r2dnb

You may disagree but saying that it doesn't make sense is quite a stretch. I will nonetheless address your points :

1) Throttling is addressed by decentralizing the web with technologies such as Web Torrent. If every user is a seeder, there is not much the ISP can do. At the same time, the reason tech giants may not be happy with this approach can be understood, but then it is their choice and ISPs should not be blamed. Once this category of heavy traffic is out of the way, with regards to FQDNs if the traffic is lightweight, then throttling wouldn't make anysense. My guess also is that discriminating based on FQDNs provided lightweight packets would be blatantly anti-competitive. It would be similar to denying access based on race. Also, keep in mind that the only thing ISPs are saying is that companies driving more traffic (namely streaming companies) should pay more. So the chinese-like firewall you described is highly unlikely.

2) Too slowly, you can't make a product based on any of the disruptive features as of today. Support is barely existing and not mature enough. If they really wanted it, it would already be done because while the modern web is progressing slowly, these companies manage to iterate much more complex features on their other products. For example, while we've been struggling with the shitty Internet Explorer, Microsoft managed to literally roll out their very complex enterprise cloud business and scale it from zero to a multi-billion dollars segment. This and the .NET Core stuff. Similar things can be said of Apple and Google. Let's be real. In 2017, we should be at the stage where all the backbones are long done and they are rolling out their implementations of the bluetooth spec.

3) Prices may go up on Netflix, but they'll go down on comcasttube.com (if the service is not outright included in the ISP subscription price). Then they'll go down again on Netflix. Regarding the point on the richness of the web, this is not the way I think it will pan out for the reasons I explained. And part of my point was that, with this regard, tech giants getting real with the modern web has much more to do with it than NN, despite the rational currently being pushed by the valley.

From my perspective, the positive to this is that it will incentivize tech giants to accelerate the development of the web platform (WebRTC, WebGL, Web Assembly, Web Torrent and the like) as stuffing everything in HTTP and using encryption will protect them from the dirty blocking of services, and will allow them to focus their efforts on fighting throttling. For this reason, I hope Comcast and others will scare the hell out of them and do some big time media-covered dirty throttling.

I can already see for-a-better-web.org where Apple, Microsoft, Google and others explain why they have finally decided to move their ass and get serious about implementing the modern web in their browsers. With their level of funding, the time all of this is taking is ridiculous. When Netflix and YouTube get their first bill from tier 1 providers, Web Torrent and libtorrent will receive a pull request within a week and chrome will be patched overnight.

I do not think that the small guy will be hit by these rules, mostly because I think that by the time it comes to that, politics will have changed. The end result will be that everybody will benefit. Implementing the modern web seriously is the one thing that web giants can do to protect themselves, as it would enable a fully decentralized web. The difference between that and NN is that the modern web would actually help the small guy by making it easy to for example start a decentralized YouTube. So it's easier to cry fool on NN, and look like you're concerned about the small guy when in reality you too are concerned about protecting your interests in the most convenient way possible.

Not saying all of this is a conspiracy, just saying tech companies are far from being disarmed, they also have their monopolies they want to protect. Keep it in mind before crying over this vote, or spending money and time on volunteering. Let Tier 1 dudes give them the hardest time of their life and watch. If it gets to hitting the average Joe, do something but my take is it won't have the time to get to that.

>Architectural offices that still use cad

Out of curiosity, what is the modern alternative to CAD used by architectural offices ?

> They force an idea in the mind to become concrete and logically digestible to other members of the party.

You make a very valid point, what I was highlighting is that good communication can be achieved without whiteboards too.

I understand your underlying argument that whiteboards may constitute the best technology, but I also think there is a tacit convention at play here. People tacitly agree to communicate in a way that make whiteboards work. For there are many effective and fluid ways to iterate on ideas that do not involve live drawings or complex tech.

I know it for a fact as drawing my thoughts on a whiteboard has always been counter-natural to me. I can do it but I wouldn't say that it is necessary for good communication. It is just a communication choice that people make.

Everything that can be drawn clearly can also be written clearly (analogies, bullet point lists for flows, etc...). Not to say that diagrams are never helpful, but it may be a stretch to assume that drawings and whiteboards have an almost essential role.

While I have nothing against MBAs, this is a typical example of what people call MBAish / corporate BS and why managerial profiles have gained a bad reputation here. It looks smart on the surface but scrutiny exposes non-sense.

>Conversations around whiteboards between stakeholders creates value.

