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> Given even a passing look at just the last 2 decades

In the last two decades, the share of humans living in extreme poverty fell from 30% to 10%. And child deaths under age five were cut in half.

So where's your data?

I will add that I don't think "western civilization" is racist, even though the term gets coopted often by racists. I happen to be proud to be part of a scientific civilization and want to see it flourish. But I recognize that has nothing to do with which people are allowed to live and work on which side of imaginary lines.

There's a fundamental flaw hiding under arguments like yours: the "civilization" you're circumscribing is an imaginary and arbitrary boundary. An ahistorical retcon. It's as unsupported as discredited racial theories that all humans fit into three tidy buckets ("caucasoid", "mongoloid", "negroid").

For example, maybe you're talking about "Christendom". But then it's not actually in decline -- hispanics are part of Christendom, and Christianity is growing in Africa, so on net it's growing, not shrinking.

Maybe you mean the population within the actual geographic boundaries of Europe and the former British colonies (including America). But if that's your definition, then you would accept immigration as a solution, and you would admit that America is already doing fine.

Maybe you're talking about people who live in societies with constitutions that ultimately derive from the ideas of the enlightenment. But again, not shrinking.

Maybe you're talking about a specific local cultural tradition -- but then it's not really "the West" that's in decline. "Western civilization" necessarily spans a huge range of cultures, otherwise you can't successfully take credit for everything from Socrates to Charlemagne to Descarte to Luther to Newton to Einstein. Consider the magnitude of the cultural turnover across that span!

Is South America part of "Western civilization"? It's literally in the western hemisphere and colonized by Spain and Portugal. If you're really talking about having a connection to European cultural history, it clearly fits. But if we include it, then again the decline disappears. Guatemalan immigrations to the US can't be a non-western invasion.

What it boils down to is, people use "western civilization" as a cover for "white people just like me". But there's no non-racist way to equate that with "civilization".

Our civilization -- the actual web of relationships and institutions that keep the lights on -- is clearly doing fine. That web is fundamentally global, as much as that annoys chauvinists. And globally, the world is getting richer and more equal at a rapid pace. Mortality is falling. The population is not in decline, although it has a good shot at plateauing in the coming decades, which will be a good thing.

This is a no-name journal with no reputation (positive or negative) that I can find. The aluminum hypothesis is widely rejected by mainstream researchers for pretty good reasons. User nilved posted a link to a comprehensive paper explaining why (go upvote them).

Please remember to be be skeptical of links like this. Being in "a journal" is not a high bar.

It's not "rewrite" that's bad, it's thinking you can cut over to a new system in a "big bang".

Rewrites are definitely common and beneficial, but the successful ones always run the new code and the old code side-by-side for an extended period of time. Which means you're still tending and caring about the old code, even as you strive to direct most of your effort into the new code.

Your example is much smaller than what people are usually talking about in terms of big-bang rewrites. So maybe you will be successful.

Even so, you're better off doing a step-by-step rewrite, where the new stuff and the old stuff coexists in a single application. That way your users can continue getting incremental benefits over time even if the rewrite takes dramatically longer than you're optimistic estimate.

If you can't figure out how to manage the complexity of a piecemeal rewrite, consider that you may not actually understand the system well enough to avoid making version 2 just as bad as version 1.

Most people overestimate their ability to act differently than they've acted in the past. It's like the unjustified optimism of a New Year's resolution that this time you're actually going to exercise every day. To get a better result than last time, you need to impose some very clear rules on yourself that cause you to work differently.

An after-the-fact test suite is a different beast than one written concurrently with the app. It's not worth trying to force one to be the other.

Work from the outside in, keeping most of the system as a black box. Start with testing the highest-level behaviors that the business/users care about.

It's not that the physics can't be modeled, but figuring out the appropriate models is probably harder than it looks. Every sensor and actuator has quirks. Does it matter how much your airframe flexes? Does the turbulence caused by some little protrusion matter enough to model? You aren't going to model every individual molecule, but how much detail is enough to be right?

The elegant thing about using machine learning is that you don't need to build any models at all. And you can develop the ML technique once and then reuse it to train different hardware configurations, instead of incurring the cost of modeling every one.

This kind of criticism misses the point. The web is not designed. It is evolved. Various bits of it were designed at their outset, but it was literally impossible to envision all the implications of those design decisions.

This is not a bad thing, for the simple reason that every long-lived complex system involving many humans must behave this way.

