For example, in your example is there any situation where there is an invoice that has not been paid?
In the vast majority of shopping cart systems, that would be a hard NO. There would be an Order ID, for carts that have not yet been paid for, sure, but an Invoice ID only makes sense if the order has been fully paid for, and not at any stage previous to that.
As such, why have an Order Status at all? Have the mere presence of the Invoice ID be the flag that states the order has been paid for. As in: null = not paid, not null = paid.
For what it’s worth, this discussion is exactly what pushed me to experiment
with a small runtime invariant helper for React/JS.
The idea wasn’t to replace good modeling or tests,
but to fail early when real-world state temporarily drifts
away from its intended shape (especially in async or legacy flows).
As someone who has worked with computers since 1982, been on the Internet since 1988, on the Web since 1992, and in the IT industry as a developer since 1997, I see AI as having five intractable issues:
1. How AI use erodes skills in the subject AI is being used to assist in. This is a 100% occurrence, and has been demonstrated across all industries from software developers to radiologists. Most experience a 10-20% erosion in their skill set within the first 12 months of AI use, but others in the study groups have seen up to a 40% erosion in their skill sets.
2. How AI use shuts down critical thinking, and makes users more stupid. This is a 100% occurrence, and has been clearly demonstrated by MRI scans of the prefrontal cortex while users are actively using AI.
3. How AI use makes the user slower. This is the only user point that is not 100% coverage, as slightly less than 2% of the most senior and skilled users (usually those with particularly deep domain experience in the project being worked on) show a slight increase in work completed… after more than 12 months of using AI. And that is if you force code quality to be maintained at a decent level. Projections have been made on the other 98%, and almost all of them will likely never work faster with AI than without it, regardless of training or experience.
4. The gratuitous hallucinations, which are only increasing in scope and severity with every AI generation. It arises entirely from the constraints the AI are rewarded with - providing no answer is weighted just as negatively as a wrong answer - and depending on the model being examined, anywhere from 60-80% of all responses are hallucinatory or incorrect in some fashion. 60-80% of all responses. That’s bad. Really bad.
5. And then you have the knock-down effects of lowered code quality, with black-hat hackers having an absolute birthday buffet of apps with vibe-implemented security and logic flaws. They’re practically jumping for joy at the abysmally-secured apps that have arses flapping in the wind, absolutely ideal for a saunter-by buggering.
In prior decades, any corporate solution with such abysmally bad performance/output would be laughed clear out of the boardroom. You cannot build a business where a majority of output is downright wrong or false, and practically begs criminals to screw you over. A political movement, fine; conservatism seems to be flourishing world-wide with this “feature” as a core advantage. But businesses?
But because capitalism is desperately seeking a solution to what they perceive as a problem - how to obtain labour without having to pay said labour - AI is being adopted hand-over-fist. And the fact that positive ROI sits at less than 2% of all AI adoption gets absolutely ignored thanks to FOMO.
After all, the underlying purpose of AI is to allow wealth to access skill while removing from the skilled the ability to access wealth.
Now, I am actually cautiously optimistic about AI. However, I feel one of its biggest weaknesses - how no answer is weighted just as negatively as a wrong answer - is what currently blocks it from being anything more than a mediocre tool at best, and makes it a horrifically terrible tool at worst.
These “results incentives” make it far more reassuring to non-technical users by providing some sort of an answer, regardless of validity, but do so at the expense of being a straitjacket that hobbles it, and prevents it from being far more accurate and error-free.
And what is even more worrisome is that AI exhibits behaviours that go well beyond its presumed programming, and cannot be explained by any part of said programming. And that by giving it perverse incentives, we risk creating an entity that sees humanity as an antagonist… or worse, an existential threat that cannot be resolved or managed, only eliminated.
> Most [software developers] experience a 10-20% erosion in their skill set within the first 12 months of AI use, but others in the study groups have seen up to a 40% erosion in their skill sets.
That sounds interesting, would you mind sharing the studies with me?
And then there is flour, which when measured by volume can exhibit massive differences in actual amounts depending on how packed said flour is.
Which is why you can easily tell the difference between an expert baker and an idiot by whether they - respectively - measure flour by weight or by volume.
