This article doesn't make any sense. It already fails at the premise. Airplanes and elevators have nothing in common with code written by normal software companies.
They optimize for a compromise between short-term gain and long-term gain. In essence, a startup can mathematically proof its software and go bankrupt before they even reach a prototype stage. Or they can shell out utter crap quickly, get some early feedback, funding and beta testers and slowly figure out what to improve first for the biggest bang.
Same goes for giants, like Google. They technically have the resources to prove SOME projects and they DO. For instance, Amazon proves their hardware virtualization software and other core pieces, where bugs would undermine the safety of the entire cloud.
I am getting a bit sick of "Why is software engineering so bad compared to XYZ". All the people asking are either not in this field or are junior engineers who just don't yet understand why things are the way they are and why writing bug-free, mathematically proven software is infeasible, unnecessary, impractical, undesired, etc.
Consider another analogy. When building a house, how expensive is it to decide that you actually want to have a ceiling with 5 meters high in the second floor, because the buyer of that floor wants higher ceilings? Simple: Tear down the building and start over...
In software? Usually it comes down to adding an IF-statement or some such. Software follows completely different economic principles and serves completely different needs.
There is at least one dimension though where this problem currently shines through: Self-Driving Cars.
I think auto-pilots in self-driving cars SHOULD follow the same rigor as airplane auto-pilots and they are most certainly not doing that, which will and already has resulted in lost lives.
"They optimize for a compromise between short-term gain and long-term gain"
Hey! Author here. This is the exact point that I make in my essay. I don't compare it to any other fields, and certainly don't mention airplanes or elevators. I explain how this compromise is deliberately reached for people who aren't familiar with the dynamics of software projects. I recommend that you read the post! It sounds like we agree on a lot.
It's a bit like saying "We found this store and it doesn't label kitchen knifes as potentially dangerous"... Nobody in their right mind would use this data set for developing a self-driving car and if one does, then they will not get a license to operate... And if by any chance they do it's still like stabbing other people with a knife snatched from the shelf a supermarket. You just don't do it.
Sorry but anyone who has worked in a professional high-tech environment should be aware of that an 8 hour days is not productive. You NEED to spend you entire day on this, you mind always needs to be on it to work on that level.
Einstein would certainly not have solved relativity by saying "Uh I guess from 9 to 5 I will work on this with a one hour break in between and then I am heading off to the fun stuff called leisure time".
No... Only if you think about these problems day in and day out you can work at in the top percentiles and this is the kind of people that get hired there.
This is getting cause and effect totally screwed up.
People want to work on cool stuff (in the sense of rockets or in the sense of making the world better, or both). They will accept lower pay (per hour) to do that. Therefore, working on cool stuff demands longer hours and lower pay compared to less glamorous things. It's not an inherent requirement of the field; it's a side effect of human preferences.
What does Elon Musk have to do with this? He is just someone who takes existing working things and tries to produce them in some slavery sweat shop conditions for cheap. There is essentially zero innovation involved here, even less so any "sci-fi".
The innovation is in bringing these products to market and keeping multiple companies viable while doing so. NO ONE else has done the things he has. Put up or shut up. Edit: I'm not a fanboy and there are a lot of things about him I dislike, but the casual dismissals just irk me. If he's so unoriginal, you go do what he did.
There are lots of centa-millionaires. None have done what Musk did.
Musk got his start with Zip2, programming it himself. Any competent programmer could have done that (but didn't). Each success he used to launch a much more ambitious enterprise.
When someone does that multiple times, it isn't luck. It's being good at it.
Or to have parents to seed said company. Not sure why you got downvoted.
It’s easier to say “Go do what JK Rowling did” than to say “Go do what Elon did” lmao. I can write a fantasy series with $0. The same can’t be said necessarily for building companies.
It’s still more than most people have and during a specific time in history. What you said doesn’t negate my point.
There’s more involved to starting a company than money. Such as your network. Your support system. Even your race and geographic location could play a factor. Luck, etc.
“You go be a 7-ft basketball player if you think it’s so easy!!!”
