zeroname

The whole "rich vs poor divide" angle is nonsense. Like the article admits, all of these services were available before, but now they have the form of an app. The money goes to develop and advertise the whole show (creating jobs), but also to subsidize the labor. In effect, these services are more affordable than before. Uber is cheaper than a Taxi. Having your groceries delivered can be cheaper than doing it yourself, even if you earn small.

All that venture capital comes from the rich and goes into the pockets of those who aren't rich. It's dumb money, the same kind that made pets.com (a ludicrous business) go to a 100 million dollar market cap. As soon as that capital dries up, these shops will close down, or raise prices. They will never make their money back, because nobody will be able to maintain a monopoly on a service that almost anyone can perform. That's also why the labor itself will stay cheap, no matter who the middleman is. It's not like these jobs were highly lucrative before all these capitalists walked in.

Remember, the upside is low prices. If you're only worth a couple of dollars in profit per year but then you eat it up in support calls, the company is better off not having you as a customer.

- overpriced health-care, because the government thinks everyone should be able to buy health-care no matter what state their health is, but also everybody should be able to not buy healthcare when they feel like they don't need to

- overpriced private primary education, because the government thinks tax money must be locked up in a garbage public education system

- overpriced college, because the government thinks everyone should be able to go to college (and go broke for it)

- overpriced housing, because the government thinks everyone should be able to buy a house (and go broke for it)

- overpriced stock, because the government-created asset bubbles must be re-inflated with cheap money in order to save the retirement funds

- high taxes and deductions to mitigate the enormous amount of government debt that this whole charade requires

As a bonus, trillions of unfunded liabilities going into the future, meaning more taxes and deductions and fewer benefits for those suckers that'll have to pay into it.

Mark my words, in the future we will need the border wall to keep people in. Also don't forget that, as a citizen, you will owe taxes to Uncle Sam wherever you go.

I would say those are in equal measure things that make people unsuccessful. You better be afraid to fail or you will follow too many stupid ideas. You can burn yourself out working too hard on the wrong thing. You can be really passionate about something that basically nobody except you wants or needs. Conversely, a lot of things that nobody really is passionate about can make a lot of money.

I will also say that Elon Musk has not been successful in real business terms (creating a sustainable, profitable company) except that one time with PayPal and that could be down to good luck and timing. Nowadays, there's too much cheap and dumb money chasing too many "next big things", so it's hard to tell fact from fiction.

In my estimation, success really comes down to:

1) showing up

2) timing

3) luck

There's lots of people that are almost Elon Musk or almost Mark Zuckerberg or almost Steve Jobs. It's a gamble, but at least you get to choose which table to play on.

I don't understand what that means.

> You know, we don't choose names ourselves.

Who is this "we" people? What makes you so sure you belong to them, bound by their arcane rules?

> I feel comfortable with Krzysztof Szewczyk, but if it's risky for you, nothing stops you from calling me somewhat different.

Thanks, Chris.

> This avatar wasn't taken from anime.

It looks like anime, therefore it is anime, for all practical purposes.

> It's drawing of Alexios Komnenos.

Let's just say I have no idea what Anime Alexios is supposed to communicate to me.

By "real businesses" I don't mean the likes of Amazon who rarely if ever make a profit. They're not really paying taxes anyway. Neither am I talking about big international corporations, they know how to offshore and not pay taxes as well.

The same goes for billionaires. You can't tax them and expect to get more money. They can allocate their wealth to pay the minimum in taxes.

Subjectively, they are.

> Men at work are not harassing every female employee.

Subjectively, sexual harassment is extremely widespread.

> People are not trying to kick out elderly widows to turn the block into a shopping mall.

When I complain about my rent going up, it is of course much easier to make the case for the poor widow than myself.

> Your shoe is not going to make you a star athlete.

Of course. It's still going to make me feel like one, just a little bit.

> An immigrant is not knocking on the door to take your job -- that was decided decades ago.

Subjectively, he is. Even factually, as a laborer, immigration drives down my wages. That's basic economics. Of course there's nary a citizen left willing to work for as little as an illegal immigrant - but that's because those wages have been driven down already.

> For every policy you put in place to protect the imaginary elderly widow, you make it harder for 10 young people to have an affordable place to live.

