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No, we should definitely include SS and Medicare. You're correct about retirement programs, but the reality is that people lump income taxes and these "forced savings" into "stuff taken out of my paycheck". When you claim the rich pay 84% of taxes, the implication is that their "stuff taken out of my paycheck" contribution is five times that of the average schmuck, and that's not the case.

That's a good start. The wealthy need to pay more. The marginal utility of money declines rapidly as you move up the income scale. $1,000 matters a lot less to me than $100 does to an average schmuck who's struggling to pay his bills. If I pay only $500 while he pays $100, the taxation system is unfair.

There has to be a mechanism for people who are truly passionate about their work, like artists, scientists, programmers, to follow their passions as far as they want. The danger, of course, is that intra-organization competition pressures people to work longer and longer hours. I'm willing to accept that risk so long as we make a shorter work week the default.

We're talking about an unusual case, though. You have to realize the most people hate their jobs. They're not following their passions. They find work tedious, uncomfortable, and frequently demeaning. For these people, the bulk of humanity, a cap on working hours frees them to do something they find much more interesting.

I can't think of anything special about this instant, but look at prevailing conditions: the employment-to-population rate has plummeted in recent years [1]. The number of zero-margin-product people on disability has skyrocketed [2]. Income inequality has increased markedly [3]. Yet our GDP has increased tremendously during that time [4].

We just don't need as many person-hours as we used to need. The trend is only going to continue. Except in the case of people with exceptional cognitive endowments (like most of the HN readership), there's a labor glut.

We could just wait. The trend will continue. Eventually, things will come to a head (or several, under a guillotine). Instead, let's gracefully adapt to increased productivity by increasing the cost of labor. That's how we can let the population as a whole benefit from this productivity miracle.

[1] http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS12300000 [2] http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/us-disability... [3] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=gini+coefficient+unite... [4] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=United+States+real+GDP...

But I'm not sure what point you're making. If market forces can operate in a world with a 40 hour default work week, they can operate in a world with a 20 hour work week. At the macroeconomic level, we're talking about tweaking a coefficient. So what? By shortening the work week, we can give many more people an opportunity to engage in dignified work, give them more leisure time, and spur further investment in labor-saving machinery, all in the same stroke.

Enact a 20-hour work week. Our machines are powerful enough now that we should be able to devote our lives to human dignity, not work. Technology will only turn our world into a Dickensian hellhole if we let it.

po1nter,

We do not allow developers to criticize our revolutionary and beautiful platform. Good luck ever getting an app featured again.

- Apple

Between on the author's explicit trademark annotations, division of the world into "junior", "senior", and "architect", pretentious grammatical hypercorrection[1], and casual dismissal of sun.misc.Unsafe use, I think I'd hate working with the him.

[1] Why the fuck am I supposed to trust someone who doesn't understand the distinction between "it's" and "its" to tell me that all of Oracle's language designers got a core piece of infrastructure irrecoverably wrong?

Does anyone else think like this article is written in a bombastic, obfuscatory style? I feel like the author is more concerned about communicating how very intelligent he is than warning other developers about the dangers of fork-join frameworks. Who is he trying to impress?

Bullshit. If there are no 10x programmers in your group, it's because your group is tiny, you can't hire 10x programmers, or because you're stifling your 10x programmers with bureaucracy.

> Every single sentence in this article is offensive, and the overall article is also offensive.

While I can't say "this article is not offensive", since "offensive" is subjective, I can say that if articles like this one violate your delicate sensibilities, you are not a person who can particulate in a free exchange of ideas. If everyone were like you, we would make no intellectual society at all.

I've noticed this phenomenon as well, and it's very frustrating. Let's add async-and-future-everything to the list as well. I honestly don't understand how to convince people to make an honest assessment of the alternatives, especially when they're unable to articulate what exactly they're purchasing with the complexity they're adding.

Will our profession ever stop being fad-driven?

The author's style is wooden and insufferable. What is it about Java that attracts people who want to give the impression they are very smart, but who just sound like MBA types when trying to pull it off?

$415 million is still pitifully low. At what point will the judge just force a trial?

Where can I buy Modafinil?

> many of the other features just stall, probably waiting for some tracker.

Ubuntu adds a Firefox extension for integrating some web sites into the desktop. It's incredibly buggy and, IME, frequently breaks on Facebook. Try disabling the extension in Firefox.

Bullshit. You can get away with that sophistry in other fields, but not tech. The compiler doesn't care about your feelings. Memory safety is not a social construct. GPU command pipes have finite bandwidth, even if you call them tools of the patriarchy.

In our field, skill is definitely subject to "objective evaluation", and some people are vastly more skilled than others. That's why tech is so problematic to social justice types: their usual techniques don't work, for mother nature cannot be fooled.

In our universe, the "debugging tools" that could defeat this scheme are ones that can depackage an Intel chip and read its EEPROM directly. What do you even use for that, a scanning electron microscope?

> the contents of any source media...should readily provide the raw, unencrypted content data

Once this crap becomes ubiquitous, why would companies ship unencrypted bits at all? They could send files encrypted with all the major OEM "protected content" keys. If you're running on non-supported hardware, well, sucks to be you, pirate. I imagine it's rather difficult to extract the private key from DRM hardware.

In the end, big media wins.

> the media becomes impossible to consume without Intel Management Engine

That's why Intel management keeps greenlighting this project. Intel thinks that it if it can convince content producers to distribute media as blobs encrypted with Intel's public key (and maybe, say, Samsung's or Apple's), then we can transition to a world where consumer video files do work on most consumer hardware, but can't be decrypted outside the protected media path and ripped.

There's no reason this scheme can't work. OEMs and content producers just haven't been able to cooperate well enough to piece it together yet. Once they do, game over, except for the analog hole.

This scheme also has the side effect of creating a "moat" around existing OEMs. Sure, a new player can begin fabricating new CPUs, but existing media files won't be encrypted for these CPUs. It is literally a conspiracy against the public.

Firefox's model is better, I think. Plenty of sites use hidden flash videos for various utility functionality. How are you supposed to click on these hidden videos so that you can enable them?

Click-to-play on plugins often breaks sites that use Flash ads as overlays. The ads often have the "close this ad" in the Flash code itself, making it impossible to kill the ad layer without activating the plugin. (In my more cynical moments, I wonder whether this behavior is by design.)

More interesting is fundamental database progress like the work Google's done on F1. Now _that_'s an advancement in the state of the art.

What advances in computer science were necessary for HipHop? It's a bog-standard JIT system of the kind we'd been building for years. Sure, it's well-executed, but it's hardly a "revolutionary project" to those who weren't born yesterday.

Christ, it's "abuse" now to bring up inconvenient but real facts? If your tribe's thinking is that rigid and dogmatic, is it any wonder we can't seem to actually come to a consensus on gender politics?

> I'm very worried that MS, as an organization, has fallen from grace on a level never before seen

That's what happens when a company refuses to pay market rate to its top people. Other Seattle-area tech companies have been poaching from Microsoft for years, and Microsoft hasn't bothered to even try to stop it.