Beware. One thing that happens to people in a homogeneous community is that the out-group shaming becomes invisible. So everyone in every little community thinks that their community is respectful, but the other communities are about hating.
Hacker News aggressively moderates to remove the most abrasive types of shaming, but you can still shame out-groups here, provided you do it civilly. See any thread about managing developers: At least one person will go on a rant about how managers are empty suits who do nothing useful and just get in the way while extracting rents in the form of cushy compensation packages.
That kind of generalization is also out-group shaming, it just doesn't look like a bunch of misogynists complaining that there are too many women in tech demanding equity.
(I'm in no way saying that just because Twitter has shaming, and so does HN, that the two are equivalent. They aren't even close to equivalent, because these things are not binary. But I am trying to point out how toxicity can be hard to judge from within a community.)
My wife is a developer in the same company as mine (albeit in a totally different sub-orga). This is maybe the cause I don't share your experience (at all).
She's the best paid person in her sub-orga. We're definitely lucky, but also the woman-vs-man topic isn't relevant at all here. We (as a company) are just looking at skill in all aspects, and she's good in most of them, as am I in a different subset.
She also has a twin-sister. She works in a different company, different federal state, and she earns a bit more than my wife - and she also doesn't care at all about the shenanigans happening, she's just doing what she likes and is good at. If you don't believe me I'll create an email alias you can mail me at and we'll get into touch.
Yes both of them have been humiliated, and this is what we should work against. But they have proven theirselves, and they have had support from co-workers, and instead of always putting blame on whatever, we should put focus on supporting good people, regardless of gender. This is so much lost.
What you describe in the first paragraph is not censorship.
There's a whole thing around censorship not applying to private platforms, but even if you argue that the word "censorship" applies to a private entity moderating the content it publishes with its own money (like Hacker News: It definitely moderates content), the thing you describe is still not that kind of "censorship."
Showing or not showing your tweets based on Twitter optimizing for engagement and advertising is not like a government deciding that nobody is allowed to criticize the Dear Leader.
It's actually like a grocery store that promises to stock your product for free, but you aren't Coca-Cola, so you get shitty shelf space and positioning, until you either pay up for shelf space, or build enough demand for your product that the store decides it can make more money giving you better positioning.
Twitter also moderates content in a way that has nothing to do with engagement and making them money. But if you give someone free content, you have to accept them deciding how they feel like monetizing that content.
Censorship is maybe the wrong word, but we all understood what he meant and agree that this behavior wrong.
Twitter misleads you into believing following someone will deliver you 100% of their content (and similarly, that someone who follows you will see 100% of your content) while that's not actually the case.
It might not be censorship, but it's still a terrible move, and frankly a sign of a defective product. The whole point of Twitter is to "follow" accounts you're interested in - if the tool can't do this with 100% reliability it should be considered as broken.
We don't get to declare what Twitter is or isn't. It has evolved over time from a kind of microblogging platform into an algorithmic-timeline social network.
As a user, I don't care for it much, but in no way is it "defective." It does what it does, and if we don't like it, it's our obligation to make sure the door doesn't hit us in the ass on our way out.
The thing we have to understand is that we who want a microblogging platform aren't their market. They're not interested in people with 500-5,000 followers using Twitter to publish things that every one of their followers will see.
Likewise, they're not interested in people who want to just follow certain people and see 100% of their tweets. That's not their business model. Do I like that? No. But I'm not their customer, I'm the product they sell to their customers.
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One thing I find very interesting about discussions like this is how closely they resemble discussions from the 1970s and 1980s about what computers were for. It seems quaint now, but people once said computers were for business, not games.
Then a younger generation came along and when all the old fogies died off or retired, gaming became a gajillion-dollar industry.
Now we get pronouncements like "That's not what Twitter's for." Obviously it is what Twitter's for, because millions of people are using it that way and are "Happy as Larry," oblivious to the fact that it used to be a microblogging platform, and if we ask 100 randomly chosen Twitter employees, exactly zero of them will say Twitter is defective and they're working hard to restore its value as a way to subscribe to everything people tweet.
