Remember when memes were lauded as a part of the millennial culture? Now when they are used for something you disagree with, it's seen as 'evil', 'wrong', or 'unethical'.
The problem is that the vast majority of voters are swayed by emotion, not fact.
These sorts of things are only going to get worse, because it is the only way to get people to vote your way. Even if you have a good idea and a sound plan, you need to dress it up in emotion-laced slop to get people to come out and vote for you.
It also doesn't help that the mainstream media, which is a very powerful force in the US when it comes to politics, is biased toward the Democratic party (as seen in the recent Wikileaks emails from the DNC). It means that to counteract this, you need to try another tactic, like posting on the Internet.
Even our leaders are swayed by emotion. Both Obama and Hillary have commented prematurely on important events ('Clockboy' and various police shootings) without having professionals and science weigh in on the actual facts of the events after a real investigation.
This is one of the main problems with our society today: anti-science winning out over facts and assuming someone is guilty before even attempting to see if they are innocent.
There was even a book on the New York best sellers list called 'Weapons of Math Destruction' claiming that math and statistics are somehow 'racist'. Think about that for a minute to let it sink in....Facts are now racist.
Social media has made it worse because instead of just having the mainstream media feed us hyperbole and rhetoric, anybody with a Twitter account can do it too.
It has now had some real-world consequences and resulted in many people getting hurt and even getting killed in riots over half-truths, hearsay, and rumors.
If you want shit posting to stop, we have to live in a society where it has to stop working so well. Maybe even holding people responsible for posting lies that lead to riots or death.
Edit: sigh. I always try to have intellectual conversations here on HN and am always disappointed. Most people here seem to just want to hear the current San Francisco narrative about the world and live only within that bubble. It's actually really sad.
> There was even a book on the New York best sellers list called 'Weapons of Math Destruction' claiming that math and statistics are somehow 'racist'. Think about that for a minute to let it sink in....Facts are now racist.
I don't know where you read that but you really, really, really need to learn about that book before repeating it, much less complaining about the lack of intellectual conversation.
Cathy O'Neil has a Ph.D in mathematics (https://www.genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/id.php?id=38230), worked as a quant, and most definitely is not claiming that math is racist. Rather, she's talking about how MISUSING math – and especially machine learning – can reinforce biases which were already present or introduced by sampling error. She's actually calling for greater mathematical understanding so people keep these things in mind and avoid them:
Many people here don't realize what it costs a business, in taxes, to employ someone. I think if more people realized this, we would have less people demanding a $15 pay-raise for minimum wage workers.
Let's be really real for a sec: minimum wage does not, in any meaningful way, drive demand-pull inflation. Minimum wage doesn't even track the rate of inflation. This is macro-averse horsepuckey.
This position of abolition of minimum wage is not seriously held by any macroeconomic experts except on the extreme far right. There is a reason that wage floors, in lieu of GMI, are accepted by even centrists: because the alternatives are literally unconscionable.
Further: capital is greedy. It's functionally unable to be anything else. Throwing labor a bone once in a while is not, desperate hair-shirting aside, going to somehow kill it and destroy the jobs, homgz.
'serverless' apps are not really 'serverless'. You are just allowing another company to run the actual server infrastructure.
While this might be good for large companies, it's dangerous for startups. Someone else has complete control over the infrastructure of your business and it not only makes it difficult for you to make simple changes that could save you money, but it's very expensive compared to traditional servers that you run yourself.
I run all of my own servers and it would cost me 10X to run it on AWS.
Too many startups outsource their infrastructure or create a business that relies completely on another business platform like Twitter/Facebook and then get squashed when things change or the platform doesn't want you to have too much power.
The book called 'Hatching Twitter' shows exactly this mindset: 3rd party API users were cut-off because the execs at Twitter realized that only a few of the 3rd party apps together had enough of a user base to compete with Twitter.
Which is why all of these services follow the same handbook: have generous access to the API, after this brings in and builds the user base, Cut-off access and severely limit the API (to prevent users from leaving).
One other step is charging so much money for the API access that it bankrupts most of these businesses and then launch a competing app.
I think you're missing a huge point there in terms of time to market and stuff an organisation wants to deal with. No matter how good I get at server ops, Amazon will always be way better than me. They probably have patents on how to cool data centres. A small company, like mine, has to choose its battles if it's to launch products quickly, and competing in server maintenance isn't what will make those products better.
And sure, I can self-host something and it's going to be cheaper if you just measure the cost of hardware. but count in the cost of humans maintaining that, patching the OS, dealing with security, working the network etc. You might be particularly good at that (and if you're running all your stuff you probably are), but I'm not. And I don't want to be. I want to focus on building stuff that I care about. So paying a bit more for server hosting works out a lot cheaper than managing all that myself, as I can focus on other things.
