mrfredward

Ask Softbank, as I suspect they have found it.

As someone who enjoys a lot of Michael Lewis's books, I completely agree. The arguments and explanations throughout make no sense, because it's a lot motivated reasoning trying to justify a false narrative.

Setting things up in AWS is time consuming, but not as time consuming as debugging.The AWS documentation is huge and seems thorough, and yet never actually helps me solve any problems. There is always some obscure bit of configuration not covered in the tutorials and buried too deep in the docs to find that is needed to get anything past a hello world to work. Meanwhile, the errors in the log are too vague to make the solution googleable, and it takes days to figure out even the simplest things.

I've found the only way to make anything work in AWS is to search for hours and hours looking for the Stack Overflow question that tells you what the docs left out. And yet I stick with AWS because last time I tried Azure everything was broken. It'll be nice when this stuff gets a little more polished.

Furthermore, it will give inferior material properties and potentially have more quality/repeatability issues.

They must believe that more complex designs can more than make up for the disadvantages of 3d printing. That is hard to fathom for a thin walled pressure vessel like a rocket body, but I'm sure they know things that I don't.

Okay, but producing fuel requires a lot of energy, so how are you going to power that? With a different engine onboard your jet?

The point of this device is to take energy available on the ground and store it for use in the air, and use a storage method with a tremendous amount of energy per unit weight (hydrocarbons).

Gaslighting usually involves lying about past interactions, not surrounding a person with persuasive material.

I'd agree HN is an example of demetrification. I would add a caveat though: HN's opaque rules about rankings, flagging, when to silently ignore votes, etc would drive me crazy if I didn't trust that the people running it genuinely want a good community for hackers. Give Facebook the same power, and I'd assume such powers would be used for nefarious purposes, and I'd find myself (rightly or wrongly) calling half the posts in my feed part of some sort of conspiracy.

I think you missed a zero. About $80 per citizen. Still a negligible part of premiums though.

The problem with health insurers isn't their profits (though that's a popular political talking point), but rather it is the part they've played in creating/enabling all the inefficiency in the current bureaucracy.

Funny enough, the founders who are cargo-culting are finding monetary success (Neumann will still be rich when the dust settles, although I'm not suggesting he got all that money out of WeWork by accident). It's the investors who will find out that just making it look like you are investing in a world-changing tech company isn't enough to make it rain.

Resizing the window is my go to method for trying to figure out how many bytes per vertex there are in the meshes of old video games. I agree that human pattern recognition is impressive.

Honestly, I've seen highly technical managers make this mistake worse than the non-technical ones. Non-technical people usually ask sincere questions before shoving an unrealistic deadline in your face. Technical managers may have already told someone in the C-suite "ohh yeah, that's easy" before talking to the guy who has to do the work.

I've had ex-programmer managers say "I just want you to add this graph to the app. I could do it in 20 lines of python." In reality, the request is more like "Add in this plot which is the result of a long running calculation. The calculation has to run in a background thread so the app is still responsive, even though the whole program has been architected with a single-threaded design. It needs some mechanism in the UI to indicate it is making progress. We'll also want a way to cancel the task. Half the datasets are using a different sign convention, so you'll need to automatically handle that. Actually, the data is polluted with garbage, you'll need to spend an unknown amount of time debugging a legacy system to figure out where the bad inputs are coming from in order to understand what can be done to filter that out...so we can have this plot by end of day, right?"

Apologies for ranting about my "internal software" days.

While the government will almost certainly never pay down it's debt completely, looking at the effort needed to pay off the debt is a useful way to ground the discussion of debt when future interest rates are unknown.

In the last 40 years, the 30 year treasury bond has gone for rates of less than 2% and more than 14%. The interest as a percent of tax revenue metric would have predicted the death of America in the 1980s, while oppositely making it look like things will be forever rosy today. Neither of those perspectives accurately characterizes the debt burden.

>you can host more than one site or database per server

I'm fully aware of this but never do it because I'm pretty much incompetent as a sysadmin. I don't want to be in a position where I can break an existing project while trying to configure something new I don't understand yet. Nor do I want to run security updates for a blog I setup 5 years ago.

I'm not 100% thrilled with going serverless because it makes debugging awful, but it has saved me money and it makes most things easier. If I went back to shared hosting, I'd just be paying for the privilege of getting to shoot myself in the foot.

The comparison of Gates to a mobster is unfair. We're comparing bundling a shitty internet browser with Windows to committing murder here.

Gates didn't take a life in building his fortune, but now he is saving lives. He is a net positive.

I like the article, but I think a missing piece of this is that when a company becomes a big enough conglomerate, parts can be in day 2 while other parts are at day 1. Amazon isn't raising money from investors anymore, it's taking profits on parts of the business and using it to expand in other places, and Bezos himself is famous for saying a profit margin is an opportunity for disruption.