I kind of feel like those of us who miss its microblogging origin are metaphorically members of an older generation than those who are happily Tweeting, TikToking, SnapChatting, &c.
The concept of following still (at least to me) implies seeing all the content said person is posting. Twitter liberally uses the word "follow" but then doesn't deliver.
They are not being transparent about your experience being manipulated for the purposes of generating engagement either. Most non-technical people don't immediately associate "contains ads" with "will use all kinds of nasty tricks to make you spend more time looking at said ads".
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> are "Happy as Larry,"
Are they? The amounts of arguments and toxicity on that despicable website (enough to prompt highly-upvoted posts about quitting the website every so often) suggests they aren't?
> exactly zero of them will say Twitter is defective
They profit from the fact that it's defective, so of course to them it is not a defect, just like a printer manufacturer will tell you that ink cartridge DRM is not a defect, or some smart juice press manufacturer will tell you that its online-only requirement and juice pack DRM is also not a defect.
They are not being transparent about your experience being manipulated for the purposes of generating engagement either. Most non-technical people don't immediately associate "contains ads" with "will use all kinds of nasty tricks to make you spend more time looking at said ads".
You have something there that applies to all of social media (and just because others do it doesn't make it ok). Algorithms are black boxes. Even if you make 100% sure I read a disclaimer explaining that the timeline is curated and algorithmic, I still will never know what I'm getting and what I'm missing.
The lack of control and transparency is abhorrent to a certain type of person, and you and I are probably those kind of people. But there's a vast world out there that simply. doesn't. care. Even after we explain why they ought to care.
Compare and contrast to walled gardens like iOS. There's a certain type of HNer who talks about iOS the way we're talking about Twitter. And yet... Many, many people are happy with an opaque system deciding which apps they can install, which apps appear on the front page of the app store, &c.
It can be very frustrating, but there it is. People like Twitter, and no amount of explaining why they shouldn't like it will change their minds.
The fact that some people are blind to these issues doesn't mean we shouldn't be calling out unethical, malicious, misleading or defective behavior and/or software.
100% agree. It may be futile with the vast majority of their users, but every person who actually cares about it and becomes more informed though advocacy is a modest win of some kind.
a printer manufacturer will tell you that ink cartridge DRM is not a defect, or some smart juice press manufacturer will tell you that its online-only requirement and juice pack DRM is also not a defect.
There's a phrase for this: "Defective by design." Meaning, what we the observer consider to be a harmful quality of the product is not an accident or oversight, but a deliberate choice.
I say similar things about Slack's iPad client. It's defective by design.
Likewise, web sites that choose not to be accessible are defective-by-design. If you ask their product manager, the response will be, "Accessibility is not a priority, and we can live with people who need accessible web sites doing business with someone else."
Of course, it's implicit in the phrase "defective by design" that this kind of defective is not exactly the same kind of "defective" as the product not doing the thing its creators designed it to do, or not doing the thing that their target market expect it to do.
Are they? The amounts of arguments and toxicity on that despicable website (enough to prompt highly-upvoted posts about quitting the website every so often) suggests they aren't?
This is a very interesting point, to which I will say that people who complain or praise any product are always the vocal minority.
As I alluded to in another reply, we regularly get impassioned posts and comments about what's wrong with iOS on HN, and yet we know for a fact that many, many, MANY people are happy with their iPhones, iPads, and Apple Watches.
Most people are happy with censorship and a lack of freedom of speech, because most people have nothing to say, and a lack of such never affects them.
Most people are fine not having any privacy, because they believe that they have nothing to hide.
The danger comes from making it impossible to publish unpopular things or publish anonymously, or making privacy impossible. There is a percentage of people for whom these things are not only important but essential, and when we close off those options then we lose the important aspects of society facilitated by those people. Those aspects benefit everyone.
We should pay very close attention to the complaints of those people, even if (or perhaps especially because) they are a minority of users.
Your handle "freeopinion" reminds me that although people often say "you get what you pay for," just because something's free does not mean that it's worthless.
Let me reframe this: You are the director of engineering. I am a manager reporting to you.
