wolframhempel

The fact that I'm disproportionally excited about this probably dates me as an early 2000s web developer. But since selects can do things that you simply cannot recreate in HTML, e.g. have options drop downs that extend outside the viewport boundaries, makes this a really helpful feature.

Now, do autocompletes and tag selectors next...

I'm curious - in 2021, the top 1% earned 26% of all income in the united states. What % of total contribution to the country's federal income tax would you consider fair?

I agree with what you're saying, but lowering the risk does not mean completely eliminating the problem. It's always hard to argue the counterfactual, but I feel the number of conflicts since 1990 that HAVEN'T happened due to countries being economically dependent on each other is significant.

Sorry, could you elaborate on "Meanwhile people in the West are being dropped into poverty."?

As for " lowering the risk of armed conflict - how's that working out for everyone?" - pretty well, thank you. Deaths in armed conflicts have massively decreased since the 1980s with most of them originating from local wars in Africa prior to 2022. (see https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace) - the Ukraine conflict is a return of exactly the kind of imperialist expansion that we've seen in the leadup to World War 1 which happens when isolated countries with territorial ambitions seek to expand.

It's especially beneficial for the poorest people in the developed nation. In the 1940 US, the poorest 20% spent almost their entire income on basic needs, such as food and basic clothing. Today, the poorest 20% can still afford smartphones and flat screen TVs, clothes and even vacations. Yes, globalization has massively increased market sizes, making the richest much richer. But it also made the poorest much richer.

Making more stuff in the countries with the cheapest costs also means that people in those countries are being lifted out of poverty. China's GDP per capita went from ~350USD in 1990 to 12.500USD in 2023 and similar growth happened for India, Bangladesh and lots of other poorer countries. Globalization brought affordable goods to wealthy nations and better living standards to poorer nations. In addition, closer trade ties lower the likelihood of armed conflict.

Smart wealthy countries understand these benefits and move their own economies to higher value creating activities like deep research, high tech development or financial services. Less smart wealthy countries try to erect trade barriers to force a return of uncompetitive manufacturing...

I'm surprised that there doesn't seem to be a concept of payments or monetization baked into the protocol. I believe there are some major companies to be built around making data and API actions available to AI Models, either as an intermediary or marketplace or for service providers or data owners directly- and they'd all benefit from a standardised payment model on a per transaction level.

Blender, in my view, is one of the best arguments to develop native desktop applications over web view wrappers like Electron. Everything is responsive and instant, you can open new 3D view windows by just sliding them open at 60 frames a second, performance is stable even with multiple windows open and the download size is a reasonable 334MB.

I particularly like the confidence in the succession diagram.

Pythagoras->Da Vinci->Descartes->Pepsi...obviously...

I feel that most people instinctively assume that some institution, e.g. the government or the dictionary publishers are the authority on what constitutes "correct language". It's important to emphasize that language (included spelling) is something that develops organically and that the role of these institutions is just to capture the status quo.

At least that should be the case in free societies. Language is power - and controlling it is an important aspect of exercising control.

A lot of good things have already been said, but having worked on similar initiatives within larger banks, here are some of my key takeaways:

- Treat it as a product. Build something that would be appealing to real world customers. Spent time on writing great documentation, making a website that demos the components and advertise them internally. Even if other teams will be forced to use what you build by company mandate, getting buy-in will make your life much easier.

- Write great documentation. Incorporate usage by other teams as code samples.

- Avoid becoming the bottleneck at all costs. If you ship components to other teams, these components won't do all the things the other teams need. This will create friction for the other team and make you a bottleneck in their development workflow. They won't put up with this for long and quickly start working around your library or ditch it alltogether. To avoid this, make sure you continuously allocate some parts of your team to make fast changes and remain responsive.

- Allow for others to contribute back. Teams won't just use your things - they'll extend it. Make sure you have a clear and structured way to incorporate their changes.

- Stay responsive. Embed your developers and designers within the teams using your library. Don't become "the UI team" that bestows the unworthy with an update at their leisure - get close to your "customers", share their wants and pains.

I feel there's a place for YAML and JSON and that they are quite different:

- YAML is for files written or edited by humans - e.g. configuration files for servers with lots of comments and explanations, but generally quite simple key value pairs or basic data structures

- JSON is for files written and consumed by machines. It allows for complex, nested data structures and types, but requires technical knowledge to use.

The problem arises once you start confusing these usecases. I'd argue that once you start writing `'{"a": 1e2}'` in YAML you're quite far outside of its ideal use. I appreciate that feature creep might lead to overly complex configuration files (I remember editing XML config that allowed you to specify for-loops in my earlier days), but really, at a certain point it might be worth taking a step back and reflecting if you're still using the right tool for the right job.

Aside from duplication there's also competition. If you bake for your family, your pie will be appreciated, regardless of its novelty. But if your pie is meant to go onto a supermarket shelf alongside other pies, you need to give the consumer an incentive to choose yours - by making it better and/or different.

I agree with that - but in many cases, I think I'd at least define "works" as "is a benefit towards the set aim, rather than a detriment". Although in many cases, it'd be fairer to define it as "is a net benefit towards the set aim when taking all costs and externalities into account".

In this way, I would argue e.g. that

- the war on drugs is a detriment, having significantly increased the price and thus the profitability of drugs and fostered a cartel ecosystem that is now a large percentage of the economy (and often the government) of many countries.

- the war on terror or the prison system might be a net benefit towards the aim of reducing terror or crime respectively, but is a net detriment when taking its costs (monetary, social, freedom etc.) into account.

I'm not sure that "education" as the article states is one of them. But the war on drugs certainly is.