On the whole serverless thing - yes, it's a buzzword, but people tend to look at it from a technical perspective which is all wrong. the financial side is what matters. the tech isn't really that exciting there -- sure, there's a lot of new tech like containers, but the major change is that I'm only paying for stuff when it does something useful, instead of paying for servers to sit idle. But that's a topic for a completely different discussion. I published some of my thoughts on it here: https://gojko.net/2016/08/27/serverless.html
like I said, it's all about control. It gives a company like Amazon too much control over your business..especially when it comes to price.
Most hosting providers take care of any hardware issues and open source has come a long way. It's not that difficult to manage and scale a medium-traffic website.
In all likelihood, you will never need the level of scaling Amazon provides and are overpaying for the service.
I've been running web businesses for over a decade and have seen many companies fold because they give too much control to another business.
I don't like these types of boxes because many of the people that get it think they can set it and forget it. When security updates fail in the background (or they know nothing about them in the first place), it gets 0wned.
If you can find a stable enough Internet connection (which costs a lot more in Asia), you will need to be very disciplined to actually get anything done.
All of the expats I met were 20 something college-aged students that just wanted to party, drink, and smoke weed every day or people that were rejected from their home country for one reason or another and can only find a job as an English teacher because most schools don't do their due diligence and weed out bad workers.
The rest are a small percentage of people that are in the same boat as you and were transferred for a short amount of time (usually 6-months to a year) for work.
It can be very isolating, unless all you want to do is party and get drunk. I was lucky because I had some other like-minded friends that came with me and I had studied the main language before I came. Almost all of my friends were locals, not expats.
I finally had to leave because my business was suffering and tripled my income after I came back.
Friendship needs to be earned, or it won't really mean anything. Bullying is a terrible thing and needs to be stopped, but this will do little to help out the person being bullied in the long-run.
I was bullied in middle school and finding a good group of friends is what stopped it. But I had to do it myself and earn it.
I feel like many startup founders, including Patrick, build the technology and hope the business will follow...usually with an unsuccessful outcome.
He's great at marketing. He should have spent a year building a network of employers with lower-tech solutions and then expanded it out with starfighter.
I've been following Patrick since the BoS days and all of his products have been pretty low profit. Enough to support himself only (some, not even this much) (I'm not including consulting, only products or services)
Money is the lifeblood of all companies and you will need it to truly change the world.
5 years of 1 year experience repeated 5 times is better than someone that will introduce spaghetti code and security flaws simply because they've never experienced it.
It takes years to figure out patterns (when to use and not use them), good coding practices, avoiding newbie mistakes like sql injection and xss and how to actually make a deadline (its not easy to finish a project when you also have to learn the language and other skills in addition to the task at hand).
As a business owner, I don't want someone learning the above on the job and on my dime.
There is a company in MI that tried this called Compuware back in the 90s. It was a complete and utter disaster.
The problem is that the vast majority of voters are swayed by emotion, not fact.
These sorts of things are only going to get worse, because it is the only way to get people to vote your way. Even if you have a good idea and a sound plan, you need to dress it up in emotion-laced slop to get people to come out and vote for you.
It also doesn't help that the mainstream media, which is a very powerful force in the US when it comes to politics, is biased toward the Democratic party (as seen in the recent Wikileaks emails from the DNC). It means that to counteract this, you need to try another tactic, like posting on the Internet.
Even our leaders are swayed by emotion. Both Obama and Hillary have commented prematurely on important events ('Clockboy' and various police shootings) without having professionals and science weigh in on the actual facts of the events after a real investigation.
This is one of the main problems with our society today: anti-science winning out over facts and assuming someone is guilty before even attempting to see if they are innocent.
There was even a book on the New York best sellers list called 'Weapons of Math Destruction' claiming that math and statistics are somehow 'racist'. Think about that for a minute to let it sink in....Facts are now racist.
Social media has made it worse because instead of just having the mainstream media feed us hyperbole and rhetoric, anybody with a Twitter account can do it too.
It has now had some real-world consequences and resulted in many people getting hurt and even getting killed in riots over half-truths, hearsay, and rumors.
If you want shit posting to stop, we have to live in a society where it has to stop working so well. Maybe even holding people responsible for posting lies that lead to riots or death.
Edit: sigh. I always try to have intellectual conversations here on HN and am always disappointed. Most people here seem to just want to hear the current San Francisco narrative about the world and live only within that bubble. It's actually really sad.