Maybe? But it destabilized the Middle East, caused the migrant crisis in Europe, the migrant crisis caused a rise in right wing movements in Europe, it caused the rise of ISIS (lots of Iraqi ex-military), ISIS was involved in the the civil war in Syria, it caused a loss of faith in the American government, created a generation of disillusioned combat vets, so on and so forth.
I really think we're still recovering from the damage caused by Bush administration.
I agree with GP. I would amend their claim with "most problems* could be solved by building high density housing and services in areas with jobs." I.e., build real cities.
Building homes on federal land in the middle of no where will not do anything for people. We just need to allow people to build housing where there is a demand for labor.
Some things I think would be solved include:
- the housing crisis
- mobility => it would be easier for people to move to other parts of the country because they would be less tied to their homes
- labor mismatches
- climate change => less reliance on cars
- funding infrastructure => more dense infrastructure means you don't have as much infrastructure to repair and you have more people paying for it
- city government budgets => high density areas are more tax efficient
- home insurance => the homes on the outskirts of cities are most likely to burn down; if housing is cheap the cost to insure it will be cheaper as well
IMO, if housing is 30-60% of peoples budgets and transportation is another 10-20%, if you can bring those costs down you can de-stress a lot of people. That might make politics less intense too.
* "Most problems" is not strictly accurate. But "more problems than you might think are directly related to housing" doesn't really roll off the tongue.
I live in America. I have all my life. I've ridden on nice trains in Europe and Japan. The culture in the last 80-100 years has revolved around cars, but before that relied heavily on trains.
I much prefer riding a spacious train to riding in a cramped airplane. I like to be able to get up and walk around while the train is traveling. I prefer the minimal security processes on a train to an airplane.
Driving 6-10 hours is pretty miserable. I would much rather take a train or fly unless there are specific reasons why I need to drive.
It may be like comparing apples and oranges, but some people prefer apples. The good thing is that you can still eat oranges if you like.
Right but have you flown for business every few days like that? It seems like you’re still thinking about leisure travel between LA and SF.
My whole point was about business flight. Sure for leisure I’ll take a train. But if I’m flying for work I’d rather deal with a consistent (mostly, compared to any rail I’ve taken) experience.
I would not describe LA to SF as a consistent experience. I had an 8:30 PM flight delayed until 1:30 AM. Actually, the only consistency I've had with those flights is that they are consistently delayed.
I've heard that the flight delays cascade throughout the day. So if the first flight is 10 minutes delayed, all SF-LA flights are delayed for the rest of the day. Since SFO has a lot of fog, my understanding is that it's often delayed.
Maybe it's okay coming from Burbank, but I live on the Westside so I have to take LAX.
I would love to have another option. Ideally, a train would decrease the load on the airlines so that they could handle delays better.
To answer your question directly, no I don't have to do work trips every couple of days, but I do have work trips from LA to SF every couple of months.
Yeah, I think we should keep that aspect of prop 13. That is what it was originally billed as.
It just doesn't make sense that golf courses pay taxes that are more aligned with the 70's property values.
If there was ever a major change to prop 13 taxes, I think we would need to phase in the new taxes over a five to ten year period. Otherwise, the market would be thrown into chaos.
You would need to overturn the proposition directly. The state Congress can't overturn it so you would need another proposition. That's a "simple" majority vote, but it's the third rail of California politics. We almost got it removed for businesses, but COVID happened and people were not in the mood for raising taxes.
Last time I checked (2020) there were already a few rejected proposals to shorten the syntax for this. It seemed like they were pretty exasperated by them at the time.
> I know HN has a bit of a click-bait love relationship with Erlang/Elixir but it hasn't translated over to adoption and there are companies that are just burning money trying to do what you get out of the box for free with the Erlang stack.
Elixir is "bad" because it is not a friendly language for people who want to be architecture astronauts at the code level (you can definitely be an architecture astronaut at the process management level but that's a very advanced concept). And a lot of CTOs are architecture astronauts.
That's the opposite of my experience. I tend to get those "architect astronauts" in teams using other languages platforms, and the folks I work with Erlang or Elixir tend to be pragmatic and willing to dig down the stack to troubleshoot problems.
> When you go too far up, abstraction-wise, you run out of oxygen. Sometimes smart thinkers just don’t know when to stop, and they create these absurd, all-encompassing, high-level pictures of the universe that are all good and fine, but don’t actually mean anything at all.
> These are the people I call Architecture Astronauts. It’s very hard to get them to write code or design programs, because they won’t stop thinking about Architecture. They’re astronauts because they are above the oxygen level, I don’t know how they’re breathing. They tend to work for really big companies that can afford to have lots of unproductive people with really advanced degrees that don’t contribute to the bottom line.
Joel was wrong about one thing, they also work at startups. My roommate worked at a startup where the senior frontend developer was basically building react in svelte + zod. Once a week he would see all his work deleted and completely rewritten in a fever dream PR that the senior produced. Completely impossible for grug developer to follow what's going on, his job eventually became "running this guy's code through chatgpt and adding comments and documentation".
My personal opinion as a fan and adopter of the stack is that the benefit is often seen down the line, with the upfront adoption cost being roughly the same.
E.g. the built in telemetry system is fantastic, but when you are first adopting the stack it still takes a day or two to read the docs and get events flowing into - say - DataDog, which is roughly the same amount of time as basically every other solution.
