olfactory

Today we have a military industrial complex supported by both parties and our most vital student loans (championed by our "left" party) come with no bankruptcy protection.

We do have a very strong Federal government, but it's designed to funnel money to various interest groups.

By making compute infrastructure affordable and by making consumer review data available for all products, Bezos is a champion of the little guy. He hasn't gotten rich through government crony capitalism or fraud, he's done the simplest stuff better than anyone else could. He let's people buy products that are reviewed thoroughly by other customers, he has a reasonable return policy, etc. This benefits consumers AND honest merchants selling through the platform.

AWS has made it way cheaper to start and scale many kinds of tech startups, and paved the way for firms like Heroku and DigitalOcean, and the entire vps ecosystem.

Bezos is a master of infrastructure execution. This is extremely rare, as we can see from the fate of Jet and Azure. Year after year the genius of his business tradeoff decisions and strategies become more clear. This is why he's wealthy. What we need are more people with that kind of vision and ability to see the big picture and solve real, unsexy problems.

Before AWS I had dealt with Dell as a part of several startups. The sales people were shady and they tried to milk every penny out of the customer for semi-proprietary hardware that was expensive to support. People flocked to AWS to escape the kind of predation and mediocrity championed by Dell.

Most readers of HN have the technical ability to have started AWS but (if they were of age at the time) did not see the opportunity and the path to execution. Bezos did. Let's give him some credit. I think he's one of the most remarkable visionaries of our age.

He's going to be many times over the richest person in history before long. This has been clear for a long time if you look at the rate of growth of his wealth. But it's not bad news. Bezos has an unmatched ability to create infrastructure that works well and is low cost.

E-commerce is a very competitive market and yet Amazon grows every day. Why? Because consumers trust Amazon's reviews and return policy. It's way better than what most retailers offer. The reviews are unparalleled and offer consumers tremendous power against firms that try to rip them off.

I've moved many of my tech investments into Amazon b/c of the steady track record and stable trajectory of good decision making and execution.

If the economy tanks, it makes Amazon's review data and free shipping even more valuable. If I'm strapped for cash I'm less likely to walk into a retailer and pay top dollar for something with no reviews.

That's misleading though, because he's had great risk of ruin and lots of smart people have tried (Jet, Azure, etc.) to compete with him but have fallen short.

Compare Amazon to something done by government like the highways. When I order something on Amazon it nearly always arrives exactly on time as expected. Highways are always in a state of disrepair and congestion, and get worse every day.

This is not an example of why Bezos wealth should be used to build highways. Every penny of his wealth was earned by offering services in a competitive market better than the alternatives. With government infrastructure there typically are no alternatives and so nobody cares or expects much.

Bezos is not an enemy of the little guy, he's someone who has made it so much cheaper to build a startup. Remeber the days when the first $200K of fundraising would go straight to Dell for a bunch of bare metal hardware? Contrast that to AWS. He's done the same in many areas of the economy.

Bezos will surpass that several times over in the next few years. He's added tremendous economic value which is why so many of us pay him for his many products and services.

Is it not obvious that this article is meant to make us imagine beloved elders as participants in high risk sex?

That just changes the risk profile of deciding to execute a trade vs the predictable outcome. It may be more costly or less costly than existing approaches.

Well, FWIW js is not the most friendly language for functional programming. I'd argue that the trend toward immutable.js and redux occurred partly because rest/spread syntax was/is relatively confusing, and so immutable patterns without a library feel less elegant until one really groks the somewhat visually opaque semantics of the rest/spread syntax.

Redux also offered a simple approach to the "action bus" idea from Flux, but omitted first class async support, etc. React itself also somewhat overlooked async patterns, which created the idea that their absence was by design and so an additional (opinionated) library was appropriate.

In sum I'd argue that React actually fights against js quite a bit and that it will truly come into its own once reason gets more mindshare.

For those of us who invested heavily in react as all this was becoming clear (and being ironed out) I hope we learned enough to allow better decision making in the future.

Also, React has a few "on by default" performance enhancements that are a bit conceptually confusing and create something of a mismatch with the functional approach.

But still it's difficult (and unpleasant) to imagine the world without React.

His point was that openness is highly valued. The way I'd put it is that in SF, it is completely OK to be a nonconformist and to do things your own way.

It's actually hard to be fully aware of the high levels of conformity one finds elsewhere until you have spent 6+ months in SF.