> It’s still more than most people have and during a specific time in history.
The freeways around here are gridlocked with cars costing more than $28,000.
> Such as your network. Your support system. Even your race and geographic location could play a factor. Luck, etc.
Oh phooey. I started my company with nothing more than an IBM PC. Nobody knew my race or location - it was mail order. Want to network? Use the internet. The D development community is all over the world.
On HN I regularly see extreme negativity and often outright hostility to all the opportunities all around us. What I enjoy about Musk is he likes to do things everyone else says can't be done.
> The freeways around here are gridlocked with cars costing more than $28,000.
Yea, financed with debt over what is now typically 7-10 years. 28k of capital to invest is out of the reach of the majority of Americans. Please don't pretend that's a small amount of money anyone can come up with.
BTW, if you can finance $28,000 over 7-10 years, you can buy a perfectly fine $3,000 car, save up what your payment would have been, and have those funds to invest.
My daily driver, for example, is 31 years old now, and is worth maybe $500. I invest the money I save (taxes, insurance, and repairs are pretty cheap for the thing, too).
My not-so-humble opinion is that if you have to finance a car, you should buy a cheaper used one you can pay cash for. Financing an expensive car is a great way to never have any spare funds available.
Oh I agree with you on the car, but this assumes you know enough about them to get a decent one for 3k; people go for newer used ones because it's a black box to them and they want something they "feel" is reliable and they don't feel that about older cars. They're wrong, but that's the nature of not understanding a thing. 28k is still out of the reach of most.
The guy who made Flappy Bird lived in Vietnam. Sure, he's not Elon Musk, but apparently a single day of Flappy Bird ad revenue was enough to earn that $28K.
It's a shame he let everyone's negativity and tall poppy syndrome talk him into killing the app, instead of riding out the wave all the way. He made something that made a lot of people happy all over the world.
Yeah, sure. We’re talking about Elon Musk though... And whether it’s fine to say “you go do what Elon did.” It’s more realistic to say “you go do what the flappy bird guy did”. You fanboys are hilarious.
While Musk should be rightly criticised for the ethically-questionable practices, we can at least be thankful that SOMEONE has both the drive (okay, sure, the ego) and passion for technological progress that results in the societal change we've seen so far.
Are there ANY other players at his level of household-name and wealth that are pushing as hard as he is, in as many directions? Gates has done fantastic work for decades but only using conventional methods, and basically everyone else is only doing R&D for their own purposes.
He's not some Tony-Stark/Tom-Swift type, but neither is he just another capitalist dick.
He's simply a Howard Hughes type: every generation since Hughes has had one, and they're all backed by the military industrial complex and spooks. He'd have gone broke by now otherwise. None of his companies make money.
This sounds fishy. He probably pleaded guilty as part of a plea deal, so law enforcement has a scapegoat and some meaningless "media success" in exchange for him getting a drastically reduced sentencing. They always do that, threaten people with insane penalties if they don't accept so shitty plea deal and if you are not super certain that you can win, you will likely accept that one, just because it seems "safer".
There are a LOT of cases like this, just most of them don't gain this publicity. Actually, 95% of court cases never reach court because of this. Innocent people plead guilty because they don't have the wealth and resources to win in court. USA is a shithole when it comes to law enforcement. Medieval and sad. Land of the free (as long as you are rich, that is).
Promise (YC startup) was also saying that 70% of people in jails are waiting for judgement or are in for a technical violation (ex: did not show up to a hearing). And being in jails they end up losing their job, eventually they lose their house etc.
This is a space with a lot of low hanging fruits. And minor fixes may end up doing a lot of good.
Firstly, because there's needed some way to filter people. If you get 100 applicants, you can't make a detailed consideration. But if only 30 have degrees, it's much easier. So there is a signalling effect.
But secondly, and more importantly, because you need somewhere to have these kids. If there's ten million jobs and ten million two hundred thousand jobs, you'll get problems. This is also why many countries had military service, to further improve on the unemployment figures.
"We didn't raise [the school leaving age] to enable them to learn more! We raised it to keep teenagers off the job market and hold down the unemployment figures."
