Hacker News: taffer

New comment by taffer in "How to earn a billion dollars"

taffer — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 22:05:51 +0000

> It's mind boggling that you

Please don't do this.

> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

New comment by taffer in "How to earn a billion dollars"

taffer — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 21:43:12 +0000

Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith. [1]

I was talking specifically about the moral implications of books that can be read without any additional work from the author. This statement is about books, not authors.

> but it's certainly not "work" the same way that digging a ditch

I don't think so. Value comes from utility, not from toil.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

New comment by taffer in "How to earn a billion dollars"

taffer — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 21:25:34 +0000

Neither is medicine, climate science, nor the marxist interpretation of the labor theory of value I was replying to.

New comment by taffer in "How to earn a billion dollars"

taffer — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 21:21:13 +0000

You're missing the point

New comment by taffer in "How to earn a billion dollars"

taffer — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 21:19:52 +0000

You're missing the point. The difference between three-year-old and fifteen-year-old whisky is mainly due to capital costs, not labour costs. According to the LVT, capital costs are not real.

> product is constantly evaporating and you're getting a lower yield on the same initial input

This so-called 'angel's share' accounts for ~2% per year, not 10%.

New comment by taffer in "How to earn a billion dollars"

taffer — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 15:50:36 +0000

I fail to see the moral problem with being able to write a book that millions or even billions of people can enjoy. To me that's a feature, not a bug.

New comment by taffer in "How to earn a billion dollars"

taffer — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 15:46:25 +0000

> > I could give you examples of how value is created without any work at all.

> I'm all ears.

Ageing whisky.

New comment by taffer in "How to earn a billion dollars"

taffer — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 15:38:46 +0000

> "Mainstream economics" is doing a lot of heavy lifting.

As is "mainstream medicine" or "mainstream climate science". If you don't trust mainstream science, you must be either extremely smart or just delusional.

New comment by taffer in "How to earn a billion dollars"

taffer — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 15:13:21 +0000

> The work is the same, yet if the take home is different, you've proven that your income is not in fact earned through work in a moral sense.

You could say the same about musicians and authors. Are they immoral as well?

New comment by taffer in "How to earn a billion dollars"

taffer — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 15:03:01 +0000

As the Wikipedia article states, the labour theory of value (LTV) was replaced by the theory of marginal utility in mainstream economics due to its major inconsistencies.

> Take Google as another example. The profit per employee has famously been (at times) over $1 million per year.

So, are you saying that the employees were exploited in some way? I could give you examples of how value is created without any work at all.

New comment by taffer in "High Density Living, 2000 Years Ago: Inside the Roman Apartment Building"

taffer — Fri, 29 May 2026 20:00:19 +0000

You have it the wrong way round: In the US the slave owners lived on the farms. The bustling cities were in the free states.

New comment by taffer in "High Density Living, 2000 Years Ago: Inside the Roman Apartment Building"

taffer — Fri, 29 May 2026 19:55:53 +0000

It isn't that simple. The most important thing about a city is the streets and blocks. Manhattan and Barcelona are good examples of cities that have been designed in a way that make them walkable and high density.

New comment by taffer in "Vietnam bans unskippable ads"

taffer — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 13:28:04 +0000

Advertising is as old as humanity itself. Asking what people did before advertising doesn't make sense.

Also, word-of-mouth advertising is, as the name suggests, a form of advertising.

New comment by taffer in "Vietnam bans unskippable ads"

taffer — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 13:23:37 +0000

Not really a counter example: gh.de is a pure advertising platform.

New comment by taffer in "Vietnam bans unskippable ads"

taffer — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 01:05:18 +0000

Companies spending money on advertising is just another way of acquiring customers. If they were unable to do that, they would need to resort to other, more costly ways of acquiring customers. I doubt that higher costs would result in lower prices for customers.

New comment by taffer in "Vietnam bans unskippable ads"

taffer — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 00:50:41 +0000

> When we used to pay for newspapers

Some newspapers were 50% advertising. You still had to pay for them.

New comment by taffer in "Vietnam bans unskippable ads"

taffer — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 00:41:52 +0000

How? If you don't advertise, no one can see you.

New comment by taffer in "What Does a Database for SSDs Look Like?"

taffer — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 14:06:47 +0000

On the other hand, smaller pages mean that more pages can fit in your CPU cache. Since CPU speed has improved much more than memory bus speed, and since cache is a scarce resource, it is important to use your cache lines as efficiently as possible.

Ultimately, it's a trade-off: larger pages mean faster I/O, while smaller pages mean better CPU utilisation.

New comment by taffer in "Against SQL (2021)"

taffer — Sat, 25 Oct 2025 19:33:04 +0000

I use Postgres JSON functions to return nested results. The database itself contains no JSON; just a well-normalised data model. However, the queries return nested JSON in the format required by the application, e.g. for rendering an HTML template or returning JSON to the client in a single round trip. Check out the old dogs can sort of learn new tricks in this great article: https://www.scattered-thoughts.net/writing/sql-needed-struct...

New comment by taffer in "Django: One ORM to rule all databases"

taffer — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 23:38:46 +0000

Again, performance is not my point. If you want maximum performance, use a low-level key-value store, hence my VSAM analogy. On the contrary, for me it is about simplicity.

SQL is the most high level language in common use. It abstracts away everything: Storage, memory, concurrency, and, most importantly, control flow. Complexity comes from complecting things, simplicity comes from decomplecting [1] things. SQL decomplects the what (data flow) from the how (control flow) which means less cognitive load, higher developer productivity and better maintainability.

In my experience, writing business logic in SQL results in fewer bugs and less code. I have replaced 50-line Java methods with 15-line SQL projections multiple times. With Python, the ratio is closer to 2:1, but it's still impressive.

And all of this without having to consider type impedance, eager versus lazy loading, result set mappings, second-level caching, dirty tracking, lifecycle management, OCC, or obscure savepoint bugs. Performance is just a nice, but welcome side effect.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxdOUGdseq4