quanticle

There's a hidden assumption in your argument that the only way that forums like Hacker News, etc, can moderate is if the government allows it. Else why would you mention governments and private forums in the same sentence?

I support private forums being able to moderate. I oppose governments having that same power.

Do you believe every online forum accessible to Americans should have as strict, or stricter moderation than HN, because it's been demanded by a subset of voters?

As someone who visits both HN and 4Chan, I like having the choice. I definitely don't want the government deciding that 4Chan is illegal and wiping it off the 'Net because it contains disinformation.

When you ask, "How should governments fight disinformation," what you're really asking is, "How can governments deny their citizens the right to choose what information they read, watch or listen to." When it's phrased like that, it's not so appealing, is it?

The same way they ought to fight drugs.

Don't.

As one of my friends put it, "The internet is a machine that erases everything good about you, but preserves a million copies of your worst tweet."

    Once anything that can be copied is brought into contact with internet, it
    will be copied, and those copies never leave. Even a dog knows you can’t
    erase something once it’s flowed on the internet.

I wish people would stop repeating this trope. The internet does forget. Try pulling up any blog post or article that's more than two or three years old. Click on some of the links. How many of them are still up? Of the ones that are down, how many were saved by the Internet Archive?

Google was in this position in relation to Apple and the iPhone, and that worked out all right for them. First-mover advantage isn't the be-all, end-all.

    Yes, the cheapest option will probably have more issues then the more
    expensive one. But that's actually good, because if I can't deal with them,
    I probably would give up with a more expensive one.

I don't see how that follows. A cheap electronic component is much more likely to be out of specification, requiring hacks or workarounds to deal with the fact that it's out of spec. A more expensive component is more likely to be within its advertised specifications, and thus Just Work™, when used in a design. It seems to me that using the cheapest, bottom of the barrel, dodgiest components is a recipe for more frustration, and thus more likely to lead to giving up than using components that are modestly more expensive, but actually work to the standards which are advertised.

    Trying to assess the performance of the engineering team with the money the
    company generated
 

But is that wrong? And if so, why? We're hired, as engineers, so that the business can make money. Insofar as our excellent engineering makes the business money, it is valuable. When David Hennemeier Hanson wrote the Rails framework for Ruby, his justification for using it was not that it was more elegant than Java, although it certainly was. It was that his convention over configuration approach allowed small teams of developers to launch websites quickly, by having the framework assume that they were doing things in "sensible" ways.

    would lead you to use let's say crappy php web framework
    everywhere

Maybe we should use more "boring" technology like PHP and Java. Has the continued replacement of Java with PHP, PHP with Rails, Rails with Node.js actually benefited our customers? Or has it benefited programmers' desire for novelty at the expense of our customers? At work, one of my co-workers proposed writing a new front-end component in Vue.js, rather than React, because React was "old" and "showing its limitations". I pushed back, arguing that all the rest of our code was in React, and I wasn't sure that he'd necessarily made the case for Vue providing tangible improvements in maintainability or speed of development. We went back and forth, but in the end he won out, and now we have a bit of Vue in our codebase. Has this improved anything for anyone, other than the programmer who now gets to say on his resume that he's implemented production code in Vue.js?

EDIT: That's not to say that I'm against all innovation. There are certain classes of innovation that have definitely brought tangible improvements in the speed of development and reliability of the software developed. Memory management is a big one. Going from (legacy) C++ to Java is a huge step forward, just by freeing the programmer from having to worry about the most common sources of memory leaks. Likewise, strong type systems are another advance, that is just coming into the mainstream with Rust (and, to a lesser extent, Typescript). Lisp-like languages (although little used) offer another step forward in productivity by allowing the programmer to write functions that can inspect the internals of other functions as data.

But I feel like that's a different category of thing than trying to argue the merits of React versus Vue or Python versus Javascript.

    None of this resonates with you on a personal level?

Honestly? Not really, no. I think the world has gotten a lot better over the past few decades. My gripes are that, mostly due to short sighted and avoidable decisions, things could have been even better. But if you asked me, "Okay quanticle, I can take you back in a time machine and strand you twenty-five years in the past, would you prefer that?" my answer would be an instant, "Are you kidding? Get outta here."

Just personally, when my family and I came over from India, roughly twenty-five years ago, we could only afford to call our relatives in the home country once every other month, for five to ten minutes at a time. And, on half of those phone calls, the line would be too noisy to actually hear or make out anything from the other end. Today, my mom (in the US) and my grandmother (in India) speak for anywhere between ten minutes and two hours, every day, in high resolution video. No, things haven't gotten worse. We might not have gotten flying cars, but we did get videophones, and that's pretty cool.

