bongobongo

Gitlab has an excellent free plan, in fact it’s so good I honestly don’t understand how they can afford it and doubt it will last (but really hope it will for individual developers). They even give you Docker registries and thousands of CI hours.

You’re describing a monopoly and the proper tool to deal with it is anti-trust, not entrenching it by pretending it’s a public utility.

This isn’t as insightful as you think. You’re tautologically describing the notion of sovereignty. Sovereignty is supreme power. Of course it abhors “competition.”

Libertarianism is not the same thing as liberalism (classical nor modern).

Switched to Firefox for work and home. It feels like Chrome did in the early days. No, it’s not faster than Chrome. Yes, there are a couple of dev features that I no longer find intuitive. I just mean in the sense that it is really focused on users. Chrome is focused on advertisers. The change has mostly been painless, and I’m a Web developer.

At this point I just don’t trust Google nor Chrome. All the incentives are there for Google to turn Chrome into adware. The evidence is pointing in that direction. And the trust is no longer there.

It’s funny to think about (and this is of course a gross caricature) but Chrome feels more and more like they took all the annoying adware/bloatware from the 2000s and disguised it in a browser—except they figured out how to do it without anybody noticing. Today, we are all Grandma.

If you are asking questions like this you probably should not be buying individual stocks

Can’t disagree with you there. I don’t know how these people sleep at night. The taint should extend to any firm that consults for them. I don’t care how many adults really do use them as cessation devices, they are clearly intended to be used by children.

Serious question: why just the executives? I know everybody needs a job to get by, but there’s an expression for getting by by getting kids hooked on harmful drugs: being a shitbum drug dealer. There should be some consequences when it comes to earning your living by damaging the health of children.

Your first point isn’t a matter of opinion. Competition and innovation have been steadily declining, and monopsony (wage-setting power) concentrating. These aren’t just the musings of some random know-it-all on some tech board, they are reality. Look it up.

Your second point is just whataboutism. Investigating Google now doesn’t mean Equifax can’t be investigated later.

Agreed completely.

And on a larger note in terms of media distribution and delivery, I feel like we’ve regressed to something even worse and more frustrating than the 20th century model

I’m not an expert in the subject, just pointing out that you can die or lose your toes sleeping outside in the North, which changes things a bit.

I think this is accurate, having lived all over CA and the Northeast. Northeastern cities build shelters because otherwise homeless people would freeze to death in the winter, though. Sometimes the shelters are only available during the freezing months.

Sounds like you’ve advanced in your career by undermining your teammates and sacrificing professionalism in order to win praise from people who are willing to put systems and users at risk without understanding the co sequences.

I understand your point, which basically boils down to the axiom of managing expectations. But sacrificing professionalism is not something that should be accepted as normal, let alone celebrated as clever. It’s the oldest trick in the book.

I've never seen somebody drive a car on the sidewalk.

I see scooteridiots going 15+ MPH on the sidewalk all the time.

Just because people have money to burn does not mean they earned it or acquired it through hard work and good thinking. Most people with money are absolute idiots just like everybody else. In fact, in many cases, and especially with wealth inequality as it is, they can afford to be stupid.

I am not joking-- I'm willing to bet that there is a direct correlation between inequality and stupid products/business models making it to market. When you can just keep trying new things until something sticks, you're not going to try very hard or act with much caution.

That's why it's not a market. Like I said.

Let's not be silly, there is no market in this case. It's an oligopoly and occasional cartel.

You are mixing in airline surcharges with taxes.

Most forms of technolibertarianism are just feudalism with gizmos.

You may not know this, but the Constitution guarantees the same rights to foreigners on US soil as it does to US citizens. (This is a pretty basic part of civic education, but civic education in the US these days is terrible.)

So, no, I would not be OK with the government violating the Constitution.

It is not "wild speculative hyperbole" not to give the benefit of the doubt to companies that have repeatedly demonstrated that they are not entitled to the benefit of the doubt.

Russia already assassinates people all over the world, even in the US (e.g., Mikhail Lesin was likely offed by Russian agents right in the middle of Washington, DC in 2015).

It's a very fanciful idea that CIA has as much of a presence in Russia as you think it does. It's really not at all likely that the US could assassinate somebody in Russia _and_ get away with it. That second part is key. Russia isn't as concerned about getting away with it (see the recent cases in the UK) because its entire regime is predicated upon controlled misinformation, and because it isn't afraid to dispose of/disown/disavow an agent or a useful idiot when it is in the government's interest. For a country like the US, it's a bit more complicated.

To answer your questions, Snowden only does what he is allowed to do by the Russian government. Snowden is an ex-NSA contractor in Russia right now thanks to the good graces of Vladimir Putin; if you think that he isn't being handled daily by Russian secret services, that's pretty funny.

If the argument is that it's OK because the driver will be there to stop the car from doing something fatally stupid, then that sort of defeats the purpose of not driving the car yourself; this isn't a "self-driving" car, it's glorified cruise control.

I’m not sure that’s true. Devs do well but not necessarily better than nurses, doctors, and engineers.

The big gap is in licensure and education. You can get a high paying job in tech starting with a GED if you play your cards right. That is because demand is so high, and the field has zero professional standards (in the sense of an actual profession with an actual organizing body, like nursing or medicine or engineering, etc.). The latter part is important. There may be lots of demand for nursing, etc., but real professional organizations do not lower their standards in order to accommodate demand.

Two things will happen this century. First, there will be many, many more people who know how to build basic systems (Web applications, etc.). Second, people will have a much better understanding of the risks involved in software development, which are now still mostly abstract to the public (but this is already changing). Once those risks become apparent, there will be an attendant demand for actual professionalization (standards bodies, licenses, codes of ethics, etc.). There will be greater regulation and classification of software development as a profession (i.e., you might not need a license for some kinds of work, but for other kinds, you will have strict licensing). This will drive up the compensation of (credentialed) developers to the level of doctors and engineers, but will also create many more barriers to entry in the process.

It works, it just won’t happen because all the structural incentives point to the status quo. Another reason to love our current crop of monopolists...

I won’t call you dumb, but you can only stretch an analogy so far. And some weirdos trading pizza arcade tokens like they are real money is not at all the same as one of the richest companies in the world trying to disrupt the global currency market for gain. Since you asked—that’s the difference, that’s what has got people “upset.”

The unique combination of arrogance and ignorance on HN grates on me, too. And a lot of it is motivated by what you suggest, which is the high compensation of techies relative to other knowledge workers—it makes them think they are inherently special rather than just temporarily overvalued.

That being said, techies—unlike admen—are still builders and the people who build the shit will always ultimately have the clout. It’s just a question of using the clout effectively.

Relying on propaganda for social stability is a recipe for authoritarianism.

You missed it

It's a kind of mind-trick that only occurs in articles and white papers about cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies. I've noticed that they often end up proposing a distributed private shared database controlled by a corporate cartel and call it "freedom."