Maybe, but doesn't everyone like elderly widows? Doesn't everyone hate those hipster millennials?

> Stop believing so much in symbols.

Never. Not in a million years.

Different emotional appeals still work on you and are being exploited without you knowing. For example:

> ...a cozy one where I am made to feel comfortable through attention to detail

I'm informing you that they're objectively going to lower your chance of success. Considering that it is "impolite" to tell that to someone, it becomes uncommon knowledge. Fortunately, I'm not a polite person.

For what it's worth, if I had any scientific evidence that having an Anime avatar on Github lowered your chances of success, I would tell you that as well.

I will leave you with this quote by Donald Knuth:

"The most important thing in the programming language is the name. A language will not succeed without a good name. I have recently invented a very good name and now I am looking for a suitable language."

That's actually not true, that's your warped perception of what I'm saying. Your brain happens to portray me as a caricature of everything that's wrong in the world - a common bias you may not be conscious of.

Let's take my standpoint to the extreme. Let's say I know there's a bunch of violent Nazis roaming the streets and I suggest not to wear a Star Of David out there in public. Does that make me a Nazi or an endorser of Nazism? If I was the Nazi, wouldn't I rather want to withhold that piece of information?

In any event, your name is not your heritage and your heritage is not you.

> And your inability to pronounce someone’s name is a failing in your education or experience. Your failing, not theirs.

That's actually a pretty arrogant thing to say. Let's say there's an Indian restaurant chain that serves food worldwide. Are you going to say they'd be denying their heritage, if they tuned down the spices in markets where people generally can't stand hot food? Is it the failing of the people if they don't return after eating just one meal that was too spicy? You know what, maybe it is. That restaurant chain is still going out of business there.

Again, if you don't care about success, go all in with staying "true to your heritage" if you like to. Keep your unpronouncable name and insist on it being pronounced correctly.

That's one-sided thinking. The goal may well be to make the data not subject to the (lack of) control of a foreign state, namely the United States in this case, but any foreign state in the general case.

In fact the EU already mandates similar restrictions for data of EU citizens and special provisions for EU-US data transfers:

https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/law-topic/data-protection/data...

Let's say some major Chinese company pulled out of the U.S. market because of the Iraq War, would the reaction of U.S. citizens, even those opposing the war, be positive? Wouldn't politicians use it as an instrument?

Make no mistake, scary stuff is going on in China, but the solution has to come from within China. In fact, by explicitly supporting the opposition in China, any accusation of "evil foreign influence" is substantiated.

If you think discriminating based on difficult names is "racist bigotry", okay. It doesn't change the facts. If you want free discrimination showered upon you, keep your unpronouncable foreign name. If you want success, change it. It is common practice for a reason.

> Practising it is fucking despicable.

You know what's despicable? Accusing people of "being racist" for just acting like ordinary people happen to act. It's diminishing the impact of the word. Ordinary people, including you, do have these biases. Consciously, unconsciously, it doesn't matter.

I want people to do better for themselves, I can't change the world for them. Neither can you by leaving these comments on HN.

There's tons of evidence:

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/why-your...

If it's "presumptious" of me to point that out, I don't care. Only ever telling people what they want to hear is not helpful.

> Is the casual racism completely necessary?

Is the casual accusation of racism completely necessary?

It has nothing to do with race, more with history. Crab mentality is very common in the former "eastern block".

> Couldn't you just stick to the critique of the work rather than the person and his nationality?

I'm not criticizing the person's nationality, that's not their choice. I'm drawing the distinction between the individual and their nationality. You can be a proud Pole, doing polish things, espousing polish ideals and mannerisms above all else, whatever. You also can be an individual in global society who happens to be from Poland.

I'm aware, but your global audience is generally not. That's why I advise on name changes. You own your name, you can do anything to it. There are people from India with names so long that a byte overflows and there are people from Africa with exclamation marks (click sounds) in their names. I'm sure there's a great cultural heritage behind these names, but they're just impractical.

If I don't know how to pronounce a name, I am going to avoid you just a little bit more. I'm less likely to remember your name. I'll have to look it up to spell it right. Should I get into the unfortunate situation of having to pronounce it in public, I'm likely to embarrass myself.

In short, your name is a risk to me. A small risk, all things considered, but a risk nonetheless. It's causing me extra work. A small amount of extra work, but extra work nonetheless.

