lkrubner

"This kind of transaction is exactly what modern capitalism is trying to stamp out."

Since small businesses lack "economies of scale" they need fat gross margins to survive. In the USA, both the public and the political leadership was frightened of the slow buildup of inflation from 1960 to 1973, and then the explosion of inflation, into double digit territory, for much of the period from 1973 to 1982. After that experience we had a long era, a whole generation of leadership, where the public and the leadership felt the fight against inflation had to be one of the most important economic fights that the government engaged in. And the fight against inflation had to involve the fight against gross margins. So we, as a society, went to war against small businesses, because small businesses survive on the kind of margins that were seen as causing inflation. By contrast, allowing the spread of companies such as WalMart, which benefits from "economies of scale" and so can survive on razor-thin gross margins, was seen as helping to stop inflation. Likewise, opening up the economy to nations such as China was seen as an important step to limit inflation. The cost structure in China was such that a company in China could have fat gross margins and yet still underprice a company in the USA that had thin gross margins. Thus importing from China became an important part of the war against inflation.

All of this worked for awhile. The era from 1982 to 2008 was known as The Great Moderation, an era when inflation fell and the business cycle moderated. And the era after 2008 also saw rock bottom inflation -- inflation remained under the Fed's 2% target for several years after 2008.

Under President Trump, the USA began to adapt a new economic policy, and President Biden has continued forward with the Trump policies. The new era has seen increasing tariffs on China and a willingness to rethink some aspects of the open trade policies that we followed for most of 50 years. And since 2000, starting under Trump and then continuing under Biden, we have seen several trillion worth of stimulus spending. This has revived inflation, but it has also allowed many small businesses to raise prices and thus re-attain the kinds of gross margins they need to survive.

In general, a society can have the lowest possible prices, or it can have prices that are high enough to support small businesses, but it cannot have both. Since America is a large, diverse nation we will never have agreement about what our priorities should be, but we should keep in mind, we did some real damage to ourselves during the decades that we eliminated inflation and we are gifting ourselves some real benefits during this current era of inflation.

"Ask yourself, do Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the US, Britain, Ireland, etc, all have the same inability to build or is there maybe some other common cause? ... a broken financial system."

You claim that these countries do not have the same system of building but they do have the same financial system. That is a large claim to make. You should try to offer at least some kind of argument for why you feel the variations in the financial systems are less significant than the variations in their systems of construction.

"according to evolutionary theory"

Promoter genes are also part of evolutionary theory. You seem to think evolutionary theory came to an end in 1882. But a lot has happened since then.

Various illnesses are caused by promoter genes. These are genes that serve no purpose but they specialize in promoting themselves, so they spread through a population even though they serve no evolutionary fitness goal (often they bring illness). A good book on that topic:

Genes in Conflict: The Biology of Selfish Genetic Elements

by Austin Burt and Robert Trivers

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0674027221/

However, referring to the original article of this thread, it is also possible that the same genes that give us depression also give us something positive, such as creativity.

I appreciate this emphasis on simplicity and I recommend it to others. I've seen trends in the other direction which I think are dangerous. I notice that as some companies adopted a microservices approach there was a tendency to allow in more technologies than necessary.

"Premature polyglot programming" is a disease that afflicts certain startups. While any sufficiently big company will be polyglot, a small startup needs to stay focused on a limited tech stack, for as long as possible. After all, each new technology requires someone on staff who has the skill for that technology, and when your startup is small, your talent pool will also be small, and so it becomes common that you only have 1 person on the team who knows how to run some particular technology (Kafka, RabbitMQ, Redshift, DynamoDB, MongoDB, Tornado, etc).

So you end up with a lot of single point of failures, where the "single point of failure" is the single engineer who knows how to run the technology that you've made critical to the company. Be wary. Avoid this if possible.

I notice, especially, as the tech industry developed better tools for managing complex devops situations (Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform) there was a tendency from some engineers to think "Nowadays it is easy to run 10 different technologies, therefore we should run 10 different technologies." Be wary of this.

