coward8675309

I haven't looked, because I would get too depressed, but I'm sure YouTube contains videos teaching people how to get rich quick by creating videos that teach people how to get rich quick by…

I spent $600 on a PS2 from an eBay-based scalper in 2000. I can only imagine how much more organized and pervasive the practice is twenty years later.

The paranoid conspiratorial tone of TFA is a symptom of what's wrong with the Internet and therefore humanity:

> The big brands that are ultimately at stake (Sony, Microsoft, NVIDIA, AMD) all talk about “demand exceeding supply”. Oh, really? [New paragraph.] It is a rather evasive explanation, without any communication about the actual state of their supply and production lines…

The dark secret? Not only is demand GREATER THAN supply, but supply is — wait for it! — LESS THAN demand! OMG, they've been covering this up the whole time! And not only that, current events and world affairs are contributing to this situation! When will the sheeple wake up?!

What we're witnessing, mercifully, is the strangling of programmatic advertising. So much of the app install business — the thing that is most at stake to Facebook here — is in free-to-play games, which are going to be plummeting in profitability as those apps become a less effective means for the delivery of programmatic ads.

Programmatic advertising has so many negative externalities that we should all cheer the diminution of this industry. Breitbart and Infowars and a million other toxic cesspools pandering to all manner of human weakness wouldn't exist without programmatic, the means by which these sites both grow audiences and monetize themselves.

I don't think Facebook is playing the long game very effectively. They and Google have more attention share of consumers than nearly anyone else, and they're going to benefit, relatively, from Apple's or the EU's or California's clamping down on the hoovering of personal data and identifiers vis-à-vis other actors in the mar-tech/e-commerce ecosystem.

Facebook is being sleazy, but they're not being hypocritical. In America, casting yourself as the champion of Small Business™ is nearly a time-honored a tradition among scoundrels as is wrapping yourself in the American flag.

I read the comment you just flipped out over as suggesting that the developers weren't tuned into to the current performative hypersensitivity and outrage that is fashionable among members of the American Left and those who pander for their clicks — not that Poles as a people are somehow more misogynistic or xenophobic than Americans.

At the time of the intro of 64 bit ARM, the conventional wisdom was, "Pooh pooh, this'll just bloat your code and not offer any performance advantage whatsoever. How pointlessly stupid!"

You're bringing issues of morality into this when it seems to me that the employees are more focused on self-interest and the accumulation and exercise of raw power while Google is preoccupied with public relations.

I don't know what general principles people are arguing for here, but the facts at the heart of TFA relate to someone laying down an ultimatum to an employer — "do these things or I'm going to quit" — and the employer replying "sorry to hear that buh bye."

That accepted conditional resignation (as someone mellifluously put it in an earlier HN discussion) is being interpreted by some as a firing. Having read the original letter, it sure sounded like a conditional resignation to me and, as a manager, I would've done my best to get the writer of the letter out the door ASAP.

Keep in mind that as an IC, I once worked for a company that imposed a 10% across the board pay cut without consulting me. I resigned the day it was announced, because my compensation is a term of employment mutually agreed to by my employer and myself, not something imposed upon me. So I've been on both sides of this.

As a general life rule, I go nuclear on people who play hardball with me, whether I am the manager or the managed.

I don't disagree with you. I was at an adtech startup, and I had bright lines — no payday loans or for-profit education. Luckily we never needed to blur or cross those lines, but as our business evolved, the way I delivered my — and my colleagues delivered their— preferences was not through laying down ultimatums but by having conversations.

Some people seem intent on creating drama and casting things not as their preferences but as Epic Struggles Between Good and Evil, where people who don't share their preferences are Evil. These people may not be offended by this characterization!

Life is complicated. I re-watched Schindler's List the other day, and assuming for a moment it's historically accurate, one could argue that by laboring in the factory, the workers were aiding the war effort and trading their own temporary safety for the lives of the people who would be victims of a Nazi war machine fed out of the factory's enamel pots. If someone were to actually argue that, I would just sort of stare at them like there were insane, despite not knowing how to rebut the argument except by blurting our words like "nuance" and "perspective" and "balance."

Maybe works like Faust have deep resonance with people because we all make deals with the devil and are conflicted and make choices that balance not good vs evil or even evil vs some other evil but a whole menu of ambiguous options against each other.

It's the self-righteous who are the real enemies, not the people who knowingly make the best of whatever resigned compromises they find themselves forced to make.

This makes no sense to me. If you don't believe in the raison d'être of a company, you should not join the company. There is no need to delve deeply into competing theories of the corporation. I'm willing to bet that even over in Europe, Ruger, Sig, Glock, Walther, and Beretta don't have a ton of gadflies on staff who are paid to write papers calling for the outlaw of handguns.

Das Tolle an Deutsch ist, dass es lesbar ist, während Englisch nicht.

The exasperating thing about AWS is that it inevitably turns engineering teams into equities and derivative traders. Yes, all programming is about balancing storage, CPU, memory, network I/O against each other, but AWS introduces the complexity of needing to reason about these things over time horizons that are long by a startup's standard.

If all of your business's metrics are sharply up and to the right, you probably don't need to worry so much, but if your goal is operational cost efficiency for a relatively stable workload, AWS is a challenge. That may be a blessing in disguise, as self hosting becomes a reasonable thing to consider if your needs are nontrivial and relatively inelastic.

I don't pack a desk in my messenger bag: a laptop, pencil, and notebook suffice.

