I may be reading in between the lines but I believe OP's point is that HN leans more liberal which in today's political climate means more receptive of negative economic news (thus necessitating more intervention / change of government control) rather than positive economic news.
HN may lean liberal, but that would be primarily because half the commenters here are from western Europe, where even the conservative politics are frequently liberal by US standards.
Younger and on the coast. West of I95 and East of I5 you'll find plenty of young people who may find certain social policy points dated but generally agree with republican ideas.
Actually, there was an article on the front page earlier today talking about this phenomenon (social filter bubbles) but it's long gone because everyone was complaining it was a dupe. Go figure.
Interesting. Thanks, I didn't go there at all and I believe ambiguous statements like these create a lot of the misunderstanding that we see in today's political climate.
Is it more "pro-American" then to cover up negative indicators? People consume weather reports to know if it's going to rain. People consume traffic reports to see where the accidents are. People consume news for the negative indicators. That's not anti-American. That's human.
One HN user proudly posted that he flags everything from guardian.co.uk. When the flag is liberally stroked as a content don't-like/payback button instead of a content spammy or obviously not interesting to tech people you're bound to get these asymmetric presentations.
You can just say that outright next time. It's an anonymous internet forum so it's really not a big deal, and it's very hard to guess what you mean if you aren't clear about it.
OTOH, one can argue that one who's critical is also the most helpful or caring lol.
My comments that expose some 'against the system' stuff always end up getting downvoted tho(actually, at first they get some ups, but then are slowly shot down), so my view always was a "techie" thing... Ppl that would like some adjustments but most aren't radicals.
Another possibility is since here there's more informed ppl from very different places, a lot will make sure to point out weird stuff in American debate, since we all end up getting exposed to it but from a different vantage point.
It’s actually getting quite annoying. Reddit started off with r/programming being by far the largest community. It’s pretty obvious to see how it has drifted with time. I see the same phenomena happen to HN and I come here for tech news. I’d like them to have a subHN for economic news for those that want it. I believe datatau (announces on HN a few years ago) attempted to solve this. I get that people here respect each other’s opinions since we are like minded tech folk, but I’d really rather it was separated.
There's no drift. If you look at the submissions by pg himself (the creator of the site), who stopped years ago, more often than not they weren't "tech news": https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=pg
You are 100% correct. I would even expand it to say that it is very anti-western and frequently anti-capitalist (which is insane given the raison d'être of this site). Anything that paints the US or western culture in a negative light will flourish, meanwhile anything that disagrees with this orthodoxy is flagged to hell.
These perceptions are entirely in the eye of the beholder. People with the opposite views to yours see HN in precisely the opposite way, and are just as indignant about it.
I feel bad for you. Every single one of the comments you have ever made on my posts is some sort of lazy dismissal. I’m sure you get it from all sides and have a truly miserable task, so I can forgive your trite canned responses.
The bias and censorship on HN is a perception, and a perception which happens to be accurate. I would love to “prove it with data” but I have more productive uses for my time than painstakingly collecting information on the disastrous stewardship of an aging internet forum. I am doubtful that many could be convinced of these things anyway, regardless of compelling data or stirring rhetoric. That being said, the clear moderation biases on HN have been noted on certain stories by many people which are often conveniently flagged and memory holed. You pick and choose, or perhaps you allow the flag brigades to pick and choose which stories stay up and get taken down. A great example in recent memory was the James Damore Google memo controversy. Numerous articles and blog posts with hundreds of points and comments were flagged to hell until suddenly a story with the correct narrative floated to the top of HN and stayed there for hours.
Maybe that was the moderation team, or maybe it was the community. Either way, to claim that that episode was given a fair and even handed treatment on this site is complete BS. And there are many other similar examples over the years.
The people on the other side of that controversy have the opposite opinion, and are just as sure of it as you are.
The truth is that these narratives are all made up, based on however what people notice passes through whatever filters they have. That's also why these digressions are so tedious—they're self-referential projections.
I saw what you edited out. Too bad I didn’t grab a screen shot. Why don't you go ahead and tell everybody what you think is the “real reason” behind my comments. I would like to know.
You don't need economic pessimism to make the case for change in government. The malice and corruption in the executive branch makes the case on its own.
Agreed. We can more easily follow the autopilot patterns of commercial flights such that cars can activate autopilot once they have officially entered freeways, and disengages again after exiting.
Doing so can also help spur further investment into the Interstate system, which as an immigrant was one of the best inventions that America had made in creating a higher quality of life than other countries.
Hybrid drivetrains (tiny engines with forced induction and electric motors as a blueprint) plus driver assistance tech is a much brighter near future than trying to wrangle busy city streets and electric charging.
