No one is winning economic wars. Not even the rich who get to play both sides. They’re just avoiding losses, if you’re in the position to do war profiteering you would have made money anyway.
I don’t understand why money is being funnelled into an economic war rather than, aham, attempts at speeding up the dictators transition into a different state of consciousness ( or lack there of).
I genuinely believe that would be the most effective use of money. Get someone to, you know, do the thing, blame it on one of the countless possible usual suspects and cut a deal with whoever emerges victorious from the ensuing power struggle.
People will say “you don’t know if the next one will be worse”. Sure, but, my argument would be Stalin. Stalin was repudiated after his death. People went along just because they were terrified of him. I don’t think the situation would be much different now.
I don’t know. Just my two cents. I don’t like war, economic or otherwise. The sooner it stops the better it will be for everyone.
At the start of this year, I was in Cuba. While in Cuba, I opened my bank app to check my balance. Just that, not to make any transactions.
I am a EU citizen. I only have EU bank accounts. The app I used was of a EU bank. There are no EU sanctions against Cuba at this time or at the time I was there. I also have no relation to the USA, I was never there or have business there.
A few days after opening my bank app ( again, read only, no transaction ) I received a threatening email from my EU bank saying I might be in violation of sanctions and it is prohibited to use the bank in a list of jurisdictions ( basically the ones mentioned in the post minus the last thee ) and the bank reserves the right to terminate my account.
As you can imagine, this was very concerning. Fortunately nothing came of it.
But still, I find it ridiculous the bank threatened to close my account just for being in a country that, at least for the jurisdictions that concern me, is a normal country.
I have no doubt this was an automated message. The only thing that prevented my bank account from being terminated was the suspicious activity flag triggered the email handler and not the delete account handler.
On the Cuba issue specifically the EU and Canada many years ago basically told the US to "f off." Way back in the 90s in the beginning of the Helms Burton act days. I know the US occasionally makes threatening but unenforceable noises, but I'm pretty sure the EU drew a firm line on US overreach on Cuba. The mechanisms behind the US trade blockade of Cuba are considered to breach the sovereignty of other nations.
(As a Canadian I've been to Cuba many times with no issues; however a friend's father worked for a nickel mining company and spent time there overseeing their operations in Cuba and he can no longer travel to the US among other things.)
There's no "blockade" of US against the dictatorial communist regime of Cuba, just an embargo. which is totally different. Proof of that is the thousand of Canadians that go to Cuba to have cheap sex with poor people including minors, something they cannot do on their country. With a blockade you could not do that.
Basically the Cuban government is a mafia, that never pays back what it owes to other countries on top of intentionally impoverishing its own people and violation all sort of human rights there. making paper laws for the world while doing anything they want one on the inside to its slaves citizens. In Cuba you can go to jail for 30 years just for pacifically and silently protesting on the street with a t-shirt saying: "Patria y Vida"
The question isn't "does Cuba do shitty things?", though.
The question is a) "why is Cuba singled out over places like China that do similar (and often worse) shitty things?" b) "why are we ignoring decades of failure of the embargo to induce any meaningful change?"
Exactly. And I would add that the shitty things about regime in Cuba are somewhat contiguous with the previous shitty (Batista) regime. Both repressive. Both awful. The biggest appreciable difference is: American vs not-American (former Soviet) control/domination.
I think Obama at least sensed that the best way to get Cuba into a more functional state and better neighbour was to take the "but we're embargoed!" excuse away from the regime there. Trump undid that.
BTW the only time I came across sex tourism in Cuba, it was indeed a creepy guy with two young (probably minor) girls. In a cafe in Havana. But the guy was not Canadian, he was American. And repulsive.
Know or assume what? That the email was automated? Yeah, I mean I don’t know 100% but I highly doubt a human analysed the situation and typed an email.
What seems more likely to me is, a request came from my app to some bank server. The server detected the request coming from Cuba and flagged the account as having suspicious activity, that in turn triggering an automated message.
Maybe there was indeed a guy somewhere in an office who saw one request to my account coming from Cuba and decided to have some fun and said he’ll turn my account off. I don’t know. Whatever it is, it’s creepy it happened.
This is precisely why I would rather have my data tracked by China rather than the US. Only one of those would get other countries to fuck me over for some arbitrary reason.
I found well written and maintained readme files to be useful. That and redundancy in terms of people who know the code base.
The best readme files write in english what the mode does, a sort of heat-map of the code ( often some parts are more used then others ) and pitfalls.
I’m also a big fan of short and succinct comments in appropriate places. I once broke production because I saw a private key being written to kafka. It felt odd so I removed that. Turns out something was reading that private key. There’s now a comment saying “When checkin data, double check this other module”
But the best thing is to have shared knowledge. I don’t think it’s useful or practical for regular engineers to know everything but the tech leads should be able to provide guidance across the larger cod base.
One of the most interesting books in the Bible at least from my perspective is Job. Unlike all other books, it’s sort of a standalone. It’s time is not specified and the place is not in a usual biblical setting.
Most people know it as that one time God made a wager with Satan but the interesting part to me is when Job is taken on this whirlwind tour of creation and all complexity of the world is laid before him and he is made to see his smallness and insignificance contrasted to Gods greatness.
If you want to give it a secular spin, you can think of God as the realisation this universe is far larger and far more complicated than any of us can even begin to comprehend. It is the realisation the lifetime of planets, of stars, let alone human life is but the blink of an eye on a cosmic scale. It is the realisation you mean nothing, you life and experience and love and knowledge and everything you hold dear is a meaningless blip, unnoticed and soon forgotten by a universe you simply cannot comprehend. You are, to quote the good book, dust, and unto dust you shall return.
This is what contemplating God is. And living a righteous and good life in spite of this realisation of meaninglessness is what wisdom and godliness is.
This has to be one of the best explanations of Job I’ve read yet. Listening to many preachers/pastors they always try to spin it in revelationary ways, and maybe that’s true, but the comparison aspect is much greater imo.
Germany is a very bad example to follow. In many areas and especially in work culture and innovation.
If someone changing jobs frequently is considered a red flag, that’s a failure of imagination on the part of the prospective employer. You look and see a “reliable employee” I look and see a no-nonsense individual who knows his worth and interests and is not afraid to pursue that.
In my experience hire fast fire fast works best. Because the really good ones don’t get fired.
It’s not the best, far from it, but it was fascinating to me so I will share.
I used to work for a large newspaper. Engineering wasn’t the focus of the business, it was only a means to an end, it was just something they needed to have a competitive website. As a result, the churn rate was very high. But more interesting there was also a very high return rate. Engineers would come and go and return and leave again all the time.
As a result, the code base was a path work of various engineers with various skill level, different directions by different heads of engineering, repurposed old projects, legacy code and last minute additions by urgent request from the editors, among others.
The part I was most familiar with was what I can only describe as a sort of next.js but unlike it, it wasn’t planned or designed but rather it sort of grew organically over the years.
The fascinating thing to me was precisely this phenomenon. Some projects have a clear design and purpose and are built so from the start. Sort of like a building or a mechanical clock.
Others just evolve over time, they change, mutate, evolve, incorporate other bits. More like a biological organism or perhaps nature taking back a derelict settlement.
At first as you can imagine it was difficult to wrap my head around it. But in time, I started to see the beauty in it. It had historical bits. There was code written in 2010 that ran in 2020. Others you could tell little habits of the writer. Not everything gets stamped out by the linter. There was this guy who wrote “class ClassName extends React[“Component”]” - I have no idea why but I would run into code written by him and immediately recognise, ah yes, that’s that guy.
It’s certainly not an example of a good code base, but to me was interesting being able to see the code as a living organism with a history and fingerprints of it’s creators rather than a well designed machine.
The book "A Deepness in the Sky" features people living on an ship whose operating system is thousands of years old. One of the main characters is considered a software archaeologist of sorts - he's an engineer, but in a sense also a historical researcher.
I can't emphasize enough that this notion is only a side point in the story and not a main aspect of the plot, sadly, so I wouldn't go reading it in hopes of hearing more. (Although it is a great book regardless.)
I have often considered trying to write a scifi novel centered around this idea because I find it so fascinating.
The "software archeologist" idea has lived rent free in my head ever since I read the novel nearly twenty years ago. It's an absolutely fascinating premise, one I can most definitely see being viable to grow into a fully-fledged novel. I would definitely read that.
