Hacker News: somatic

New comment by somatic in "Georgism"

somatic — Thu, 21 May 2020 01:32:39 +0000

An economy is driven by free money.

New comment by somatic in "Georgism"

somatic — Thu, 21 May 2020 01:31:09 +0000

The standard defenses of the ability to be rich are persuasive arguments promulgated by those who are rich.

If we assume that the rich are, as other advertisers, rational and self-interested, the we should expect their messaging (i.e., the “standard defenses”) to be that which is most effective.

Something akin to if it works, it ships.

Consider that from the perspective of the accountants, every job created is a huge and ongoing liability and cost, and that from the perspective of the shareholders, every job created is stolen profit, money that is not returned in the form of equity appreciation + dividends.

Then you will begin to see the reality of the situation.

New comment by somatic in "Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage"

somatic — Thu, 21 May 2020 01:19:49 +0000

You say that capitalism is broken, but the capitalists are all doing very well, even as everyone else feels the pain.

If the capitalists are doing very well, then how can you say that capitalism is not doing very well?

To answer this question may require you to undergo a paradigm shift.

Think about it.

New comment by somatic in "What Is Nix?"

somatic — Thu, 21 May 2020 01:02:11 +0000

The term “modern JS” should be used only as a pejorative.

New comment by somatic in "The Mainframe Is a Modern Platform"

somatic — Wed, 20 May 2020 21:51:57 +0000

I mean... is there really?

How much do these people get paid?

New comment by somatic in "Lessons from six years as a solo consultant"

somatic — Sun, 05 Jan 2020 08:16:54 +0000

Dude, nobody cares. What ridiculous moralizing. "Fiddling with stuff on a computer?" Crabs-in-a-bucket comparisons to doctors? Whatevah. Get outta town.

No one pays you because they like your face. They pay you because you make them money.

No one works when they have rivers of cash flowing in their direction. You trade your time for their money: a slice of your life, in the most literal sense.

What is the value of your life?

Know your worth. Take every dollar. You will get precisely what you can negotiate, nothing more, nothing less.

New comment by somatic in "Software Disenchantment (2018)"

somatic — Thu, 02 Jan 2020 20:46:18 +0000

Scheme is properly tail-recursive and has been around since 1975. Most (all?) Common Lisp implementations have proper tail recursion. Clojure has tail call optimization for simple cases and only if you explicitly ask for it, but it gets you most of the way there most of the time.

So there are reasons to prefer more imperative languages and their systems, but stack-smashing isn't one of them.

New comment by somatic in "Software Disenchantment (2018)"

somatic — Thu, 02 Jan 2020 20:06:19 +0000

Yes, you're absolutely right: React itself is great. But React is part of the NPM ecosystem; try using one without the other.

And then if you're still feeling cocky try finding someone else who uses one without the other.

New comment by somatic in "Software Disenchantment (2018)"

somatic — Thu, 02 Jan 2020 04:54:44 +0000

Free markets hate good software. "Good" meaning secure, stable, and boring.

On both ends.

Software developers hate boring software for pragmatic HR-driven career reasons and because devs are apes and apes are faddish and like the shiny new thing.

And commercial hegemony tends to go to the companies that slap something together with duct tape and bubble gum and rush it out the door.

So you get clusterfucks like Unix winning out against elegantly designed Lisp systems, and clusterfucks like Linux winning out against elegantly designed Unix systems, and clusterfucks like Docker and microservices and whatever other "innovations" "winning out" over elegantly design Linux package management and normal webservers and whatnot.

At some point someone important will figure out that no software should ever need to be updated for any reason ever, and a software update should carry the same stigma as...I don't know...adultery once carried. Or an oil spill. Or cooking the books. Whatever.

But then also it's important to be realistic. If anyone ever goes back and fixes any of this, well, a whole lot of very smart people are going to go unemployed.

Speaking of which...

https://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/susan/joke/cpp.htm

New comment by somatic in "Software Disenchantment (2018)"

somatic — Thu, 02 Jan 2020 04:42:45 +0000

jQuery: 88KB, standard everywhere, one entity responsible for all of it, people know what it is and what it does, if it breaks you know what went wrong and who to blame.