Any attempt to top-down design the perfect, universal, distributed application runtime hits fundamental social problems not unlike those in a centrally planned economy: too much information to integrate, too many stubbornly uncooperative humans with their own divergent goals and opinions.

Systems at this scale are much more like biology than like circuit design.

Yes, they can. Every male between 18 and 25 is still required to register for the draft. The database is sitting there ready to go. The president just has to declare an emergency and convince congress to approve activation of the selective service system.

In practice, will they? Probably not. But weirder things have happened.

> Why would people of say, central Maine want to encourage tech industry to move there.

Because jobs, obviously.

Talk to any politician or civic leader from a place like central Maine and all they can talk about is "good jobs". In the 21st century, good jobs are tech jobs, at least using an expansive definition of "tech" that encompass modern manufacturing (heavily digitized), modern healthcare (heavily digitized), etc.

> They can look to SoCal, Massaschusetts and see that that sort of society is not compatible with their values.

As rural counties continue to sink further into social decay, this excuse is wearing thin. There's practically no measure of social health where they aren't worse than wealthy liberal cities -- divorce, suicide, crime, teen pregnancy, drug abuse, lifespan, welfare dependency.

It's odd to hear a CDN complaining about this limitation when it has already been solved for well over a decade by other leading CDNs.

Akamai can serve your apex domain from their edge servers. They do it by giving different answers for the A record to different users, based on where each user is coming from. All that's required is that you use them as your NS.

There are a lot of people who make hardware random number generators:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_hardware_random_...

People who were displaced out of agriculture didn't necessarily go get factory jobs either. The industrial revolution was massively disruptive socially, and a lot of people didn't come through fine. A lot of them drank themselves to death, much like the opioid crisis today. It was their children who adapted to a new economy.

> So back to the question: What does that person do? How do they feed and house their family?

We need to build the political will to take care of them through guaranteed basic income or equivalent. And even if we do some of them will still drink themselves to death anyway, because they see welfare as shameful.

We have already been through this transition before. Two hundred years ago, 90% of the population worked in agriculture. Now only a few percent do. The rest didn't end up unemployed, we invented entirely new industries to meet demands that didn't even exist before.

But I do agree that the speed of the change this time makes the transition period far more dangerous. I think the biggest hurdle is that culture itself will need to change. People have been taught to judge their own worth based on how hard they work. That makes this transition an identity threat, which is even worse than an economic one.

If we can get through the transition period without a horrible war, I am highly confident we will see an economy that's as much beyond ours as ours is beyond 1817. It's very hard to say it will look like (any more than farmers in 1817 could have predicted how I make my living writing software). But as long as there are unmet needs and desires, there is work to be done. And as long as some things are scarce (attention and social prestige seem fundamentally scarce), there will be economies.

Another way to put it is: if most people can access the output of the robot factories, then they won't be poor. If most people can't access the output of the robot factories, then they constitute a big market and there will be plenty of jobs serving each other.

If you've got the previous generation of macbook pro and are wondering whether you should upgrade, here's an alternate suggestion:

I took my 2014 retina macbook pro to the Apple Store and got a "topcase replacement" (because my keyboard was beat up with overuse and starting to get flaky). That had the side benefit of giving me a completely new external case, so it looks brand new again. And it includes a brand new battery. And I got a new display for free, because there's a recall on that generation of retina displays for delamination issues.

It feels like I just bought a new laptop at one fifth the price. And the specs on it are still competitive with the 2016 models: 16GB ram, 3ghz core i7. Only the very highest 2016 configuration even beats it, and that by only a little.

Am I the only one who saw this headline and thought "Fuck, did Miyazaki die too?"

I am glad to see he is still with us. And nice work.

See also http://hospitalrun.io as an example of a pretty substantial open source effort. They're funded by a nonprofit (https://cure.org) that operates charitable hospitals throughout the developing world.

The app itself is fully offline-capable and pretty neat.

On the contrary, Facebook is the one place where people get pushed out of their filter bubbles regularly.

You know your racist family member you see sharing conspiracy theories on Facebook? That's reality, that's something punching through the filter bubble.

It's precisely because Facebook is full of hometown and family connections that it lets these ideas leak across. It makes Facebook feel pretty bad sometimes, because filter bubbles are very pleasant.

The people who are busy productively shipping products are not the ones who spend the most time and attention on these online debates, so it's easy to form a biased impression.

