lordlic

That sentiment makes me pretty uncomfortable given the proximity of this article's topic to wider ongoing events. Like we should all pour glasses of single malt and sit around a table in our smoking jackets having a languorous discussion. These issues are too important, and the horror and shock and outrage are too fresh, to react to nauseating views by politely sipping your whisky instead of throwing it in their face.

> Go had first class tooling

Eh, I would describe go's tooling as "minimalist" or, less charitably, as "barely adequate." Pre-modules the global GOPATH approach was hacky and ugly, and post-modules the go command is a mess of contradictions straining against the backwards compatibility guarantee. And editor integration back in the day wasn't much more than running go fmt and go build.

The reason that RDMSes aren't dead isn't that they have too much momentum to be displaced by NoSQL. The reason they're not dead is that they're a good data model for lots of applications, and their consistency semantics and tooling provide real boosts to developer productivity.

I read that the same way until I realized that it would be fair to say that even I'm "intimidated" by C++ despite having quite a bit of experience with it. It's not a matter of cleverness or experience. You can know something inside and out, and still admit that it's out of control and worry about the costs of its complexity.

How much does this actually cost? I don't see pricing anywhere on the site. I assume that info comes with the trial email but TBH I don't want to waste my time with the trial if it's going to be out of my price range.

> We need to explain that the information about you can be passed among 25 different ad tech companies or it can be passed among 25 parts of Google. Which one of those is better or safer? That’s hard to know.

Really? Neither option is great but if you absolutely have to choose the lesser of two evils it seems obvious that Google is going to be a better steward of your data than 25 random ad companies. At least Google isn't going to sell your data. Those 25 other ad companies are going to turn into 2500 real fast.

The largest system in the human brain is the one responsible for vision. There's a scary amount of computational power involved in a human completing simple-seeming visual tasks, and that's not always easy to reproduce with computer models.

Well, the cultural chauvinists elsewhere in this discussion are certainly in for a rude awakening but I don't know how much pain American programmers will feel. We have a lot of really first-rate engineers and product people, and we won't stop making our own breakthroughs just because new countries are emerging in the global tech scene. And, in the medium term at least, we have the inertia of several trillion dollars worth of tech behemoths having strong ties to the US. Also, this isn't a zero-sum game; American tech companies generally don't have great penetration in markets like China and India with home-grown competitors, and those competitors generally don't have notable penetration outside of their home markets. There's plenty of growth to be realized without anyone being in a world of hurt.

The Gini coefficient would be a much better proxy for economic inequality/oppression than GDP per capita:

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

I guess it's worth clarifying what exactly you're talking about. If you want to share images and text with a small group of people, okay, that might be useful in some cases. But that's not the use case that Facebook users have in mind - you're setting the bar almost comically low and the impact on the actual landscape of the web will be exactly zero.

If you mean something that can make a splash in the social media space to address the "user agents on Facebook" problem, color me skeptical about the prospect of competing on useful features with the Facebook behemoth while fighting the complexity up and down the stack of making everything decentralized and trying to make it friction-free for casual users to run, with no funding from ads, and starting out at square one on network effects. Yes, Mastodon is a possible counter to this line of argument, but Twitter is so stagnant and their product is so simple that I feel like it's almost a unique case. And for most people the Facebook use case includes being able to find all their real-life contacts; by that measure even Mastodon would fail.

I'm sympathetic to Chinese-style censorship, at least in theory before it degenerates into the state trying to suppress anything it considers embarrassing to itself. "The government thinks it knows what’s best for people" because it does know better than most people. Facebook, as the lowest common denominator for American public discourse, is a cesspool of misinformation, pseudoscience, hate, deceptive advertising, and people losing their skin in MLM scams. In India, fake stories on WhatsApp have whipped up violent mobs into a frenzy of xenophobia, resulting in tragic murders of innocent migrants. We should be more aware of the enormous costs associated with a lassie-faire attitude toward speech, even if we decide it's worth the cost. "A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it."

