I don't consider the term 'self-taught' to mean that you didn't learn from others. Before the Internet, the local library was the primary source of information. People would go spend an enormous amount of time reading and browsing books written by other people to learn a skill.
Life is not a 'zero sum game'. Just because someone benefits from something does not mean someone else is exploited or oppressed.
Many in the anti-capitalist crowd have the mindset that wealth is not created, but just spread around. If someone gets rich, it must mean others got poorer. If that were true then everyone would be getting poorer as the population grows (finite resources spread ever thinner within a growing society).
On human lifetime timescales much of life is very much so a zero sum game.
Only the exceedingly privileged cannot grasp this fact of life. Academic bubble theories don’t help a generation of rust belt manufacturing workers, but it sure as hell made a whole lot of other folks rich at their direct expense.
The same academics are happy to talk about income inequality while ignoring the elephant in the room.
Ignoring this fact is exactly how we’ve gotten to where we are today. Politicians have only just begun to exploit this blind spot so many seem to have.
I have directly benefited from this fact and have done quite well for myself. But it’s so obvious I can’t believe it’s even an argument. Comparative advantage may help their grandchildren, but it doesn’t help the 49 year old machinist with no realistic job opportunities and bills to pay after the executives ship the plant off to Mexico or China. I personally watched it happen.
Agreed. It is a zero sum game once you consider the extreme asymmetry in opportunities.
In the age of social media, it's a myth that you can 'create opportunities for yourself'. It doesn't work like that. You need the right social network; else you will create value but that value will be ignored and not integrated into the system; you will not be paid/rewarded for it.
Either you exist in a social environment where opportunities fall on your lap by the hundreds and you have to pass on 99% of them and only pursue the top 1%... or you exist in an environment where you have to work like crazy for 10 years straight to get a single mediocre opportunity and such opportunities are so rare for you that you recognize it instantly and you know you cannot pass it up.
The economy is a zero sum game at best and a negative-sum game at worst. If it wasn't, we wouldn't have such significant asymmetries in opportunities.
Just look at anyone who is earning a lot of money in our system... They're not adding value. They have shares in companies; they could sit at home all day and they'd get paid the same. How is that not proof that they're being paid for not adding value?
Ignore past stories of what these people supposedly did once-upon-a-time to get to their current positions. What do you call a system where, at any given time, most of the money flows to people who do the least amount of work and consume the most?
Probably 5% of the population could do a better job than most CEOs. Still, these people will never get the opportunity to become a CEO. There's just not enough room at the top... So people make up all sorts of nonsense stories about track records and connections.
Buy up my existing cryptocurrency shitcoin for hundreds of millions of dollars and my track record and business connections will magically appear out of nowhere. I don't need to do anything. Just a Tweet from a celebrity will do.
You're not describing a zero sum interaction because the gain in China has almost certainly outstripped the loss in the US. That's pretty much the story of globalization so far.
This is precisely the academic theory bubble talk I was referring to.
On balance no one cares that some Chinese peasants had a huge increase in quality of life. Their lives, and the lives of their children were significantly degraded so some executives and owners could get obscenely rich. If you zoom out far enough literally nothing is zero sum given the conservation of energy. But that’s a silly argument.
That it may someday be a net win for humanity (and this is entirely uncertain) is very much immaterial to anyone other than folks so disconnected from reality that they are insulated from the impact these theoretical games have on real people in their own country and communities.
> If that were true then everyone would be getting poorer as the population grows (finite resources spread ever thinner within a growing society).
Well then what is inflation?
Not everything is infinite like software. The largest sources of inflation are caused by things that have a human limitation. ie. things that need to have a human in the loop.
And lets not forget the many sources of suppressed inflation. That iPhone is its current price because we rely on low paid Chinese workers and factories destroying their local environment to produce that phone. Once that goes away (some are saying this is China's last decade of free trade) then we will see the real cost of these things.
It does mean something was manipulated though. In most cases attention and or resources. Both finite at some scale. When either is gained it does take from something else.
Do the same people who think that every line of code ever written should be free; also think that every book, article, or painting should also be free?
Or are there people who draw lines and say that one type of work product should always be free while it is OK to charge for another?
Maybe get back to the original 20 years of copyright protection instead of the insane “70 years after death of the author” that has been made solely for the interest of the IP holders?
All my code (that isn't owned by a business, contractually) is free (well, technically I have a couple of private repos, but they're not paid access, they're just not available). So are all of the translation and commission work I did: people were paying to choose what I'd do next, not to keep something exclusive for themselves.
Corporatism is going to be the death of art, because we've normalized the idea that art is an ancillary function of some business project that first and foremost wants to generate profit.
they might suggest various other revenue models aside from royalties.
For instance, taking on production of art as a commission or pre-sale, releasing a book once a fundraising goal has been met, but not attempting to sue people for unauthorized copies after the fact
My code could effectively be free. The thing is most consumers don't care for code, they care for products. So I don't think open sourcing a currently closed source project would impact 99% of tech out there.
So if authors refuse to spend the time and resources needed to get a work ready for publication because they will be denied any compensation for doing so; should they be forced to write them anyway so that you can have your free books?