Janet Carr's emphasis on simplicity is something we should all imitate.

Your Versus example is how I write my Clojure code, with post and pre conditions on most of the functions. And the JVM has a flag that makes it easy to strip that out for production builds.

Thank you, this is great.

I've seen a similar idea implemented with a lot of tech teams. In particular, I've seen companies try to be "flat," meaning that the software developers don't have managers, but instead, the software developers are expected to self-organize.

But all of the normal tasks of a manager still exist: someone has to coordinate the work of multiple teams when those teams have zones of concern that overlap, and someone needs to be able to assign a budget, spend a budget, and take full responsibility from both the good and the bad that arises from spending that budget. If money is spent poorly, someone has to take the blame. If money is invested wisely, someone has to get the credit.

What tends to happen (in "flat" organizations) is that a lot of the coordination work gets pushed down to the individual software engineers, so that they now need to spend more of their time on coordination activities, and they spend less time actually writing code. I've seen "flat" organizations where senior engineers spend as much as 25 hours a week in meetings, because they've taken over all of the coordination work that would have previously been handled by an engineering manager.

Decisions about budget are rarely extended down to individual software engineers, so instead those decisions go up the hierarchy: you've now got the CEO making small-scale spending decisions that should have been passed down to some middle manager. For instance, at Futurestay.com, the CEO was dragged into an argument about what managed hosting service to use for MongoDB, a decision where the difference was maybe $200 a month. Obviously the CEO should not get dragged into spending decisions of that scale (unless you're talking about a 5 person startup that is just getting started).

If it was possible to wave a magic wand and make all management work cease to be necessary, then every company in the world would do that. But instead, many companies will make the managers cease to exist, while the management work is still there. And the overall result tends to be a loss of productivity, either because essential coordination activities are left undone, or because talented specialists are forced to do management work for which they have no training.

Also, if I might comment on a controversial issue, so-called "flat" organizations tend to be especially weak at enforcing discipline. If a worker is lazy, or if a worker does poor work, then they would normally run the risk of being fired, but in a "flat" organization they can often get away with poor performance for a long time, because fewer people are tracking their performance.

But I do think Bayer has a grasp on a thread of at least one important idea: they claim they are doing this to save $2.5 billion. That implies they think the management work can be done by other employees who are paid less money than the managers. And that implies that the managers were overpaid, relative to the value they delivered. While I think Bayer is making a mistake by getting rid of its managers, I also think that managers are probably overpaid relative to the value they deliver.

When I was at ShermansTravel.com we had a very competent project manager who oversaw the tech team. She did a fantastic job of estimating tickets, prioritizing tickets, and keeping engineers focused on the right tickets. But she was paid less than any of the software engineers. And I think that is the right model for most companies, including Bayer. The default assumption, everywhere, is that managers need to be paid more than the people they manage, but why is that? I think there are many cases where the managers should be paid less than the people they manage.

Somewhere between 500 million to 2 billion is probably comfortable. Anywhere in that range offers a reasonable trade-off between wealth versus strain on the environment. More people means more wealth but also more strain on the environment, but anywhere in that range we still have some non-crisis choices available.

Within my lifetime the population of the planet has doubled, from 4 billion to 8 billion. That was a dangerous, sudden surge. If we take a break, and maybe lower the population a little, that seems like a positive thing. "Population doubles in one lifetime" is something I expect from bacteria, not complex mammals that use much of the planet's resources.

I think most people continue to have a primitive association between prosperity and "the Mandate of Heaven." If something is good, it leads to economic growth, and this reflects that the gods are happy about that thing. Of course, I'm exaggerating slightly, but it is almost certain that some people do engage in a certain amount of guilt-by-association during bad times, versus a happier praise-by-association during good times.

See this FRED chart, which shows real median family income in the USA:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N/

Family income hits a peak in 1999 and then is stagnant or declining for the next 15 years, hitting a low point in 2014. It does not recover till 2018.

