completely anecdotal, but the reason from my perspective is that the system has been overwhelmingly rigged against being able to take economic risk.
I would have started my own business by now ... heck I'd probably have started and failed several by now if not for one thing. Well three:
1) you cannot afford prescription drugs in America unless you have good health insurance. At least in my state (Alabama), the federal health marketplace offers exactly one option from exactly one provider. It has a ridiculously high deductible and is (no shit) not accepted at nearly all doctor's offices in my town.
2) I cannot afford to lose my access to prescription medication and healthcare, because my wife has diabetes and I survived cancer a few years ago. We're in fine health now, but we DO have medical expenses ... things that should NOT be that expensive (yearly CT scans and insulin are hardly breaking technology), but have been SO inflated in price by a bogus, rigged third-party-payer system that we literally can't afford those things without "insurance".
3) I had kids early in life, and since my adult working career began, it has been an absolute baseline requirement that I be able to get them medical care and otherwise provide for them.
ok ... having kids early was my decision, and I'll accept that this decision limited my universe of personal options. Getting sick. Having a wife who got sick. These were not personal decisions. They are just things that happen to people.
Our system in America is designed to keep me at my desk, working for someone else, doing mostly meaningless work. Why? Because it'd be a complete nightmare for those at the top, if every last one of me out there in the workplace could afford to take a risk that might not work out.
There'd be a helluva lot more competition out there.
America is dying because of this. Not just our economy. But our society. The world would genuinely be a better place with the companies I would have started in it. And that is true for every other stymied inventor/would-be-entrepreneur in america.
There is always a downside to risk, and there is always a risk involved in starting a new Enterprise. But what we have right now is so far out of whack that taking even a minor risk, can straight up kill you or your kids for lack of access to proper medical care.
> you can't become a doc for love of the profession, because it's a profession you can't test drive
oh, I don't know about that. It's like a 6 week community college course to become an EMT. There's a test drive for you. There are 2 year programs that will get you a nursing license.
You can get a taste of the medical career path without going the full MD route. Maybe not as accessible as coding, but it is accessible.
As my kids are just now graduating HS, this is something I try to drill into them. College can be like an assembly line that spits you out saddled with the equivalent of a 30 year mortgage, trained for a job space that you literally have no idea if you'll even want to do ... or it can be like a Baskin Robins of careers, and you can try every last one of them until you find what you really like.
passion and knowledge of self are everything. the rest is a commodity.
Nope. OSS was here long before redhat and everyone else, and it will be here long after.
Because, in your analogy, the librarians are all volunteers. That’s how we got here. If the pain of not having a problem solved is great enough the volunteers will fix it. Or they won’t. If you feel like the pain level is high enough. Hey maybe YOU should try volunteering to solve it.
This is what makes OSS powerful. It is a community service. If you aren’t happy with the service p become a member of the community and contribute.
Right all this talk of "what it takes to be a success in OSS" ... programma please!
"Success" in the OSS world is putting code out that others can use. Either they find it useful, or they don't. If they don't that's not failure. That's ... someone else put out something better, or that your user community is small or just not out there.
OSS is not a business model. It's a SHARING model.
God it's just like the music scene these days. Did you get into it for the Art? Cool you're gonna be ok. Did you get into it wanting to be a rock star? Might as well buy a lottery ticket. Your chances are better.
OSS success is providing something of use to a community that contributes back to it.
Yeah, maybe you can find a way to make a nickel off that, but that's not what it's FOR. It's not a marketplace, it's a public library.
This celebrity/glamor seeking is so apparent on github. Every single project's readme.md reads like marketing copy these days.
Just like the music scene again. Reminds me of the 90's when the record labels still had money and steamrolled the alternative scene looking for a cash grab.
> But my personal history? My photos? Words I've written? Oh well. If someone wants that stuff, they can probably get it. And the gaping maw of robotic commerce doesn't actually care about me personally, it only cares what it can sell me.
>
> I'm not worried about the police or some authoritarian tyranny on a personal level, on the level where what I say on the internet matters.
Yeah, but then 2016 happened.
This sort of "tactical positioning" on internet privacy is where I was prior to that year. The fact of the mater is that "personal threat exposure", while not completely irrelevant, misses the forest for the trees.
It's not YOU they're trying to manipulate, it's the herd. And it works. And that eventually comes around to impacting you just as personally as if you'd posted your bank account number and ssn on facebook.
I say I'm a musician on the side, but truthfully I've been messing with sound instinctively since I came out of the womb, and I only picked up programming and design and stuff later on. As such, I gravitated toward electronic music doodads almost immediately.
This issue of "falling down the LCD well" has been at the forefront of electronic music for a while. Synthesizers were cool in the 70's because they had knobs, and any abstract logic involved was done by you, so you had to be into it.
Then the 80's and 90's came along and we got stuff like the DX7 and innumerable "workstation keyboards" that were little more than a tiny display and two or three buttons. Maybe a jog wheel if you were lucky.
These were unambiguously cleaner from a design perspective, but what people began to realize is that the screen was too much of an abstraction. Then of course DAWs came along and even the synthesizers themselves moved into the computer physically.
