briandear

Can we stop with taxing everything you don’t like? Taxes should be equal and used to fund the government, not as tools to make people do things you like.

Don’t we have enough taxes? Taxes should fund government not be used to force people to do things.

Crazy. It depends on the kind of software being built. Working on embedded systems for avionics is an entirely different animal than working CRM software development as an example. Even Wozniak didn’t have a degree until 1986, long after Apple went public.

Most of the people I worked with at Apple didn’t have CS degrees yet they built the thing many of you are using to read this.

Much of software development is deciding what to build rather than how to build it — that takes skills far beyond CS. We are building software for people to use rather than building it for its own sake.

CS people might know algorithms but do they understand why they even need it? How does it help the user? Some of the worst places I’ve ever worked had lots of CS degree people who spent more time complaining about framework defaults than building something people are able to quickly use and pay money for.

Inventors of Perl, C, Turbo Pascal, Typescript, Delphi, C#, FORTRAN, PHP, and COBOL pioneer Grace Hopper — no CS degrees.

Jack Dorsey, Peter Thiel, Zuckerberg, Chris Wanstrath (GitHub,) Arash Ferdowsi (Dropbox.) — no CS degree.

Stewart Butterfield (Slack) had degrees in philosophy! Reid Hoffman — also a liberal arts guy.

Avie Tevanian (Architect of MacOS,) — no CS degree. And while Steve Jobs wasn’t as technically astute as Wozniak — he still did tech and of course, no degree at all.

I could go on all day — I only mentioned the famous ones. At Apple I could list a hundred top engineers with no CS degree. I am sure most people here could.

The CS degree gatekeeping is complete ridiculousness.

I am biased though— I spent 7 years at Apple and have been in this business 16 years and my degree? Journalism.

CS people might be able to answer questions, but many times they don’t know the questions to ask. Tech has room for everyone and everyone brings a different skill set to the party. Not all doctors need to be neurosurgeons.

So you support nuclear power?

How about chopping down all of the London Plane trees next? Absolutely disastrous for public health. They are also all over Barcelona and cause nothing but respiratory misery.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/05/04/scourge-of-londo...

I hate the tracking too. But how to websites monetize free content otherwise? Advertising doesn’t work if you can’t price it. Without tracking, everything becomes a paywall.

Yet every website still has them.

No. The cookie banners have ruined the internet. The banners haven’t fixed anything. Business as usual, just click here.

100%. This is why many of us have a problem with the EU. And world governments in general — the more power they have and the further away from the elections that keep them accountable, the more tyrannical they become.

This is a country that has arrested people for social media posts. It’s also a crime in the UK to offend someone.

Orwell identified the genetic defect in the British genome 80 years ago.

Why do people vote for large, strong governments that are able to take the power you suggest Tech is enabling them to take?

FabFilter is another independent company that make some of the best plugins around.

People care about stories.

Apple doesn’t use Leetcode. It’s often an 8 hour whiteboard interview during with you write pseudo code for the most part. You can’t “cram” for an Apple interview typically.

It would be great if editors had some kind of terms limits to avoid the WikiMafia stuff we commonly see.

Good communication should be the goal of all writing.

Trackball?

Have you used Oracle, Salesforce, Windows? That’s why.

PTA isn’t the place. The school board is.

You could look at disposable income. That’s a more objective measure.

Not having to use outlook is a feature not a bug.

Completely agree. I hate kids being stuck in a Google ecosystem. Apple’s classroom app is really good.

Why doesn’t the market respond? If people don’t like Android, it seems like a market opportunity to make another OS. People love to complain about Apple and Google’s “monopoly,” but doesn’t that present an opportunity for someone to build their own thing and if enough people want it, they will be able to sell it?

Is anything stopping you from coding your own OS?

How is AI viewing content any different from Google? I don’t even use Google anymore because it’s so filled with SEO trash as to be useless for many things.

Very true. Just the other day, another “copyright is bad” post on the front page. Today its copyright is good because otherwise people might get some use of material in LLMs.

Considering this is hacker news, it seems to be such an odd dichotomy. Sometimes it feels like anti-hacker news. The halcyon days of 2010 after long gone. Now we need to apparently be angry at all tech.

LLMs are amazing and I wish they could train on anything and everything. LLMs are the smartphone to the fax machines of Google search.

So how do authors make money? Going on concert tours? The copyright system needs reform (Mickey Mouse for example) — but the system protects creators.

If there were no copyrights, no author would make any money.

It’s not just corporations. Look how much tracking nonsense goes into a recipe blog.

Is it factual?

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

Did congress pass a law I missed? Government communication isn’t a 1st Amendment issue. When you work for any employer, you are subject to the whims of that employer.