salt-thrower

This is exactly how I feel. Great to hear it from someone with Netflix experience. So, so many organizations jump headfirst into microservices before they even realize what that entails just because they heard it's the trendy new thing Netflix is doing.

If you make your code and architecture simple from the get-go, then you can refactor to microservices when you know you really need it.

It's a big tradeoff for maintenance complexity and cognitive load though, and people often don't realize how big that tradeoff is. Chasing bugs and maintaining the spiderweb of network connections between all your services can quickly become a nightmare. A distributed ball of mud instead of a monolithic ball of mud, but a ball of mud nonetheless.

Personally I lean towards building a monolith first, then breaking out features into separate services if you need it. But I've worked on teams that advocated for microservices needlessly, and it was 100% cargo cult behavior: "Netflix does it, so we should too."

Another anecdote: my current company, a startup, could've launched its product a year earlier than it did, but our engineering lead insisted on pre-engineering a Rube Goldberg machine of a microservices backend before we even had any prospective customers. Took months of engineering time and headaches to grok all of it, when in reality, one monolith and a basic database could've done the job for years before we'd ever have to scale past that.

But microservices architecture looks great on a resume, so /shrug

Anecdotally, I've seen the strawman become real. Usually it's not more than two different languages. But at my current job, we've got a split between Typescript, vanilla Node.js, and Scala on the backend. All the results of various migrations and refactors spearheaded by different people at different times but not completed. The current vision is to have a unified Scala backend someday, but I'm not holding my breath.

Social conditioning by years of right-wing media to distrust everything any scientist says is what will cause the outcomes we're seeing, not a cartoonish reverse psychology plot.

What's the difference between: A) smugly telling them to do it so that they won't do it, and B) genuinely telling them to do it because you care about public health, but they interpret it as smug?

Also, the kind of reverse psychology you're describing generally only works on children.

You're claiming that because most people vote Democrat, it must be a progressive utopia?

The Democrat party is barely a left-leaning party. You have famous national examples like AOC and Bernie who are very progressive, but by and large, most Democrats are happy to accede to corporate power and regressive policies when it actually matters. What is considered "radical left" here in America is basically centrist by the standards of the rest of the world.

No, it's not "no true Scotsman," because when you look at commonly held progressive values, little of them line up with how San Fran actually is. Again: massive wealth inequality, the housing crisis, gentrification, concentration of capital in VCs who gamble by funding unethical and scantily regulated tech companies. None of that is progressive!

The only thing about it that's progressive is its social culture, in some ways, such as how it's a very LGBT-friendly city. That's all that comes to mind.

And on top of that, the politics and policies of these so-called progressive utopia cities in California are frequently the subject of scorn and derision by actual progressives I know of. I don't know anyone who would genuinely call it a "progressive utopia." It's a laughable idea unless you're trying to sell headline clicks.

Yeah, I wish someone would explain how a city with perhaps the biggest concentration of wealth inequality in the world, fueled by nearly-unfettered speculative venture capital gambling on unethical tech companies, is a "progressive utopia."

These headlines are clickbait. I wish The Atlantic was better than this, but I know it's not.

I think you're spot on with this analysis. I would add that the gridlock in the U.S. government isn't just happenstance, either. An ineffective government benefits Capital (at least in the short term), and thanks to lax lobbying and campaign finance laws, Capital is able to buy enough politicians to ensure that any legislation which would challenge the status quo dies before it reaches the President's desk. Gridlock serves the political and economic elite well, so they're invested in keeping it that way.

It's not just a back and forth in good faith. Small changes like plastic straw bans are often used to avoid taking action on things that really matter. It creates the illusion of progress so that the people really causing harm can continue without making any substantive changes to their bottom line.

> What of free society? Is the government of the USA, UK, or other "enlightened" societies throughout history relying upon censorship and denial of information? I think they're moreso allowing moneyed interests and plutocracy to have lobbying and backdoor dealings, they can easily ignore the public square most of the time.

This is definitely part of the picture. To add to this, I'll refer to Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky. "Propaganda" does still exist in modern "free societies," but it isn't overt like a 20th-century dictatorship would have been. Subtle manipulation of corporate media by monied interests to sway public opinion, combined with lobbying and corporate capture of government institutions, is more than enough to maintain the hegemony of certain narratives and power structures. I find it fascinating, and unsettling, to learn about.

So in a nutshell, controlling information and mainstream media narratives is important for the modern ruling class, but it's much more subtle than overt censorship like a dictatorship would have. Which, in my view, makes it much more advanced and insidious.

For those who don't require 4K, I was able to find a 1080p "dumb" TV from the Insignia brand at Best Buy. All their 4K models are smart though, unfortunately.

True. Using price as the only gatekeeper means you have to be okay with a large swath of the population never having access, no matter how many times they are told to read self-help books about making more money.

Besides, I'm sure Disney has thought about this. Going to a Disney park is usually somewhere between a once-a-year or a once-a-decade treat for families with kids. They'd probably rather have it be just affordable enough for middle class families because those families and kids go on to consume tons of other Disney content and merchandise. Letting average people have access means it reinforces the fandom for generations to come, as opposed to just having the park be a rich people thing.