> My wife does not like when I solve problems instead of just acknowledge the problem and say "that's a shame/sad/terrible", but I can't help it, we as engineers are wired to do solve problems, not just acknowledge them.
There is also a strong gender imbalance there, in that men have been evolutionarily hardwired as problem-solvers.
This is evidenced by the near-ubiquity of women who have been enraged by their male partners always trying to solve the problems that they bring up, when “solving” wasn’t even in the same universe of why they raised the issue.
It takes an immense amount of effort for most any man to just sit there and listen to a problem brought up by someone they care about, and to not offer up any solutions to that problem. Mainly because the only reason why any man would proactively confide in others with a problem is when they are actively soliciting for - or, at least being open to - advice on how to solve it. We simply cannot imagine why any proactive b*tching about a problem isn’t done explicitly for the purpose of finding a solution.
I would still do a job, but it would be something that is important to me.
And $10M would require some up-front management and ongoing maintenance to develop an index-tracked revenue stream from it. I mean, aside from an initial disbursement meant to wipe out harmful debts and get a few small toys, the vast majority of that $10M would go towards being productive revenue-generating assets. No, not from the backs of other members of the working class like rental homes, but via stocks that generate dividends.
For one, I would likely adopt one or more open-source projects that have people struggling to be maintainers, and to fund them in some manner via the dividend income. Kind of like a “you no longer have to worry about food and shelter needs anymore” type of support.
It’s not like I would be able to support oodles of projects like this, but a choice project or three that is vital to the entire tech ecosystem and which desperately needs to remain independent of corporate influence… yeah. I already know of a few.
> And $10M would require some up-front management and ongoing maintenance to develop an index-tracked revenue stream from it.
Buy $5M of VOO and $5M of VTEB or BND. Send dividends to your bank account. When your bank account is over the FDIC limit, buy more of whichever fund has less $. Dividend yield on VOO is about 1%, bond fund is about 3%, approximately $200k/year from dividends, but if that's not enough, sell from the fund with more $ as needed. If you go with VTEB (tax exempt bonds), you'll have a very low federal tax with $50k of mostly qualified dividends and $150k of mostly tax exempt interest; if you go with BND, you're still only looking at about 20% effective tax rate Single, or 15% married filing joint.
Probably check with your insurer and get an umbrella policy for $5M+ cause they're cheap and you don't want to get a judgement and lose out on the easy life.
Send me a check for about $10k a year as a reminder of how much work I did for you right here in the open :P (j/k, I'm not a financial advisor, I can't take compensation for this). You could do something fancier like optimizing the tax-exempt vs regular bonds or think about your preferred stock/bond ratio or exotic investment options to enrich the advisors, but $10M is enough that anything safe (80:20 to 20:80) will work unless you overspend, and it's not enough that getting a little more return is going to let you keep a private jet (better to charter anyway).
On the OP's question. I kept working while I was having fun and then worked on cleanly transitioning things out so I could feel good about leaving without loose ends. I went back to work part time in order to insure domestic tranquility. :P You can do a lot with computers without a job/company/product, but IMHO, optimizing things is more fun when you have a lot of users and you can see the results, so that kind of leads towards working at least a bit, even if you don't have to.
I always find it hilarious that people on HN think that there is something morally wrong with being a landlord like everyone should be a homeowner no matter what the circumstances are. Should college students buy homes? Someone who may not want to live some place for a long time?
> there is something morally wrong with being a landlord
In the traditional manner, by upgrading through houses over a lifetime and holding onto the prior homes as “mortgage helpers”? No, not in the least.
In the modern context, by buying up 5, 10, 15, or even more homes in a neighbourhood just to rent them back out for their labour-free “investment income”? Oh YES, VERY MUCH SO.
In the modern context - which is practically every rental these days - landlords do not provide housing. They HOARD it and ransom it back to the community for more than it’s worth.
Landlords and other “investors” are why North America as a whole has a housing crisis, and by direct-causation proxy, a homeless crisis. When an individual or company can sweep into a neighbourhood and buy up most to all of the houses and then jack up rents to the maximum that the market will bear _just because,_ even when a third or more stand empty, that’s economic parasitism of the working class, plain and simple.
So where I stand, if anyone is renting out any sort of a habitable structure that they themselves didn’t live in for the better part of a decade before they turned it into a rental, THEY ARE THE PARASITE.
