toberoni

Annual growth rates during the Industrial Revolution where way lower than 10%. In the 18th century it was well below 1%, during the 19th century it was on average at 1-1.5% (the highest estimates go up to 3% annual growth for certain decades close to 1900).[0][1][2]

Some regions or sectors might have experienced higher growth spurts, but the main point stands: the overall economic growth was quite low by modern standards - even though I don't think GDP numbers alone adequately describe the huge societal changes of such sustained growth compared to agrarian cultures before the Industrial Revolution.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20071127032512/http://minneapoli... [1] https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/explainers/how-has-growth-ch... [2] https://academic.oup.com/ereh/article/21/2/141/3044162

I feel Uber is the outlier here. For every unicorn company there are 1000s of companies that don't need to scale to millions of users.

And due to the insane markup of many cloud services it can make sense to just use beefier servers 24/7 to deal with the peaks. From my experience crazy traffic outliers that need sophisticated auto-scaling rarely happens outside of VC-fueled growth trajectories.

I use Gnome on multiple PCs and my first thought was they use a bitmap font or a 720p screen because everything looks off. The screenshots are not representative of how Gnome's font rendering looks like with a font like Inter & HiDPI.

The numbers are in Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) USD so they already measure how many goods in the local market basket can be bought per working hour (on average, as these GDP numbers don’t account for income or wealth distribution).

How much buying power does this income provide for goods & services that the younger generation wants/needs to buy?

For example: Over the last decades housing prices, college tuition & stock prices have significantly outpaced the average inflation rate. Older generations could buy up these assets at a discount (at least compared to Millennials & Gen Z).

I'm not so sure that your theory is a fact. There are a lot of plausible explanations for the course of this war. I follow this conflict closely and personally I think the West never had a coherent strategy and there would have been better ways to decimate the Russians.

I still don't see how letting Russia conquer half of Ukraine minimizes civilian cost. Russia has a long history of deadly deportations and it has already established systematic torture in occupied Ukranian territory. A landlocked Ukraine will be very hard to stabilize. And will Russia stop or will it continue in Moldova, Georgia or Kazakhstan?

There's also the question if the link between Western aid and warmongering holds up. All aggression comes from Russia and it alone is responsible for this destruction. As long as the victims, the Ukraine people, ask for help to defend themselves the West should deliver. The current aid is not enough but it surely is better than fighting Russia alone.

This is not a proxy war, neither EU or US are interested in Russian territory. They made it clear that no Western weapons are to be used outside Ukraine. This is defensive support for a sovereign state, not a scheme to topple Putin (who is the sole aggressor in this conflict without any formal declaration of war).

Furthermore, I’m having a hard time understanding your reasoning regarding US aid.

Currently, Russia is paying an enormous price while the US risks no lifes and gets to send its old weapons to Ukraine. This might not be a winning strategy for Ukraine, but it sure sounds better than an open war between 2 major nuclear powers which puts billions of lifes at risk or draconian Russian occupation of large parts of Ukraine.

I found this info:

When it comes to Weird Niche Sites, the co-hosts really capture the weirdness of the web. Spencer reveals his ‘90s-looking website, Disk Prices[link to the site], which is essentially a list of hard drive prices and their different characteristics.

https://www.nichepursuits.com/apple-gets-36-of-google-ad-rev...

The website isn't the money maker.

It's the backlinks that allow it to rank. Getting them requires a lot of knowledge & work, like publishing articles on Medium or receiving links on HN.

Unsurprisingly, it looks like the creator is an SEO-expert with years of experience and dozens of projects.

I can see why recommend this book as an example of human cruelty, but I think you should be aware of the author’s past when you recommend his work.

Jürgen Thorwald was a real former Nazi propagandist.

The German version of Defeat in the East was written only 10 years after another of his books has been published with a foreword of Hermann Göring in it. It is interesting as a contemporary document and Thorwald changed his public attitude after the defeat of the Reich - but it is by no means a reliable account of the war.

A modern work like Timothy Snyder‘s Bloodlands shows human cruelty in the same impactful way while being far more accurate. Again, my intention is not to put any agenda in your mouth but to give some (in my opinion very important) context regarding your recommendation.

Germany has been lacking a coherent security strategy. They neglected the Bundeswehr for decades and in recent years doubled down on their dependency on Russian fossil fuel (one could argue this was a mutual interdependency as German companies were crucial for the Russian arms industry).