Why ? Are whiteboards magic ?

>Pair programming makes for lower defects and more reliable scheduling

Putting aside the fact that the benefits of pair programming as less consensual than what you seem to suggest, it can be done much more conveniently in a remote setup with a screenshare and a headset than by sharing a desk.

>Software is a design delivery operation.

So ?

>There was recent article on MS office space redesign to create more value.

Here we have the business case reference, always good to include one. The substantial remark is that once again this doesn't prove anything, the first reason being that "value" is extremely vague.

>Productivity is not per-keystroke

The art of looking like you are siding with the people you want to control while it is actually the opposite. If we go the bottom of the reasoning : value is not per keystroke, we therefore need to put employees in a room because their true value must be monitored to be appreciated. "Please understand, I really want to be able to appreciate your true value". Sounds a bit hypocrite to me.

>Personal productivity is almost a misnomer

One more slogan.

>I have been paid extra to kill projects that never should have started.

While I am the first to advocate careful planning and writing code last, as an entrepreneur, I consider it a crime to sabotage projects, because anyone who has ever created something, or started a project or a venture understands that creativity is almost Holy. Beyond the technical deliverables, projects trigger group (and market) dynamics and institutional learning that may be hard to reproduce later in time. For this reason, doers do not sabotage or kill projects, they rectify them. Sure there can be pure follies that need to be stopped ASAP to stop diverting valuable resources of the company, but my overall impression is that you have a more liberal approach to assessing what must be killed.

I respect arguments from both sides, but this comment is really representative of the crap filling most companies.

Not taking side on the issue but this article sort of misses the point. The first half of it is focused on demonstrating that unlike packaged goods, producing electricity does not result in packages needing to be put in the trash which is a fact nobody ever challenged to the best of my knowledge. I never even heard of this interpretation of the waste criticism. But the author goes on and opens the Webster's dictionary at the "Wasteful" page to continue his argument.

The other half is an augmentation of the line that the electricity used for mining is actually used by the mining computer, and very little of it evaporates as heat. Moreover heat inefficiencies are not intended by miners. As a result mining is as legitimate as any other business activity and mining bitcoins should not be considered a waste of energy. While in this case an opponent may possibly exist, I am left unconvinced by this demonstration.

The real discussion is that as of today, the raw materials required to produce electricity are in limited supply and in decreasing amount. Provided this limited supply and this decreasing amount, a structural increase on the demand will result in a pressure on price which may have a negative impact on society and the economy. An other concern is that as of today, efforts are made to decrease energy consumption because energy production has a negative impact on environment with the current state of the art technologies. The waste discussion comes from the fact that the energy footprint of the bitcoin network may seem unnecessary to some since alternatives exist to transfer value.

The author fails to consider the issue from the other side of the table and does not even know who or what he argues against. He misunderstands what the opposing view is. Throughout the article a lot of energy is spent defending positions that nobody ever challenged and this for sure is a waste.

Just to represent the people who like me will not be able to invest time considering your tech until pricing is available.

The pricing of the infrastructure has the potential to literally poison a product.

Just adding this since nginx proponents seem to be over-represented in threads these days :

- I too find that the Apache documentation is much better than the nginx one

- I also prefer the Apache License over the open-core, pay-a-license-for-more-feature model of Nginx.

- Then the module system of Apache is simply stable, proven, and seamless.

I'd go with Apache any time of the day as far as HTTP servers are concerned. I have nothing against Nginx per se, but I think that the Apache is dying / Apache is obsolete rhetoric is so far away from truth and exaggerated that it is almost becoming some sort of propaganda.

Apache is doing just fine and is going nowhere anytime soon and its configuration file format is not that complicate. Just try it for yourself and read the (well-written) docs.

Many thanks jorgeleo ! I wasn't clear on how FP handles complexity management and the unknown. You've beautifully connected the dots and helped me shift my thinking, this is all clear now.

In particular your demonstration was very convincing from a DDD perspective. I can see that FP is not less natural than OOP for domain modelling while it approaches things from a very different angle. However FP brings to the table rich domain semantics, high correctness guarantees, and I feel productivity gains too. And with the mindset you've presented, it is also clear that the unknown seems to be accounted for in FP too. As an architect, this last point was the grey area and the deal breaker for me. However now I see no reason not to invest in heavily leveraging FP moving forward. Thanks again jorgeleo.

Many thanks for taking the time to explain this, I can see that you have a point.