You ask me to hire and lead a team to build X, which will generate $Y in revenue. But I tell you that everything is delayed, because I'm having trouble finding good hires.
"What's the problem," you ask, "let's pair up and go through the funnel." And I reject resumes because I don't like the profile pictures or some old homework assignments.
Do you accept my argument that the company has to wait on $Y in revenue until I find some candidates who have nicely formatted github profiles and a blemish-less history of code, even code not written for professional purposes?
Or do you replace me with a manager who is focused on shipping a product using whatever team of misfits and uglies they can hire, provided they can actually do the job?
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It's not unreasonable to prefer that candidates make our job as hiring managers easier, but at the end of the day, the hopes and dreams of an entire organization rests upon our ability to hire people who can do the job.
If our funnel is bursting with great people, we can disqualify unlucky people with little consequence. But for most companies, it's better to hire good engineers that have flaws in their presentation than to wait in the hopes that someone will present well, have the job skills, and be willing to accept the offer we can afford to make.
FWIW, I think that's terrible interviewing on their part.
Literally looking for their wallet under the lamp post because it's easy to pick nits in your homework assignments, but difficult to determine whether you could be a productive team member today under completely different circumstances with complete different incentives and forces on your choices.
I am deeply, deeply romantic about programming. I consider it an act of self-actualization.
But answering the question literally, I am not representative of everyone in the industry, and that's a good thing. It's easy to feel romantic about your vocation when you have a number of reasonable options for achieving modest financial security, and you thus had the privilege of choosing the one that most closely matched your idea of self-actualization and self-identification.
Not everyone in this economy has the same set of choices. For many, programming is the lowest-risk way to put a roof over their head and feed their family. We can make up little myths about how we romantics are obviously more passionate, work harder because it's our dream, are more deeply engaged, and so on.
But in the end, I think we'll find as we look around that those of us who feel romantic about something that is also an excellent way to make money at this particular place in time and space have won a lottery of sorts, and are definitely in the minority.
> For many, programming is the lowest-risk way to put a roof over their head and feed their family.
It seems that to some extent the romantics are actually indebted to this cohort for pushing forth the ideas of fair compensation and fighting for workers' rights, because people who are passionate about their work usually end up getting taken advantage of.
Game Development is an example of what can happen when there are too many people passionate about their work. I'm not saying that everyone in that industry is taken advantage of but it's a lot more than the broader tech industry even though there's a lot of overlap between skill sets.
It should be noted that one of (if not the) biggest game release of all time this year, CP2077, was built on the back of terrible working conditions and months of crunch.
My own writing on the subject of this industry falls into two pretty cleanly divided piles:
The writing about programming itself is "impractical" and "romantic," because that writing is for those who have an affinity with the "romance of programming."
The writing about getting a job, negotiating compensation, shipping products, hiring programmers, &c. is practical, because that writing is for everyone.
What is the difference between practical and romantic? Musashi wrote a book called The Book of Five Rings, which is as romantic as the name suggests, but half the book is an if-else set of instructions.
> We can make up little myths about how we romantics are obviously more passionate, work harder because it's our dream, are more deeply engaged, and so on.
This comment stuck out for me. There’s no shortage of people who “love their job” who aren’t actually good at their job. They can be very motivated to do the wrong thing and often have unearned egos.
I agree with your caution, I disagree largely with your reasons/the dangers you identify. I've avoided California, so maybe that has an impact, but I almost never have seen ego as a problem. I'm one of the only ones who will do impractical things sometimes (but just as often my crazy ideas are radically simpler).
My gut feel is that romantics have it the hardest. They are way more in touch with the potential & powers of it all, the overwhelming awesomeness that is everywhere, & how un-tapped, un-actualized the world-actual about them is. I don't have particular links, alas, but I think of MrDoob, author of the much loved Three.js library which has the lion's share of 3D on the web. He seems clearly to be engaged, to be interested, but he also has talked to himself not being great employee-material, suffering problems of motivation.