Was WhatsApp a "perfectly engineered product"? It's important to note that, at the time that Facebook purchased WhatsApp, WhatsApp was still running at a loss. That $0.99/year subscription fee wasn't cutting it. Maybe WhatsApp could have survived by raising prices, or maybe that would have prompted everyone to switch to Facebook Messenger (or Google Hangouts). It's an open question.

It's hard to claim, though, that WhatsApp was perfectly engineered when its financial model was unsustainable.

Maybe in California. Out in the rest of the US, there're still plenty of affordable restaurants.

Dan Luu has a post (https://danluu.com/filesystem-errors/), which covers some of the same ground, and links to papers with more information on the failure modes of file systems in the face of errors from the underlying block device. Prabhakaran, et. al. (https://research.cs.wisc.edu/wind/Publications/iron-sosp05.p...), did a bunch of filesystem testing (in 2005!), and their paper includes discussion on how to generate "realistic" filesystem errors, as well as discussion of how the then state-of-the-art filesystems (ext3, Reiser (!), and JFS) perform in the face of these errors.

I'm unaware of any research newer than Dan Luu's post on filesystem error handling.

Thanks for clarifying. I didn't realize that the input buffer was separate from the stack.

Maybe I'm doing it wrong, but I installed the font, started the program, typed in:

    2 ENTER
    3 ENTER
    +

and it spat out

    6.0000

Have I misconfigured it somehow?

Similarly

    2 ENTER
    5 ENTER
    +

spits out

    10.0000

    Management doesn't like scaring their workers and wait for
    recessions to fire low performers all at once. Hiring someone
    else's scraps isn't the best strategy, and digging for the
    diamonds in the dirt is very expensive.

Can we please dispense with this notion that layoffs target "low performers"? There is zero evidence across any of the current round of layoffs that low performers were systematically targeted. There was zero evidence of this in 2008. There was zero evidence of this in 2001. Mass layoffs hit in a number of ways and "performance" is just one of the criteria used to determine who gets the axe. It might not even be the primary one --- there are plenty of stories, even in this specific layoff, of people who were just promoted and are now being let go.

From the perspective of the individual worker, it's far better to model layoffs as a random lottery. Telling yourself, "Oh, I'll work hard, I'll get good performance reviews, that'll save me from the layoff monster," is just cope. Good people get laid off. Bad people get laid off. Mediocre people get laid off. It's just luck.

    Some retail has a 75%+ markup as standard at the store. That's why
    they're able to regularly offer sales where they take 25%, 50%,
    even 75% off: it's not just to clear out unsold inventory; many
    retailers that do this are still making a profit at those prices.

But how many of those items actually sell at the sticker price? The reason I ask is because I've noticed this with mechanical watches (which I have a moderate interest in). Mechanical watches will often have absurd sticker prices. Two, or even three times the final sale price is quite common. But do any of those watches actually sell at those prices? Does anyone actually spend a thousand dollars for, e.g. a Hamilton automatic which has a selling price of roughly $400 on Amazon, and elsewhere? I very much doubt it. The sticker price is just there to add prestige and the sale price, for all intents and purposes, is the actual price.

Similarly, clothing often has some ridiculous sticker price, because the entire point of the sticker price is to be marked down in one of the seemingly perpetual sales that retailers have. I remember that J.C. Penney, when they hired Apple head of retail Ron Johnson, tried to change this practice, by setting the list price of clothing closer to the price that they paid, eschewing having sales. It was a disaster [1]. Customers had become accustomed to seeing large markdowns, and when those markdowns weren't there, they waited (or shopped at other retailers which continued to offer markdowns).

Just because the sticker price has a 75% (or 2-300%, in the case of watches) markup doesn't mean the retailer actually expects to make that margin on anything except a small fraction of sales.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/panosmourdoukoutas/2017/02/24/a...

I'm sad, but unsurprised to see Amazon Smile go. Retail isn't exactly high margin to begin with, and Amazon has made a specialty of squeezing what margin remained. As Jeff Bezos said, "Your margin is my opportunity." So, when Amazon announced Smile, I was very surprised that they weren't adding a surcharge for the donation, but rather where making the donation out of whatever margin they earned on the product.

I guess with the current economic downturn, Amazon has decided that there is insufficient margin to continue taking a cut out and donating it to charity.

Joel Spolsky has a good article about this [1], where he discusses apparent cleanliness versus actual cleanliness in the context of a bakery. I agree that, at least on the surface, a warehouse or commercial kitchen may be quite messy. But there has to be an underlying order, otherwise the system just doesn't function like it ought to.

[1]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/05/11/making-wrong-code-...