The integrity of engineering excellence should never be sacrificed for profit and/or conveniency in places where it involves human lives. Realistically and pragmatically speaking, you only ever get to have just one single shot at establishing and maintaining that kind of life/death level of trust. Fuck it up, and you're gone- quite literally, mind you.
This is some Challenger O-ring type of shitshow. Accidents are one thing; incompetency or, worse yet, callous indifference is absolutely unacceptable.
The first crash can be compared to the Challenger shitshow. It was a (massive) engineering mistake, which lead to the Lion Air plane crashing. Looking at the history of the 737 in general and the 737-MAX specifically it was rekless, but I'm pretty certain not intentional or foreseen by Boeing.
That massively changed by the fact that they didn't immediately pull the plane after this crash and went into deep analysis mode to really evaluate the cause. Instead they smeared everybody but themselves, developed a completely useless checklist without really knowing or (apparently) caring if it's useful at all and let that deathtrap fly.
The second crash, in my opinion is corporate mass murder for profit. Maybe not legally, but morally most certainly.
"The integrity of engineering excellence should never be sacrificed for profit and/or conveniency in places where it involves human lives."
There is always a trade off, your statement is too bold for a world of limited resources.
We can use engineering to make the roads safer. Spent a trillion USD on road safety will save lives for sure. But maybe it is spend better on cancer R&D efforts?
The safest plane would be the most expensive and most uncompetitive since it needs unlimited resources and unlimited time for being designed.
It's not so much a matter of ressources than of specifically engineering excellence. There's plentiful examples of a much better product that was created with less ressources than the shitty existing competition (this must be commonplace for HN members).
I'm convinced the safest plane is not the most expensive, it's the one designed through sound and clear-sighted engineering.
Since there won't be an ultimately and best product for ever, there is always a way to improve things. Then time and financial restrains come into place again.
Are you an engineer? Your argument sounds naive. Or to give a counter example: In the Soviet Union there were likely more accidents (normalized) compared to the west. Yet, they did not focus on maximizing profits.
I am, and I have experienced many times what I'm talking about.
A simpler yet effective design (may it be initial or rework) comes at a much lower cost than a flawed one, which inevitably aggregates irrelevant complexities.
The F-35 fighter is a good example. Trades many disadvantages (not fast, not good in dog-fighting, tremendous long maintenance time, low payload etc.) for one advantage. The F-35 may or may not be invisible to an able opponent. But this decision is a tremendous difficult one. Based on your argument, it would be better to stick with a simple design. This was worked for the Soviet Union in WW2 (don't build the best tank, build a decent one, build many).
Thanks for the suggested read, sounds interesting indeed.
I'm not comparing simple vs. complex but rather sound vs. flawed, although often sound = simpler than flawed.
The 737 here is yet another example of this :
- the MAX design is flawed : faulty risk assessment of MCAS, seemingly unstable airframe in some configurations
- a likely sound design could be : airframe rework, thorough risk assessment, extra pilot training...
While the flawed design came at a lower initial cost, it will now overrun the cost of a likely sound one (further rework + retrofit + sales/reputation damage + legal), including the cost of a probable longer design phase in the latter.
(I concede that legal/sales costs are not directly technical debt costs).
You're talking about the cost of the product, but what about the cost of redesigning in itself? Including the opportunity cost of delaying the product to keep reworking the design.
> Realistically and pragmatically speaking, you only ever get to have just one single shot at establishing and maintaining that kind of life/death level of trust. Fuck it up, and you're gone- quite literally, mind you.
I wish this statement was held with as much as accountability as this comment implies. But have any of the major outlets been discussing potential prison sentences for Boeing or FAA employees / executives or potentially even board members? If you want accountability in today's age it seems the pressure needs to be applied at the point where financial decisions are held with more precedent than safety of life.
Boeing stock was up today on the glimmer of hope that the "software fix was working". Investors are assuming the stock is on sale and this only impacts Boeing for, what, a few weeks? I said something similar in another comment but I think Volkswagen is going to do more jail time and have more brand detriment than Boeing or the FAA will. Egregious doesn't begin to describe the misdirection of conversation. Why is the focus not yet on who will be sentenced for death over profits?
> Investors are assuming the stock is on sale and this only impacts Boring for, what, a few weeks?
Reminds me of the Equifax breach. Stock tumbles then recovers. Overall, it validates that breaches are not a liability; therefore, additional resources to address future problems could be seen as a moot point.
Same with Boeing. If there is no impact to the company, then why change the business model?
Equifax is not comparable to this. The difference with Equifax is that there has been little actual damage compare to how much data got compromised. With Boeing we've had hundreds who got killed.
If the world was fair they should all (decision makers at Boeing and FAA both) be packed by the lot and send to stand trial in Ethiopia and Indonesia for 300+ murder, which is what I consider this to be.