The really romantics have problems of alignment. There are few situations in the world where the passion is allowed to flow. There are few working environments that support the chaotic workflow & passion-driven-development. Agile: we all practice agile. What is agile but a way to insure consistent steady endless sprints, each slowly optimizing productivity? What an evil anethema, a plague upon those of us who work by our muses. The corporation, the industry, wants worker bees. And for many years that's probably a good way to function, probably a valuable personal development, of fitting in, declaring what you are working on, learning how to tackle problems. But in the long game, I think this mode of software development is a joke, is consistently low-ambition, squanders the immense potential we have. And I don't think you need long deep experience & talent to be squandered.
I once had someone vehemently complain to me about certain style rules in place in a code base saying, “only machines will ever read it, who cares how it looks as long as it works?” As someone who’s deeply passionate about software development it certainly made me look at this person in a different light.
It might be a lack of experience. I've seen people reacting like this when they are still very new to programming and feel pressured by the need to learn/adapt to stricter rules. After some time once they become more comfortable they pay more attention to the way something is written.
I've worked with people who would scatter literals throughout a codebase because they were too lazy to type out the names of variables and constants. I feel your pain.
> But answering the question literally, I am not representative of everyone in the industry,
I am deeply /deeply/ romantic about programming, but industry is dreck. Unimaginative, low potential, sapping, low-ambition, filled with endless middle- & low-roads & compromises. Countless stakeholders, endless non-technical-personals to "reason" with. Plans & designs & endless corporate aligning & planning. All for middling corporate plans, faint progress, carried forward under the weight of countless legacy systems & terrible decisions.
Programming & open source is this limitless potential, this endless imagineering & exploration. We are unencumbered by anything beyond what we might imagine, what we might want to do, free to think of how we want to represent, structure, develop things.
Not everyone is into programming for the same reasons. But I find increasing distance, increasing inability to articulate to others how amazing being a programmer is, what expressiveness & power we have, how unencumbered & free we are. Even if others don't share the ambition & sense of grandiosity, don't feel the immense pull of the vast humanistic work that we distinctly are the crafters & doers of, there's still such power to create & share & inform that is so rewarding, so immense, so imminent in the craft, & I deeply deeply crave seeing some recognition, somewhere, of some of it- of themselves!- at some level, in my fellow peers. It's ok if we have different reasons, different motivations, different engagements, but there is a might of human potential here that programmers are so uniquely connected to, so immersed in, and I want these fish to realize the water about them, even if they only aspire to be small fish.
I affirm strongly the question: how indeed can you not be romantic about programming?
Do you have any example code that enforces the idea of romantic to you? I've always just worked on business related tasks, and might have missed out on the romantic side of programming
We are all human. Just because I don't understand why someone would spend their whole life studying beetles doesn't mean I don't respect that they find it engaging and worthwhile.
You are making the classic mistake of projection. Accept that people are unique and will find different things engaging even within the most "mundane" areas of software.
That seems like a harsh view.
A lot of software isn't very glamorous or exciting at first glance, that's true. But if you're sufficiently intrigued by logic puzzles and the challenge of solving things elegantly, my guess is that even the most boring piece of software has some opportunity for fun buried in its architecture.
But since you don't seem to be able to relate that too much, maybe you are just motivated by other things than many programmers. What would be the 'actual fun' things then in your opinion, that you have to be 'socially successful' to participate in?
Most jobs are boring if you aren’t interested in the problem they’re solving. I appreciate you throwing some shade at the otherwise hive mind here but you’ve kind of jumped to the opposite direction. I don’t find recording audio interesting but there’s a whole field about it and I assure you I know people who find the art of recording sounds interesting who aren’t “telling themselves” it isn’t just to keep from being depressed. People are interested in different things and programming, like math, is the art of abstract problem solving and there very much are millions of people who find the act of abstracting problems and automating their solutions interesting. Your comment is downvoted because you are claiming otherwise to a community full of these very people.
Sure programming is boring, to the billions of people who aren’t programmers just as recording audio or, for a “real world” type of fun like you imply, playing most sports, is boring to me.
This is really right on the mark. Real accounting involving trusts, tax shelters involving various corporate structures, the intricate tax code knowledge required to understand and take advantage of loopholes is quite technical.