The point is not who's currently relevant, it's that people on the cultural Right complaining about cancel culture are on par with a schoolyard bully complaining about someone else bullying them. They are happy to do it when their opinions hold sway; when they can't, they whine about other people doing it.

And to be clear, I'm not taking a "both sides are equally bad" stance, I'm just describing the hypocrisy of this particular line of complaining.

This is the best rebuttal to the CRT panic I've ever read. Thank you.

I, too, used to think that "oppression matrix" = "all white men are evil," but putting aside the paranoia and simply thinking about it calmly helped me realize that it's not that radical of an idea.

Even as a kid I instinctively understood that as a white dude I have it easier in America than most other identities, even though I didn't have the words to express it. It's a pretty simple idea, and all the knee-jerk reactions against it just come from an emotional unwillingness to face that fact head on, I think. Which is its own deep issue that I won't pretend to fully understand or to be immune from.

Do you have any examples offhand where this was true? To me it seems that the Twitter mob has much less real-world impact than people think. Someone loses a particular gig one day, then gets hired somewhere else like nothing happened. Half the time it ends up being free publicity.

This far predates the modern Critical Race Theory boogieman, which I assume is what you're referencing. It's been going on for decades.

If you zoom out you can find many more examples. A bit further back, look at the Right's behavior throughout the Bush years - the Dixie Chicks are a perfect example of someone opposing the Right from within their own culture and being summarily "cancelled" for it.

More recently though, Kathy Griffin hasn't recovered from the Trump's severed head controversy.

I'd also like to point out that the type of cancelling and thought suppression the Right does is much more insidious than the Twitter mob, which has the attention span of about a week. The way the Right targets school boards at the local and State level to suppress any curricula which makes them uncomfortable is a huge, widespread problem. Countless teachers in America are legally forced to teach demonstrably false narratives about racism and slavery, as well as to present evolution and Creationism as "equally valid theories."

Comparing a comedian getting cancelled by the Left on Twitter (which rarely sticks; even Louis CK is doing gigs again) with the systematic miseducation of millions of kids based on demonstrably false narratives by the Right, I'd say the latter is much more harmful.

> I think burnout in engineering (at least for me) is just the endless building of widget after widget to make money for someone else while racing against some arbitrary deadline.

I could not have said this better myself. Yes, we are paid extremely well, but the soul-crushing grind of building stupid web apps for companies that don't even need them really takes a toll eventually.

Every scrum team I've ever been on fell into that pattern eventually. Companies adopted Scrum because it became the trendy way to signal that you're a modern company. Not because of any actual commitment to its framework.

In reality, Scrum went from "empower engineers" to "allow managers to micromanage their employees even more, but we call it Agile so you can't push back against it because then you're challenging the orthodoxy."

Calm down, Phoenix Wright. I read the article that OP posted. That shows a huge Twitter thread of John Cleese complaining about things. I’ve read other news articles about other times he was on Twitter complaining about things.

That’s true. But even then I would question the thread’s relevance to HN.

I’m hardly ever on Twitter so I only see things on a case by case basis. Whether I agree with them or not is a moot point. It’s just a behavioral pattern I noticed here.

ICE was created in the Bush years and has been demonstrably brutal and racist. You don’t need ICE to handle immigration. Somehow America made it until the 2000’s without it, and much like other three letter agencies created post-9/11, their effectiveness is dubious at best.

One real way to solve illegal immigration would be to make it easier to legally immigrate. Making them citizens means they have equal labor rights and can’t be treated like serfs, so then can command higher wages.

Also, outsourcing has done far more damage to the working class than immigration. Billionaires ginning up the “they’re taking your jobs” sentiment while offshoring as much good paying blue collar work as possible. Neoliberalism in a nutshell.

That surprises me because she’s been getting banned from various shows and venues for most of her career. Shock value has always been her shtick. It’s weird how that one was the one that was “too far” even for her. (Maybe she was contacted by a three letter agency about it?)

That’s my perception. He’s an insanely successful comedian and could probably get a gig anywhere he wants besides debate clubs on college campuses. But he’s decided to become a Twitter crusader instead. It comes off as whiny because to the average observer it seems blown out of proportion.

Are you saying Cosby’s serial drugging and raping habit was unrelated to his career? I know you’re not defending him, but that’s still a crazy take in my mind. His career and popularity helped put him in the position to be able to do that, and to get away with it for so long.

It’s not about an individual experience, it’s about the general quality of HN being polluted by clickbait. More clickbait makes more targets for trolls. If trolls find lots of fodder they’ll spend more time here. Etc etc.

Strong moderation is the key to keeping up the quality of discussions around here. I’m also glad this post got flagged.

Great points. I mentioned this in another comment but it’s worth adding that the Right does this too. Like adults in the 70’s and 80’s trying to cancel heavy metal bands and get dungeons and dragons banned because it was “satanic” and would corrupt the youth. Ridiculous stuff, but similar behavior from a different political faction.