- "The World" has jumped in to help Americans often. It's just that USA, due to their advantageous geographical position, never being bombed to bits, and having economic and military absolute supremacy, hasn't often been in a position of need where other countries can help out significantly.

- An example of where the world has helped significantly: Post 9/11 wars

- A recent example of when the world has helped: Californian wild fires

- And separately from that, of those "five thousand times" where the USA has helped other people in trouble, I guarantee a lot of those actually had considerable benefits for USA, meaning it wasn't a charity thing but the USA got something they wanted out of it, as well. Which is fine but let's not kid ourselves about those motives.

Just opening Wikipedia on the San Francisco earthquake, under the heading "Relief" it gives some indication of the international support given:

> During the first few days after news of the disaster reached the rest of the world, relief efforts reached over $5,000,000, equivalent to $169,560,000 in 2023. London raised hundreds of thousands of dollars. Individual citizens and businesses donated large sums of money for the relief effort: Standard Oil and Andrew Carnegie each gave $100,000; the Dominion of Canada made a special appropriation of $100,000; and even the Bank of Canada in Ottawa gave $25,000.

And if we're allowed to go back as far as the San Francisco earthquake to "judge" the world, maybe we can extend that just a little further towards independence, where France provided significant support to the fledgling nation.

"The Americans", is frankly, ridiculous, and anyone subscribing to the sentiments within betrays the same (and wrong) isolationist understanding of the world as they ironically indeed blame others to have.

No, they’d move things around a bit. SFO decided that this plane wasn’t going to land there as soon as they asked for ILS, instead of doing their job and making a gap.

Yeah it's a few hypotheticals onwards, and there's probably better ways to surface those problems, but companies are messy and no one is without flaw or 100% competent, no engineer and no manager.

(Note that I'm not saying evaluating a person based on delivering story points is optimal, or even useful)

I think the part in the article where a manager wanted to fire Tim because he delivered 0 story points, and the teamlead (?) refused, is made up for dramatic effect. I can't imagine any manager seeing those type of results and instead of asking the teamlead what's going on there, jumping to the conclusion that Tim should be fired.

In this particular case, I can think of a few reasons why the original scenario that this team was in would still be considered "bad". For example, maybe Tim received tasks to do and he didn't do them, now the company is behind on things. Maybe the other people are not as good as their job as they should be, but because of Tim's interference that's being hidden. Maybe the expectation is that the other people are as good as Tim, so why are they not helping each other out as much as Tim is? Should Tim get a promotion, or are the other people performing badly compared to their position and salary? Maybe the tasks that Tim was supposed to do are more important than the ones he's helping others with. Maybe the company didn't budget this much investment (2 people) for a specific thing that needs doing, and as there's just so much engineering time going around, what other tasks are now receiving less time than budgetted?

There's so many ways where this story may fall apart in a real context. Obviously, something has to change (expectations, budgetting, salaries, job levels, etc...) to align reality with the direction that the company wants to go into, and that change is not necessarily (limited to) "keep Tim around and have him help everyone out and everyone will be OK and this is the optimal scenario and management bad".

The implication also being that "evaluating people on story points is bad", but that completely disregards the fact that doing this has surfaced an issue in the department that needs resolving (and before I get pitchforks thrown at me - that issue may very well be that Tim needs a change of job title and a promotion) - but obviously expectations and reality didn't align beforehand, and the story point metric surfaced it and allows for resolving it. In that sense, the story point thing yielded benefits that otherwise wouldn't have been had.

> Additionally the outrage, as far as I am aware, has less to do with Reddit needing to make money rather it's way of going about making money is killing the user experience which kills the point of the website.

It's not killing the user experience, it's making the nice user experience "just" more expensive, which I covered in my first comment.

The cost of 0,00024 per request seems reasonable, and according to Apollo’s creator the cost per app user would be just 2,5 a month. Keep in mind that currently this app probably has no incentive to go light on the requests, so with some tinkering the creator could probably get that down. Maybe some proxy caching or what not.

Of course free is going away, but paying users at say 5/mo or 50/yr should still work for Apollo.

Point 1: increased demand for stocks will increase the price of it and thus the market cap. Point 2: the higher the market cap of a company the more capital it has available.

So I do. And invariably either the original responder goes radio silence, or admits that my question is the correct one and they can't help me with it.

I think saghm really hit the nail on the head with his YZ answer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36080243

This is because I was not up front about all of the context of course, but to fully explain the context and constraints that I’m working in, which I have already synthesised into my original question, would take two days due to complexity of the problem.

Let’s just get on with the problem solving instead of playing the meta game.

(I understand that knowing more context might be necessary to answer the question. I am referring to situations where that is not the case)

I found it an interesting criticism, and from what we know about the project I don't think I agree with the author.

In the space of what database to use, there are really few differences between Postgres and Postgres' peers, that "using what's available" is a perfectly sound reasoning to use Postgresql over, say, MySQL. I think around that time MongoDB was a possible alternative as well, however it was experimental and often mocked. Postgres and Mysql are pretty much feature parity, even in 2011, except for very niche use cases, which this project did not sound like it would have.

Factoring in that Heroku's PG UI is great, and to use an alternative would mean to have to set things up yourself (in 2011 the Heroku marketplace was not yet as expansive iirc), or at least have another account at another SaaS company with dubious maturity, the decision to use PG seemed to have been given the correct amount of critical thinking ("will it be able to support all that we need? most likely yes").

The author may also not have been aware that for RoR applications the code is pretty DB-agnostic, an unawareness he hints at in other parts of the story as well. Meaning that in the span of the year that they're working on rebuilding the site in RoR, if they discover a use case that another DB would be extremely helpful with, they could relatively easily switch over to this other DB without having to rewrite all of the code. At most it'd take rewriting of some migrations for FK's and possibly some (hopefully few) custom SQL queries. Remember that they had a one-time-switch-over when the site was done being built, so during this year of development time, the database did not accrue live user data that would have made such a change more difficult.

So when he claimed "I can reach the far east by sailing around the other side of the world in X days, as it's just a distance of Y miles" that was against common knowledge of that time, and everyone knew that a trip like that would take 2Y or 3Y miles, something unfeasible with the technology of that time.

The only reason his ship didn't perish halfway like everyone expected them to, is that there just happened to be a continent halfway that they stumbled upon. Columbus is a prime example of "task failed successfully".

Maybe cost was never an issue, but collaboration was. Maybe the culture that this policy generated was more important than the extra dollars they had to spend.

Or maybe, just maybe, your "factual evidence" is actually just a casual quip Joel Spolsky threw out there that one time for quick laughs. I would really love to see your sources that state "if Facebook had single offices instead of an open plan office, there would be just as much innovation, collaboration and successful products, yet the total cost of payroll would be 30% less." I'm pretty sure that's impossible to prove, regardless whether you'll label it with "factual evidence" or not.