thaneross (u/thaneross)

thaneross commented on Oxide raises $200M Series C oxide.computer/blog/our-2... · Posted by u/igrunert

IshKebab · a month ago

Yeah there's a famous essay "The tyranny of structurelessness" or something like that. The TL;DR is that there is always a power hierarchy. If there isn't a formal one that just means there's an informal one which is usually much worse.

thaneross · a month ago

This tends to come up every time flat structures are discussed and it seems like such a failure of imagination that anything other than strict hierarchies could work, despite plenty of counter-examples like Valve. Yes, some people do badly in an environment where you have to have convince people rather than use power to get things done. However the problems with traditional hierarchies are so well known people assume them to be innate. I'm tired of it being normal to have an incompetent boss.

thaneross commented on Y Combinator will let founders receive funds in stablecoins fortune.com/2026/02/03/fa... · Posted by u/shscs911

bombcar · a month ago

I mean it’s obvious that successful businesses are only a side effect of what the point is - a successful exit. And if one big success can be strongarmed to help other ventures exit successfully, they’ll do it.

Why wouldn’t they?

thaneross · a month ago

This is why we can't have nice things.

thaneross commented on I switched from VSCode to Zed tenthousandmeters.com/blo... · Posted by u/r4victor

dijit · 2 months ago

I think this is quite ironic actually.

If I understood the history correctly, being a "shareholder" was a path to a fractional business ownership for people who could not afford to outright own a business.

It comes from the same mental position as a co-operative.

In these scenarios, a CEO is really just an employee of sorts for the shareholders.

It's quite funny that we see the CEO of a publicly traded company has worse than a sole-proprietor, when profits will go directly to a sole proprietor- but not to a shareholder CEO.

I understand how it has played out, that the largest companies on earth are publicly traded now, and that CEO compensation in those companies is crazy. But it's quite ironic in my opinion how it played out.

thaneross · 2 months ago

Given the top 10% holds 87% of shares, it seems clear the stock market is primarily a tool to compound wealth. Having a surplus of money is table stakes to play.

thaneross commented on The Junior Hiring Crisis people-work.io/blog/junio... · Posted by u/mooreds

m_rpn · 3 months ago

It's really not obvious to calculate the output of any employee even with years of data, way harder for a software engineer or any other job with that many facets. If you've found a proven and reliable way evaluate someone in the first 2 weeks you just solved one of the biggest HR problems ever.

thaneross · 3 months ago

What if, and hear me out, we asked the people a new employee has been onboarding with? I know, trusting people to make a fair judgment lacks the ass-covering desired by most legal departments but actually listening to the people who have to work with a new hire is an idea so crazy it might just work.

thaneross commented on Apple's Problem with Bodies drobinin.com/posts/apples... · Posted by u/valzevul

contact9879 · 4 months ago

Damn. What’s with all the personal attacks against the author in this comments section?

thaneross · 4 months ago

American culture still holds puritanical views of sex, and this article crosses the taboo threshold that 15 year olds are having sex.

thaneross commented on Stategraph: Terraform state as a distributed systems problem stategraph.dev/blog/why-s... · Posted by u/lawnchair

otterley · 6 months ago

I can't help but wonder whether the problem being addressed is the result of two antipatterns.

The first is that the scope being managed by a single Terraform application is too broad (e.g., thousands of resources instead of tens or hundreds). File-level locking is fine for small databases with few to no concurrent writers, but as more users come in, and the database gets bigger, you need record-level locking. For Terraform state files, it begs the question why the database got so big and why there were so many concurrent users in the first place.

Second, Terraform state files are a cache but they're being mistreated as a source of truth. This isn't the user's fault but it is the result of (understandable) impatience which results in inevitable shortcut-seeking. It's been a risk since Terraform's inception, and it won't go away as long as people complain that collecting current actual state from the resource provider is too slow.

thaneross · 6 months ago

Unfortunately many providers don't expose all the state used to create certain resources through the API, so there's no way to download the real source of truth after the fact.

thaneross commented on Do I not like Ruby anymore? (2024) sgt.hootr.club/molten-mat... · Posted by u/Vedor

matltc · 7 months ago

As someone coming from Ruby to TypeScript, I find types cumbersome, verbose, complex, and not of much use. I have been writing and reading TS for the past six months. What am I missing?

thaneross · 7 months ago

If your only exposure to static typing is six months of TS, what you are missing is experience. You're still on the learning curve and thus the cognitive load of explicit types is high, but with time the opposite becomes true.

thaneross commented on Valve Software handbook for new employees [pdf] (2012) cdn.akamai.steamstatic.co... · Posted by u/Michelangelo11

isleyaardvark · 7 months ago

The main criticism of flat organizational structure is that management will develop as an emergent property anyway, but it will do so poorly. "The Tyranny of Structurelessness is the classic essay on the subject: https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

thaneross · 7 months ago

A poor manager in a structureless org is only going to have as much influence as their popularity allows. While this may cause damage, it pales in comparison to a bad manager in a traditional hierarchy who has the power to force their decisions.

thaneross commented on TikTok is harming children at an industrial scale afterbabel.com/p/industri... · Posted by u/cwwc

intended · a year ago

However cancel culture is 100% going to evolve once you create an internet, and then leave things to the market to solve.

Cancel culture is ... i guess the best democracy in a broken system. Its people realizing the lever of power that is left is the levers as a consumer. So by choosing what they consume, they are sending signals to the system of society.

For some reason, I am not bugged by cancel culture, for me its an inevitability. As is the natural irritation and opposition which would appear to it. I suppose, all of it, cancel, counter cancel, is just the invisible hand at work?

thaneross · a year ago

I agree people are reaching for the limited power available to them, but the objections to cancel culture aren't usually around voluntary consensual boycotts but rather the use of "social force". Destruction of reputation, demands for firing, deplatforming, doxxing, swatting, etc... the methods of harming a person over the internet.

thaneross commented on America Is Backsliding Toward Its Most Polluted Era theatlantic.com/health/ar... · Posted by u/pmags

wpietri · a year ago

> I don't think it's cognitive dissonance if you recognize the issue.

Well I recognize the issue and still experience a feeling of dissonance. Indeed, I work to be able to be tolerant of that feeling, because I think it's important in pursuing deeper understanding.

If you have a better term I'm all for it. But I think the "unknowingly" there is meant more as the general case rather than an absolute limit on the term.

thaneross · a year ago

Violating ethical beliefs when they are inconvenient is what I'd call "moral hypocrisy". Practically everyone is guilty of it to varying degrees.