tomcam

Seems to be strongly influenced by HyperTalk... or is it the other way around?

Total agreement here. His posts indicate a life well lived.

You make it sound like a bad thing

Gotta be honest… the phrase “ticks that can barely be seen” did nothing to improve my outlook on life

Just read this and laughed loud enough to wake up the chicken in my office. Thanks!

OK he's living the life

They're all plugged with concrete

Not sure if I missed this in the story, but the second incident started with the owner removing the battery. It was replaced by the joyrider. Here's what I don't get. Presumably the incident happened in the middle of the night? Did the joyrider carry an extra battery? Or did they take notes, purchase a battery the next day, and install it that night?

suck it up, pal, I just repacked your wheel bearings

The downvoting patterns of HN are often disheartening and illogical af

EDIT: I meant $800K

> it simply taxes you on all assets as if you disposed of them the day you leave.

Same thing in the U.S. but I think the first $800 or so is exempt.

Clear explanation, thanks. Seems that many companies have moved from California to Texas or Tennessee. Am I wrong?

I just laughed. You’re a better person than I.

You misinterpreted nothing.

Dutch Snellius sounds like an obscure baseball player from the 1940s

What search terms would you suggest?

> the church killed everyone that was talented and didn't join their ranks, effectively wiping out a lot of knowledge (by design)

Citation very much needed

My instinct normally is to bat for a single or a double, not a home run. But we have different needs than most people. For us, owning our real estate outright and making mid 6 figures or below pretax in a HCOL area is the target. Any higher income and you spend too much time on business trips, emergencies, hiring people, HR issues, etc. Too old for that. Inflation and property taxes are running much hotter than we'd like but we assumed years ago it would happen at some point. It hasn't affected us at all on a day-to-day basis.

So when my wife and I evaluate business ideas, it never crosses our mind to assume it will be picked up by a VC and hit the front page of HN. We try to project the worst, best, and most likely scenarios. We project these same terms a few years out to understand where problems might arise.

Our businesses are always medium- to long-term plays that we can run with minimal to no staffing. We have about a 50% success rate, about 30% higher than we normally bet.

Love this project; thanks for letting us know about it. I have been voted "Least likely to succeed in Web Hosting Security" by HN for 13 years in a row, so apologies if this is irrelevant. But being able to know precisely what software you're running would be a great way to run a web server, no? Or is it not efficient enough running in a container or what?

Very well put

>> we are in a place with an order of magnitude less trouble building a business.

> What is this claim based on?

Blog posts I've read from I've read, largely in HN. Personal interviews in those countries.

> Is there 10x as much stress among French business owners? Are entrepreneurs working 10x as hard in China? Are there 10x fewer businesses in England?

No clue. I've run many businesses and it's all stressful.

> And, stepping back a bit: To the extent that running a business is easier in America, how much of that is because the US exploits and bullies the rest of the world?

The US definitely exploits and bullies the rest of the world. Very often it's shameful and I hate it. All countries exploit other countries in their best interest. You may also be forgetting that for centuries the US has policed the world's waterways mostly in its own interest but, from about 1945-2020, for the rest of the world too, all at its own expense. We've been the leaders in anti-pirate forces since Jefferson.

> How much is because it's a huge country with vast resources

A lot. We are the luckiest country on Earth by a country mile. But also because of somewhat free markets, rule of law, somewhat free press, property rights, and constitutional belief in the individual. Japan doesn't have a huge country with vast resources but still does well. Canada and many countries in Africa have vast resources they could exploit responsibly but don't.

> (that were stolen from its murdered inhabitants)?

All countries are stolen from murdered inhabitants. All of them. Look at the Comanche, the Huns, the Houthis, the Japanese in WWII, the Goths, the Chinese, the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Dutch, and Luxembourg.

OK I'm kidding about Luxembourg.

> How much is because the lack of regulations allows for rampant externalization of costs?

Super complex question and a good one. Impossible to deal with in a comment.

> How much is because businesses are more 'free' to exploit their own workers?

Zero. No one forces you to work here, unless you're one of the hundred of thousands of trafficked workers here. Those traffickers should be hunted down and shot.

> How much is because most of the mechanisms for basic accountability are broken?

Don't know. We have huge corrupt corporations and a huge corrupt government working hand in hand against the citizens, but we also have tons of regulations and a justice system that can still help the little guy sometimes. You are absolutely on the right track, but we might have different definitions for accountability.

However since we're comparing the USA to others Mexico and China are shot through with corruption, China more perhaps than any other country on earth. Though we give them a run for their money.

> These aren't "gotcha" questions. They're fundamentally important to our future, because none of that is sustainable.

I sort of think you played your hand. The term "none of that is sustainable" suggests to me you've already decided on answers to all these non-gotcha questions. But I tried to answer them in the best light.

You’re right IMHO, but now look at what it’s like to build a business in places like France or England or China or India and you’ll learn we are in a place with an order of magnitude less trouble building a business. Frightening.

Microsoft never ever got the mad props it deserved for its extensive testing and compatibility work. I remember going through reviews where we had to fix bugs from our competitors to preserve compatibility for earlier versions of their own products that had taken shortcuts.

I’ve often wondered if part of the declining quality of its products is that those actions were simply never given the respect they deserved.

I worked in Building 2 and it was my best job ever. Loved every second of it. They knew the need for thinking time, hence individual offices. Buildings 1-8 were in a wooded area with trails threaded through the area. Gorgeous in any weather but especially snow days. Jogging there in the snow was gorgeous, and of course they had showers so you could change.

I find Poles to be among the very best, but it may be a bias in the sample. Most of the ones I know were motivated enough to move to the States for awesome jobs.

So what methods do you use?

Pretty neat how you’ve become so good at summarizing what looks stupendously opaque to me.

Salary is an indirect and partially useful metric, but one could argue that your ability to self-promote matters more, at least in the USA. I worked at Microsoft and saw that some of the people who made fat stacks of cash, just happened to be at the right place in the right time, or promoted things that looked good, but we’re not good for the company itself.

I made great money running my own businesses, but the vast majority of the programming was by people I hired. I’m a decent talent, but that gave me the ability to hire better ones than me.

Duly upvoted! I tend to agree. Yet the shibboleth of productivity haunts us still.

What bothers me more than any of this particular discussion is that we seem to be incapable of determining programmer productivity in a meaningful way since my debut as a programmer 40 years ago.