from https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html: "Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting."
The typical counterpoint to this NIMBYism isn't, communism, but rather most of Texas (where there's loosening zoning law) or West Virginia (where there's abundant poverty and social problems but also abundant housing).
The incentives you're talking about -- they're missing because of NIMBYist overregulation. The whole point of NIMBYism is to use regulation to hamstring the positive incentives in the market. "There's demand for twenty units here but the place is zoned for a single unit." or "There's demand for twenty units but the city demands that if we build a multitenant unit, we have to do a twenty-year environmental survey first".
Do you live in a place with a homeless crisis. Guess what: You're a citizen and you have some agency. Democracy can be a backstop to "pure" (or mis-regulated) market forces. I, for one, enjoy clean drinking water (and also: a good deal from a healthy competitive market).
Have you ever been to a great restaurant that happened to be on the wrong corner? Or been at a company where one change in execution made or broke the company? My guess: the founder lost interest but the employees still believed in the [impressive] tech. Because of the lack of traction: the cost of the tech wasn't prohibitive for the employees?
I’d much rather a useful AI-aided post that gives me insight than the almost daily pedantic unrelated gripe “interesting post but I hate the font”. This AI slop is bad but is it worse? In any case “bad” should be a reasonable bar to get over.
fwiw I don't have a problem with LLM posts. But I do agree that this is pretty generic. If you want to use an LLM to post comments: find a better prompt / workflow
I'm not sure it's so simple as "making it pretty costs more". I'd bet there are hidden utilitarian cost benefits as well. E.g., murals prevent graffiti. (No judgment concerning graffiti, but municipalities tend to pay to remove it.)
Or: maybe there is no large cost trade-off. Do beautiful manhole covers seen all over the world significantly affect the total cost of ownership?
I really like the slightly silly writing style! Reminds me of a toned-down Douglas Adams. Honestly, I'm not particularly interested in Janet but the style sucked me in.
I don't think the article touches on internal vs external hiring at all. They tried it but eventually didn't do it. But there's no value judgement -- it just seemed like they couldn't find a great candidate and then the author was eventually promoted.
Fwiw the same thing happened at my last startup. We did a search for a VP eventually promoted from within. I hereby claim, that statistically speaking, it definitely happens sometimes.
I guess the author disagrees with your last statement,
> If you start at the bottom then you remain there because your skills are not valuable in the top leadership roles.
She says that she had the space to think more about strategy because the "people at the bottom" were doing an good job of keeping the company's infrastructure stable as they scaled. Maybe it's less about top and bottom and more about what types of problems people are good at solving. My tip: if you like planning and management and strategy, you should try to get roles, in the top, bottom, and middle using those skillsets. Lots of even introductory roles involve "manager", and lots of non-management roles are a great career path for many.
Yeah I wish you could just start with a `.tools-version` and nix would generate a development flake. Someday!
That being said, the task of debugging a deprecated tool version in asdf justonetime makes the investment in the nix awkwardness worth it.
the pitch for nix isn't that it's a nicer tool than, e.g. `asdf`, but rather, that it will probably work in five years. frightful flashbacks of of trying to get nokogiri to build.
What does `make_pizza()` do? It could be a lot or it could be a little. It could have side-effects or not. Now I have to read another function to understand it, rather than easily skimming the ~four lines of code that I would have to repeat.
I think the article fails to show particularly problematic examples of DRY. E.g. merging two ~similar functions and adding a conditional for the non-shared codepaths. shudders
"Government casuses cronyism -- especially anti-cronyism laws". What should the role of government be? I guess the authors would say: Governments should be replaced with financial modeling. I'm not convinced.
There's something fundamentally undemocratic (and perhaps, sadly, realistic) about this take. Will advocating for broad de-regulation and business rule actually reduce cronism? Will it / can it reduce negative externalities?
I just think ... we've tried that. It's been the experiment of the last 40 years. What's next?
FWIW our experience has been:
- finding devs with experience is hard
- finding great devs who want to use interesting tooling is easy
In the end, we hire interesting, curious devs, and ask them to use tooling (elm) that has a pretty shallow learning curve.
I think bootstrapping a project in Elm without any experience on the team could be tough, but once you have some expertise, the seeds you plant in yield abundant fruit. At NoRedInk it's been a great success -- especially with regards to "finding other developers".
Regarding your first point: I want to do those things if I'm convinced they help the "good work". I might not want to clean the dishes but I'll do it until I can delegate it.