Music, like life in general, is visceral, and the screen is not. Musicians became frustrated with the lack of physicality.
The modular synthesizer approach of the 70's has made a HUGE resurgence with the eurorack standard.
Not everyone, but LOTS of people actually PREFER a gigantic mess of tangled wires with physical plugs and knobs to a sterile pure-logic implementation on the computer that can do all the same stuff cheaper and in a more reproducible way.
I suspect we'll see a similar sort of resurgence of physicality across every product that has been absorbed into the computer screen.
> What are the remaining APIs that people need in Electron that are not available in the web browser? And what's the timeline to getting those in the browser to deprecate Electron?
I get what you're saying but to me, even if I could do literally everything that node does inside the browser, that STILL would not deprecate electron for me.
It's not lack of functionality in the browser that's a problem for me. It's mutability of the browser.
With electron, I get to use ONE version of javascript, ONE implementation of the DOM, ONE implementation of CSS. Period.
I do not give a single hoot about that ancient corporate version of IE you have to use at work. About how this looks in safari, versus edge versus, opera, versus whatever.
It simply doesn't matter anymore.
no more shims, and I can dump about half of the frameworks and stuff from my code because of it.
If I get an app going that everyone likes and I actually want it on the web, THEN I can go and add all the cruft I'll need to make it work out there in the wild.
One of the reasons I love HN is that the commenters here usually have a much deeper understanding of this sort of thing than I do.
Which is why I'm left wondering why nobody has mentioned Firefox Incognito mode (chrome too I think).
At least on firefox, incognito mode does not store cookies on disk. They persist for the duration of the tab/window you logged into.
this would circumvent cookie tracking, I think. I mean I guess not if you opened one icognito window and did all of your browsing inside of it, and never closed it?
FB may have started out as an invite only thing for technically savvy(ish) college kids, but those days were completely over the minute they got their app so tightly integrated with iOS and Android. So ... circa 2010 maybe?
FBs target audience now is literally the same as or even wider than television. We don't expect granny to understand the economics of her cable box.
She's used to paying the cable bill, seeing a few ads and feeling free to use whatever is on offer. Because she paid for it.
For instance the guide channel is not "free" from her perspective, and she has no expectation that she should need to be suspicious that for insance, the guide channel is tracking her viewing habits and customizing the programming on offer so as to massively sway public opinion and elections.
Average US consumers are used to this model, whether or not the fine print spells out something else. They're going to think "I paid my cell phone bill, therefore I am paying for facebook" ... the question never even arises.
An interesting question I've had recently, which isn't necessarily directly related to the subject of the article is, "how does access to technology affect brain development?"
When I was a kid, my family was dirt poor, in a fairly literal sense. That was the early to mid 80's and while I was reasonably bright as a student, access to technology really did hold me back.
I didn't get my hands on a computer until high school (in '90), and that was a broken C-64 that I had to fix myself. I didn't have a TV to connect it to. I had to earn enough to buy an old black and white TV at a garage sale before I could even get it working.
My whole life I felt that this is what held me back, and so when the time came, I endeavored to make sure my kids had access to technology if they were interested.
But now I see where tech has headed. They've had computers, but mostly pads and phones their entire lives. It seems almost like these platforms have DULLED their imagination to some extent.
I wonder in the coming generations, if we will see some sort of correlation with access to tech in one's formative years. Especially given the intentionally addictive nature of many of the apps that have become popular in recent years. Also as tech has become ubiquitous and cheap, access it not entirely defined by economics anymore either.
Success is far more than raw intelligence. I'll be interesting to see how all of that plays out in the next generation or two.
Nearly every major industrialized nation's infrastructure was bombed to hell after WW2, except America. To the victor went the spoils, and so our economy boomed to a much much greater degree than it would have otherwise.
This lasted for a generation or two, and certain aspects of that capitalist feeding frenzy were enshrined as cultural values.
The idea that there was a social contract between employers and employees, and that an average hard working American wouldn't be tossed out on the street if they got sick, would have a house to live in and would not have to toil in their old age, was baked into America. If you work hard and you're loyal, you'll be ok.
However, where that was seen as a Governmental function after the Great Depression, in the boom years after WW2, the economy was simply flooded with money.
When there's that much money and opportunity around, it's easy to start thinking that the Government was the problem. That the social contract would always remain, and that we could trust our bosses who we knew and worked with every day far more than some politically motivated government bureaucrat.
Corporations bought the politicians. Then the politicians passed laws to make the bribery legal. Then slowly those post WW2 culturally enshrined easy answers became law.
Now we have people seriously talking about "trickle down" economics as if it were a real thing. Because it was kinda like that in the 50's when we were the only major industrial powerhouse in the world.
Now we've privatized nearly our entire healthcare system, because in the 50's hell, going to the doctor was cheap and how could that be anyone's problem but yours?
And now we have no retirement plans other than "we will let you put some of your own money into the stock market tax free, but hey if the market tanks you're on your own bruh! (even though you had zippy control over that)"
Again, because maybe that would have made sense in the 50's and 60's, and god knows if anything might have seemed true in that era it must be the word of God himself.