And this is certainly one of the biggest shocks about the Internet: that it did not lead to prosperity. I'm old enough to remember the optimism and confidence of the late 1990s, we were all certain that the Internet was about to usher in the biggest economic boom in human history.

Exactly the opposite happened: we experienced 19 years of stagnation of family income, the longest stretch in the history of the USA.

So, we've all learned some things, and some of the things we learned have been humbling. Deindustrialization was a bigger deal than we realized, and the cyber economy was a smaller deal than we realized, and competition from China was a bigger deal than we realized.

Between 1870 and 1970 the dramatic advance of science and technology contributed to rapidly rising standards of living. And it was fascinating to speculate about where such trends would go in the future. And that fascination expressed itself in part through science-fiction.

But what kind of science-fiction would appeal today? We've already been saturated by dystopian science-fiction, how much darker should it get? Would people necessarily be interested in a bleak science-fiction that suggests everything is going to get worse and worse forever?

I suspect real-life trends have to resume an upward march of progress before the public is again intrigued by this kind of speculative fiction.

This article, in part, overlaps with what we know about the Flynn Effect:

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

I'm not saying that the larger brain definitely explains the increase in IQ, but that is certainly a possibility worth exploring.

It's been many decades since the USA government attempted to go after a vertical trust. During my lifetime, almost all anti-monopoly action has been against horizontal trusts: companies that gain too much market share for some particular product or service. But there was a time, a long time ago, almost a century ago, when it was common for the government to do this kind of thing, for the benefit of the consumer.

"Neanderthals left Africa 500,000 years later into Europe while Denisovans left at the same time"

For most of the past 25 years there was a theory that Neanderthals and Denisovans were descended from Homo Heidelbergensis, in which case Neanderthals and Denisovans probably evolved in Europe or the Middle East. The oldest known Homo Heidelbergensis is maybe 1 millions years old and most of the early Homo Heidelbergensis were found in Europe, so it is assumed that Homo Heidelbergensis evolved in Europe.

Recently, many have argued that Neanderthals and Denisovans were not descended from Homo Heidelbergensis, but instead from some other species of humans that has not yet been discovered. But it remains likely that Neanderthals and Denisovans evolved outside of Africa.

"Pushing on a string." Generally speaking, investors won't invest if you promise to lose their money. Or if you promise to destroy their money. Or if you promise to steal some of their money. Most of the time, investors hope to make a profit. So you can cut interest rates to zero, but you can't cut it much below zero.

A big surprise of the aftermath of 2008 is that investors will, in fact, tolerate a slightly negative interest rate. Big investors with tens of billions of dollars cannot simply take the money as cash, they need to put it in a bank, so if a bank imposes negative 0.1% then some investors simply consider that a fee for storing the money, so it was, in fact, possible to go slightly below zero. But the problem was, there was no way to go deeply below zero. In the USA in 2009 it was estimated that we would need an interest rate of negative 6% to get back to full employment. And of course, no investor will voluntarily take such a loss on their money. That's why monetary policy has limits. That why financial policy has to be used. However, a coalition of Republicans, along with a handful of key Democrats, such as Larry Summers, moved to block all financial policy, so we suffered several years of high unemployment.

Japan, of course, had it worse than the USA, as they are also facing demographic contraction. In their case, they used monetary policy and some financial policy, but all of it together barely offset the demographic contraction of working age adults that they have faced.

"IMO it'd be sensible to let the markets set the interest rate."

We tried that and it was completely untenable. During the 1700s and 1800s more and more of society switched from the non-monetary economy to the monetary economy, and more people went out and got jobs for money, and at the same time economic growth became entirely dependent on debt, so that by the late 1800s the Western nations were witnessing wild swings, where the economy would grow 15% one year and then crash into a 10% depression the next year, then grow 14% a year for two years and then have another major depression. The instability was leading to revolution in many countries. In the end, the government had to step in and regulate the speed at which new debt could be issued, so as to smooth out the business cycle. Britain did this first. In the USA the idea of a central bank was much contested during the 1800s but finally it was made official in the early 1900s.

