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.
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.
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.
Doing a hybrid app in the way that the articles describe sounds like a recipe for tremendous complexity.
One line in one of the linked articles that really struck me was "Often times, it is not clear whether code should be written in native or React Native. Naturally, an engineer will often choose the platform that they are more comfortable which can lead to unideal code."
Without a top down vision of the proper role for React Native vs native code, how could anyone possibly expect things to go well?
Even within React Native there are a lot of existing "boundaries" where native code is used in a way that allows the general contracts adopted by React to be used without worrying much about the implementation details.
The quote above suggests that Airbnb expected a cohesive and sensible approach to emerge, when clearly there were (as the articles mention) many developers who were strongly opposed to React Native from the beginning.
While it's not necessarily the case, it seems that if there was debate about where "models" should live, there was really a need for a CTO to simply make that call and allow the rest of the team to coordinate around the tradeoffs associated with the decision. Without that, the battle will be fought with every pull request and other social and organizational factors (like bro culture, intimidation, etc.) will dominate over the technical merits of the decision.
I love Airbnb, and use the app extensively both as a host and as a traveler. It's not clear why it ever seemed sensible to go down a "hybrid" path. The app has pictures, scrolling listings, and photo views. I'd be curious to read an article that discussed very frankly the decision to go hybrid and where the lines were drawn that turned out to be problematic.
There is a big difference between ego and narcissism.
Many people have low self-esteem, which means that they are constantly doubting themselves, feeling less worthy than others, feeling destined for failure, feeling too timid to take reasonable risks, etc.
Meditation helps to restore correct ego functioning in humans, creating a balanced perspective where the self can thrive and does not inflict self-harm by allowing impulses of self doubt and fear to hijack a person's productive effort.
The idea that selfless humans are simply humans with very low self esteem is absurd, and this article suggests that the two are equivalent.
Humans who possess the virtuous quality of being good team players and contributors to society are quite likely very good at goal directed behavior and do not wallow in the emotions of self-inferiority and fearfulness that low self-esteem individuals do.
Think about the stereotypical low self esteem douche who goes around insulting others to make himself feel better. That person is not a model of selflessness and virtue. It takes a deep well of inner confidence and belief in the value of one's own worth to be mentally strong and courageous enough to stand up to injustice or ridicule and to make the world a better place.
The issue of self esteem is confounded by millennia of religious dogma that tells people that "selflessness" is virtuous, when in fact quite the opposite is true. Virtue comes from the channeling of one's desire and one's life force toward noble ends, not by suppressing one's confidence and simply letting others (such as religious or political leaders) tell us that we are worthless and that they know what is best for us.
FWIW I think you guys should put out a major call for help to other companies and add more non-FB people to the core committers.
React Native is fantastic, but the ecosystem is thrashed around horribly by these kinds of bugs and the non response from Facebook for things that impact most of the non-Facebook open source ecosystem around React Native.
This is a great point. There have been a few issues that I've followed only to find that eventually the entire thread on Github with tons of example cases of the bug gets "closed for inactivity" because nobody from Facebook would respond to it.
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.