We're half-way there already. I've been telling people that the volume of software written has exploded exponentially, and the real skill anyone in IT has now is not knowing how to use a piece of software on a computer, but simply knowing that a piece of software exists to solve a problem.
These days I work largely in a cloud / devops role, and I can't even begin to list everything that I ought to be using but can't because there aren't enough hours in the day to keep up with all of the new developments. That's within a single language, a single web framework, and a single cloud provider!
I see projects where architecture astronauts stitch together multiple clouds, multiple languages, and some random junk on-prem that was installed over a decade ago by someone who has passed away since then. Within the expected lifetime of such a system, you'll need a software archaeologist to figure it out!
I regularly describe my day job (which consists in reading a 10-year old, arcane & barely readable Spring code base) as me working as a software archeologist. :)
> I can't emphasize enough that this notion is only a side point in the story and not a main aspect of the plot
Is it sprinkled throughout the story, or a mostly uninterrupted block of text? As in: is there an easily findable chunk of the book one could read for that idea alone? If so and you could provide a few keywords or a direct quote, I’d be interested in grabbing the book to read that.
I just went and glanced over the text by searching a pdf for a few key terms - no, it's really just sprinkled. The idea doesn't get much attention and is mostly mentioned in passing.
There is the bit where the story of Pham’s youth is told. He was third son of a King on a medieval–tech world (one with ancient stories of flying machines and long–distance communication devices) when some traders from a distant world landed. To everyone’s surprise they were human, and had expected this world to have a much higher technology level when they arrived. Pham’s dad did some kind of deal where his son Pham was given to the traders as an apprentice; even Pham didn’t know the details. Pham spent the next 20 years or so living on the ship because he refused to use the suspended–animation system (too coffin–like). He learned use use the many layers of emulation to use older and older programs, and eventually learned even trivial details. For example, he learned that the epoch of the time system used by the traders wasn’t actually the date of the first moon landing, but was a couple of years after that. He even hypothesized that over the millennia, many ship’s captains would have installed back doors in the system that might now never be rediscovered (which turns out to be foreshadowing :).
One funny detail I remember is a throw–away line where someone rapidly keys in “a column of text”. If you’re paying attention you can combine that with names like Pham, Vinh, Nau, and Qung Ho, the rarity of the red–headed gene, and the descriptions of some traders from the far end of human space you can reconstruct how things went after Humanity reached the stars.
This is a natural development as the field matures. I've worked in codebases that had roots in the 1980s, and large chunks of code survived virtually unmodified from the 90s. I'm sure some here could tell stories of even older codebases.
Living codebases that have such old roots but have seen gradual maintenance and refactoring such that the whole thing didn't degenerate into spaghetti deserve a lot of respect in my opinion.
People here on HN have compared the evolution of large and old code base to the evolution of DNA before and I think it makes perfect sense: E.g., in both cases, complexity has grown organically over the years/millennia and logic tends to be spread out over dozens of files/genes; change one line of code/gene and suddenly it will impact lots of other things; et cetera.
It's not about conflating freedom of speech and having a platform. It's about discrimination by businesses. We have laws in place preventing businesses from discriminating. A shop cannot say "we don't allow black people here" and hide under the excuse of "oh but there's plenty of other shops you can go to". A platform should not be able to saw "we don't allow X people here" and hide under the excuse of "oh but there's plenty of other platforms you can go to".
> Or to be blocked from being able to say it out loud
Proponents of hate speech laws and their silent enablers would be one answer. Certainly not the only one.
> I think what you mean is that people are calling for internet platforms to kick out certain groups. This is in no way a call against freedom of speech.
You keep telling yourself self that. Especially when social values will change again as they always do and you will find your self shut off from society. You just keep telling yourself that’s not a loss of free speech.
> I am not sure why people suddenly believe that being for 'free speech' means that other people have to provide private infrastructure for those people to spread their speech.
I am not sure why people suddenly believe that being for ‘equality between the races' means that other people have to provide private shops for those black people to shop in - Someone with your thinking not that far away in the past
Tell me, should shop owners be allowed to ban the blacks from their shops? Or is it just the backers that have to make cakes for the gays? Or perhaps it’s the age old “one rule for thee and another for me”?