>Or you can focus on the meaning of the words, then you need just a few types, see how those meanings compound, and go from there.

>I agree, FP is bad at extending things... but it is not FP fault that you see the world as things that need to be extended.

I should probably give another look to FP and continue to study the subject, I have likely been approaching it with a OOP mindset as you suggest. One last question though, what about code duplication ? If you focus on the meaning of words and compounding these meanings to create new things, wouldn't it most of the time create lot of duplicate code ? For example in the case of the local shop and the supermarket, wouldn't you have two functions (or a switch case) containing exactly the same code to calculate the quantity multiplied by the price of the groceries ? One would take a local shop as parameter, and the other one would take a supermarket.

Splitting the sale processing function in two parts - one summing up the groceries and the other one calculating the taxes - so that you can reuse the first function implies knowing in advance the existence of the supermarket structure (which you will only know many years after putting your product in production). Not doing it in advance either means duplicate code or refactoring every time you add an operation. The extension mindset initially comes from the need to avoid code duplication which is known to make maintenance difficult.

Now maybe the strongly-typed experience of FP and its compile-time checks are so convenient in practice that they make the maintenance of this kind of code easily manageable ? Maybe it's not even really duplicate code since what would be a basic number in OOP would be two different types here in FP ? Or maybe it's still thinking about FP from an OOP perspective ?

Thanks for the reference, this is indeed all about it. The solutions mentioned are unnatural patches to the respective shortcomings of FP and OOP. It's ok to patch corner cases to complete the last 15% of a job for which the tool was a perfect fit for the first 85%, however the first patch should be to use the right tool for the right job.

The functional and strongly typed value proposition of FP is very appealing on paper but only shines when you have a level of certainty and knowledge on requirements that you typically do not have in real world software development. OOP by design embraces this uncertainty (but as a trade off is less assertive on correctness than FP).

That being said, certain businesses do not have a high level of uncertainty in their developments while correctness is a big deal for them (banks, scientific researchers, etc...). It makes sense for them to reinvest this slack in correctness. However, for those iterating consumer facing products (which represents the majority of developments), OOP modelling usually is the way to go. Because of the expression problem (which should probably be called the expression dilemma to better highlight the fact that the assessment should be continuous and situational rather than ideological and/or philosophical)

>Most of the time, when you are working using functional programming you are implementing the business vocabulary.

>Here is where building a vocabulary that represents the business subjects pays off. Change now is a definition-change and, unless the business is pivoting, definitions rarely change; instead, they have constant adjustments. Functional shines in creating a vocabulary and having this adaptability.

I tend to use the same arguments to make the case against FP for business modelling.

I tend to say that FP is good at adding new operations to existing things, while OOP is good at adding new things to existing operations. However when Software Development is used to model a business - as it should be for reasons you accurately explained - the reality it meets is the one of the business world in which business needs evolve and requirements get added. You start by supporting local groceries and then you grow to support global supermarket chains. OOP is more suited to model business because you can naturally extend existing types and apply existing operations to them (ie. pass a supermarket everywhere a shop was expected + things such as polymorphism). In FP, every time you add a type, you need to add switch cases to your existing operations (at best), or redefine them create / new ones (at worse), since the ubiquitous assumption of FP development is immutability and known types.

I'd be curious to know how you approach this conflict in a way that makes FP work in real world business modelling which needs to be extension-oriented. It seems to me that the more operations using a type you have, the more you will be screwed when you want to extend this type. The only reason I can see this wouldn't be the case would be to say that I approach FP with the wrong philosophy and that there is no such things as extending types in FP. But in this case I'd question if FP modelling really is the best tool to model real world business for which it is natural to define things as extensions of other things.

I agree with Twisell. The solution is to create a super data-structure so this really is an architecture and abstraction issue - ie. design things in a way such that these structures can be added in an incremental and painless way when the need appears.

Only a minority of people are good at that. I'd also note that there is a correlation between the importance of such needs and the ability to anticipate them at the initial design stage. (ie. is it reasonable to be surprised by the fact that a holding owning several supermarkets asks for consolidated reporting at some point ?).

If you're good at abstraction, modularity and composability, there really isn't any gotcha to fear. Stuff don't just come out of the blue.

This is a smart move by YC. This gives them a platform to assess promising ideas and teams at no-cost. I wouldn't be surprised if at some point teams become required to graduate from the program before being able to apply to YC.

I am not trying to be cynical here or downplay the value of their contribution. I think that they will genuinely teach the best of what they know to people. And what I am actually saying is that this is a good example of healthy capitalism.