Prison is just a logical extension of this. If they weren't in prison, they would be unemployed and causing all sorts of trouble.
In major cities like LA, bail for misdemeanors can be $80,000 if someone misses a court date. And the jails are horrific, they force you to be racist especially if you’re Hispanic or black.
There’s so many LAPD/LASD scandals that it’s hard to conceptualize. The FBI spent millions installing videocameras throughout the jails to stop the rampart torture and abuse of inmates by LA County Sheriff Deputies. The longtime Sheriff went to federal prison over it. And this was after a 10-year supervisory role of the DoJ and hundred million+ spent to stop police report. After it!
Good luck surviving that system without a serious bias towards authority.
Then they just go in again until they're either rehabilitated or dead.
It doesn't functionally matter what happens in there, since it's the same thing as with standardized tests: all tests are inherently fair, regardless of how poorly constructed they are.
The assumption that unenmployed causes all sorts of trouble, and thus should rather be in jail... Sure doesn't sound like a country that values freedom.
There is a much simpler way to solve the problem: reduce the weekly working hours. Instead of working 40 hours, require people to work 35 or less. Instead, what governments around the world are doing is using the excuse of technology to increase the working hours, therefore causing hourly pay to go down and increasing poverty. It is a completely destructive social policy, and we're all paying the price in some way.
The problem here, as always, is that all of the routine jobs that require minimal employee knowledge are being automated. The remaining jobs, even in 'blue collar' areas, now involve job-specific knowledge which takes time and money to impart and which goes stale if not used regularly. It's far less effective to have two part-time engineers design a widget than it is to have one full-time engineer design it. It's even worse having two part-time electricians wiring up a machine, because the handover is going to be messier.
No, I was responding to this: "minor fixes may end up doing a lot of good".
They won't, since the purpose is just to have somewhere to store people. The actual crime isn't very interesting, the thing of importance is that they have somewhere to store them.
Something has to be done. It's either the case that they are productive members of society, in which case they are rarely imprisoned, or that they are not, in which case they often are.
Children aren't productive members of society, therefore we store them in schools until they've grown up. Same principle - I'm not dehumanizing kids, for the record.
The reason there are more prisoners in America is because there's a larger underclass who are forced out of employment for structural reasons. As long as these issues persist (and indeed, they will get far worse), we have to keep the unemployment rate down somehow. Prisons are just the end effect of this requirement.
The important thing to remember is that the alleged crime doesn't actually matter. This is also why corrupt Wall Street bankers rarely get harsh prison sentences. Why would they, when they're going to be able to find a job without much trouble anyway?
Or the failure may be on your end, believing that "many people are sensitive to data collection" while in fact, most people don't give a dusty fuck about it and happily share everything for saving a few bucks a month.
Hackernews is NOT the people. HN represents a TINY TINY fraction of users.
That's why we should give a fuck on their behalf. In a techno-capital society, it's too much to expect normal people to have to know the technical details of all of these things.
I don't know anything about water treatment or nuclear power, but I still expect the people working in those industries to be held to extremely high standards of competence, virtue and accountability.
We should have the same standards. We don't, so instead we need to demand regulations for these monsters.
Civilized societies don't tolerate "vampires" and cannibals walking among them (or lording from on high). They eliminate them. Eventually the people will wake up.
You're saying this group of "most people" knows what's being sent, that they're exercising informed consent? Surely you aren't hanging this argument on "common sense."
They don't care. Until you can show them you know how often they're on Grindr and where their tricks live.
Or that they got a prescription filled. For Valtrex.
What would be helpful -- but that I am adamantly against -- would be tons of data drops, in communities across the nation, of local church leaders and local community leaders.
It's true, until you show them how much data is collected and who is buying and selling the information without their consent. Then a significant portion start to recognize the threat. There's a reason none of these companies mention it.
91% of Americans feel that they have lost control of their personal data and privacy. The logical conclusion is that at least that many understand what they have gotten themselves into. That would indicate that a majority of people are exercising informed consent, despite the vast majority of Americans feeling that way, they continue to use the gamut of products and services.