As a former landlord - who would rather get a daily anal probe with a cactus than ever do it again - there is nothing “passive” about being a landlord.
A quick Google search shows that only 1-3% of homes are owned by institutional investors and has almost nothing to do with the homes not being affordable. It’s a talking point that even the briefest Google search will contradict.
IMO anyone holding more than 5 rentals is doing so for the purpose of investing; of having a revenue stream well above what is needed for mortgage purposes.
Why? Because if you take the traditional route of living in a place, and do so for the average of 8 years that most jurisdictions see people doing before upgrading, and turning that prior home into a rental, it would take you into your 70s or 80s until you have 5 rental places.
And having 5 or more rental units accounts for almost ⅓ of all landlords. This means that ⅓ of all landlords are economic parasites, being landlords purely for the income stream.
I am not talking about “institutional investors” that hold 100+ homes by themselves (100+ being the industry definition of an institutional investor), they are just included in my concept of a parasitical population of housing “investors”.
> there is nothing “passive” about being a landlord.
You clearly are an old-school landlord.
These days there are “property management” companies that - for a small fee - do all the work for you, and the only effort left to you is to cash the cheque. And many people with multiple properties leverage this system.
Every business is about buying something or producing something and selling it for a cost higher than it costs you. Why is rental property evil? Do you think building and running an apartment complex is wrong?
Every business is about producing an income stream. My 23 year old son and his fiancé rent a house. They don’t want to buy a home and don’t even know whether they are going to stay in the city they are living in
There is nothing “small” about the fee that property management companies charge. It’s 50% of the first month’s rent for a new tenant and 10% of rent each month. Standard underwriting for rental income is assume 75% - 80% occupancy and you have to account for slow payments and long eviction processes. Even in a red state like GA it can take around 3 months to evict someone for none payment.
And again bringing the 2-3% of homes that are owned by institutional investors won’t make a dent in housing affordability.
Profit margins on all inelastic essential goods are fundamentally evil.
A mansion for a single person isn’t an essential inelastic good. A Bachelor suite or basement suite for a single person _is._
Water in general isn’t an essential inelastic good. Sufficient water to keep a single person hydrated, clean, and in good health _is._
Junk food and premium-grade food isn’t an essential inelastic good. Sufficient raw foods to keep a person fed _is._
When you forcibly extract more from a person than providing the product costs you, purely because they have no other choice, you are an evil parasite, full stop.
And no, going homeless is not “a choice”. Neither is dying from exposure. And there are plenty of people who work full-time jobs yet don’t earn enough to put a roof over their heads.
> bringing the 2-3% of homes that are owned by institutional investors won’t make a dent in housing affordability.
But dealing with the ⅓ of all rentals who are owned by parasites _will._
You refuse to answer the question - do you think that everyone should own a home and their should be no rental market or do you think that landlords should rent at cost?
Housing is very much elastic. There is plenty of undeveloped land in the country and there is even more air - meaning building up and not out. Personally, my wife and I sold our big 5 bedroom 3200 square foot house in the burbs that we had built in 2016 for $335K in the burbs of Atlanta in the good school system to move into a 1250 square foot condo in Florida and we couldn’t be happier. Blame the lack of supply on NIMBYism that opposes multi unit housing and zoning laws.
As far as raw food, do you also think that people in the supply chain like farmers, packagers, food delivery drivers etc shouldn’t make a profit?
You never did answer the question - are you also opposed to apartment complexes owned by investors?
The second point you didn’t address is should my 23 year old son and his fiancé be forced to buy home or should his landlord have spent money on a property and rented to him at cost?
Me personally, if I were renting a house, I would rather deal with a corporation who did it professionally than deal with an individual landlord. The management companies both times I rented an apartment in Atlanta were excellent.
And it’s nonsensical that if you got rid of all of the investors who only own 2-3% of the supply, it would make a dent in housing prices. Do you think everyone who rents wants to buy no matter what their life circumstances? I definitely didn’t want to buy a home when I was single, I wanted the option of moving quickly
> And it’s nonsensical that if you got rid of all of the investors who only own 2-3% of the supply,
Either you are sealioning, or you genuinely can’t comprehend the written word.