If you don't have food in your belly and you steal you get jailed. You are not satisfied with your million dollar salary and your billion dollar company profit and don't care if people get killed, you get to have PR firm write how sorry and sincere you are. Justice seems truly blind so many times just not in the way the phrase was coined.
>If the world was fair they should all (decision makers at Boeing and FAA both) be packed by the lot and send to stand trial in Ethiopia and Indonesia for 300+ murder
And they're totally going go get a fair trial and not some sort of kangaroo court to appease the locals?
I actually thought about that a little also but if I have to find a fairer choice between Boeing most likely to get away with a slap in US because big corps almost always do (too big to fail) vs. them getting taken down by a kangeroo court in those two countries it's not hard not to pick a potential kangeroo court.
The difference between Wolkswagen and Boeing is the latter is an american company and hence is probably not going to face billion of dollars of damage from american authorities and current administration. Probably no jail time either.
Agreed. It remains to be seen if Boeing deliberately used a loophole to avoid reclassification of the MAX8. If so, I'm curious to see how this would be different in a court of law. Especially if Boeing is compelled to provide email around the comms with specific regard to MAX8 certification.
Black box high five for the win, amirite?! Roll it back up to the top of the hill and lets see if it records something different...
It's sad, but most faults seem to be like this. First one is treated as an anomaly, second one is treated as the start of a trend. It happens so many times I'm glad I'm not working with human lives.
>The integrity of engineering excellence should never be sacrificed for profit and/or conveniency in places where it involves human lives.
That's just unrealistic. Unless you want plane and car rides to cost as much as a trip to space, after all, since everything would need to be engineered to that level of quality.
Neither safe nor affordable are booleans. They are on a scale, and a dependency exists between them.
Anybody may have a different judgement with respect to exactly where on the scale is appropriate, but we cannot just pretend that there's no trade-off to be made. Or that absolute safety is even a possibility.
It's pretty freaking safe, isn't it? We've literally had zero-fatality years in the US. That doesn't happen through good luck alone. Clearly the manufacturers, regulators, and operators are doing almost everything right.
In my mind, the difference between science and engineering is that science is concerned about what's provably true, whereas engineering (and I include applied math and even medicine here) is about getting to a result.
Therefore, our medicine is not perfectly safe, our cars are not perfectly safe, our building are not perfectly safe, we don't / can't provide 100% health coverage to everyone, and so on... but in aggregate, they make the world a better place, so it's worth it.
Slippery slope here. Why precisely is past performance indicative of future performance beyond some very weak correlations? Analogously, is a person's last relationship truly indicative of their future mating potential?
I understand that /some/ people believe it to be so, but I believe it's wrong to move society towards this. We should be going in the opposite direction- that you are as good as what you are aspiring to and putting in the work to become tomorrow.
I think past performance of a human is generally pretty strong as an indicator.
It's rare (though possible) for someone to turn from a lazy, self-entitled dilettante into a hard-working ace coder. It's rare for someone to turn from an excellent coach and mentor into an insufferable bastard.
> It's rare (though possible) for someone to turn from a lazy, self-entitled dilettante into a hard-working ace coder.
Is it though? In my experience people are good at building things that they care about and bad at building things they don't care about.
If someone has been trapped working on sisyphean bullshit projects I would expect them to do much better on something they cared about, and the initial sorting of people into what they work on is often largely indiscriminate when it comes to what they care about, so I would expect there to be a significant percentage of people underperforming at their current job who would excel elsewhere.
I know at least personally, my job performance has fluctuated wildly depending on whether or not I cared about what I was supposed to do.
If you managed to incentivize me enough to get me to leave what I'm doing well now to go do something that I thought was rent seeking and deeply meaningless, I would most likely perform very poorly, and I've already had the opposite happen where I performed mediocrely in a boring area and then performed incomparably better when I got into doing things I cared about.
Our product centers around growth potential and the belief that every candidate is exceptional in their ideal environment. This means, that even if a reference believes a candidate did not have stellar prior performance, we ask referencers to contextualize their feedback and comment on how to set the candidate up for success in the future. This ties nicely with the example about romantic relationships - sometimes people just aren't right for each other at the time. But, prior rocky relationships are still great learning opportunities for what will work better for us the next time.
> You are as good as what you are aspiring to and putting in the work to become tomorrow
I mean come on, sure 120-150k starting salary out of university is only a thing in SF, Seattle etc but even in other parts software engineers are paid well. 80-90k in some city in midwest where housing is super cheap is a great middle class salary.
How much lower is the starting pay in Boise, or Kansas City or some non-tech hub? My startup company pays well over 100k for college hires with no experience. And other companies pay more. Yes, we are in one of the tech hubs (Seattle). If other companies don't pay nearly as much, why would people work there?). You might pay 20k a year for your cool apartment in walking distance to bars, shops etc, but you have a great lifestyle.