Agreed. I remember in 2012 we joked that if you used enough Javascript you could get the Web in 2012 up to the level that VisualBasic 1.0 offered back in 1991. But we were certain that in 10 years, by 2022, we'd up to the level offered by VisualBasic 6.0, which would have been amazing, because VisualBasic 6.0 had been amazing.

I've been stunned by the lack of progress. The major browser companies/projects have largely stopped innovating. The period from 1993 to maybe 2010 or 2015 was very fluid, and HTML and CSS expanded quickly, but after a certain point the attitude seemed to be "We don't need to fix HTML because we can fix it with Javascript." Which is sort of true, but it is clunky. It would be much better to simply add more to HTML. At a minimum, every form element offered by VisualBasic should have eventually been added to HTML. What is the hold up? Why isn't this happening?

It's shocking, but there are still no calendars in HTML. Every calendar has to be custom built with CSS and Javascript. You'd think in the year 2024 we'd have every possible time element added to HTML, with easy customization options. I'm baffled this hasn't happened yet.

What will it take to get the major browser companies/projects to start adding more to HTML?

Thank you again.

Are you aware how difficult this is? Python has a complicated and messy history regarding concurrency, and even as recently as 2012 the most common advice was "avoid threads and use processes." Python was late to come up with any story around concurrency.

Thank you for this. It's a good start. But also, there is so much on Hugging Face, how does anyone evaluate it all? It's not possible to personally test everything, and develop good intuitions about what might be useful in particular situations.

As an analogy, 10 years ago we had a lot of debates on Hacker News about various languages and frameworks: PHP versus Python and Rails versus Django. But where do I go nowadays for similar discussions about all of the tooling that is springing up around the AI and LLM and NLP space?

Possibly off-topic, but does anyone know where I can read up on LLMs? I've posted an "Ask HN" here, in the hopes some people can inform me about how I can keep up on what's new:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39688911

The main thing is the "work from home" movement. At first employers hated the idea of employees working from home. But then employers got used to it, and then they realized that they could outsource most work to a Third World country. Because once work leaves the office, there is no reason for the work to remain in the USA or Europe. It might as well as go some place cheap, like Brazil or India or Vietnam. Mentally, it took employers several years to fully adjust their mindset, but now that they've committed to being "remote first" they are realizing that they can outsource much more work than they ever did in the past.

"It happens during a collapse of the imperial order.....with the French Revolution"

That is also ahistorical. In 1789 the court of King Louis XVI of France was struggling to find the money to pay for a bureaucracy of 500 people, but just 5 years later, in 1794, a revolutionary France had a bureaucracy of 5,000 people. The bureaucracy grew by a factor of 10 in just 5 years, thanks to the Revolution, which seized the property of the Church and sold it or taxed it, thus generating revenue that the King could never have dreamed of. The dramatic expansion of the bureaucracy almost allowed the French to catch up with the fast growing bureaucracy of Britain. Likewise, the Communist Revolution in Russia, after 1917, brought in a complex system of committees vastly more convoluted than anything the Tsar could have ever dreamed of. See here for some speculations on this theme:

https://demodexio.substack.com/p/is-communism-inevitable

Also, this is astonishingly ahistorical:

"Bureaucrats are also almost universally reviled for their lack of accountability and the lack of pride in their work. While there certainly have been great men; leaders who were great bureaucrats (Napoleon), they’re mostly seen as mostly a caste of sniveling eunuchs who flee from taking responsibility or attempting to make things better or taking any risks, even when that is in their job description."

This is very, very inaccurate. Criticism of bureaucrats starts with the 1960s. While you can find an occasional novel or story that critiqued some aspects of bureaucracy (arguably some of Kafka's work, also maybe Bartleby, the Scrivener, though that is mostly seen as a critique of alienation, rather than bureaucracy per se) the rise of the "bureaucracy sucks" as a genre can be dated to the 1960s.

