erulabs

You're certainly welcome to miss what coding was, but being rude to engineers who are trying to build businesses is just as ridiculous and entitled as this article is.

If someone loves building technology products that doesn't mean they were "only in it for the money". Beyond just being disparaging for no reason, you're missing the path out of the depression-pit here.

A reliability engineer's nightmare, and a common one, is stepping into a company whose deployment pipeline is built in-house, with dynamic bespoke software. What happens when Jeff leaves to build his own startup and absolutely no one knows how that Node.js script shells out to SSH to call docker on a remote server? I can tell you what happens: everything works fine for awhile and then suddenly doesn't for awhile.

On the other hand, you join a company with K8s and plain-jane YAML and can instantly grok the entire system and fix prod on your first day while the S-team sweats behind you, watching every key stroke. The seconds I have to read some javascript or bash or perl are precious seconds the brand is suffering.

In software engineering, flexibility and abstraction is a benefit: the product must pivot and evolve. In reliability engineering we want dead simple, tried and true. You want to be able to step outside your SF office and say "Someone help me with EKS, my DevOps guy died last night in a car crash!" and have 4 people with wild hair take their weird off-brand not-air-pods out of their head and say "uhhh sure okay".

Does all of this change with AI? Yes. Did it make sense a year ago for business continuity reasons? Yes. Was it ever beautiful where the rubber hit the road? No.

Why aren't tires as complex as wiring harnesses?

If a person is found not guilty, they are not guilty. To argue otherwise is to undermine the core institution of western civilization.

You can make the (somewhat weak) case that Russia was provoked, but the first violent strike was made by Russia and Russia alone.

They're donating money to anyone who isn't anti-tech / anti-business / anti-datacenter / anti-AI

That ~50% of those folks are R being the newsworthy part is the real question. Why should Silicon Valley support people who clearly loath the technology industry just because they're blue? The simplest explanation is the most obvious one, and the one this article explains: Tech leaders are donating money to tech-friendly politicians.

Trade and exchange are natural and human and friendly and cooperative and loving parts of the human experience. To think they're some artificial bolt-on is the derogatory implication.

Selfish doubts aside, congrats to Planetscale on the launch!

I'm actually much less anti-Musk than the average HN commentator but it should be universally agreed here that a small handful of mega-corp websites dominating the majority of content on the web is a bad thing. Nitter was hardly a solution. Federated platforms like Mastodon and Bluesky are "culturally" closed, and "free speech" platforms like X are "technically" closed.

IMO we all need to start vibe coding PHP bulletin boards again. 'RETVRN' etc.

You're both correct, of course!

Note this was not the point of the original comment or my reply. You can in fact reduce spending without addressing defense spending: the majority of the federal budget is entitlements. No presidents (D or R) is even remotely hinting at doing this; it would be political suicide.

1) efficiency means "use software to identify and cut federal programs that could reasonably be taken over by either the State dept, States themselves, or the market"

2) efficiency means "add new software and programs that streamline existing processes"

As usual, we should be doing both in a careful and considered way, and definitely should not be accusing the other side of either fascism or communism. "Efficiency" is not a decision on funding or not funding federal science research, and everyone using that word to mean that is being knowingly disingenuous.

There was a huge amount of bloat in USAID, and I'm sure there will be a huge amount of bloat in NYC, and I'm sure there was a lot of good in both. Unless you're willing to discuss specifics and tradeoffs with a calm head, you're not helping just by virtue of being upset.