if that were true it would have already happened in healthcare, so they can extract more from sick people in the States; these existing systems optimize around different problems, goals and bounds
Intuition and judgement come from changing the context of the analysis--the time range/history, the details included. Geopolitical and economic forecasting appear to fit this pattern. The question posed about whether data-driven companies win seems simplistic and formulaic to me personally. Often outcomes can be better fortunes and circumstantial than from over analyzing and using the right approach. Of course both together tend to be where we'd see success looking backward.
The remedy for this lies with Apple and Google to compete over. They’re naturally incentivized in various ways. Mozilla too but Mozilla can’t seem to figure out what to do until it’s passed by, even when the opportunity is still there. Imagine paying it forward to not have calls and text and voicemails related to your expiring warranty, reliable messages, etc. I don’t think even slack can touch this. Otherwise they would have already. Allow me to point out the planet has been networked for over 100 years and this is the best our lawmakers and tech companies can muster. It’s as though everyone has lost sight of doing something practical (for money).
Werewithal (or werwithal) forthcoming dictionary definition: transformational withal, typically during a full moon, though it regularly manifests in Hacker News posts, causes not yet fully determined. The withals can be complex.
China is more likely to have its government choose a very different leader with resulting policy changes than attack Taiwan. Its economy and along with this politics have increasing problems which are unlikely to reach a plateau or improve in the next decade, possibly longer, and the current leader's policies are accelerating and exacerbating these problems. The only major wild card I see is if the government is able to make a unilateral move against Taiwan in an effort to distract from its internal problems. I don't know how the PRC works well enough to have some notion of how realistic this might be. Given Biden's restatement of the US positions it seems even less likely this would happen. And if it did I'd expect the US and Japan will immediately become involved, promptly followed by other allies if it escalates. What I also cannot gauge is what might happen if action were limited to only a place like Kinmen. If so the arms shipments to Taiwan and would likely immediately change and who knows maybe both Japan and the US would setup military bases there.
Often tech debt stems from political and cultural issues that cannot be (easily) fixed. And even when that's not the issue, are obviously non-trivial costs to resolve. It's been hard for me personally to realize how cultural, even religious Silicon Valley and technology work is. I tend to think there's a common appreciation for certain values, openness and transparency in execution, and these are not the case.
During the first 2 to 6 weeks on a job (it probably varies more than this) most corporate US environments expect significant amount of time to go to processing/onboarding. When providing status updates in meetings just state as much, usually with little to no specifics. I've yet to see anyone respond at all within the first month. What's remarkable to me is the amount of overhead/cost associated with these institutional mechanics, despite tools like Workday, which frankly I don't see as actually being effective. Staff counts of 2 and more (in addition to the new person) with these tools still can't manage to communicate with new staff where to go, where to send equipment, etc which reveals a significant need in the market.
Yeah a Stanford professor told me you need 6 months to be productive in a coder job. 3 months, others have said. To pull your weight, and then pull more than your weight.
Of course where I've worked the firing threats start on day 1, and they obviously expected (Unholster for one) that I work at home. Those guys wanted the whole install to be done at the end of day 1.
There is no such place in the US. And SF is not it either. San Jose appears to be steadily improving, though this is not a recommendation at all. This is my perspective traveling and living around the northern hemisphere awhile, including substantive time in SF. Manchester NH is within an easy Uber ride of BOS and may be of interest. Winters aren't so great but you can easily fly as far south as Puerto Rico, which has massive crime problems and barely functioning government. There are obviously various options in between. My opinion is that the US is generally inhospitable, SF included, and is unlikely to change substantively in the next several decades. California could start banging out housing, improve transit and reform healthcare delivery and it would probably take at least 20 years to catch up... to what you'll easily find outside the country. America is at the stagnation point in transition through institutional and socio-economic cycles based on what I understand and the solutions aren't super clear at the moment--at least not as clear as the problems.
A tremendously helpful article. Possibly one of the best HN shares I've seen related to software. Most code reviews I've seen professionally over the past decade are almost entirely stylistic one-way brittle dialogs over text of small to large pull/change-requests. When in reality these could, should, recommended to be (as the article shares) side-by-side discussions for dialog to improve the product being contributed to. It's really an effective way to ensure that someone else can pick up the work and go if the other gets hit by a bus, and in my own experience, when I lead with an explanatory walk-through exposes bugs (to myself) along the way--that even the reviewer often doesn't note. Thanks for sharing, software development practice is several decades behind... other practices, and content like this help to improve it.
