thewarrior

Having rigorous code reviews that aim to raise the bar on readability is the best way imo.

If a few people agree that something is readable then the odds are much better that code is maintainable.

Isn’t China somewhat of an example of what the author suggests ?

It is a market economy with a very strong central regulator.

How can we be in post scarcity if millions of people are in poverty?

I can try to help out with my haphazard guide to social skills that I’ve picked up from my experiences. This is tailored to the biases most nerds have towards social interactions.

1. Stop trying to make sense of everything people do in social situations using logic. There is a deeper logic to most things people do however you are much better off imitating what others do at first. And then observing and taking feedback. Social situations unfold too quickly to use logic and thought. Practice the rest consciously till they become habit. Start with a few at a time.

2. Pay attention to how you dress, how you speak. Observe other popular people around you and try to imitate their mannerisms and sense of style.

3. Break the above rule sometimes so you stand out and people remember you for something. Steve Jobs understood this very well. Cultivate a sense of style and keep putting it out.

4. Whenever you are interacting with another person stop thinking about yourself too much. You should be absorbing everything you can about the other person. Their goals, their hopes, their dreams, their fears. Obviously you do it step by step and don’t escalate to these directly.

5. Invite people you want to get closer to for meals, dinners or just to hang out. Find common interests and hobbies to establish rapport. Have a social calendar going to regularly have interactions with the key people in your life.

6. Understand how status and power run most of our world. Understand the pressures that managers and people in power face so you can anticipate what they will do. You will survive even if you are not very effective if you don’t create headaches for those in charge

7. Learn to stand your ground without being confrontational and cleverly diffusing conflict using poise and language.

8. Stay calm and collected. Never be too desperate.

9. Visibility is the name of the game. Nobody can care about you if they don’t know you exist.

10. Never underestimate the power of an emotional appeal.

11. Never under estimate peoples deep felt need to feel validated by and connected to other people. The more genuine it feels the better.

12. Try not to be too in your face or public about your ambitions. Try to avoid open competition or making enemies wherever possible.

13. Everything in the world is one irrational monkey deciding to enter into an exchange with another irrational monkey.

14. The irrationality comes from the lower brain. It’s well understood that people have very poor defenses against this generally. Putting a pretty woman on a bill board is dumb but it works. I know that Axe Body spray will not result in women swarming all over me but it’s the only mens spray brand that I can even remember. The lower brain cares about tasty food, beautiful scenery, safety and warmth, status and validation, sex, power etc.

15. Meditate to get your lower brain under control. Understand how others lower brains can lead them astray and short circuit most rational calculations. Politicians understand this very well.

Why does gold have a non zero floor price and not Bitcoin ? Is it merely because Gold has industrial uses ? That floor would be far lower than Golds current price.

If we run out of energy aren’t there bigger things to worry about ?

This is something I’m stumped myself about. HN etc says crypto has no value and I wonder about other things in conventional finance that are of speculative value :

Gold - Sure it’s a good store of value as a metal but so is bitcoin. If Gold can be valuable because lots of people value it as a store of value so can Bitcoin. In fact bitcoin is arguably better than Gold.

The total wealth of the world is 1000 trillion. Bitcoin is easily worth 0.1 - 0.5 % of that because of its permissionless advantage. Bitcoin has a non zero floor price. I think anyone would agree with this.

This is unlike say NFTs which are not likely worth anything with a potential floor of 0.

Loss making stocks like Snapchat - A company that said in its IPO filing that we may never be profitable and is still struggling with profitability is worth 100B.

If conventional finance is 50 % a Casino based on social factors why can’t there be one more ? Are the purveyors of the current system afraid that they’ll lose their cut ?

What is the right mental model here ?

Why ? Valuations are generally high these days and Big tech has the cash. If there’s a crash all valuations go down and they’re even more acquirable.

The acquisition doesn’t have to happen at these valuations for the investors to make money. See - Liquidation preferences

It’s not easy because of all the bureaucracies and inefficiencies at large companies. Most employees at AWS are probably barely inspired compared to the people working at Vercel who can also ship much faster. Nothing new here just what PG has been saying for years.

These companies can be disruptive innovators by focusing on Niches that the big companies won’t care about because they’re tiny. For eg - managed react applications. IIRC Firebase was acquired by google. But the plan is to go after all of AWS slowly from a different direction. Cloud flare is doing the same thing and their stock is going gangbusters.