I love this article as it speaks to one of the most overlooked aspects of modern life: There are a lot of fundamental things that we take for granted and practice every day - a lot of things with lots of experts and powerful institutions around them - that simply do not work.

And once you have such a thing, and you've build your reputation, your power base, your institution around it, it is absolutely paramount to carry on with it, deepen it, and extend it - regardless of whether it works or not.

But continuing the thing that doesn't work doesn't require some malicious intent or ulterior motive. Quite often, it's just a question of "well, what else would we do?". And the answer to that is often "nothing" - or "we don't know" - so it's better to do something and feel like we have agency and are doing something about it than just carrying on with our lives.

I need to develop better impulse control. I was already halfway through filling out the shipping address when I took a deep breath and thought - really? Are you ever gonna seriously read this?

But then again, it does come wrap in space foil...so there's that...

I'm wondering if at this point its more of an autocracy of systems. And whilst you can vote for the top layer that (nominally?) governs the system/institution, the system itself is permanent and continuous.

Just wanted to share the related Wikipedia article. Germans do - factually - work fewer hours annually than any other developed nation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_a...

As a German who lived abroad a long time, but moved to Berlin eight years ago, here’s my (completely personal) assessment of why Germany is going down the drain economically - and will continue to do so:

1) Mindset and Culture. The idea of entrepreneurship, hard work and reward for risk is becoming completely alien to Germans. New technologies and high growth sectors are almost exclusively perceived in terms of their risks and downsides. Security, reliance on the government for problem solving and tall poppy syndrome are paramount.

2) Overly complex civic systems. Germans always were famous for their bureaucracy. But government interference in the most minute details of running a business, endless red tape and micro regulations have made it largely impossible to be competitive on the international stage.

3) Poor Work Ethic. What? The Germans? Aren’t they known to be the hard working ones? Well - somehow, our trains are also known to be the punctual ones. These cliches might have been true during the “Wirtschaftswunder” - but today, Germans work the fewest hours of any OECD country.

4) Climate Focus. Germany’s government is focused on a largely ideologically driven understanding of climate change prevention. It’s not just that Russian gas is no longer available - in addition all nuclear power plants were shut off. Climate regulation and taxation also adds to rising energy prices and production costs.

5) Worker Rights: Germany has very high levels of worker protections, making it hard to scale workforces up and down and near impossible to dismiss employees for performance reasons.

6) High Taxes. Germany has some of the highest corporation and personal income taxes in the developed world. And while e.g. Scandinavian countries have even higher taxes, in Germany it doesn’t feel like you’re getting something of equal value back from the state. This is of course highly subjective.

7) Few Future Industries. Germany’s industry has focused on gas powered mobility and advanced machine building - and has become a world leader in many of these areas. It has, however, very few software, AI, or other companies that make up the bulk of e.g. the US economic growth.

There’s probably many more - but this might paint a picture from the inside.

I studied art history, and this always bothered me when learning about Christian symbolism. When reading about numbers related to cathedrals, such as the number of statues on a ledge or the number of archivolts (the bands around doors), so much emphasis was put on the meaning of these particular numbers by whoever authored the piece. Three related to the Holy Trinity, four represented the four Gospels, five alluded to the number of wounds Christ received, seven related to the days of creation, sins, or virtues - and don't even get me started on twelve.

In fact, as an architect of a cathedral, you pretty much had to make 22 or more of anything to avoid having a meaning ascribed.

Fair enough - let's take Stardew Valley as an example then.

I feel, the current generation of AAA Games are a great example for why you should make something you enjoy rather than something designed to make money. Look at Baldurs Gate 3 vs Skull and Bones. Make something you love and are passionate about. Get good at it. Use the Internet to show it to others that are passionate about the same thing - and there's a decent likelihood of success.

I've got to admit, Descent was the only game to ever make me physically ill. Not because it was bad - it really wasn't - but for a short while in the 90s the Genre of "fly tiny spaceship through low resolution, spinning 3D maze where there's constantly a wall right in front of your face" was really popular. Today, I can't watch a five minute gameplay video without feeling nauseous.

I played Descent, Forsaken and Hellbender that all followed that formula. Only later did games like Incoming, G-Police and Yager take the 3D-flyee-shotee genre to the wider outside and it became less nauseating.

Fair, should be 98%. Can't change the title anymore though

SEEKING WORK | Remote | Finance & Trading Technology, Web Apps, 3D/WebGL, Realtime Data

I'm a highly experienced one-man army with a focus on finance, complex web apps with realtime data and 2D/3D visualizations. I've built open source projects like deepstream and Golden Layout, totalling 14.000 Github stars, created companies like the Cloud Visualisation tool Arcentry or the trading platform “the Merchant” and worked in positions like VP of Trading Tech at JP Morgan or Architect at the gaming company Crytek.

You can find more about me and samples of my work at https://wolframhempel.github.io/me/

I'm actually with traviswingo. Just launch. Chances are, no one will care about your website for quite a while. Unless you're building a product with a lot of hype around it, there's likely going to be a huge gap between launching and seeing any traffic at all. This gives you plenty of time to implement some of the great recommendations given here. But don't delay the launch for it.

It's an important point. We've ended up using two Hilbert curves, rotated by 90 degrees to tackle this problem. If it is close on either, it is close in 2D space

I've bookmarked it, just because the site is so pretty.

It's important to say that this isn't in the VCs interest either. As a VC, you want to keep the founders motivated to make you money and grow the pie - or at least to stay on and continue what they are doing. Taking away their personnel incentives through over boarding liquidation preferences is in neither side's interest.

This is even more true when it comes to future investments. Founders talk to each other. And articles, such as this one, get the word out. So - next time you're choosing a VC for your promising startup, will you go with the one that forced the last company into a sale that left them with nothing - or will you go with one with a more founder friendly track record?