This is an example of the fact that it is possible to articulate your best interests in a way that also helps people.

But I have to say that also admire the strategy itself. This is the kind of things that get you thinking : "they should have done it a long time ago" after you see the solution. Never thought about it either to be fair, but this is how you recognize the best solutions : they shine through their simplicity.

Anyway, well found and wishing you the best with this, and hopefully this will help and inspire many people to make the world a more pleasant place.

>It has nothing to do with what individual corporations can do.

My point was that we should pay attention as "citizens" because Freedom of Speech is / may be concerned. I wasn't trying to build a legal case with references accurate enough to be received by a judge. This is a about "Freedom of Speech" is the only thing I was trying to say.

>If you don't like what Facebook's policies, go share somewhere else

You're ignoring my point on the fact that FB is not a corporation like another. According to you Microsoft could have gotten away with : "People can use another OS" in the 90s, but this is not how things worked out. We need to respect law and understand why this kind of laws have been put in place. We paid a huge price before understandind why we needed them, repeating history will be expensive.

I can understand your point, I hope you could understand mine too even if you disagree.

Finally

>Will provide links to third-party analysis for any flagged stories, and list the criteria for third-party fact-checking. [0]

Thanks, this is interesting. Let's see how it turns out.

>The example you responded to isn't a "What If" scenario - it actually happened.

Then you are acually making my case. My point was that it would be hard to call that a fake news, this is an opinion.

I just posted on an another thread that the problem here is that Facebook positionning / PR is to be say that they are a neutral agent.

"Share what you want with your friends / family etc." This is why this case is different. If I use ExxonMobilBook, I kind of know what to expect of Greenpeace related stories.

Given their size, extra-precaution needs to be taken. They either need to rollback, or make their agenda more appearent.

>Facebook is this era's nightly news and, just like the nightly news, they have a right to avoid sharing crazy conspiracy theories and outright lies.

I have no problem with that. I have a problem with them choosing what I can share with my friends, and more generally what people can share with each other. "Sorry it's fake news so we limited the reach".

The problem is that they are not open. My only problem is opacity. HN is transparent, Breitbart is transparent. You know their opinions, you know their agenda. But this is not the case with FB which pretends to be neutral, and this is the issue.

>This has nothing to do with the bill of rights. Facebook is not the government, government is not requiring fake news to be censored, and the fact checkers are independent organizations.

Do you remember the anti-trust suits against Microsoft ? You can't pretend that a company having the influence FB has is just a corporation like another. When you have this size, you have added responsibility / expectations since your actions directly impact a significant part/aspect of the country.

Moreover they coordinate with politics, so this has everything to do with the Bill of Rights at this point. The citizen should at least pay attention to what is happening.

>Are you opposed to that as well?

HN never pretends to be neutral, it is a community with a set of rules. For example we even expect them to filter out-of-topic posts, and we know very well the opinions of the moderators / founders and where their line in the sand is.

However FB pretends to be neutral. If it's only flagged and there is no impact on the ranking algorithm, of course there would be no issue. It would just be a way to know FB opinion. But, frankly, we know better than that, of course the ranking and the reach will be impacted. This is even the stated intent.

The article could go on and make the case that the actions of the Pope are not aligned with his rethoric which shows that nothing is as black and white as what you suggest.

Remember :

- It all started with Facebook being accused of manipulating the timeline to remove conservative stories during the campaign

- At the time, their PR was along the lines of : we will fire the staff and replace it with an "objective" algorithm

- Shortly before the end of the campaign, the Fake News narrative started to be tested under various forms ("conspiracy theories are going mainstream", "damaging rumors" etc...)

- Post election the Fake News narrative started to be really pushed by politics

- At the same time, FB started to announce actions to fight the so called "Fake News Problem".

- And these day, hearing FB and mainstream media, the rethoric is as shameless as "We need to clean the news".

Having been caught doing some very troubling things, FB answer is to double down with what would be called censorship if it was being done in China.

Shutting down opinions, based on the opinions expressed can remind certain patterns of a not so old history. I find it shocking that people accept this development so quietly. Everybody seems to be ok with that. It seems like citizens are no longer awake and fighting for the bill of rights, seriously folks how can something like this possibly happen in this country ? Are you realizing what is happening here ?