All that being said, the practical consequences of YouTube moderation are not even remotely the same as those of the Chinese censorship that everyone criticizes. The worst thing that can happen to you on YouTube is that you can't comment or upload videos anymore. YouTube is not sending people to prison or calling up your employer to tell them you're a dangerous agitator.

> I don’t want youtube to be in charge of deciding what is credible or not.

YouTube has to make these decisions because there's no one else willing or able to do the job. If the government established a Department of Social Media to do the same work, HN would be losing its mind over government censorship. And if YouTube does nothing at all, it ends up hosting terrorist recruiting videos and instructional videos on how much bleach to drink to kill coronavirus.

You might be uncomfortable with the role of big tech companies in moderating content but, until you can provide an alternative, your discomfort does not override the imperative to save human lives.

Setting aside all of the discussion about Microsoft's perennial new UI frameworks... does anyone else really dislike the Fluent design language? It feels weird and mobile-optimized and spaced-out and infested with odd special cases, and it seems like every classic-style Windows component they replace with the new style of UI gets simultaneously dumbed-down and harder to use. When Google released Material Design I didn't like that either, but it's grown on me. Fluent Design still hasn't clicked with me.

> Many of us are sick of ...

Not many enough to matter.

> who cares BeCaUsE mAh BaLaNcE sHeEtS

It is an actual concrete fact that in many (most?) cases the total cost of developing and owning an Electron-powered app is going to be lower than a real native desktop application given that you can reuse the same code/people/skills you already employ on your website and mobile app. Building the same UI n times is crazy.

Are you just complaining about that fact or actually suggesting that we ignore it and stand up against "resource inflation" as a matter of principle? I can't imagine a startup CEO going before their board with a slide deck and saying "We're making progress on a unified app experience across web and mobile that should reduce our development costs. We were going to do the same thing for desktop too, but then we realized that Engineering Excellence™ meant we had to hire a whole new team of developers. No, the app isn't performance constrained, why do you ask? Sure, everyone else is using Electron but everyone else is wrong."

I'm all for expanding Medicare and Social Security, but to be fair the government is perfectly able to continue funding these things on a temporary basis without payroll tax receipts. Presumably a bill to freeze FICA taxes would also contain a provision for funding the expected shortfall with a transfer from the general fund or new federal debt issuance.

The payroll tax holiday idea is bonkers. The people most in need of help here are hourly or gig workers who are told to stay home from work or who get sick and can't work. Paying less taxes on nonexistent wages doesn't help. It seems like the administration is more interested in propping up the markets than actually addressing the health crisis and its human costs.

Also, eliminating copays on coronavirus treatment is nice, but it's hard not to notice the glaring omission of anything to help the 9% of Americans who are uninsured.

US national defense hasn't really been about, you know, defense in a long time. Politically-motivated proxy wars don't count.

The real solution, at least in metro areas, is using public transport instead of driving. And that is another reason not to buy a Tesla, because of the Musk empire's ongoing crusade against public transportation. Dollars spent on Teslas are dollars available for advocating/subsidizing Loop-type and Boring Company projects that drain the public coffers for transportation infrastructure. I'm sure different people have different opinions on ethically how the anti-public-transport conflict of interest stacks up against the good done by making electric vehicles sexy, but for me they approximately cancel out and there's little virtue in buying a Tesla instead of a very efficient ICE or hybrid.

I'm not just willing to accept some small tax increase, I'm willing to accept (and actively advocating/voting for) radical socialist transformation of our economy to a point that would be far beyond anything that would be in my own interest. I vehemently disagree that I'm not "really" on the same side as the barista because our interests don't align. There are some of us out there who will fight for what's right even if it's against our own selfish interests. Obviously we don't share the same struggles as, say, the struggling barista on a day-to-day basis so sometimes the appropriate urgency isn't there but in the end we are 100% on the same side.

> it is the bitter barista, ready to enforce that knocking down a peg, who ends of in control

This is not really the goal in my experience moving in leftist circles. There's a lot of talk about bringing the wealthy down to the same level as everyone else to eliminate various forms of inequality, but not much talk about inverting the system so that the formerly rich are now under the heel of the formerly poor. The ones "in control" would be everyone, including the former elites.