Others often make this point, but you can really judge the cultural transition by the careers of leading business commentators, such as Peter Drucker. In 1946 he published his study of General Motors, the book Concept of the Corporation. In it, he examined the large bureaucracy at General Motors and celebrated it as the pinnacle of human civilization, the absolute peak of what the last 6,000 years of civilization had all been building up to.

Drucker was not alone. In 1958 John Kenneth Galbraith published "The Affluent Society." A part of the book emphasizes the idea that "If we want to accomplish big things then we need big organizations." Once again, the book implies that large bureaucracies represent our success as a civilization, and those bureaucracies are what enabled that success.

Starting in the 1960s, there is a tremendous cultural backlash against bureaucracy. We are still living with that backlash today. It is noteworthy that the cultural backlash has not had a real world result nearly as significant as the cultural result: that is, bureaucracies have continued to grow, even as they have faced relentless criticism for 60 years now.

In my own consulting work, I've seen multiple promising startups fail because the founders were afraid of "becoming bureaucratic." I've seen other companies survive but never live up to their full potential because the CEO never set out to build a beautiful bureaucracy. My own sense is that the backlash against bureaucracy must come to an end at some point soon, because too much potential is being wasted by the lack of bureaucracy. At some point, business leaders must again commit themselves to building big, ambitious, beautiful bureaucracies, so they can capture the full potential of the organizations they are running.

First they suggest that most computer programmers are bureaucrats:

> Most “software engineers” dealing in protocols, technical debt, the JVM, operations …. are also bureaucrats.

Then they complain that Google is probably hiring bureaucrats, instead of real technical people:

> Do you think the extra 100,000 people Google hired over the last 5 years are actual engineers, or any kind of innovator? I’m willing to bet they’re all bureaucrats, and any of them would say “I work at a tech company doing tech things” and be indignant at being described as what they are: bureaucrats.

Well, if you re-define every job as "bureaucrat" then you automatically get the result that everyone you hire is a bureaucrat. The result is the consequence of how you've defined everything.

"in which case, what's the point?"

I cannot imagine what system of ethics you are operating from that you would have to ask this question. The point, always, is to provide the best possible life to the greatest number of people, without regard to where those people come from. My goal in life is to maximize human happiness, I do not care what nation a person is from. Unless I'm misreading your words, or you chose your words clumsily, you seem to want a system that works for some set of people but not another set of people. But I'm curious, one what basis would you chose one set of people, and then why would you care about them at all, rather than care about some other group? If you're not going to care about the happiness of all people, then it seems to me you should be consistent and not care about anyone's happiness. But if you honestly care about one group, but not some other group, I'm curious on what basis you chose the group that you care about? And do you really care about them?

"You're only playing a game of managed extinction in cooperation with your country's new settlers"

I think you meant to write "One generation has apparently found it is possible to maximize their happiness without having children, and now gratefully receives help from new arrivals so as to take care of them during old age, as they have no children to care for them."

Up till now there has been substantial pushback against the idea that homo heidelbergensis built small villages in France 400,000 years ago: small huts surrounding a giant long, thin building, 15 meters long but less than 3 meters wide. Up till now that find has been earliest finding of a possible gathering of human buildings, but many archeologists have had difficulty believing it and have criticized every aspect of the evidence. But now with this new find, the claims about the heidelbergensis village also becomes more believable:

https://books.google.com/books?id=LXmY3Q8qBngC&pg=PT74&lpg=P...

I think you mean STRs not AirBnB? STRs are still growing, but AirBnB is facing much more competition from VRBO and Booking.com and Google Travel then it has previously faced. When I consulted at https://futurestay.com I could see the income shifting from AirBnB to Booking.com.

Careful, my child, for those who speak of these things are forced to leave their tribes and wander forever in the deserts and the wastelands.

Painting all experts with such a broad brush leads to what is an epistemic waste land in which you are cut off from everyone else's knowledge, since you can dismiss any belief you dislike by simply declaring it expert knowledge.