Apart from the far right/left everyone in Germany (that I know) is thankful for America's support in Eastern Europe. Most of these people had no goodwill towards the US military before this war - mainly due to the shameful campaigns in Afghanistan/Iraq. But they also realized that the German/Western European security 'strategy' regarding Russia was a big failure.

Thank you for the link. Apparently I received a batch where this problem has been fixed.

The hinge is not very wobbly when typing and won't move if I lift the laptop carefully. However, it won't stay in position when moving it quicker.

Maybe this is by design so one can open the lid with a single hand. I prefer the sturdy hinge on my old Thinkpads though - it's difficult to open them with one hand but they stay in position when I move them.

I'm writing this with buyer's remorse on my Framework.

It's a huge step down from my previous Thinkpads. The battery life is atrocious - a night in modern standby drains the battery from 80% to 35%. Outside the office battery life is a constant worry, I mostly use it docked these days.

The display hinge is wobbly - when I lift my Framework from my lap on a table it often folds back 180 degrees. Very annoying.

In general it feels less durable than my old Thinkpad X1.

Linux support is better than on most laptops and worse than on Thinkpads, e.g. no BIOS upgrades out of the box (only beta firmwares for months). Additionally, I experience rare kernel loops, sometimes the laptop doesn't shut off properly etc. Overall Thinkpads seem to be more stable.

While this position might be comfortable, I would worry about cardiovascular deseases over the long-term. Emulating bedridden people sounds even worse than sitting (for healthy people).

A standing/walking desk seems like a better direction to explore. It's much more natural to do a couple of push-ups or hang from a pull-up bar every 30 mins when you are upright already.

That's less comfortable, but certainly closer to what our bodies need to function well for decades. Lying should be reserved for evenings & nights.

I have a similar routine and it makes me really productive - stacking different habits is powerful.

However, in my experience this approach has one big problem: certain events (changing continents, moving, sickness, finished milestones) completely unravel my productivity for weeks or months. Once I lose the streak it's very hard to get back on track.

I either have to rebuild a new routine step by step or just procrastinate long enough until I've found a new project I can build my work day around. These periods can last several months.

Has anyone come up with strategies to cope with such breaks?

Unfortunately this is happening with S3 sleep and numerous battery tuning tricks activated.

Don't buy the Framework as your main laptop if you plan to travel/use it unplugged a lot - I consider it a broken device for this intended usage. Put down the lid overnight and you'll have around 2-4h SOT left (and that's with a fully charged brand-new battery).

No other business laptop in the last 15 years felt so limiting in this regard, battery life is a constant worry. My Framework won't leave the dock and I'll hope manufacturers close the gap to the M1 soon (I don't care about raw power, but energy efficiency).

I'm using a Framework with Kubuntu and I have mixed feelings about it. I like the 3:2 screen ratio, repairability & the expansion cards. However, there are many downsides:

- The battery life is ATROCIOUS, even after TLP etc. It's about the same as my 4-year-old(!) Thinkpad. Standby battery drain is the worst, easily 20-30% overnight, which I find unacceptable. I can't use this laptop as intended and always have to switch it off completely. Also because of this:

- BIOS 3.06 ships with a bug that could result in the Framework not switching on if the battery is drained to 0%. The new beta BIOS might fix that, but errors like this show this is not a mature product.

- There are no stable LVFS firmware upgrades for Linux yet and some users also report overwritten bootloaders after upgrading. Linux compatibility is definitely not there yet.

- Many small annoyances on Linux: Fingerprint reader is not working out of the box, screen tearing, Bluetooth regressions etc. on certain kernels.

- My Framework didn't turn on for almost 2 weeks. I tried different RAM/SSDs to no avail... then, it suddenly worked again with the original components. No problems after that, very strange.

- The speakers are worse than the one in my smartphone. On most surfaces it sounds muffled and just not right.

- My CPU fan made strange noises. I could fix that thanks to the great repairability though.

- The fan can get very loud. Fortunately, it happens very rarely. Most of the time it's silent when browsing the internet or doing web dev work.

- Build quality is clearly a step down from my old Thinkpad X1 Yoga. The hinge doesn't feel as strong, some keys are mushy/creaking and I'm skeptical my Framework will survive as many falls as my old laptop.

Don't get me wrong: it's impressive for a first iteration product and a lot of modern laptops can't compete with it (despite the Framework being far more extensible). It ticks many boxes and offers a package that is hard to find these days (Lenovo & Co. seem to love soldered-on RAM, decreased keyboard travel, fewer ports).