By analogy... I'm a well-off technocrat and I think the big tech monopolies should be broken up and taxed more (and I think I should be taxed more also). That doesn't make me a hypocrite, it makes my position stronger because it eliminates resentment toward successful tech elites as a possible motive.

I think it speaks well of this guy that he's not some bitter barista ranting about elites - he's talking about knocking his own class down a peg.

Those judgments appear organically through mechanisms as simple as how much coverage a topic gets. The worst case is that a bunch of circa 1900 Europeans write this article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_history_of_indigeno... and the impact of colonialism is mentioned in half a footnote rather than taking up the bulk of the article. If systemic bias were completely unchecked, entire articles might not exist.

You might also be interested in reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Wikipedia#Self-censors...

> You're making the bold assumption that the robots will actually work, instead of wasting ammunition on all the wrong targets, including friendlies

I could easily imagine the US military deploying autonomous combat bots to some middle-eastern country unaccompanied by human troops. They would care approximately zero about wasted ammo, and we already know from our drone strike policy what the military thinks about accidentally killing non-combatants. As long as there are no Americans around to get killed by rogue bots, it doesn't really matter how much collateral damage they cause, within reason.

I don't see the point of linking that either, but your "reality is neutral" argument is severely flawed. Wikipedia doesn't cover merely technical topics. Obviously there's not going to be a problem with systemic bias in an article on merge sort, but you don't think there's a potential issue with mainly wealthier, whiter, younger people writing articles on topics, for example, related to the history of colonialism? Think about how drastically perspectives on figures like Christopher Columbus have changed over just the last generation from bringing more diverse viewpoints into the conversation. Hell, we demonstrably see this today on the Japanese language Wikipedia with topics like the Nanking Massacre.

Ads allow whomever has the deepest pockets to dominate the public's attention. Incumbents will have more money to spend, chilling the influence of new competitors. Most of the "disruptor" success stories that come to mind started with some variation of "we didn't spend anything on advertising, relying on word of mouth."

> Neighbors previously complained about the replacement of historic streetlight poles for Van Ness BRT. Replacement poles made to look like the originals ballooned the project cost by $6.5 million, according to city documents

This is a perfect microcosm of San Francisco governance. A small number of highly-motivated landowners unashamedly hijacking city policy for their own interests. How do we stand up to this?

What a depressing attitude. Just because something is common doesn't mean it's acceptable.

Compared with Russell's day, we have those magic replicators. Agricultural technology today is such that one farmer can feed thousands of people. We're off in an asymptote where we gets closer and closer to zero cost for basic needs, but the workweek never gets shorter. Clearly it would be ridiculous if one single farmer were able to support the needs of all of humanity but we still had to work the same as when each pre-industrial farmer only supported about 4 people. So at what point do we start seeing the benefits of this "replicator" (in the limit) technology?

> The world has tremendous labor to be done.

Is that so? There's already enough housing for everyone, with more empty houses than homeless people. Hunter-gatherer societies worked half or less as much as we do today, and they didn't have the benefit of industrialization. Production gets more and more efficient, but the workweek never gets shorter. Is this reasonable?

> Billions of people yearn to live the kind of comfortable life Russell lived. That won’t come to pass through idleness.

Idleness is the kind of comfortable life Russell lived. The alternative of working your fingers to the bone for your employer is a tragic waste of human potential.

"Kids these days with their wokeness. Back in my day we didn't care about things like human rights, wealth inequality, the plights of underrepresented groups, or destroying the planet. All these damned messy ethics are interfering with business!"

My eyebrows are practically in orbit. If you believe that, you're being fooled. There is plenty of money to give employees these kinds of benefits, especially in a high-margin business like software. We don't see it very often because VC funding invariably comes with certain expectations about fiscal discipline when it comes to rewarding the rank and file, and because owners of successful bootstrapped startups prioritize taking profits over investing back into their people. But the money is there.