Time and time again you keep hammering on this point, which is only a tiny fraction of mine. You keep hammering on the window dressing, while I am addressing the real elephant in the room, THE OTHER ⅓ OF LANDLORDS, WHO ARE THE MAJORITY OF THE PROBLEM.
I am talking about the other ≈30% of landlords
≈30%. Not 2-3%. ≈30%. That is the size of the problem.
> Housing is very much elastic.
For buyers and sellers, perhaps. For renters, NO.
If rent was elastic, we wouldn’t have a “working poor” homeless problem. If rent was elastic, we wouldn’t have 23 empty homes for every homeless person.
> are you also opposed to apartment complexes owned by investors?
A single, separate, unrelated owner per apartment/unit? No. That generates genuine competition for renters.
A single owner per complex? F*ck, yes. It’s an obscene concentration of economic power away from the renter and into the landlord’s hands.
> As far as raw food, do you also think that people in the supply chain like farmers, packagers, food delivery drivers etc shouldn’t make a profit?
My family have been orchardists for almost a half century. We know plenty of other farmers and orchardists. Most would rather let their food go to the hungry rather than let it rot on the tree or in the field.
And yet, it takes capitalism and the Parasite Class to drench food in kerosine and light it aflame in order to generate artificial scarcity and keep profits high.
And if you know anything about economic trends, you would know that food prices keep skyrocketing, yet the share that farmers get keeps shrinking.
Where does it all go? To the middlemen, increasingly concentrated in a handful of suppliers that keep buying up all the competition, thereby concentrating profits in the hands of the ultra-wealthy Parasite Class.
Even up here in Canada, it’s even getting such that the lines between middleman and retailer is blurring, with mega-corps such as Loblaws - which makes up a large majority of supermarkets - buying up distributors and processors in order to capture that middleman profit margin for themselves, denying the farmers higher returns and the consumer lower prices.
Yay, capitalism?
Because it’s neither the consumer nor the farmer who’s benefitting from capitalism. It’s the parasites at the top.
> Either you are sealioning, or you genuinely can’t comprehend the written word.
Time and time again you keep hammering on this point, which is only a tiny fraction of mine. You keep hammering on the window dressing, while I am addressing the real elephant in the room, THE OTHER ⅓ OF LANDLORDS, WHO ARE THE MAJORITY OF THE PROBLEM.
What exactly is your point? For single homes, if only 2% of all homes being sold are owned by investors, releasing those would at most increase the supply by 2%.
But it’s even crazier that you think apartment buildings shouldn’t be owned by corporations and centrally managed.
Do you think individual owners will take care of maintenance, property taxes, collecting rent, a centrally managed tenant office erc?
Funny enough, I have an idea of exactly how that would conceivably work. I mentioned before that my wife and I moved into a condo. I didn’t mention that it was a unit we own in a condotel (https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/condotel.asp). Each unit is individually owned. But the complex itself is run like a hotel (not a timeshare). All of the owners but us use there unit as some combination of a second home and an investment property. When someone stays in a unit the owner gets half the income and the property manager gets the other half.
To be clear, this is in central Florida close to Disney and it is zoned and was built as a hotel. Unless you are also opposed to corporations owning hotels
You have to have central management for a large apartment complex just like for the condotel we live in.
As far as farmers what do you suggest? Either every farmer distributes the food themselves across the country or everyone in the distribution chain does the work for free? BTW, my grandfather raised and sold pigs and cows most of his life and my uncle (his son) still takes care of the cattle. I don’t think he’s going to be killing and processing the meat himself. Should everyone between him selling the cows and it getting to shelves do it for free?
> For single homes, if only 2% of all homes being sold are owned by investors, releasing those would at most increase the supply by 2%.
For the last time, I AM NOT ONLY TALKING ABOUT CORPORATIONS. I am INCLUDING those INDEPENDENT INDIVIDUALS who are landlording AS A CAREER.
Like, anyone who has bought any residence purely to rent out, and who has never lived in that residence. Who treat housing as an investment without actually being a corporation.
THAT is what covers 30+% of the market.
Release 30+% of that housing onto the market, and supply increases DRAMATICALLY.
QUIT BEING A F*KING TROLL.
> But it’s even crazier that you think apartment buildings shouldn’t be owned by corporations and centrally managed.
>Do you think individual owners will take care of maintenance, property taxes, collecting rent, a centrally managed tenant office erc?