In 2016, the average citizen thinks he is a good citizen and is all proud by being "politically correct" for a number of small things (often ridiculous and preventing him from maturing his own opinions) but everybody is comfortable with movements such as "Cleaning the news" being organized in plain sight. That's how you know something is fucked up. This is a shame.

Wow... So if I understand correctly :

1) They decided to mess with a company having $500B in-cash

2) Which decided to attack their low barrier-to-entry market

3) And took the unusual revealing step of building its own instead of buying

4) And is playing in its comfort zone (productivity tools, Office, API, cloud-scale integration points : azure, azure marketplace etc...)

5) While having a pool of 90M trustful paying customers and the ability to provide them the same offering for free in less than 1 second.

The worst they could do was to help Microsoft define this offering as a direct competition. But this is just what they did with this arrogant and high-schoolish "Welcome" letter.

What really has me roll my eyes here is the way they think that they can be frontal with a corporation like Microsoft playing in its comfort zone and having the dollars we know they have.

This will cost them a lot. You can't easily backtrack from that and even if they somehow manage to do it, by the time they get there, Teams will have already seized a good chunk of their user base.

>One of the biggest flaws of the tech industry is the belief that being a tech expert is enough to disrupt other industries in which they don't have any expertise.

Here's an article elaborating on this sentiment : https://read.reddy.today/read/5/new-entrepreneurs-are-no-lon...

Forgot the most important part :

>The important thing when you start is to know how a computer works, and how lines of code are interpreted and executed by the computer, as well as how to express and solve real world problems with computer instructions.

And C is both low-level enough and high-level enough to allow you to do all of this at the same time.

I learned C when I was 11, an uncle gave me a book as dense as a dictionary covering all the aspects of the language, as well as algorithms. He called it "The Bible".

For 1 year I woke up at 5:00am every saturday and sunday, to use the only computer we had at home before other people were up so I could do every single exercise of the book (there was about 20 per chapter, 10 first trivial, and the rest were small projects of increasing difficulty).

I consider that this experience is what made me the best programming student even at college, and an excellent developer when in the workplace. The lessons I learned from C are still priceless even though I mainly develop in managed and OOP languages today.

This will teach you basics that will never fade, there're certain Google searches you will never make again.

The important thing when you start is to know how a computer works, and how lines of code are interpreted and executed by the computer, as well as how to express and solve real world problems with computer instructions. You don't need to know every detail, but the less magic it feels, the better.

I won't mention basic things like non-competition clauses, honesty etc... The majority of people are usually honest - especially those senior enough to be exposed to this kind of secrets / overview.

But past that starting a business, especially a physical product one is not a trivial thing to do. You need to be very motivated. Like with software you discover many time-consuming details as you implement. And here not everything can be automated once solved. Even established competitors do not copy as fast as one may think because of these forces.

It might be dumb money but it still isn't easy money - and that's what make it even dumber : why not invest the effort in something "better" someone will say.

This used to be my feeling too, but I changed my mind when I worked with a company doing just what you describe. They grew it to a 50-people company within 5 years. Initially I felt smarter than them and wondered how on earth they could have put all their eggs in the same basket in such a way.

Then I realized that with the money they had, they had been able to hire me to do this work, so perhaps I wasn't the smartest guy in the room after all...

The thing to understand is that capitalism is about identifying opportunities to accumulate the largest amount of capital in the shortest amount of time.

The truth is if you focus only on "logical", sustainable, defensible, infinitely scalable business models, you'll be missing out a good 60% of the opportunities.

If you could let's say accumulate $600,000 in 5 months with a non viable business, you'd have all the time in the world to work on the viable businesses you mention.

In capitalism, you rarely know for sure which game the other person is playing. It's not because she is moving cards around that she is playing cards.

So the bottom line of my comment is don't be too smart . Being able to make dumb money is as important - if not more important - than being able to make smart money.

And I can even say : making dumb money at the right time is more valuable than making smart money at the wrong time.

>The article flat out says that some of the groups he worked with were rebel forces in Africa trying to overthrow governments, not exactly people who are famous for their cuddly nature.

Granted, thanks for insisting I didn't realize that, missed that part. I think like you that his good intentions might have gone too far and turned into rationalized behaviour.

I guess the millions of innocent people deported and killed by the nazis in front of him gave him a different perspective on what's a detail and what's not. Perspective probably different than green-pastures-based ones.

I do not endorse breaking the law, and I wouldn't do it myself. But sometimes it is possible to understand where other people are coming from.

Someone said : practice does not make perfect, only practice of perfection does.

Too few people realize it.