Was the article actually plagiarized? Yes, the two articles look at the same topic, the economics of the "creator economy". However, they seem to have different points of emphasis. The alleged original [1] focuses on the effects of the hollowing out of the creator economy on firms that provide services for those creators. The key quote that stood out to me was:

    "Trying to siphon off 5% fees from an industry where even the top
    1% are only mere multi-millionaires was never going to work," said
    one top 1% content creator. "How are you going to reach a billion?
    Your addressable market itself is not a billion-dollar industry."

Whereas the other article, the one that is alleged to be the copy [2], is a far more generic-sounding one which expresses pessimism about the prospects of a "creator economy" to address growing economic inequality. The key quote there is:

    The creator economy was once hailed as the solution to economic
    inequality and the savior of the middle class. But as it stands
    today, it is a world where only the top echelon of creators are
    able to make a living, while the rest struggle to find their place
    in a market that is oversaturated and dominated by a few big
    players. It's time to take a hard look at the harsh reality of the
    creator economy and ask ourselves: is this really the future we
    want?

They're not really talking about the same thing, and while the second article is certainly expressing a less original thought than the first, it's not really clear to me that one is plagiarizing the other.

[1]: https://www.bigtechnology.com/p/the-creator-economy-was-way-...

[2]: https://therationalist.substack.com/p/the-creator-economy-th...

    Does Serverless (FaaS/CaaS/WASM) count?

I'm not sure it does, because the servers that "serverless" programs run on are overwhelmingly Linux.

    This is so rare, it's not worth thinking about.

It might be rare in the sense of code that will be around after you're dead. But it's probably not rare in the sense of code that will be around after you've left the company.

    Doesn't matter what the code looks like, as long as the customers
    are happy.

Can you imagine if other industries had this same attitude?

"It doesn't matter what the warehouse looks like, as long as we ship on time, and the customers are happy."

At one level that's true, but at another level, it does matter what your warehouse looks like, because a neat and tidy warehouse is what allows you to ship on time. A warehouse that's filthy and disorganized is one which loses orders, ships the wrong products. Similarly a disorganized codebase with poor abstractions isn't bad because it's unpleasant to work in. It's bad because when a dev ships a feature, they have little or no confidence that they've done so without breaking two or three other features and causing customer dissatisfaction in the process.

    Reams and reams of absolutely useless tests that may not have
    checked anything that mattered, but that did bump the coverage
    metric up.

I would go farther than that, and call those tests worse than useless. Tests that are written to appease some kind of automated coverage metric god tend to be tests that test internal implementations rather than API contracts. So you end up with a codebase where a single line change to production code requires something like 150 lines of test code changes, all because the internal representation of some data was changed in some kind of trivial way.

It's possible to avoid this failure mode, but the teams that are smart enough to avoid this failure mode are also generally smart enough to avoid having unreasonable coverage goals.

I see a "Latest" tab. Are you not logged in?

"Cyber", when applied to anything, and even more when used by itself.

The fad of naming products i-whatever has thankfully tailed off.

    If you're going to say or imply that surviving these experiences, or being
    tolerated for experiencing them, was only "a small proportion" then you're
    making broad assertions.

It's a broad assertion I feel safe making from what I've read, and from what I know of human nature, and the often toxic dynamics of small communities. Being different in a small tribe sucks. Yeah, if you're different in just the right way, you're venerated as a shaman or religious figure. But I feel absolutely safe in asserting that for the average mentally ill person, being mentally ill in a pre-modern society would have been worse, both in quantity and quality of life.

Maybe you wouldn't have been exiled, as such. But you would have been a marginalized outsider in an environment that was far more resource constrained than the environment in which we live today, and which rewarded conformity to a far greater degree.

How many of your relatives have died from bacterial infections? From getting kicked in the head by a horse? From being stabbed in a dispute? From drowning? From war? How often have you faced starvation?

If you're arguing that the modern world is anywhere close to the same level of danger as the ancient world, then you're sadly mistaken.

    Most people who experience psychosis don't experience it as a perpetual
    state,

Agreed.

    and they aren't particularly more dangerous while experiencing or any more
    dangerous while not.

Hard disagree. I have been in a mental ward. I have been in close proximity to people who have been undergoing psychotic breaks. Never have I felt in more danger for my safety, even though, ostensibly, nurses and other trained medical professionals were right there to deal with the issue. Being in close proximity to someone undergoing psychosis is a terrifying thing, and it's no surprise that traditional societies, in the absence of other mechanisms, would choose to exile people undergoing psychosis. And if the people never returned from their exile, well, that's a hard thing, but the great spirit must have had a different purpose for them.

I assume no such thing. Quite the opposite, actually. I'm pointing out that the author makes this assumption, implicitly, by suggesting that vision quests and other traditional shamanic interpretations of psychosis are a better, more holistic way of dealing with "mad" people than modern medicine.

Yes, going out into the desert without supplies to perform a vision quest is certainly more romantic than a stint in a mental hospital. But it's certainly not safer.