I have been of the opinion for a long time, that the basic architecture of file systems is antiquated and needs to be replaced. Any data organization technique you devise for organizing your files using a traditional hierarchical folder structure, will quickly break down once the number of files gets really large and are spread across many storage devices.
We need to move to an 'object store' architecture that can effectively manage hundreds of millions of files; attach a set of meaningful meta-data tags to each one; and find anything and everything in just a second or two of searching.
I created such a system that works exceptionally well that is currently in open beta.
Great. Didgets is a general-purpose data management system that supports multiple data models. The object store features allow it to manage file data. The tagging system I designed to attach meta-data tags to each object also allow it to manage structured data like relational databases.
The website was designed to highlight its DB features and how it can be used to quickly analyze data in its tables. Don't let that distract you from its initial purpose as a file system replacement.
I'm not sure building furnace is a good metaphor for crafting good software.
The nature of software is that every piece of it can be mass produced (copied and distributed) once the first piece is finished. All the 'artisan' effort goes into making that first copy.
That's a pretty narrow view of software too. The nature of building software systems is not always towards being able to mass-produce them. What would be the point of copying and distributing 10K copies of my script that runs migrations for one legacy database in a very specific way?
I have written a lot of software for myself or some close associates that is really only for our purposes (or sometimes just for our amusement). Certainly I could trivially distribute the software to whomever I wished, but it wouldn't be useful, appreciate it, or perhaps even run outside of the environment I wrote it for.
For instance I have some lovingly crafted bash scripts, that feel somewhat artisan. They keep my home server humming along, applying updates, making regular backups, and reporting status. The scrips are very tailored to my use and would not easily integrate elsewhere.
I could have used off the shelf software for much of this (ala "IKEA"), I'm sure, but I am a tinkerer, hobbyist, and, if I flatter myself, an artisan.
Of course. I feel more comfortable speaking my mind under a more anonymous account. Even then I'm pretty measured, I just don't want to deal with potential headaches in my professional career.
Not really the ideal way to approach HN, although understandable.
If you're considering HN from a forum perspective, the best advice I've read is to think of 'points' as currency to spend on unpopular opinions. After a certain point, you can 'afford' to say whatever's on your mind (within reason). Reddit is the same. You rack up 'karma' so that you can afford to take some downvotes for speaking your mind.
Now, the other dynamic is that some people here expect to see and work with other HN folks in the real world. THAT is more chilling, and I don't think one could be one's 'authentic self' in that instance unless you're already a 'name' who doesn't need to give a rip about others' opinions.
> the best advice I've read is to think of 'points' as currency to spend on unpopular opinions. After a certain point, you can 'afford' to say whatever's on your mind (within reason).
That's not really correct; downvotes on HN hide your comment and it eventually becomes dead (it can also become dead if super-users flag it); then it will only be visible for users who are logged in and have explicitly opt-in in seeing dead comments.
So no, you can't use your karma to go against the hive mind on HN, your comment will just be flagged and hidden completely.
I tend to wonder what the heck I said that caused an unexpected downvote.
I tend to get grumpy when an expected one happens, there are many unwritten rules on HN.
I tend to defend against imagined arguments with my statements, and against corner cases far, FAR too much. Getting those imagined arguments wrong doesn't help either.
I do notice that things that are inconvenient but true tend to take a hit, then rise back over time, so that's a good thing.
I genuinely don't care. I've questioned downvotes I've received before, but usually it's just because I want to know why I might have had a bad take or how I might be looking at things wrong.
Respectfully, I know nobody here and you all mean nothing to my life, which is much broader than what I post here, so what do your judgements matter to me? What do these points actually mean that I should choose not to be myself because of them? The answer, to both, is nothing.
Are you only interested in mainstream stuff that have been widely deployed and where textbooks have been published about them?
Or are you open to experimental stuff that are willing to 'break the mold' and try a whole new approach to how unstructured data (files) can be stored and managed?
All of the above, with a focus on modern high-performance, parallel, distributed filesystems. I assume the more modern systems may not be adequately discussed in textbooks and that papers may be better at covering their details.
The problem might be with your service. Do you force users to sign up before you share any details with them?
I routinely provide fake info when a website that I think MIGHT be something I am interested in, but refuses to give me enough info to know for sure, until I give them a bunch of personal info. NO THANKS!
Sometimes I tell them my name is Bob. I live at 123 Main St. My email is bob@nowhere.com. If that works to get me in the door, then I can look around to see if I want to become a real customer.
You are way too nice. Sometimes I sign up with fuck@off.com, address is 666 nunya business street, anonymousville, united states of handsoffmydata. If I can get their CEOs details or whatever, I sign up with that. Same for newsletter popups.
If they force an email verification, 9/10 times I just leave. For the 1/10 times I'll give a pseudonymous email, and if the service then proves to be useful I /might/ give more info. Usually if I'm actually buying something.
I agree with this. I have a personal project that, even after years of working on it, still has as many features on the 'to do' list as have been completed. I would love to get help implementing them or testing the completed ones.
People will tell me that simply open sourcing it will make help magically appear. Not to say that cannot happen (sometimes it does), but the odds are against it.
I would consider those people to be self taught.
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