Having been exposed to what it takes to do this level of accounting via direct conversations with someone who does this, they can't wait to move on from it. It's not a good fit for their personality. It really is a back office type of work that can get quite lonely.
You’re partly right, programming as a whole and on a sort of macro level is soils crushingly boring and pointless. But on the micro scale, even boring pointless programming tasks can offer challenges that are interesting enough to keep you entertained for a few hours until you look up and remember how pointless it all is.
I like to compare it to solving sudoku. If that entertains you and you can make 200k doing it, it’s not the worst thing in the world, even if it is sad and boring when you see it in a wider context. Who wants to go through life as a programmer?
Some people just have great interest in a narrow area.
I agree that most of those types of applications have a very low interest-to-drudgery ratio just in general, and I personally don't find them interesting at all. But let's not forget that some people just have interest in the details of things that most other people don't really care about. Some of that work might not even be objectively that technically demanding, yet it somehow catches the attention of some people.
> It’s boring and people only do it because they’re too socially unsuccessful to participate in things that are actually fun,
To throw some bombs the other way, I think there's a legit feeling that a lot of the socialization/fun that humanity gets up to is frivolous, pointless, dis-engaged, solipsistic avoidance of how they are spending their lives. We are all engaged in distracting ourselves at some level (Terror Management Theory[1]), and while it is popularly accepted that being popular & social is how one wins, I think there have been a lot of folks who feel other callings, to do, to make, to explore, and often it's less than clear how to do these activities socially. Einstein only found two other people in the world when he made the Olympia Academy[1], but that was enough. Other people wouldn't call that social fun, but it engaged him, and I would judge more earnestly & wholly & to greater joy than most people's social fun.
> so they convince themselves spending hundreds of hours making boring stuff is actually a good use of their time. I understand that some programming is great, but since 99% of all software is not interesting, I don’t believe the amount of people who say they love it.
I'm much more sympathetic to this all. So much of my first post was about the split, the difficulty, of doing software development from within the confines of the corporate-industrial environment.
There are endless fun challenges & explorations to get up to (from within those confines). There's so many things that feel good about programming, about feeling like one has gotten on top of these confounding complex problems, & built a secure well structured coherent domain for oneself. I think there is fun here, genuine fun, but I also think it's distracting & shallow. It's the social gossip of software development. Decoupled from what one is doing.
Most software is, alas, built in corporate-industrial manner. Most programmers are merely producers, not imaginators, not true creators, very much by design of the corporate-industrial system, & it's accepted as 99.999% hard fact that programmers need the help of other people or else they will make horrible software that won't help users. Very little software that is written, I would say, is written by software. This wraps up into the whole corporate-industrial software problem, that software is always intent on being product, on consumerization, and I strongly feel it's the lack of trust & lack of exploration that keeps 99% of software in the not-interesting realm, that keeps computers as a whole impervious & uninteresting & uncompelling & unknown (the proverbial kids who know a couple apps really well but nothing more about computing).
Most of the programmers you meet, who you accuse of not being passionate: perhaps you are right. They're having fun, but how engaged are they? Are they avoiding the fear of death, engaging themselves in industrial fun? Or do they really have a passion, see the world truly, have some sense of place of it all, & feel a connection to something? Are they facing the terror of death earnestly, more genuinely; have they advanced beyond the socializing masses? I think your doubts are well founded. I think we ought be critical, try to keep a cosmic brain view & skepticism, of ourselves & our applications.
The consumerist cycle is indeed a vicious trap in some ways when we place it in the context of self-actualisation. I’d like to add that another component or alternative to Terror thinking is our scarcity thinking. We still all live like we need to hoard nuts like Scrat from Ice Age.
A reasonable solution is the Sublime from Schopenhauer, or an alternative enlightened moment in once life were one does indeed she ourselves part of a Cosmic whole. Or otherwise said from that movie “What we do in life, echoes in eternity.”
