grosjona

They shouldn't have advertised 'free forever' on the website. OMG. In that area, people don't even think about the next day.

One of the things I learned is that you should never offer even one tiny ounce of added value which the average user is not capable of perceiving.

Literally the entire idea of profit rests on arbitraging between perception and reality. You don't want to pay for surplus value that is beyond your customer's perceptive capabilities.

I thought I'd found my place when I got into open source distributed pub/sub over WebSockets. I worked in this area for over 10 years but you won't find my project in the first 100 results on Google for those niche 7 keywords.

Surprising considering that almost none of these terms even existed 20 years ago.

I would argue that there is very little correlation between a programmer's perceived skill level and their actual skill level. I know some programmers who used to be considered rock stars because they created a lot of popular libraries and modules at an opportune moment in history but years layer it turns out that their code was full of security vulnerabilities.

Also some programmers are highly optimized for certain things to the point that they're terrible at everything else - I know programmers who are really great when it comes to writing performant code, but they are unwilling to make compromises to make that code more readable.

I wonder what would happen if Let's Encrypt started charging for their service AFTER HTTPS became compulsory. Seems like a great (but evil) business strategy. All these CAs could just start increasing their prices and we'd all be forced to pay.

If you understand human behavior, then you know that this WILL happen eventually.

I think that the argument that you can't trust ISPs is weak.. With HTTPS, you still need to trust certificate authorities. It is somewhat suspicious that Google suddenly decided to create their own Certificate Authority in 2017. Forcing every website to use HTTPS just reduces the pool of entities who are able to track and manipulate us and it gives a false sense of security.

There is no doubt that this change is designed to take power away from some entities and to put it in the hands of a few key players which Google trusts.

Also, the video created by the author is highly deceptive; the author makes it look like he has hacked the website itself; in reality, he has only intercepted the traffic to his own machine so in reality he has only modified his own view of the website; he hasn't actually hacked anything. I'm sure that the author is being intentionally deceptive; he knows exactly who the target audience for that video is and he knows exactly what it looks like.

I was reading about non-disparage clauses and I find it disturbing that these clauses are allowed to override a law as fundamental as free speech. It's disturbing that the US needs to make new laws just to reaffirm the validity of some of its oldest, most fundamental laws.

Doesn't that in itself reduce the credibility of all laws? Maybe the real problem is that the justice system is not doing its job properly.

I think that there are lots of people who could do a better job than Elon Musk but they will never have the opportunity to prove it. The vast majority of people would know that calling the Thai cave diver/rescuer a 'pedo-guy' was a bad decision. Also, announcing that some funding was secured when it actually wasn't - That was a bad decision as well. To suggest that Elon Musk is irreplaceable is ridiculous. People used to say that Steve Jobs was irreplaceable but look at the Apple stock price now.

One positive thing about being born in a third-world country is that if you can manage to train yourself to become a good software developer (which I admit is probably much harder to achieve than in a first-world country), you can find remote work for a foreign (first-world) company and then you can live like a rich person in your own country (buy houses, etc...); this seems relatively attainable if you put your mind to it. When you're from a first-world country, becoming rich is essentially unattainable; you wish you could move to a third-world country to live a better quality of life, but that's not really an option; often, the law of these countries forbid foreigners from owning property; also, you don't know the language or culture so you might end up getting ripped off when doing large transactions.

Maybe these types of people would not have power if everyone knew who they really where.

That said I understand people who are afraid that loss of privacy would be asymmetric but I don't think that would happen. Celebrities and public figures will always have less privacy than everyone else.

I disagree with that statement because they have fundamentally different purposes.

Free speech affects my ability to improve society. Right to privacy affects my ability to cover my own ass.

I think it's fine. If you did nothing wrong then you have nothing to lose by unlocking your phone. So if you don't unlock your phone, it's an admission of guilt.

People are way too paranoid. Nobody cares about what you do with your phone.

Sometimes I feel like the upper classes of society (especially hypocrites who have money and a reputation to protect) are projecting their fears on all other classes. Then like fools, the honest proletariat adopts all these ridiculous fears as their own.

I do think that our current social system rewards the wrong things and drives human evolution in the wrong direction. Traits like lying, cheating and hypocrisy are rewarded evolutionarily because they help people to accumulate more resources and produce more offspring; this works at both the genetic and environmental level. The good news is that predators cannot exist without the prey to sustain them so there should always be more prey than predators. The solution to the problem is decentralization of wealth; otherwise power becomes too concentrated in the hands of predators and it decreases their reliance on prey.

I find modern minimalist architecture depressing; the ceilings are low, tables made of glass, everything tends to be white (made worse by modern LED lights), there are no decorative features. Big modern cities are designed to trick people into paying more money for a lower quality of life.

This is sexist. They should also allow Introverted Males WithOut Rich Parents to form a company for free. It is very difficult for an IMWORPs to start a company and raise funding these days. How many IMWORP CEOs are there these days? Probably close to 0. The worst part is that people make no distinction between IMWORP and EMWRPs even though we're the opposite.

Makes more sense how you explain it, thanks.

Why is it that when the price drops, consumers would want to buy more and producers would necessarily want to produce less?