That being said, in many ways the point of business is to end up a day 2 company. VCs invest so they can cash out in the IPO, IPO investors buy so they can sell to other investors, those investors sell to others, and so on. It sounds like the last guy is left holding the bag, but in fact, the people at the end can make a fortune, even as the company is fading away, if the company is distributing profits through dividends and buybacks. If a company dies before it gets to that end phase though, the whole thing will have just been a wealth transfer from later investors to the early ones.

I'm no accountant, but I think the bulk of the issues is that profits never last in the auto industry. GM trades at a price to earnings of 1/4 of what the market as a whole gets, because investors expect earnings to be negative as soon as a recession hits. GM has cash on hand of 3X its current profits to weather this storm.

Not sure how others feel, but personally, I'd be more interested in a tab that shows everything except politics rather than a politics tab.

True, but the lack of a downvote button on posts means we'll never know how many agree. This community is far bigger than 110, so the vast majority (as with every post) abstained from the vote, and we'll never know their reasoning.

No one's brain is "broken" here. You're thinking on the individual level, the parent to your comment is looking at it from a societal level.

Once someone can read, write, do arithmetic, it's more specialized skills that are needed. There are very few jobs where four years of studying history or political science is necessary. In most cases, a few months of training could do far more than four more years of general education.

The value of a degree for most jobs is it shows an ability to learn. Ultimately, having people spend six figures to send this signal is making society worse off. Employers are looking for the qualities that make someone a good student far more than they are looking for experience criticizing ancient works of literature or solving systems of equations.

I agree with you on the turning into the reddit part, but I have to say that the way I read the guidelines, this article fits the description for off-topic more so than it meets the description for on-topic.

>The power imbalance in feudalism and the gig economy is clear.

I'd say capitalism, communism, socialism, mercantilism, and every economic system in history, when done at scale, usually end up with some people having far more power than others. If a power imbalance is as deep as the comparison goes, school is feudalism, dating with a significant age gap is feudalism, traffic stops are feudalism...everything is feudalism.

With so many people wanting to bet against it though, those put options would end up mighty expensive.

It's very situation dependent. I try to advocate for the old code when I can, but I've had similar experiences. The most recent example was a multithreaded app started by a person who understood neither mutexes nor pure functions. Doing a ctrl+f for "sleep" for quickly showed that code was doomed to always be breaking in inexplicable ways. Give code the benefit of the doubt as much as possible, but there is a point where old code deserves more suspicion than respect.

The Bloomberg article mixed Bury's words and the author's words quite a bit, and I'm beginning to wonder if the whole reason we're having this discussion is because some important nuance was lost.

It's hard to see why Mom and Pop buy and hold index investors should care about the liquidity risk Bury talks about...market cap weighted funds will be fine in the long run because the ratio of each underlying stock to a fund share will be constant through the temporary price fluctuations...so no money is lost if the price crashes and then comes back to the same sport shortly after.

Perhaps there are other market participants who are leveraged and would find themselves insolvent if indexes cause a liquidity problem? I just don't see how the fund investors themselves would be hurt if underlying stock prices went out of whack for an afternoon.

This isn't any sort of wild speculation though. It is a hard mathematical fact that pension funds will be more sensitive to a stock market decline now than they were previously. The math says we'd need a small miracle to NOT have to deal with this problem, although it probably won't be as painful as the emotive language in the title makes it sound.

In the past, responsibly run pension funds projected a conservative rate of return to account for these risks.

The problem isn't the financial model of pensions, but the politics of it. Lowering the expected rate of return of a pension fund causes a huge increase in the funding requirements that are calculated, and a suddenly appearing budget problem such as this is bad news for people's political careers.

The same problem exists in the private sector. Changing the model to project a lower rate of return hurts profit numbers in the near term and makes a huge liability appear on the balance sheet, so executives will kick the can down the road as much as they can. The problem is only worse with public sector pensions because of regulatory differences.

>Quick...tells his students he’s always available – except between 10pm and 6am. It’s important to put limits on when you’re reachable, he says.

Really...this is their example of healthy boundary setting? A professor who says he's available the entire time he's awake, but won't answer emails when he's supposed to be sleeping.

The political machine had an interest in smearing her. Democrats could never let her be seen as a victim, because if she's a victim Bill Clinton is a predator. Meanwhile, some of the right wing media-started mocking her as not what you'd expect the leader of the free world to get with, if for no better reason than it makes for better TV than lecturing about family values.

With business software it's more complex...it isn't just a download link being sold...it's support: help choosing the right products, getting things set up, having someone to call when things go wrong, continued updates, possible customization, etc. The actual "fair price" depends quite a bit on what the buying company looks like.

Office pools buying lottery tickets can beat the stock market...once in a while.

If you aren't doing anything economically useful...don't expect returns greater than inflation in the really long run.