> Don’t show me the random code you built that makes a users like history load 500 milliseconds faster, talk to me about how to make the product better/more engaging/monetized!
Honestly, if I were the CEO, I would ask for the former if I were looking for the good programmers to keep since these are the things that make the technological base of the company run.
The answer is of course likely different if I were looking for the managers to keep ...
First: there is of course an incentive not to admit this.
Second: I do believe that many people on HN really deeply care about technology/hacking topics and have detest for office politics. On the other hand, the people that the article discuss are good at office politics/marketing themselves and often don't have such a deep knowledge about programming. Thus, I would indeed assume that the typical HN reader/writer less likely fits into the "highly overrated people" pattern of the article.
> I think you are vastly overestimating the willingness and capability of volunteers and underestimating the effort needed to coordinate such an effort.
> And having any kind of manual intervention required will almost certainly reduce the reliability of the testing.
Perhaps I am underestimating the necessary effort, but the willingness and capability problem can in my opinion be solved by sufficiently streamlining and documenting the processes of running the test procedure.
If the testing procedure cannot be successfully run by a "somewhat experienced Linux nerd", this should be considered a usability bug of the testing procedure (and thus be fixed).
>
Although some kernel driver developers have testing clusters with real hardware (like GPU drivers devs), there is no effin way Linux could be effectively tested without someone paying a lot of money to set up real hardware and people to keep it running.
Just crowdsource this testing: I am sure that there exist some people who own the piece of hardware and are willing to run a test script, say, every
* night
* week
* new testing version of the kernel
(depending on your level of passion for the hardware and/or Linux). I do believe that there do exist a lot of people who would join such a crowdsourcing effort if the necessary infrastructure existed (i.e. it is very easy to run and submit the results).
> Enough people say it wrong it eventually becomes right. There's nothing definitive about language except for usage...
This is a view that is common among English speakers. Among many German native speakers it is instead common to love to analyze words and tell why some word is wrong even if it is actually in common use sometimes for decades.
> Amazon is unusable at this point, and I don’t get how they have so many customers.
At least in Germany, using Amazon is often the easiest way to buy copies of foreign-language (often, but not always English) textbooks about scientific topics.
> This happens in other markets just fine, one that springs to mind is oscilloscopes. Often you will find that a the hardware in one model is the same as the hardware in scopes in the same "family", what differs is software / locks set.
There exist quite some makers who solve this "oscilloscope tiering" by installing a hacked or alternative open source firmware on the oscilloscope.
> and so that begs the question why not make twice as much working as a software developer and not have to sort out these types of messes?
You partly answered your own question: perhaps you pay the librarian/documentation writer too little? ;-)
Seriously: letting the documentation to be written by such a person won't be as much a cost-reducing measure, but instead mostly an approach to improve the documentation quality.
He is influenced by multiple feedback loops: one that is encouraging this behavior (from the respective website) and one that does discourage it. In this case, the former one was stronger.
> Well, even from that perspective, "society" is giving him some strong feedback that this is not acceptable.
With the same reasoning, you can argue that people in this kind of internet forums gave him a strong feedback that the "society" is wrong here.
Why do most people what they do? Because their are conditioned/brainwashed by school and society to believe in specific morals for their behavior.
Similarly, as bilekas suggests, the fact that "'trolls' are seen as cool in the online world" gave this man an active feedback loop for reinforcing this behavior.
> Philosophers have been talking about justice and morality for æons, something so small isn’t going to turn our thoughts on justice on their head.
Theologists have been talking for æons about the essence of God and what the role of Jesus in the holy trinity is. Try to convince atheists that this æons-talking should turn their thoughts on religion on their head.
> If a factory increases efficiency resulting in idling of the machines for 2 hours thus decreasing costs, yet at the same time keep the prices of its output same - that would never ever considered stealing.
I disagree: the shareholders of the company clearly would consider it to be stealing if the machines were idling for the mentioned 2 hours (i.e. they are not used to produce more money to the shareholders) if there does not exist a good economic reason for this decision (e.g. the downtime of the machines is used for better maintenance of them making the production process more reliable; not spilling the market with the products enables the company to demand higher prices for the product (artificial shortage)).
Possibly ... ;-)