The way I put this to clients is that you should own the bricks that your product is made of and not worry so much about the mortar. The bricks are the SQL queries, the logic inside the container images you run, the data stored in the tables and storage buckets. Oh yes, and the business relationships and brand equity.

As long as you're wiring those things together in ways you can replicate across cloud providers or in your own datacenter or on your own server in the closet, you've achieved the sweet spot in terms of deployment portability.

Running your own (Kubernetes cluster|database instance|pubsub system) on a cloud provider is crazy given that you now have at lease $150K+/yr piece of overhead in the form of at least one (dev)ops person. Save that expense for when or if you decide your needs have become predictable enough that you can start building your own software/hardware/network infrastructure.

Unless advanced devops fu is an important part of your company's mission or valuation, don't do it unless its saving you a lot of money over the alternatives.

True, and filing lawsuits is not the same as violent, armed insurrection.

Maybe go find someone who subscribes to the NYT or watches MSNBC to hurl your unfounded accusations at. Because you’re not replying to someone who’s trying to grind you into dust.

True. And people filing lawsuits is not the same as armed insurrection.

As someone who voted against Trump twice, I am horrified by his attempts to cling to office. At the same time, I am also reminded of the people in my social circle as well as in the Lefty media who in late 2016 talked about how Electoral College members had no legal obligation to cast a vote for Trump. (Except that many states have laws that say they do.)

What seems to be true of "both sides" is that both see their enemies as people who are set on their destruction and thereby justify "by whatever means necessary" thinking.

I too am one of those people thought a pinko socialist by some and a revanchist caveman by others.

It's not clear to me that open-source-as-a-business-model was ever vibrant enough that it makes sense to say it has now died. Open-source-as-a-funding-model was surely a thing, but turning open source into a source of consistent and growing free cash flow has been much more rare.

At my last start-up the first things to go out the window when we wanted to stop burning money were the commercial Aerospike and Nginx licenses. That was five years ago.

The most durable model for commercially-funded open source is as a stratagem for commoditizing someone's complement. If you want to stick it to Apple, fund Android. If you want to stick it to Oracle, fund PostgreSQL. If you want to stick it to Microsoft, fund LibreOffice. If you want to stick it to Sun -- er, Oracle -- fund Linux.

Docker, Inc. has the opportunity to be the NPM, Inc. for container images. How much did NPM sell to GitHub for?

Less concretely, is there a business model for a low-level piece of infrastructure like Docker? Is there a business model for ncurses or readline or df or ls?

"Real world" infrastructure is typically high capex, low margin. How many VC-funded startups build bridges or tunnels? SpaceX is pivoting to Starlink to find good margins and escape the fate of being a trucking company to space.

Here's a thought: Open source project contributions can function as a Veblen good. Made to display or assert status and to communicate that you produce intellectual property in such bulk that you can afford to give it away.

Surely open source contributions occur for many reasons but I'm inclined that the above is an important one.

While incumbent car manufacturers may or may not envy Tesla's technology, market cap, grassroots enthusiasm, et cetera, they so, so, so very much envy Tesla's ability to dispense with a dealer network.

Auto reporters in the past hammered on GM, for example, for its uninspired "badge engineering" i.e. creating nearly identical cars for Pontiac, Chevy, Buick, and so forth. The reality was that GM didn't want to do it — they say it as a big distraction — but the company had to deal with their dealer networks, which would complain loudly if a variant of the latest hot model for some other emblem weren't available for them.

Reading the article, I'm wondering if GM tried to induce as many dealerships as possible to ask for a buy-out. In the age of company-owned and branded stores — Tesla is like an Apple Store for cars — for every product category except cars, GM may be trying to claw its way to controlling the consumer experience for Cadillac, its marquee brand, from soup to nuts.

Airbnb is a great example: While I love the company's product — I've stayed at Airbnbs dozens of times — the company does generate negative externalities, and the company has done what I'd consider shady things (mostly astroturfing and other aggressive PR moves) to get itself past the profitability finish line. Once we get back to the world, I'll surely use Airbnb again, but I have a nuanced attitude about the the pros and cons of the company's offerings, both as a stayer and a citizen.

What PG doesn't address (which isn't his goal, so no dig intended) is a bigger issue than the immortal souls of founders and billionaires: Bad things happen just as often as a result of good people with good intentions as they do from the diabolical acts of sociopaths. That truth is equally under-appreciated by both American progressives and the well-meaning people who help create big problems even as they create joy for billions.

What, so that thousands of HN readers in search of an authentic open web experience can trample them into dust?

You've touched on something that irks me to no end — the tendency of many Elite Coder Bros to say things like, "Didn't you see my enormous headphones on?! Can't you see I'm coding — don't you realize I think for a living?!"

Yeah, dude, we're all thinking. As a hands-on programmer-manager I can report that creating slides for the fundraising deck that'll raise money to pay you or writing that email about you taking bags of beef jerky home for your post-workout recovery meal can take as much sustained concentration as you spinning in your `while 1 { copy_compiler_error(); stack_overflow_it(); paste_code(); }` infinite loop.

I'm very much with you on this. Increasing standards of living are directly tied to a decreased cost of energy. Aside from property absolutely everything can be decomposed into physical or mental effort — energy [omitted at suggestion of follow-up, merci!]. The industrial revolution allowed the substitution of wood or coal or uranium or PV cells for food that powers oxen, horses, and humans.

Any suggestions for alcohol-free things to do in Covid-era NYC after hours in autumn and winter when you live by yourself and have spent all day at your desk in your bedroom?