> Free Speech was never about requiring private citizens to provide a platform
Then why are there laws like ADA or title VII of the Civil Rights Act?
Give me a break. You can’t have it both ways. Just admit it, drop the pretence, be honest. Just say it out loud. You believe there are undesirable groups in society and those groups should not enjoy the same rights and opportunities as the rest.
And once you admit to your self that is what you actually believe, reflect for just one second and understand in whose philosophical company you find yourself in.
Those laws were made to protect specific groups and their basic human rights to operate in a society. You have you no right to force me to host your opinion however. Especially when that are dozens (hundreds?) of hosts that will pretty much allow anything if they will allow Gab, Stormfront, 4chan, etc.
We agreed as a society business are not allowed to discriminate. If businesses cannot discriminate, then your business should indeed be forced to host whatever content I put there, no matter how repulsive you may find it, as long as it is within the boundaries of the law.
Close the door to this and the door to discrimination will open.
For now, it will be in your favour. At some point, societal values will change again. And you will find yourself on the “wrong side of history”.
That is why we made anti discrimination laws and that is why we should stick to this.
It's troubling that you're unable to see the difference between restricting hate speech and protecting marginalized people so they can participate equitably in society.
I don’t think it’s urbanisation. In the west, the twentieth century had urbanisation and was far more open to free speech while many parts on the world didn’t and were more censorship prone. In fact, in the middle east for example, one could argue in the middle of the twentieth century there was less urbanisation but more openness to western ideas and less religious oppression than it is now.
I think the shift away from free speech we are seeing is the result of decades of indoctrination and people being goaded into emotional reactions via social media.
I genuinely don’t see any functional difference between so called “social justice activists” railing people up and fanatical preachers delivering fire and brimstone sermons. It’s the same phenomenon manifested in different forms.
I will also add, most censorship prone people tend to accuse their opponents of lacking “critical thinking”. While at the same time, missing the point that is precisely what opposition does. You look at the other side, you criticise it’s premises, you criticise it’s assumptions, you criticise it’s goals, you look if the stated goals align with the actual results and criticise the discrepancy. You really can’t have critical thinking if you can’t, you know, criticise.
I think we had more free speech, and more critical thinking in the past because criticism was allowed. Nowadays, if you criticise anything that goes against what some would term The Cathedral, you will suffer severe consequences.
I think there might be a miss alignment of values here.
It all depends on what you see the purpose of the company to be.
Some people are dedicated to the company as an entity of it’s own and the product they build and the people working there. It is a valid and respectable way of looking at things. From your post, I have a sense you might fall into this category. Assuming you subscribe to this point of view, it makes sense to consider the retreat an abuse.
Other people do not see companies like this. Instead, they see the company as an means to an end. A tool to use for enhancing financial opportunities and abilities and living a full, luxurious, rich and comfortable life. I believe this too is a valid and respectable way of approaching things. This is how I personally view companies and their purpose. With this point of view, a vacation expensed on the company is not an abuse. It’s the intended purpose.
If you would like to see a decent portrait of this different philosophies I would recommend seeing the difference between Dany Crane and Paul Lewiston in Boston Legal.
Of course it might also be the case this was a miss alignment of business strategy and not fundamental values. If he invited the business partners perhaps he saw it as a business opportunity to renew contracts, perhaps upsell more services, etc.
Whatever the case might be, I think a very frank discussion between the two of you is in order. Business strategy should be aligned, yes, but far more importantly, fundamental outlook on what the company is for.
Best advice I can give you is, don’t leave this unaddressed but address it in a professional manner in order to understand where the other co-funder is coming from. Once you understand his position you will be in a position where you can make an informed decision about your future and the future of the company.
I don’t understand why money is being funnelled into an economic war rather than, aham, attempts at speeding up the dictators transition into a different state of consciousness ( or lack there of).
I genuinely believe that would be the most effective use of money. Get someone to, you know, do the thing, blame it on one of the countless possible usual suspects and cut a deal with whoever emerges victorious from the ensuing power struggle.
People will say “you don’t know if the next one will be worse”. Sure, but, my argument would be Stalin. Stalin was repudiated after his death. People went along just because they were terrified of him. I don’t think the situation would be much different now.
I don’t know. Just my two cents. I don’t like war, economic or otherwise. The sooner it stops the better it will be for everyone.