dventimi

That's a fair point. It's just my perception that those things don't tend to be taken very seriously by people commenting on HN.

"the nature of dark matter and dark energy"

I don't know anything about "the nature" of things. That sounds very philosophical to me.

"What are [the properties of Dark Matter and Dark Energy] aside from their effect on the large scale structure of the universe?"

I don't know. I also don't know why you're excluding (in the case of Dark Matter) its gravimetric effect on the large scale structure of the Universe. That seems like a pretty important property to me.

"America" doesn't underestimate or overestimate things. People do. So which American people underestimate the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back? Name names, or it didn't happen.

It's important to note that it doesn't have to be this way. This isn't the natural order of things. There IS no "natural order of things." This is a choice. You're free to like that choice if it suits you, but nobody is obliged to like it, and if you don't there is a tried-and-true program for forcing other choices: organize, unionize, and galvanize.

Meanwhile, on the subject of "state capacity" the author immediately cites "the Niskanen Center". What the heck is the Niskanen Center? Evidently, it's "the most interesting think tank in American politics" according to Time magazine's Molly Ball (Yale, 2025 tuition ~$65k/year), with "roots on the libertarian right". The Niskanen Center says of itself that it "promotes policies that advance prosperity, opportunity, and human flourishing, guided by the belief that a free market and an effective government are mutually dependent." So, what does the most interesting think tank in American politics say about state capacity? Surprise surprise, it says both the traditional Right and the traditional Left are to blame for the decline in state capacity, the latter owing to what else but stifling and "sclerotic" over-regulation. Who exactly at the Center says that? That "research" comes from Brick Lindsey (Yale, Harvard), former senior vice president at the Cato institute where he focused on free trade. Who else is on the masthead for the Niskanen Center? It seems like it's mostly right-leaning Republicans, ex-military, and ex-Cato people.

Is all of this as clear to you as it is to me? To me, this is just the usual prep-school to Ivy League Acela Corridor and Silicon Valley wealthy neoliberal elite making yet another bipartisan "blame both sides" bid to roll back regulations that stand in the way of them making even more money. If that's what you want to read, go for it. It's a free country. Just please don't have any illusions that there's anything new here.

"Overly restrictive rules (zoning) and elaborate process (permitting and planning) create chronic shortages driving prices higher and creating an angry populace. That’s the TLDR thesis of a lot of the abundance books.

This is just the same concern-trolling anti-government neoliberalism that's been "eating state capacity" since at least the 1970s.

1. A team must be in control of its own destiny...

2. Any communication between teams must be done by... an interface such that changes between teams are made obvious."

Sure. You'll get no argument from me on these points...

"it comes back to my original point: The architecture is the function of number of people in the system."

...or on this one.

I will grant that a division of code along the same lines as the division of labor is both sensible and inevitable. I will also grant that 100 or 250 or 2500 or more people are sometimes needed for a firm to achieve its objectives. Will you grant that sometimes, they aren't? That sometimes, the tail wags the dog and the staff and its culture determine the architecture rather than the reverse? That sometimes, adding more people to a slow project just makes it slower? I ask these questions because in my world, micro-services have typically been narrowly defined as network servers in Java, Python, or Rust, each interacting with a database (sometimes, the same database) through an ORM, and a rigid adherence to this orthodoxy has padded resource budgets both in terms of compute and people and has sapped performance both in terms of compute and people.

Let’s be clear: no single piece of hardware "caused" the gender gap in tech. But the Apple II symbolizes a turning point — when computing left institutions and entered homes, and when existing cultural biases about gender were quietly baked into the code of who got to belong. It's not about the machine itself — it’s about what we did with it.

https://chatgpt.com/share/67e21390-ee58-8013-b760-86b1a2132f...

"So yes—tongue firmly in cheek—the Apple II is responsible for the Vietnam of Computer Science. It set a generation on an imperative path, which led to a decade of trying to bend SQL to our will with ORMs, with mixed success and plenty of scars."

https://chatgpt.com/share/67e211b4-86a4-8013-9c09-1b8bf78787...

I have no idea, but I don't worry about it because I haven't been persuaded that will happen.

You have turned 20 teams working on 20 different focuses into 1 team. The focuses are interconnected but 90% independent.

I would explain that what was originally presented to me as a monolith was later explained to me to be something else: a family of interrelated services. Then I would say that's a different problem, invoke Conway's Law, and say that they can stay as 20 different teams. I would also say that doesn't necessarily mean 20 different network servers and 40 different tiers, which in my experience is how "micro-services" are typically envisioned.

these patterns evolved because there was a need

I'm also not persuaded there was a [single] need rather than a network of interrelated needs, just as I'm not persuaded anyone here (including me) has a complete understanding of what all those needs were.

Assign the monolith to 5 of them then find something productive for the other 95 people to do.

Someday I will write that blog article about how the Apple II computer is responsible for ORMs and the gender imbalance in software.

https://docs.postgrest.org/en/v12/how-tos/providing-html-con...

I remember SQL Server and its Stored Procedures having a brief period of popularity because Visual Basic had been popular, in no small part to non-university-trained people starting their careers by graduating from MS Excel VBA macros to VB UIs in enterprise client-server apps, with MSSQL SP providing the logic layer. As the Dot-com boom took off, ASP made it possible to leverage that experience outside of the enterprise building internet applications, which was were the money and excitement was. I remember MS pushing COM, but never getting very far with it as it quickly lost ground to Java. Java was exploding in popularity and was a rich and fertile valley where the "kingdom of the application layer" could be built re-using paving stones from the "3-tier and n-tier" era that somewhat preceded it but was somewhat coincident with it.