The benefit of Elixir here is that the telemetry stack is very standardized across Elixir projects and libraries, and there are fewer moving pieces - no extra microservices or docker containers to ship with everything else. But that benefit comes 2 years down the line when you need to change the telemetry system.
These incremental benefits don't translate to an order of magnitude more productivity, or stability, or profitability. Given the choice, as a business owner, future proofing is about being able to draw from the most plentiful and cheapest pool of workers. The sausage all looks the same on the outside.
That is not true, especially with Section 174 (for the US). Right now, if you want to hire an Elixir engineer, you're better off finding a generalist willing to learn and use Elixir, and you would probably get someone who is very capable.
With Section 174 in play in the US, it tends to drive companies hiring specialists and attempting to use AI for the rest of it.
My own experience is that ... I don't really want to draw from the most plentiful and cheapest pool of workers. I've seen the kind of tech that produces. You basically have a small handful of software engineers carrying the rest.
Elixir itself is a kind of secret, unfair advantage for tech startups that uses it.
>you're better off finding a generalist willing to learn and use Elixir, and you would probably get someone who is very capable.
This is a thing I really don't get. People are like "but what about the hiring pool". A competent software engineer will learn your stack. It's not that hard to switch languages. Except maybe going from Python to C++.
I'm biased, because I worked at WhatsApp, but it may be one of the most famous users of Erlang... and from its start until when I left (late 2019) I think we only hired three people with Erlang experience. Everyone else who worked in Erlang learned on the job.
We seemed to do pretty well, although some of our code/setup wasn't very idiomatic (for example, I'm pretty sure we didn't use the Erlang release feature properly at all)
We just pushed code, compiled, and hotloaded... Pretty much ignoring the release files; we had them, but I think the contents weren't correct and we never changed the release numbers, etc.
For otp updates, we would shutdown beam in an orderly fashion, replace the files, and start again. (Potentially installing the new one before shutting down, I can't remember).
Post facebook, more of boring OS packages and slow rollouts than hotloading.
There's no killer app, as in a reason to add it to your tech stack.
The closest I've come across was trying to maintain an ejabberd cluster and add some custom extensions.
Between mnesia and the learning curve of the language itself, it was not fun.
There are also no popular syntax-alikes. There is no massive corporation pushing Erlang either directly or indirectly through success. Supposedly Erlang breeds success but it's referred to as a "secret" weapon because no one big is pushing it.
Erlang seems neat but it feels like you need to take a leap of faith and businesses are risk averse.
Well jayd did the same thing as that small company (which I joined in 2011 when it was small and left in 2019 when it was not so small), run ejabberd to solve a problem. In our case, Erlang subsumed pretty much the rest of our service over time. When I started, chat was Erlang, but status messages, registration, and contacts were PHP with MySQL, media was PHP (with no database), but those all got sucked into Erlang with mnesia because it was better for us.
But I guess it doesn't always work that way. FB chat was built on ejabberd and then migrated away.
Also, a lot of the power of Erlang is the OTP (Open Telecom Platform) even more than Erlang, itself. You have to internalize those architectural decisions (expect crashes--do fast restart) to get the full power of Erlang.
Elixir seems like it has been finding more traction by looking more like mainstream languages. In addition, languages on the BEAM (like Elixir) made the BEAM much better documented, understood and portable.
Anyway, the options seem to be either summoning transcendent threats by superficial syntax or by well entrenched semantics. There seems to be no other choice.
If you have a bunch of people who work at companies that are trying to maximize eyeballs then they shuffle around to different companies, are they going to adopt the goals of the new company? Or is their existing perspective and skills going to shape the new company?
I imagine it's a bit of both. Given how big Google and Meta are and how much talent circulates among big tech companies, this might cause companies to lean a bit more heavily into the attention economy than they might otherwise need to.
Also, attention is just easier to measure than satisfaction. Makes it easier to fall down that path.
> Also, attention is just easier to measure than satisfaction
This is a big part of it. Measuring how long someone stares at the screen is easy. It is in many cases a reasonable proxy for satisfaction - provided you mostly only care about the user as a source of revenue.
The social medias have demonstrated fairly concretely that it's a poor proxy if you care about the user's wellbeing. But they already got their bag, so they are hardly incentivised to fix that now.
I used to own a part of the Facebook homepage and maximizing its metrics was my job.
They told us they cared about wellbeing. I made a feature that demonstrably improved wellbeing, and we had lots of data and surveys etc to prove it.
But it decreased watch-time on shortform (what we used to call TikTok style) videos so the Director made me delete it. That started my disillusionment process that eventually made me quit.
While it initially makes a reasonable proxy you end up polluting the measurements gradually by engineering for maximum screen time. The Artificialy created screentime is increasingly unrelated to satisfaction and ultimately not at all.
Take how Google sorts results by popularity while it is also the main source of "popularity".
I wouldn’t say they are hardly incentivized now. They were never incentivized.
What company cares about a users well being? The only companies that might care are ones where the population growth rate of humanity is the bottleneck on their new user acquisition and those companies are slowly morphing into sovereign nations already
Indeed. It was however expedient to pay lip service to the idea of promoting user wellbeing at various times (i.e. shortly post-Cambridge analytica at Facebook)
I really think we're still recovering from the damage caused by Bush administration.