Literally anything built with NPM: megabytes? tens of megabytes? in size, totally inscrutable, code being pulled in from hundreds of megabytes of code in tens of thousands of packages from hundreds or thousands of people of unknown (and unknowable) competence and trustworthiness, if it breaks not only do you not know who to blame but you probably have literally no idea what wrong.

Yeah, jQuery was probably better.

New comment by somatic in "Google cancels TGIF weekly all-hands meetings"

somatic — Tue, 19 Nov 2019 01:17:18 +0000

LOL at the GPG swarm down below. I hate the Internet, I regret posting my own GPG message, and I'd delete it if I could.

New comment by somatic in "Google cancels TGIF weekly all-hands meetings"

somatic — Tue, 19 Nov 2019 01:14:53 +0000

Valid point. To clarify, it was hyperbole, as I got (rightly or wrongly) a more "military" vibe. And in my highly uninformed opinion, I'd feel much less comfortable in close quarters with actual spook-dom than I would around high-end military establishment people. Maybe I'm wrong. I'd probably take upper six figures to warm a seat for either, though. Shake the hand of the devil, sell your soul on the dotted line.

New comment by somatic in "Google cancels TGIF weekly all-hands meetings"

somatic — Sat, 16 Nov 2019 20:41:11 +0000

Get in touch?

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New comment by somatic in "Google cancels TGIF weekly all-hands meetings"

somatic — Sat, 16 Nov 2019 06:28:30 +0000

I'll be on the lookout, but quite frankly I despair. I've always wanted to be in a spooky line of work. Oh well.

New comment by somatic in "Google cancels TGIF weekly all-hands meetings"

somatic — Sat, 16 Nov 2019 05:43:18 +0000

>The good companies for 9 to 5 casual evil are small >50 man shops which require security clearance to work at.

Where do I sign up?

(Edit: this is a serious question.)

(Second edit: Mencius.)

New comment by somatic in "Farm country feeds America, but try buying groceries there"

somatic — Wed, 06 Nov 2019 00:33:33 +0000

It wasn't so much "gave up on" as it was "deliberately destroyed".

Since the late 1800's, the banks and the governments have pursued a continuous policy of economic centralization and integration, and key to that policy has been the gradual ratchet of making farms unprofitable and uneconomical.

We could have a thriving agricultural economy — just change the policymakers.

New comment by somatic in "The Fantasy of Opting Out"

somatic — Fri, 01 Nov 2019 22:55:45 +0000

You have erected a hilarious false choice.

The supermarket is recording your image as you browse through the store, and within five years will assuredly be plugging you into facial recognition software.

It is not necessary for you to have a toll transponder in order for your car to be tracked. You have a license plate which can be trivially collected and indexed with off-the-shelf hardware and software. If you have a car made within the last few years, it probably has a permanent tether to the Internet.

Your cell phone is triangulated and your location is approximated to a handful of feet by your carrier.

In some not-too-distant future, it’s easy to imagine the death of cash, the outmoded way to pay: cryptocurrency is just so much sexier.

Newsflash: every man is not his own island.

In excusing those responsible for polluting my life, you are culpable also.

New comment by somatic in "Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?"

somatic — Tue, 22 Oct 2019 17:20:07 +0000

In calling these people entrepreneurs you are really contorting the language. The entrepreneurs in this system are the creators and owners of the system. The other people are something else entirely.

New comment by somatic in "Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?"

somatic — Tue, 22 Oct 2019 17:17:53 +0000

I recommend Hegel with Neuralink: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ppGlEiQXrRI

Unless the computer is itself capable of anticipating and satisfying your desires — which, I grant, is possible, but, I would argue, incredibly, incredibly dystopian — you will need to consciously articulate your thoughts in such a way that the computer serves your will. That conscious articulation is the bottleneck. Not the keyboard, not the mouse, and certainly not the typing speed.

This is, of course, assuming that the computer remains the servant rather than becoming the master.

New comment by somatic in "Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?"

somatic — Tue, 22 Oct 2019 17:11:49 +0000

Adtech. Hence Facebook/Oculus.