The thing is, it's not just me, it's almost everyone, even those who wouldn't dare admit it or those who are unconscious of it. All those tiny little negatives add up to a significant negative in your life. Studies show that "foreign-sounding" names lead to less job interviews, for instance, but it doesn't end there.

Of course, if you hate success (as is common in Poland) you might not be bothered by all of that. Sour grapes, but fair.

> Euboea depends on POSIX and X86 highly, therefore I thought about Euboea like about another text processing / computation language to be used in shell scripts making programming easier.

If that's the focus, your selling point should be something along these lines of "a simple programming language to create UNIX tools", because that's really what distinguishes it. I also think you can then give up on the whole "safety" aspect, because UNIX fundamentally is unsafe and "no access to files" becomes a limitation, not a feature.

Good:

- "minimal usable set of keywords and control structures"

- "simple cooperation with C"

- "no access to files on physical drive"

- reasonably terse syntax (except for "end instead of braces")

Bad:

- The name of the language, I don't know how to pronounce it and I can't remember how to type it. Rename to "Boa" or similar.

- The name of the author, it's a bad transliteration. Rename to "Christoph Shoechuck" or similar.

- "focus on targeting UNIX-like operating system"

- "intended to be used with shell scripts" - shell scripts are brittle and awful to write

- end instead of braces

What:

- isn't AOT and JIT contradictory?

- isn't interfacing with C and "no access to files" contradictory?

Conclusion:

I like a simple, small and embeddable language, but I don't want to embed anything in shell scripts and I don't want to depend on UNIX.

It is moral to allocate resources more efficiently, as it increases well-being and reduces waste.

> If it were, that would mean being opposed to e.g. being taxed to take care of the disabled.

Not at all. A society which allocates resources more efficiently has more resources available to deal with such problems. It is also in the self-interest of every individual to be taken care of, should they become disabled.

The (im)morality of using taxation to this end (as opposed to voluntary charity and private insurance) is a separate debate altogether.

> I'm wondering whether there's a way to reconcile those two in the same moral framework.

They're already reconciled.

2) The fact that you are paid more ensures that society's demand of your kind of labor is met, resulting in a more efficient allocation of resources. If everyone instead was paid the same, there would be less incentive to get better training or to perform undesirable work, resulting in less efficient allocation of resources.

If criminals could just be educated and get jobs and become ordinary members of society, then our social programs would work. They don't, because from a sober perspective, if you're already a criminal (or so inclined), then crime is more attractive and ordinary members of society appear as the powerless suckers they really are.

Honestly, let us just keep Cuba a toy socialist country as it is and not boycott it. Otherwise, where would we point to when we want to show real world socialism? Assuming that Maduro is on his way out, of course.

Gobshite.

However, wages (like all other prices) in a market are set by supply and demand. Wages will rise to meet demand but not higher, irrespective of productivity. Furthermore, productivity increases through automation decrease demand for human labor and therefore suppress wages.

You aren't entitled to profits at all. Profits come after cost. You're cost. You cost more because the demand for your labor versus the supply of your labor raises the price of your labor.

Don't assume this will go on forever, the next bust may well wipe out the huge wage advantage of today's tech workers.

I personally wouldn't want want to give up entirely on all the socially inept assholes whose in-depth knowledge on crap that I don't care to know about (but rely on) seemingly knows no bounds. More specifically, I do want to keep the IT department.

Let's take another example:

A planet somewhere in the milky way galaxy is populated equally by Red, Blue and Green Octopodes. They are biased differently in three dimensions:

  Red   (3,     2,    -2)
  Blue  (0,     3,     4)
  Green (23,  -56,   128)

Note, I'm not making an argument against diversity. The average Green Octopode may hold extremist views, but they shouldn't be excluded from a group merely to reduce bias. Just like humans, Green Octopodes should be treated as the individuals that they are, not as a weight in a multivariate optimization problem.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19269799?dopt=Abstract

Going by this review, I would say that supplementation does work:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4176556/

A faculty is made up of 90% "ethnic Germans" and 10% Jews. According to the hypothesis, getting that makeup closer to the societal demographics will result in a "lower risk of bias".

I hope it is now obvious to see that the hypothesis is a non-sequitur.