Sure there are people with higher callings, geniuses like Einstein or Newton. But that’s not what we’re talking about here. We are talking about moderately intelligent people who will never contribute anything meaningful to humanity. For them work is not an excuse not to have friends or do “frivolous” things. Those frivolous things are what life are made of, so you better have a damn good reason if you avoid them. Being 10% of a team that is building some accounting software is not comparable to inventing calculus.
You can be a software developer and have a family and friends. You're acting like there is only one choice when you are passionate about software : hunker down and be lonely with your computer as your only company.
Maybe it's unique to me as a sysadmin previously and now as an SRE, but I quite enjoy gluing things together. Something about taking stuff that doesn't interoperate directly and forcing it to do so is elegant in its own right, without having to resort to scorching the earth and rebuilding everything from scratch.
I learned this the hard way. Thought I was special and passionate and hard working. Then I had a mental breakdown and could barely get anything done. All of a sudden money became the top priority I started seeing the world for what it really is.
"When you're holding a Shunting Yard Algorithm, every Domain-Specific Expression Language looks like a compile-to-RPN-and-evaluate-with-a-stack-machine nail."
If you sell someone something with a nudge-nudge, wink-wink, and they get killed using it, it absolutely hurts. You may be able to weasel out of being held accountable for it, in which case it won't hurt you, but the larger issue here is that this kind of misleading copy can lead to people making poor decisions.
You may have put it in the fine print that it's not a real product, but the whole point of nudge-nudge wink-wink is to strongly imply that it's a real product worth real money, and thus you are going out of your way to encourage people to try it and take chances with real lives.
If I buy a cell phone holder for my car, and it distracts me and I get into an accident? What if Car Play lags and i'm distracted and I get into an accident? What if radio plays an ambulance and I freak out and get into an accident? What if my sunglasses make me mistake a red light?
This product does lane assist. It does a good job according to consumer reports [0], higher than all other lane assists. It doesn't detect stop signs or traffic lights or drive for you. It keeps your lane. It acts predictably and gives the driver enough time to react.
Unfortunately the liability model is messed up. I think this product is relatively tame and should allow to exist. And you need to pay attention. They even have inward facing cameras to make sure you're paying attention, more than most other companies. They do everything they can to be safe but of course they're not stupid and they'll put in a sweeping statement on liability.
This is really pushing forward the self-driving industry and is an incredible feat of engineering. It's much more open and transparent than every other lane keeping software, and it's being developed with a lot of thought and care from a talented engineer as opposed to some nameless faceless bureaucratic commission in Ford or some other dinosaur.
I'm not gonna debate the "appropriate level of liability."
My point has to do with what you're signalling. If a thing is alpha-level, and real humans can get killed, I wouldn't let random people buy it and use it in their cars, period.
Informed consent is deeply problematic for a product like this: Very few people have the expertise to look at the code and the hardware and properly evaluate the risks, right down to understanding which kinds of edge cases need to be very carefully avoided.
Unless you're vetting researchers and barring people who just want to save a few bucks and brag their car self-drives, you really don't know if every person who downloads the extra software really does grasp the implications of what they're consenting to.
You might grasp the implications, and so might many people in this thread, but that doesn't guarantee that everyone does. THE AUDIENCE OF HACKER NEWS IS NOT A REPRESENTATIVE SAMPLE OF SOCIETY.
And we are talking about a product to be used on open roads: In addition to informed consent from the person who downloads the software, if they get into an accident with another vehicle, pedestrian, or cyclist, did any of those people consent to share the road with someone who installed alpha software on their device?
Morally, I can't get behind a few disclaimers and a nudge-nudge, wink-wink for any kind of autonomous driving tech, even if it's "just" lane-keeping.
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Update: But to be clear, I am in favour of people tinkering with all sorts of digital automotive tech, and we really should find a way for lone inventors or small teams to innovate without the "enterprise outfits" using regulatory capture to drown small competitors with red tape.
I'm only arguing in favour of truly informed consent, which I believe is tricky for driver assistance technology being provided to arbitrary customers.
So your main problem is about the disclaimer and that its called alpha. I provided a source that rates it the best product among all other competitors and the highest score on keep driver engage. And they have the most miles of any other lane assist technology. So I think its safe. I think the alpha is more tongue in cheek and is not a term that means anything really apart from, as you say, a wink and a nod.