The problem of course, is that now that the winning team picks the referees, there's pretty much no way out of this. The government SHOULD be providing healthcare, and decent retirement so that business doesn't have this burden.
But then it'd be too easy to start new businesses. The referees picked by the last winning team aren't too keen on that.
when we can make web pages, and entire sites without once actually using something a human can disassemble and reverse engineer ... this will be the end of the open web.
truly the complete dead end of it.
Unless maybe I'm missing something. Is a disassembler for WASM a thing yet?
Since the hot mess that was 2016 on Facebook went down, I've been pondering this a lot.
Facebook was an effective rear view mirror, for a whole lot of us. The more savvy among us could see the storm clouds gathering on the horizon literally almost since the beginning , but certainly by late 2014/early 2015 it was plainly obvious that psyops were afoot, though even to a lot of plugged in hackernews type people the full-blown industrial scale of it all wasn't immediately obvious.
That's whats so insidious. It's the model. It's the first person perspective that facebook locks you into. It looks like reality, and it contains people you know, but it is not real.
You don't really know who wrote what, who liked what, etc. There's no global view of facebook for a user. I think that's the problem.
The first person view that you're locked into with facebook, makes it trivial to manufacture the appearance of group consensus when no such thing exists in the real world (if you have access to the backend).
The problem really is facebook, not the concept of social media all together. The problem is also that Facebook knew what it was doing. They were building a political doomsday machine from the get-go, they knew that's what they were doing, and they designed specifically to that goal for a decade with practically limitless funding.
This is what makes me want to see something like Electron developed over Firefox internals.
Packaging my own browser with my code so that I am now developing toward ONE client instead of any random thing that can speak http, and at the same time, being able to take the core of my app, tweak it a little, and plop it out on the web without a complete rewrite ... that is completely amazing. It's what I've wanted since forever.
Even better would be the ability to optionally include features in my build. Like if I don't NEED WebGL, the MIDI and Audio APIs, etc, etc ... it'd be pretty nice to be able to optionally exclude those from the bundled browser to minimize size.
However, I don't want to be welded to google. Mozilla's codebase seems ripe for such a development.
There's like at least 3 or 4 different ways of constructing "classes" without the Class keyword. Frankly, that's a mess. I get that each has it's own advantages etc, but I don't WANT to figure out some hipster's clever new way of managing inheritance chains.
I want to use the supported method of creating classes within the language. I prefer usage of the "Class" keyword because no matter how the language changes from here on out, it's a pretty safe bet that "Class" is going to always be the rightest way to do it, and the one that everyone else will understand.
Even if the bullet didn't breach the fabric, the fabric is gonna breach YOU. I guess it might make recovering the projectile from your internal organs a little easier, LOL. So there is that.
This isn't nature we're talking about here. It's other humans.
When I spend 20 or 30 years of my life specializing in a particular task, and doing it to generate a large amount of wealth for my employer, who passes a much smaller amount of wealth on to me, there are and should be strings attached to that from the employer's side.
In the US at least, there are already PLENTY of strings attached from the employee side. I can't see a doctor without a job. I can't borrow money without a job. I can't smoke grass, yadda yadda yadda. And I live in an "at will" state as well.
Sorry. This is not nature we're dealing with. It's humans exploiting other humans. The "adapt or die" philosophy is not justified.
I would have started my own business by now ... heck I'd probably have started and failed several by now if not for one thing. Well three:
1) you cannot afford prescription drugs in America unless you have good health insurance. At least in my state (Alabama), the federal health marketplace offers exactly one option from exactly one provider. It has a ridiculously high deductible and is (no shit) not accepted at nearly all doctor's offices in my town.
2) I cannot afford to lose my access to prescription medication and healthcare, because my wife has diabetes and I survived cancer a few years ago. We're in fine health now, but we DO have medical expenses ... things that should NOT be that expensive (yearly CT scans and insulin are hardly breaking technology), but have been SO inflated in price by a bogus, rigged third-party-payer system that we literally can't afford those things without "insurance".
3) I had kids early in life, and since my adult working career began, it has been an absolute baseline requirement that I be able to get them medical care and otherwise provide for them.
ok ... having kids early was my decision, and I'll accept that this decision limited my universe of personal options. Getting sick. Having a wife who got sick. These were not personal decisions. They are just things that happen to people.
Our system in America is designed to keep me at my desk, working for someone else, doing mostly meaningless work. Why? Because it'd be a complete nightmare for those at the top, if every last one of me out there in the workplace could afford to take a risk that might not work out.
There'd be a helluva lot more competition out there.
America is dying because of this. Not just our economy. But our society. The world would genuinely be a better place with the companies I would have started in it. And that is true for every other stymied inventor/would-be-entrepreneur in america.
There is always a downside to risk, and there is always a risk involved in starting a new Enterprise. But what we have right now is so far out of whack that taking even a minor risk, can straight up kill you or your kids for lack of access to proper medical care.