It's the developer version of the 24 hour news cycle. The many companies who are steadily and happily shipping valuable products on one stack aren't the ones that generate drama and pageviews.

Taking just one of your examples: the Ember ecosystem is large and growing, with many billion dollar businesses standardizing their apps on Ember. But that is too boring compared to "why we switched" posts.

"Everyone" turns out to be way bigger than "people you are likely to hear from on HN".

AMP content shows up before other organic search results. So it's not really optional unless you want to lose all your search-driven traffic.

Thanks, I was not aware of that option.

Looks like it's new in Node 6. Yarn supports Node LTS.

Yeah, that would be much better. But unfortunately the node_modules structure (which yarn is attempting to be fully compatible with) makes that impossible.

The reason is that each package only finds its dependencies relative to its own location. So your second level dependencies cannot vary from project to project unless you do copying.

(Example: AppA and AppB depend on LibX. LibX depends on LibY. Through their deterministic lockfiles, AppA and AppB disagree on which version of LibY to use. There is no way to symlink things together to satisfy that case without copying LibX or altering node's package resolution algorithm.)

Kudos to the Yarn contributors for launching with a public RFC governance model right from the start: https://github.com/yarnpkg/rfcs

Practical, usable, deterministic lockfiles are wonderful and the lack of them has been the single biggest pain point in the npm ecosystem.

There are much more mature and stable examples to point at for community-supported open source. Successful open source generally doesn't happen because of direct dollar contributions, but because companies that depend on the projects decide to employ the project maintainers, or assign their existing employees to fix & improve critical projects.

For example, I know that at least $100k/month is being poured into Ember right now. There is no visible patreon page to point to, because it's all employee salaries. But multiple very-big companies -- in tech, finance, and media -- are using and depending on Ember and are paying their employees and contractors directly to keep making it better.

That estimate is certainly lower than the true number, because I'm only counting the group of people whose time is 100% allocated to Ember. There are a couple orders of magnitude more people who get to allocate some of their paid working time, and that group adds up to quite a lot more money.

> What does cultural homogeneity have anything to do with the way a country treats its homeless?

It's easier to be generous to people who are more like oneself, and who are physically closer to oneself.

Consider all the people in Europe right now who may be perfectly happy to support generous welfare for homeless people who happen to have been born on the same side of their borders, but who are hostile to homeless people who just fled Syria.

Or consider the difficulty of scrapping every national welfare system in Europe and uniting them under a single EU government. I contend that would be very difficult. America is more like the EU than it is like Norway. Norway is much more like Massachusetts, which has very Norway-like quality-of-life metrics.

If "we can't measure" is true, that's extremely strong evidence that the effect is not very large.

Geography alone makes Fukushima less bad for human health.

Beyond the immediate vicinity, most of Fukushima's contamination is going into the Pacific. We have very good data on how diluted that radiation is once it gets to places people actually live, and the answer is "extremely diluted". The prevailing weather all moves to the east, directly out to sea.

Whereas Chernobyl spread its contamination across a populated continent.

If you had to pick a place in the world to release radioactive contamination, you couldn't do much better than the Pacific ocean. Which is exactly why nuclear weapons testing was done in places like Bikini Atoll.

You're just describing one of the most well-established facts about learning: the dominant factor is intrinsic motivation.

Whether you call them hobbies or studies, the fact that you were intrinsically motivated to pour effort into them is why you got so good at them.

After college I spent six years working at a good tech company. In addition to a lot of great learning, it allowed me to build a big financial cushion. I continued living on a graduate-student-like budget with a software engineer salary, so I saved about half my after-tax income.

This generates one year of runway for every year worked. But my savings also grew thanks to some solid investments, so after six years I had ten years of runway.

Over the subsequent four years I spent down about 30% of my savings while working on startups of my own (I made some revenue, I took some small angel investment). Relationships and expertise that I built in the process allowed me to pivot into running a lucrative consultancy.

Before somebody says "you can only do that if you're young and unattached", I will add that I got married before I finished school, and our first child was born the same year I quit my tech industry job.

A psychopathic peer is not the same thing as a psychopathic boss.

If you're doing your job, you know how much money is in the bank and you know what the value proposition of the business is, so the failure modes described in the article don't apply.

I'm not saying a slipper cofounder can't also try to cheat you, but they have a lot less room to maneuver when you're not a subordinate.