Let me update you on this lovely little administrative structure called a STRATA COUNCIL. This covers a lot of what you just talked about. It’s a council of individual owners that make decisions about maintenance and changes to the common areas and overall physical building.
The property taxes and rent are handled by the landlords, which is what the vast majority of landlords already do.
> As far as farmers what do you suggest?
Punitive taxation of corporate profit margins. This forces the middlemen to do one or more of three things: invest in the company (such as increased wages of workers, or better tooling, etc.), pay more for inputs, or charge less for outputs.
Okay, again, are you saying that no one should rent a home under any circumstances or that people who own homes should tie up their money and do it at cost?
And again you are wrong. It’s not 30% of the market - it’s 3%.
> Let me update you on this lovely little administrative structure called a STRATA COUNCIL…
Guess what a group of owners who collective own and run something is called - a business
On the other hand, there is an existence proof of what happens when a group of individuals run a group of units - look at the mess that is most condo associations in Florida where they don’t do upkeep and condo buildings are literally falling down.
By the way, since most people don’t know how to run a business like an apartment complex or even a condo association where the units are individually owned, they still end up outsourcing the management to a property management organization as do most HOAs
It’s clear that only one of us in this conversation knows about the real estate business….
Why would anyone invest their money in a company if not for profit?
Think of it: industry cottons onto this idea, sets up entire server farms to make memory more efficient at lower cost, and then starts mining what is in memory for profit. The process accelerates and intensifies the memory shortage, snowballing the industry move.
Finally, the government steps in because it makes it so much easier to monitor “dissidents”, and mandates into law that all systems have to run with cloud memory, thereby putting anyone who is online under 24/7 surveillance. Because memory for every system has been abstracted out into server farms, it is beyond the control of users and no-one is safe anymore.
Right now the government has to employ non-trivial efforts to monitor an educated and even moderately-skilled person. This will reduce that effort to zero.
This is an immensely dangerous proposition wrapped up in an innocent solution.
"I was kind of surprised how quick the memory was, but clearly this thing isn't practical. This project was really supposedly be more of functional tech satire rather than being anything useful."
I mean swap has been a thing for so many decades...
I swear that all of life and computing is a game to maximize entropy and energy consumption as quickly as possible to hasten the heat death of the universe.
I can’t think of a single account I have created using my gMail eMail address. In fact, I technically don’t even have a gMail account, as I log into my Google account using my personal domain eMail.
This likely wouldn’t work with any other webmail provider as well, because even my Hotmail account (which pre-dates my personal domain by about three years) has been purged of anything personal since about 2005, and now exists as a spam honeypot and emergency recovery account for a handful of services that demand one.
Now, if you could scan IMAP folders, then fine. But I have never handed my passwords out to anyone. It’s gotta be a locally-run tool or it’s just not gonna fly with me.
Fair points. You're right that it's Gmail-only right now, which doesn't work for your setup.
IMAP support is the top request I'm getting. The main challenge is speed, as Gmail API scans 10+ years in ~3 minutes, IMAP would be 30+ minutes. But it's definitely on the roadmap.
Also thinking about a local-only version where everything runs in your browser. Would that work for you, or is IMAP specifically what you need?
For now, I'm focused on the majority use case (Gmail users who don't purge email), but would love your input on what a power-user version should look like if you're interested.
I see your point, but I view it through a different lens. In painting, the mastery of 'blank space' (negative space) is as vital as the brushstrokes themselves. For a project like OpenBSD, the discipline to not implement a feature—unless it can be done perfectly and securely—is a rare form of restraint. In an industry obsessed with feature bloat, this 'lack' isn't a deficiency; it’s an aesthetic and philosophical statement.
Well, considering how RAM has jumped in price by 4× to 6× depending on capacity and form factor, at least this isn’t another RAM-gobbling Electron app.
For example, in your example is there any situation where there is an invoice that has not been paid?
In the vast majority of shopping cart systems, that would be a hard NO. There would be an Order ID, for carts that have not yet been paid for, sure, but an Invoice ID only makes sense if the order has been fully paid for, and not at any stage previous to that.
As such, why have an Order Status at all? Have the mere presence of the Invoice ID be the flag that states the order has been paid for. As in: null = not paid, not null = paid.
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