If I was a company director and the price of the commodity that I produced dropped by a lot, I would work harder to produce more of the commodity to offset the lower profit margins; that way I could earn the same bonus at the end of the year in order to make the payment for the mortgage on my yacht.

Also in the case of cryptocurrencies, it doesn't seem to work the way the graph suggests; when the price goes up, people buy more.

I had the same thought. Also, I'm not even sure that this diagram makes sense overall because supply, demand and price are so tightly interconnected (with feedback loops in both directions) that it doesn't make sense to separate them like this.

>> ... as demand for a product goes up, supply increases, and price goes down

I think it is fine but confusing because it skips over some steps. A longer version might be:

... as demand for a product goes up, the demanded quantity goes up, which causes supply to increase (to meet the higher demanded quantity) which then pulls the price down (due to the increased size of the market and competition).

The net effect of this is decreased price overall due to economies of scale (since the total production volume of the product in the market is now higher).

I would only write unit tests for very complex classes whose logic cannot be simplified into something readable. Personally, I rarely introduce bugs at the unit level, almost 100% of my bugs are related to how classes/functions interact with each other - I find that bugs at the unit level are easy to track down (and often they will be caught by integration tests anyway). I prefer integration tests because they traverse more code paths and don't need to be updated so often. The main complaints I hear about integration tests is that they're slow and brittle but this is only the case if they rely on external microservices (or external data stores) and if test cases aren't properly isolated from each other. I use integration test cases as part of my development flow.

You know exactly what I mean but you can keep pretending not to. It's about signaling.

People who are accepted into Y Combinator know how to keep their eye on the ball; if they move a muscle, it is only to catch the ball. So yeah, I think he was just pretending to be nice.

I've been back and forth between startups and corporations. I think I know what you mean in technical terms; that corporations use more advanced (rigorous) processes and tools and so it feels like you're learning more (it feels more precise/correct) - That said, I think that a lot of the stuff that you learn in big companies are anti-patterns when you consider the big picture; a lot of the time, you learn technical solutions to problems which don't really need to exist to begin with.

For example, one reason why many corporations push really hard on having 100% unit and integration test coverage is because they have such high employee turnover that they can't rely on their engineers to maintain their own code; corporations have to assume that engineers who work on their projects are completely unfamiliar with the code - In this case, automated tests are the only way to maintain the integrity and stability of the code base. The time cost of maintaining all these trivial unit tests is ignored (even though the cost is actually very significant; not to mention that these tests lock down the code and thereby discourage refactoring and experimentation).

Corporate processes are designed around the assumptions that engineers don't care and can't be trusted. This is a very inefficient approach to building software. Personally, I'd rather my project have code with 0% unit test coverage written by a team of involved engineers than code with 100% test coverage written by a team of indifferent engineers.

Whenever a solution offers you simplicity, you're giving up flexibility. That's why I'd prefer to use a more advanced but standardized open source platform like Kubernetes.

Deploying to a Kubernetes cluster is easy. You just have to learn a few key concepts to write your own .yaml definitions. Also, some open source frameworks come with the .yaml definitions already.

The author should just quit their academic role and become a bureaucrat. If you can't beat them, join them. It's one of the paradoxes of our society; those who have the most power to change things are also the least interested in doing so.

>> only trust a not for profit organization

Not a very good heuristic, people always find ways to profit from so-called 'non-profits'.

>> The nicest guy you'd ever meet.

...Or most scheming. Obviously his strategy worked out for him. Truly nice people don't care about making money so they wouldn't apply to Y Combinator to begin with.

The real reason why centralized networks currently cannot be replaced by decentralized alternatives is that being centralized allows a company to do secret, evil-but-lucrative deals under the table without having to reach any sort of social consensus.

Centralized solutions are not impeded by moral factors; they can optimize for user acquisition and profitability instead - They can corrupt the government such that new regulations work to their advantage. They can promise key external decision makers lucrative future contracts or positions in exchange for favors (e.g. onboarding lucrative customers)...

My first programming experience was in game development (Flash games) but I never spent more than a few months on any game... Soon, I stopped working on games altogether and started working on open source developer tools instead. Games are awesome and exciting but they almost always have a limited lifespan. I didn't like the idea of spending so much time building something that had a limited lifespan. My goal is to build a project that will outlive me. That said I have huge respect for game developers because it's such a difficult area, game developers are true artists.

At the same time, it's just a regular rock until you hit it with a hammer. If nobody ever hits those rocks with a hammer then they might as well not exist. I don't think animals, plants, trees, fungus, bacteria or the rocks themselves care if they're smashed to shards. So they're purely for human enjoyment.

>> far more important causes of inequality, including increasing automation of labor, winner-take-all markets, concentration of corporate and market power, minimal antitrust regulation

That's true but I think that winner-take-all markets exist in a large part because of the centralization of capital and how new capital enters the economy.

New money from the Fed flows into the system through massive institutions first; the money trickles down from the government to a few big corporations and then it trickles down to a few big private capital and VC firms and then it trickles down to a select few startups... VC firms collectively run an oligopoly; their main customers are big corporations so they don't have much interest in funding too many competing startups. The corporations which are funding the VCs don't want to acqui-hire too many of the same startups otherwise it gets difficult to justify their M&A strategy to shareholders.