ythn

> Can you blame people for trying to make a career out of it when that's how Uber and Lyft marketed themselves when they first started to grow?

If Uber/Lyft really marketed it as a viable career option, then yeah, they definitely hold some responsibility there. The vibe I got was that ride sharing was something you could do on the side for fun, or maybe to/from a long commute or something for some bonus (but not sustainable) side income.

Is Uber actually giving out car loans? People are getting those on their own.

It would be like if someone leased a lemonade factory from a 3rd party in order to use my app.

It doesn't even have to be intentionally exploitative. People will exploit themselves.

If I wanted to help clean up local communities, I could make an app that allows you to post trash bounties on your neighborhood, to be collected by people that accept the bounty and go clean it up.

Soon: "CleanCommunities is an evil company! They maximally exploit professional trash bounty hunters with below minimum wage and no benefits, no protective equipment, etc!!!"

Like, geez, I wasn't trying to exploit people, I just saw a litter problem in my community and tried to fix it... I didn't even intend for people to turn this into a full time job, more like a "volunteer service with benefits" type deal...

It's basically impossible to have nice things because people will always try to any little thing into a career and then complain when it isn't viable.

Made an app so that kids can deliver lemonade on weekends to neighbors for a few bucks? Someone will try to make a career out of delivering lemonade full time and sue you because it doesn't pay a living wage with benefits.

Coming from a game programming background - before clicking the link I was expecting a VFX "bloom filter" effect on a visual commit graph where "light sources" are exaggerated and seem to "glow".

Housing in Alaska already is affordable...

There's no technological or legal solution to this problem (short of draconian), the solution is a cultural one.

Libertarians are the new advocates for small government.

Libertarians = Arch Linux (lean, mean, minimal)

Everybody else = Windows or Mac (i.e. huge operating system that tries to protect users from everything under the sun)

Not just a broad tree, but a labyrinthine broad tree where you are basically traversing a maze of choke points

If everyone in the world is an equally hard worker, then yes, all success is luck. But that's just not the case.

Anecdotally, I knew two identical twins who were both obese. They both tried to diet, but one always relapsed, while the other got serious and lost weight. Ultimately only one of the twins was "successful" at getting down to a healthy weight, while the other "failed".

Is it just luck, then, that one of the twins was born with more mental fortitude? Is that your logic?

You can say that about anything. Pick a technology/company you like and I'll write an "excuse me, but" piece that "justifiably" criticizes it.

Unless China and Russia do the same, there is little point in weakening yourself and your allies

It's what happens when profit is not your primary (or even secondary) goal. That's why my personal company will never go public. From what I understand it would force me to put profit as my primary goal, even if I value quality more than profit.

> People don't want to buy cars because they're low-emission, they want to buy cars because they're fast, big, and safe

You forgot the two biggest factors - cost and efficiency. Most people doesn't want big or necessarily fast cars. Most people want cheap cars that go a long way on a little fuel. However, it's difficult to make cars that are cheap AND fuel efficient AND environmentally friendly.

Yes but I think OP is saying that, paradoxically, prioritizing correctness over simplicity actually makes correctness more elusive than if simplicity were prioritized.

In my experience you need a paradigm shift then. If your earth centric approach is creating a need for epicycles of complex code, then you need to paradigm shift to heliocentric which eliminates the epicycles and replaces them with a simple elliptical model.

> Correctness comes first.

Not always. Have you ever used a SNES emulator? There is one emulator that is more correct than all others combined - it's called BSNES and it's the most true to the original SNES hardware of all the available emulators. Yet it is horrifically memory/cpu hungry - that correctness comes at a huge cost.

So no, correctness does not always come first, especially if you value other things like user experience.

You missed the point of the article if you interpreted it as correctness being intentionally sacrificed for simplicity.

Plus, a complete leap year implementation is already what I would consider simple and most standard libraries already have an implementation for it you can use directly.

The simple thing to do then is to call an `isLeapYear` function that abstracts any complexity.

Abstraction allows you to hide complexity and make it a simple, reusable part again.

I subscribe to this philosophy, but unfortunately simplicity is surprisingly difficult for most software devs. It's because if you don't have the tool in your toolbox, you won't even know it can be simplified.

I once did a code review for a function that parsed some Linux file for Ethernet stats. It was incredibly convoluted with tons of substring finding and indexing. I told the author to simplify it and he declared he already had and it was as simple as it could get. I then showed him of the existence of regex and his mind was blown.

*for very loose and liberal definitions of "facism"

> But the language itself never seemed “cool”

The author of "Joy, Inc." disagrees with you

https://www.amazon.com/Joy-Inc-Built-Workplace-People/dp/159...

I would say it's more like people are pooh-poohing certain brands of hammers as being inferior to TrendTech Hammers (R) which are "obviously" superior.

> First off, I was genuinely surprised by the love students and more junior developers are giving Kotlin.

This seems to indicate that the "love" Kotlin gets is mostly fad motivated. Just like younger generations reject the haircuts and "cool" slang the older generation uses, the same younger generations reject older programming languages in favor of fashionable, glamorous, new ones.

Java went from being THE trendy fad language to the old fogey that everyone mocks and derides.

Anytime I see someone bashing Java/PHP/JavaScript on /r/programmerhumor (reddit) I challenge them to a coding contest. I use the language they just bashed, they use their ideal language. No takers yet.

I think, more often than not, language choice is like golf club choice. Different pros have their preferences, but a pro can play a good game with any set of clubs. A novice will blame the clubs for a poor game.

Modern C++ is WAY better than C, IMO. I can never go back to C, having tasted C++14, and I work on embedded systems.

> A 30,000 ton ore train in Brazil will take about that long to stop, due to the nature of that weight strung out over 2.5 miles of distance.

I once learned in a physics class that weight has nothing to do with the stopping distance, but rather the steel on steel friction coefficient.

Needs satellite link as a backup-backup!

> Issac Arthur speculates that Titan may become a center of cryogenic industry and computing in the late 21st century.

More like the late 31st century

Some really good books will get false negatives by this rule, however.

For example: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, by Agatha Christie.

By the bottom of page 50 I was not enjoying it at all, seemed like a trite mystery novel. I was ready to put it down but the friend who recommended it urged me to slog through. And boy was I glad I did. As is common with Agatha Christie, there is often a huge payoff at the very end (last chapter).