Cloud services are one of the most profitable businesses to ever exist. There’s so much lock in and network effects. Especially with managed solutions like these.

These companies can get big enough to be acquired by AWS , Azure at some point. This is now the new Heroku.

The next big startup could be an application on Vercel maintained by 2 people instead of a tangle of micro services and AWS configurations maintained by 20.

This seems like a really neat web framework but I wonder if tangling some of the model and binding logic with react components might make it more confusing to extend the web app to say a native mobile client.

The way I synthesize it myself is that at the lower levels of society the burn out is because of harsh discipline and poverty.

However people at the upper echelons of society who you would expect to be all happy and cheerful are also burning out because of what’s described in the book.

This is one reason why US tech will always win. Any tech company in EU or Asia that becomes big enough will be acquired by the heavily capitalized US companies or their employees will be hired away.

Is it okay for all countries in the world to do this to American companies ?

Cost is irrelevant if you can’t store the energy generated. Nuclear is predictable and carbon free. Look at France.

Imagine a programming language where changing a few instructions gives you anything from a bacteria to an elephant to a vaccine.

This is a form of programming that makes what we currently do look like bashing rocks together.

Are there any books that teach differentiable programming ?

Maybe that’s what it’s doing under the hood.

Google - YouTube

Is it really true that wanting to be successful is just western culture?

Although the way that people are evaluated in jobs is also open ended. So it cuts from both sides.

Very interesting. But hasn’t Elon been promising even older Tesla owners a pure software upgrade to “Full Self Driving”

This comment resonates with me but I’ve read on HN from people who’ve done physical labor that an office job is still much more preferable.

Also what you said applies to any office job and not just programming.

Physical labor maybe something that we enjoy but say running a farm requires insane amounts of it day in day out.

I think this comment touches on something very deep. Spending time in online spaces seems to be profoundly damaging to our mental health.

What exactly is it about online spaces that does this ? It’s little wonder that many are burning out after a year of being perpetually online.

However I would also like to add that the amount of uncertainty in the world and in our jobs has gone up. You never really know if you’re doing “enough”. And the internet exacerbates it.

If object detection is crappy then how do they plan to make Tesla’s drive themselves?

I find it interesting that Instagram promoting celebrity culture has provoked such a backlash but the Chinese governments attempts to tackle the same on their streaming platforms is seen as misguided.

They are totally aware and believe that they are the Übermensch while funding and working on the Clubhouse app and sneering at all the people in broken institutions delivering things like healthcare or education.

"Imagine you're an expert in only one thing and it's computer programming. Books are a waste of time except as quick references; you can achieve full expertise just by teaching yourself through internet searches, discussion forums, and maybe the occasional blog post if you're really keen. When you have to solve a problem, you strip away as much of the context as possible, until you can isolate it down to a single phrase of logic. As soon as you solve that one isolated microproblem, the results blow up exponentially to satisfy all kinds of needs and desires you haven't even thought of.

Now imagine that even though you're doing journeyman skilled labor like a plumber or electrician (except it doesn't even require professional certification), you earn a salary well into the six figures - or even equity that grows to the millions or billions - in a Wall Street-like testosterone bubble where you and your colleagues unabashedly believe you're the smartest people in the room, the beneficiaries of a pure meritocracy, and you're Changing The World as much as you can when unimpeded by the hordes of fuzzies who just don't know how to think.

Of course you come to believe that anyone who claims to be a credentialed expert, and says this or that issue is actually much more complicated and contextual than you appreciate, is probably just a big faker whose whole field of study could be solved elegantly if a smart person like you just spent some hobby time stripping away the context to isolate that one neat trick of logic."

Not sure who wrote this originally found it here - https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/i7a24j/tech_brai...

Also Americans don’t realize the scale of transformation that is going on in places like India and China. As far as making consumer web apps goes India is increasingly the place where unicorns emerge every week and some companies operate at very large scales. Thanks to the internet knowledge is spreading quickly and remote work is a booster.

The gap in terms of knowledge and networks is closing with places abroad.

The other day there was a thread about how many HNers enjoyed using TikTok. They are progressing quickly and many seem unwilling to acknowledge it.