union wages.

According to the paper you referenced, from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in private industries and under the category "Management, professional, and related occupations" employees earned more actually – $35.70/h – compared to workers represented by unions, who earned an average of $32.95/h.

I would assume the majority of software engineers work in private industries, thus would fall under the aforementioned category, and as a result would actually earn more by not joining a union. Am I missing something here?

Furthermore, it's unclear whether those wages include other types of compensation, such as stock grants and bonuses for example, in which case the difference would be even greater.