After many glowing reviews I just expected a bit more. Coming from a 4-yo premium Thinkpad I'm not sure the Framework is an upgrade. It's more fragile, (currently) has worse Linux support & no next-day business support. I would definitely wait for the next generation of laptops.

I consider myself a 'functional' internet addict - as long as I keep my habits in check I can use sites like HN.

However Reddit, Youtube, Twitter, Medium and most VC-funded social media products are unusable without heavy modifications. Their default settings (endless feeds, notifications, suggestions) are designed to be addictive and often trigger behavior that results in countless wasted hours.

My solution is to only use these manipulative sites on my Desktop where I can change the layout etc. Mobile apps are off-limits. This works 80% of the time. Another step is to cut down on hardware - a slower phone, no tablet, less gadgets. In my experience this last step is very effective... but it's not easy because like most people here I love technology and it certainly has its advantages too.

3 months might be (close to) hyperbole, but webpack/JS package management is a source of consistent pain. It sticks out like a sore thumb across my web stacks (PHP/WP, Ruby, Elixir) and its brittle complexity causes the most unpleasant dev experience I have to deal with.

I doubt it's my incompetence alone - npm is involved in over 25% of Phoenix's issues!

It's telling that most instructions deal with the Javascript toolchain and not Rails itself. And let's hope that everything works and none of the 2000 imported node_modules blow up when this tutorial is 3 months old.

I'm looking forward to Phoenix 1.6 which ditches Webpack for esbuild. Every step away from the insane churn of the modern frontend world is welcome.

The victims are humans first (their religion shouldn't be a concern) so I don't find it surprising that many Western people speak up for them.

I would be happy to see more opposition from Islamic countries though.

I agree the US provide a very high materialistic living standard if you are well-educated or rich - but as you said, focusing on the tech sectors is a very narrow view on societies as a whole.

As an European working in tech I really don't care about those millions of dollars. My income - very low on the SV-scale - is more than enough to live a comfortable life.

Compared to the Anglosphere this also means that there is a lot less pressure in regard to getting priced-out with a median salary. Public transport & infastructure is great, university education is cheap and housing is affordable (not just for me, but also my friends in other industries).

Personally, this feels more egalitarian and I prefer it to a society with higher GDP that comes with more inequality.

This looks like a heavily opinionated article with a questionable use of data.

Others have mentioned the lacking focus on inequality already, so I want to add some other points:

While European countries have lower GDPs, their citizens work less hours than Americans[1] and spend less on health care[2] while having similar or longer life expectancies. Privatized education might similarly inflate GDP numbers without improving the actual quality of life.

The author - funnily enough a specialist for tax competition and board member of the Cayman Financial Review - is way too eager to draw political council from this apples to oranges comparison.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_time [2] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.CHEX.GD.ZS

I've been playing around with Elixir and rewrote a small Rails app in Phoenix to get used to it. In the end, the benefits are not big enough to make the switch

Pros:

- Less magic. It's a lot easier to figure out what's going on under the hood. - Phoenix is an improved Rails. Ecto is more flexible, the generators make more sense and everything is better organized. - FP leads to cleaner code. The difference to a neatly organized Rails (with POROs & service objects) is not big though. - Tooling/Mix is excellent. - Elixirforum is a great place full of helpful people.

Cons:

- Small ecosystem and lower productivity. I often had to spend 1-2 days to write a feature where with Rails I'd download a gem and it's done. - Elixir gets hyped up due to BEAM, OTP, stability, fault tolerance... - however, apart from some very niche cases most of its features can be replicated with background queues, Kubernetes, etc. - Speed & hosting costs. Elixir is a bit faster than Ruby and the footprint is smaller. But a powerful VPS + CDN is so cheap nowadays that it doesn't matter much at my scale. - It's an absolute niche language. There aren't many tutorials, SO answers or solutions for small problems - you often have to figure it out on your own.

Overall I'd say that Elixir is fun to work with and ist well thought-through. At the end of the day I only care about shipping products though. Writing my admin backend in clean FP code is nice, but I rather download a gem like Administrate and be done with it - so I have more time to focus on my core features.

From a business perspective I don't see many cases for Elixir: A small shop is more productive with Rails/JS/Python due to the vast ecosystems - and a bigger company will have trouble finding enough devs.