That's not to say that there aren't widespread prejudices held in SF.. the biggest one I have encountered is the belief that people living in "flyover" states are idiots and are less enlightened than those living in SF.

Saying SF is open to nonconformity is not another way of saying SF is "enlightened". It's just an aspect of enlightenment that SF culture does particularly well compared to other parts of the world.

This isn't even necessarily all kinds of nonconformity... it's just some that are rare elsewhere.

If you pick a person at random from anywhere in the US you'll find roughly equivalent levels of enlightenment and judgmental views. What's unique about SF is that being different is way more acceptable than it is elsewhere.

When you live in SF for a while and then go to other major cities and see how people dress it looks like they are all wearing a conformist costume, trying to look acceptable. But acceptable to whom? It's this instinct toward conformity that is so repellent about many areas of the country. The example I used about fashion is just an example, the same exists when it comes to life choices, values, etc.

Yes. This is obvious but also counterintuitive. People forget that it's a long game and that malware (such as Stuxnet) is patient and penetrates gradually.

Great links. I've been using cake for a while but without the advanced options.

One random question: Does it ever make sense to add SQM to a tap_soft interface? I have two locations and both have SQM set up to minimize bufferbloat, but when I VPN from one to the other there is some bufferbloat on the VPN connection.

I think it makes sense to give it 100 pages, but I read a fair bit faster than the average person.

I think it is also a question of the other factors indicating that a book might be worth reading... is it a classic? Have others highly recommended it? Is it for a book club?

While I'm well aware of sunk cost and realize that it often makes sense to cut and run, I have had the experience a few times with both books and movies where it all came into focus right at the end and make the whole thing worthwhile. If I'd stopped 90% of the way through I never would have had the moment of appreciation.

Just as a hike through the mountains is often rugged and lacking in scenery, reaching the peak changes the entire experience and puts the grueling work needed to get there into proper context.

Some albums are uninviting on the first, second, and even third listens, yet after a while something is unlocked and the music finally makes sense.

I'd argue that some of the best things are good in spite of being inaccessible. It's asking a lot of any creator to give us a happy path and also give us something deep and significant. Sure it happens now and then, but I prefer the significance over the happy path just as I prefer a carefully prepared meal to a piece of candy.

The world wants to give us candy... the endorphins of the clickbait headline are 90% of the endorphins one gets after reading the whole article... the endorphins from watching a porn scene are 90% of the endorphins of watching a romance with a plot... a few pop tarts will go down quickly and dampen our enthusiasm for any cuisine.

A few interesting things about SDR and the kind of tinkering and experimentation one can do:

- in amateur radio, SDR is starting to dominate new commercial designs, but has not yet overtaken the superhet.

- you can buy a low end SDR (rtlsdr) for $20 or a better one for $120 (sdrplay) or a high end one that transmits for $2K (flexradio)

- Ettus hardware is great if you have the dollars and only care about VHF/UHF

- if you want to play with the concepts without buying hardware, just learn DSP.

- there are many interesting applications that are now fairly affordable to build that used to require massive budgets (due to cheaper FPGAs)

Maybe different learning styles? I spoke with one very young math prodigy a few years ago who told me that her secret to self teaching advanced material was that she tries several texts and ends up using the one that teaches the material in the way that she finds most intuitive.

> I doubt it was some hybrid free for all like you're suggesting.

I certainly would not have expected it to be a free-for-all, but the quote I pasted suggests that there was not necessarily a perspective on how the decision about the boundary (or boundaries) between the technologies would have an impact over time.

We've all been there. You hire a super smart native developer who has been doing nothing but native for a long time, and he/she can work magic that makes the equivalent (probably a bit immature) implementation in RN seem pedestrian. Then, because the native dev is experienced and respected, the consideration of boundaries is ignored in favor of gratifying the feat of engineering that was just done.

Repeat that a few hundred or thousand times and the code is going to need a full rewrite, but since that is hard to accomplish politically the most likely outcome is to preserve the "value" of the native code, since it cost more (in salary) to have built, and to blame RN for the problems.

I use the Airbnb linting guidelines for JS and while they are generally useful they suggest a culture of pedantry and a failure to see the forest through the trees. One of the React core team members recently ranted on Twitter about the robotic desire some people have to pretend that moving components to functional components counts as work, etc.

So based on that I would not be terribly surprised if the decision making was locally optimal but globally crippling... or, suggestive of a devaluing of systems thinking in favor of pedantry and the petty tyranny it installs in its zealots.