The reason this is important to me is because it raises within me the questions, "What was the '3-tier architecture' a reaction to?" and "Why was it so important circa 1997-1999 that there be 3 or more tiers?" I think the answer to the first question is, "The '3-tier architecture' was a reaction to the 'client-server (2-tier) architecture'." I think the answer to the second question is, "At least one of the reasons it was so important circa 1997-1999 to replace client-server architectures with 3-tier or n-tier architectures is that, for sociological and demographic reasons, there was an important new cohort of developers who wanted to use general-purpose programming languages like Visual Basic and Java rather than the SQL of the previous generation: young men who first learned BASIC when they were adolescent boys during the home computer revolution of the late 1970s and early 1980s." To the extent that's true, then it casts some doubt on the proposition that an "application tier" outside of database was based on merit. It raises the possibility that the motivation was less technological and more psychological than is usually acknowledged: as an attempt to hold the database and its alien programming model (SQL) at arm's length by people who started out with BASIC and never strayed very far from its familiar imperative model, eventually hiding it behind an ORM layer.

To the extent that's true, then it also casts some doubt on the claim in the article that "The motivation for this separation is as relevant today as it was then: to improve modularity and allow different components of the system to be developed relatively independently." I'm sure some people had that motivation and that's laudable, but it's not the whole story. There were other factors as well, some of them sociological and demographic. But, demographics change. The "Gen-Xers" who were 10 in 1980 and 27 in 1997 are at 55 now approaching retirement and are being replaced by subsequent generations who aren't hidebound by a formative experience that occurred decades before they were born.

Tying this back to the DBOS article, in general I liked it and consider it interesting technology. I just want to push back gently on a familiar tone I perceive, which tends to present whatever product or technology is being offered as somehow "standard", "accepted", "optimal", and "the natural and logical current end state of a tidy process of innovation which relegates earlier technologies as historical but no longer relevant, if it mentions them at all." The world and technology isn't that tidy, and a lot of old ideas are still relevant.

Immediately, I see problems. Martin Fowler's "Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture" was first published in 2002, a year that I think most people will agree was not in "the 90's." Also, was that the motivation? Are we sure? Who had that motivation? Were there any other motivations at play?

Toodle-loo!

> No

Then hand one to yourself.

> They are saying that there is no relationship to wealth by billionaires and helping "the average American," only that they can get rich by creating value, whether it be for one person or many,

I know they're saying that (or more accurately, that's what I infer...neither of us knows for certain what zozbot234 is saying). And, I'm saying they're wrong.

> and that it is not redirection but creation of wealth that benefits both parties.

Well, now you're both wrong because it is a redirection of productive capacity (which is the term I used in the parent comment) and that has drawbacks for "many people." That a few megayachts might have benefits for a few people doesn't change that.

> yet you misunderstood to thinking that they were still somehow talking about the "many people" part

Neither of use knows what they were thinking, so you're in no position to say whether there was or wasn't a misunderstanding.

> I still don't think you quite understood the thread of logic of the thread, particularly how their refutation redirected the topic of conversation

If they redirected the topic of the conversation, then I'm going to score that as a non-sequitur once again.

> If you do not know the basics of the economics of comparative advantage

Give yourself yet another non-sequitur demerit. Why? Because the "basics of the economics of comparative advantage" can't tell you anything about what was in zozbot234's head. Perhaps they don't understand those basics. How do you know they do? Did you ask them?

> Sure, but that is not this thread however.

I'm starting to doubt you even understand the role that experience plays.

> sounds like you have an axe to grind against billionaires which is biasing your argumentation.

Mea culpa. I do have an axe to grind against billionaires. Don't you? I also have an axe to grind against autocrats and despots. Don't you? Or would you score any critique of [insert geopolitical villain here] as "biased"?

I'm not persuaded you're in a position to know what zozbot234 implied.

> where are you getting the idea that that relates to the American people at large

From my experience talking to other people on related topics.

> nothing was said as to whether these transactions benefit the average American

Something was said as to whether the class of people to which one of the parties to these transactions (Elon Musk, that is) belongs benefits the average American. It was said by me near the root of this sub-thread, in the comment to which zozbot234 replied.

> that is why I said your comment is a non sequitur.

If you're handing out non-sequitur demerits, hand one to zozbot234 then, if that person's comment and everything after it doesn't relate to the American people at large, as you seem to imply. Or, hand one to yourself. Take your pick.

That's not all they said. They also said, "such as EV cars, or low-cost space launches. It's a wash. Oh wait, actually it isn't because every trade of goods and services is advantageous to both parties by definition."

What's the significance of "low-cost" for space launches? What do they mean by, "It's a wash." What do they mean by, "every trade of goods an services is advantageous to both parties."? Do they mean that low-cost space launches benefit all or most Americans, because we all benefit from satellites for weather and GPS? Maybe. Do they mean that with both space launches and EV cars, the benefits of Elon's activities to all or most Americans wash out any drawbacks of him being rich? Maybe. Do they mean that this balancing of benefits and drawbacks always occurs because it's built into free-market capitalism? Maybe. Those interpretations aren't ruled out so far. You can't be certain they aren't what they intended any more than I can be certain that they are. It certainly would be in keeping with a common line of argument, which is that wealthy people return as much or more to any economy as they extract from it. I don't know that this is this person's line of argument, but it could be, and if it is then it's not a non-sequitur to attack that line of argument by throwing into doubt the universality of the benefits of Elon's products.

> If you'll then say something about how "he should make things more affordable for people,"

Let me stop you right there. I practically never hand out recommendations for what people "should" do.