SAP is the one of the few software companies who manages to consistently produce the worst possible user experience. They actually made it into an art form. There is nothing about an SAP product that is usable. Its a big steaming pile of shit. I don't even want to know how the code looks like.
This is just another symptom of why OpenSource often sucks. Instead of somehow coordinating and focusing their efforts, everyone seems to need to start their own spin off "inspired" by other projects.
When do people realize that building a new language is almost always going to fail and only very very few languages ever reach anything close to adoption.
Instead of spending all this time writing your own doomed language, why not try to contribute to a project like LLVM or Rust and add your provable subset there?
The same goes for Linux, which is the paradigm of wasted efforts.
Bjarne Stroustrup never expected C++ to be very widely used. He made it anyway.
Alex Stepanov never thought that anyone would care about his ideas on generic programming. He pursued them anyway. They became the STL.
True, building a new language is almost always going to fail. The problem is, when someone starts working on a new language, they don't know if it's doomed or not. It is good that 1000 people try, because from that we get one language that many people use, and 10 specialized languages that a few people use, and 10 languages that nobody uses but future people steal some of the ideas.
> The same goes for Linux, which is the paradigm of wasted efforts.
Um... what? Wasted because nobody uses it? Very much no. Wasted because it's a duplication of what was there before? To some degree, yes. But not everything in Linux was in Unix before it. And Unix couldn't run all the places that Linux does (smartphones to mainframes). So, no, Linux is not wasted effort.
Just an example of why things don't go the way seem to feel they must:
I do things that are not for work, because I want to do them. I enjoy designing and implementing languages, I love writing compilers and interpreters. So, I don't care one bit if anyone ever sees them or uses them. Of those languages I've designed, the only language I consider minimally complete is one I designed for personal use on personal projects. I have been arguing with friends recently who want me to at least release it to the public, if only to post about it and its quirks on blogs.
I would be utterly shocked if anyone ever wanted to use anything I've built for fun/research, that's why I've never released any of it. Also because of the assumption you make being quite popular, that I somehow owe Open Source or something to help them do things that are interesting to them.
Additionally, telling a developer who is developing what they want for their own reasons to contribute to a project like LLVM or Rust is ridiculous. If these projects aren't what drew my interest why would I want to bend over backwards to change what I'm doing to try and fit it into some existing model.
TL;DR --> I don't program outside of my job for anyone but myself, and that's all that matters. If the ZZ devs want to make a provable dialect of C, that's what they should do.
Wow, this is just yet another display of regulators complete ignorance of technology. They just don't learn. Regulation is about 10-20 years behind the current and their solution is to say: "You have to use this method of doing things"
Yeah right, and next year? What do we do next year? Will we just wait for regulators to approve a new way of doing things every 100 million years?
They optimize for a compromise between short-term gain and long-term gain. In essence, a startup can mathematically proof its software and go bankrupt before they even reach a prototype stage. Or they can shell out utter crap quickly, get some early feedback, funding and beta testers and slowly figure out what to improve first for the biggest bang.
Same goes for giants, like Google. They technically have the resources to prove SOME projects and they DO. For instance, Amazon proves their hardware virtualization software and other core pieces, where bugs would undermine the safety of the entire cloud.
I am getting a bit sick of "Why is software engineering so bad compared to XYZ". All the people asking are either not in this field or are junior engineers who just don't yet understand why things are the way they are and why writing bug-free, mathematically proven software is infeasible, unnecessary, impractical, undesired, etc.
Consider another analogy. When building a house, how expensive is it to decide that you actually want to have a ceiling with 5 meters high in the second floor, because the buyer of that floor wants higher ceilings? Simple: Tear down the building and start over...
In software? Usually it comes down to adding an IF-statement or some such. Software follows completely different economic principles and serves completely different needs.
There is at least one dimension though where this problem currently shines through: Self-Driving Cars.
I think auto-pilots in self-driving cars SHOULD follow the same rigor as airplane auto-pilots and they are most certainly not doing that, which will and already has resulted in lost lives.