For the laymen user, they won't read the disclaimer or understand what Alpha means or even know that is is "alpha". I'm an engineer and I probably won't ever really audit the code. I will do my research like most other people, read online reviews or testimonials like Consumer Reports.
So are you against all lane assist technology? How about auto-braking? Anti lock breaks?
I'm against just heaving that technology out over the fence into the hands of consumers and leaving it up to consumer reports and/or individual consumers to decide if it's safe enough.
Safety is a 'picking up nickels off of railway tracks" problem. A thing might work 10,000 times in a row, but then suddenly, catastrophically fail because something is different that hadn't been tested before, like dealing with a woman walking her bike across a multi-lane road.
this is not a good scenario to leave up to consumers to decide whether a thing is safe. Not even with consumer reports to help out with testing.
Now as to ABS, the comparison is not even close. I do not buy ABS by purchasing brakes and then flashing some ROM with code I download from the internet. ABS is covered by all sorts of regulatory frameworks around the world, it isn't simply cooked up and offerred for download like it's an MP3 player skin.
Even though it's a much more mature technology, the problem with ABS is again, consumers cannot give informed consent to a disclaimer when purchasing it from some random person.
When I buy it as part of an automobile from a manufacturer that complies (I'm looking at you, VW) with regulations, I'm consenting to trusting something in a completely different way than when I download code and there's an MIT license or whatever weasel-wording somebody em ploys to say, "If you die, sucks to be you. If you kill someone, it's your soul that will be in torment."
Your equivocation of 1. downloading code for a safety feature from the internet that's marked "alpha" and has been tested according to whatever the author feels like testing because it's not offered as a "product," with 2. purchasing an automobile that has ABS brakes which are tested and maintained within a global safety regulatory framework...
You're entitled to whatever workdview you like, but on this pointI believe our discussion ends. There is a fundamental axiomatic belief I hold that is not compatibvle with a fiundamental axiomatic belief you hold.
I don't want to spend all day trying to explain why I believe Volvo selling a three-point harness is not the same as some random person knitting a seta -belt, selling it on etsy, and leaving it up to you and I to read the consumer reviews to decide whether it's safe enough.
You believe the free market plus informed consumers will sort all this out. I do not.
Please don't doxx Ford engineers if you don't give any proof. There are hard working, ethical people working who don't want to kill people by lightheartedly pushing stuff on the road. Just because you don't know them does not mean they are not talented.
It really does depend upon the consequences of failure. Naturally, I want my children to learn to laugh at themselves when they fall off a bike.
In my case, I taught them this by laughing at myself when I fall off my bike, so I am modelling the outcome I want--them learning to try things, fail, and laugh--rather than some kind of "do as i say" style of parenting.
But even falling off bikes can have an unacceptable worst case. So we insist on helmets. It is bad parenting to allow undeveloped brains to suffer avoidable and entirely foreseeable concussions when reasonable precautions like proper protective gear exists.
I think that sums up our parenting approach: Model the risk tolerance we want to encourage, including both taking risks and managing the consequences intelligently.
This may not be the most constructive way to make the point, but this is a feature of any speculative asset. If the market as a whole has a very high confidence it will continue to rise in value, few people will want to trade it for goods and services unless they have no choice or can make even more money from the goods and services than they can from holding the asset.
Otherwise, it’s like getting options in a startup and spending them on pizza.
Hacker News aggressively moderates to remove the most abrasive types of shaming, but you can still shame out-groups here, provided you do it civilly. See any thread about managing developers: At least one person will go on a rant about how managers are empty suits who do nothing useful and just get in the way while extracting rents in the form of cushy compensation packages.
That kind of generalization is also out-group shaming, it just doesn't look like a bunch of misogynists complaining that there are too many women in tech demanding equity.
(I'm in no way saying that just because Twitter has shaming, and so does HN, that the two are equivalent. They aren't even close to equivalent, because these things are not binary. But I am trying to point out how toxicity can be hard to judge from within a community.)