supercon's comments

Sure. I’m not saying death is the sole provider of meaning, but still a major one, no matter how far we push it. As long as an inevitable end exists, we will adjust our life and actions with it.

For me this statement is a logical conclusion to the thought experiment ”imagine if everyone lived forever”. But I realize maybe for some it isn’t, so lets categorize this as an opinion.

Mixed feelings. On one hand I can imagine situations where longetivity and its development might really be useful, for example when (if ever) we enter the human space travel era, where the human lifespan will eventually start to factor in. On the other, its hard to not consider the deeper meaning of such pursuits. After all, death is what gives life meaning and pushing it further raises lots of possible negatives e.g. 1) less sense of urgency 2) traumatic death will be even more traumautic, especially in the early years of life… I do wish I can live healthily to the end of my days, but its really a sort of miracle in todays world if the reaper doesn’t collect you before aging runs it course.

I have yet to make the final push towards leaving, but have thought about it many, many times. Still, there were some new things here that I didn’t realize as a ’con’. Thanks and consider me still considering, but harder…

”Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly; Man got to sit and wonder 'why, why, why?' Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land; Man got to tell himself he understand.” -Kurt Vonnegut

Soo, is it just me or does the amazon.care site not work?

So were it not for this era of cloud platforms and the other technical ”advancements” you mention, would we somehow be in a different place when it comes to maintaining and operating software?

As someone in a devops team, I could argue that ops teams are rarely the ones deciding what technologies to use. If we follow the basic sales->development->maintenance -pipeline, as ops your task is simply to keep the service running and secure with the tools you are given. Sure there can be added complexity, but I doubt it is as systemic/general as you make it seem to be.

Anyway, if this is seen as a problem the devs could simply take on the responsibility of learning those quirks themselves or produce the level of quality software that requires no maintanance whatsoever. But for some reason that hasn’t happened, eventhough the original idea behind devops was to blur this line. So until that day comes, I’ll sure enjoy whatever security one can really have in todays job market.

Indeed, the logical conclusion for a man who has the misfortune to end up on the complaining side of one of these conversations is simply: just shut up! Thankfully you had the courage and security to remind us of this, before we further breach the code of conduct and embarrass the male gender! /s

This is really puzzling. For once we actually have not one, but two ’hi-tech’ companies in Europe, that can be considered significant competitors in a global market, yet instead of embracing this opportunity, Germany thinks its better to further segment the market to smaller players? A market that to be honest, is not as lucrative as many might think and has huge upfront R&D costs everytime the next G is coming up, especially on the RAN side.

I guess if its not airplanes or cars, we can leave it to Silicon Valley to handle. Or is it only airplanes now?

/rant from Finland

> 3. The commuting routine, even if it's a nightmare, offers a sense of normalcy that most people have gotten used to and in a weird way rely on for grounding.

While working from home, I’ve found it much harder to switch between work/free modes. It seems the daily commute has been an effective way to for me to either prepare for the coming day or settle my mind for non-work related activities.

Good read, thank you. I always welcome these articles where the notion of "how things came to be" is introduced. Makes it easier to manage the latest and greatest, when you have an understanding of how things have evolved.

As someone living in Finland, seeing "Live: Finnair flight.." as the top post in HN gave me quite the scare. But luckily, we can consider this to be valid still: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/news/Worlds-safest-airline... !

This is of course all speculatory, but I think for many of us the things that sets him apart from the "money-focused" crowd are his goals and how outspoken he is about them. He wants to get people to Mars, which as a business venture will not turn a profit in his lifetime. I'm not saying he is altruistic but rather that he might be more of the 'fame and glory' type, wanting to leave a larger mark than a big digit in some future Wikipedia bio.

> Which is about one-half of Walmart's employee base,

This doesn't take away the fact that there is interest in having these companies operating in the future.

> but the USA doesn't base its foreign policy on the whims of the Walton family.

If by "the USA" you mean the government, yes you are right, because it doesn't have to. Companies as big as Walmart, Lockheed Martin, McDonald's are fully capable of influencing the 'outside world' by their own means.

According to Wikipedia[1], the biggest U.S. arms companies employ ~700.000 people, so I don't think you need to be a conspiracy theorist when you deduct from this that, if world peace were to settle to the globe it would mean less jobs for the people, less tax income for the government and less profit for the industry. Although most of the sales for these companies come from the U.S. government, according to TIME the export business isn't exactly pocket-change either[2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arms_industry [2] http://time.com/4161613/us-arms-sales-exports-weapons/

I think that the term 'salespeople' here refer to those who proactively push their products to the market and by doing so widen the market for the company they represent.

The examples you give are indeed places where buying or selling happens, but where does the incentive to do these transactions come from? It's still from humans. Sure, we are bombarded left and right with ads that were carefully targeted for us by complex algorithms, but I don't think I've ever bought anything from Amazon without reading a review about the product from another user, or bought stock without going through several opinions written by more-or-less respected analysts.

In the book 'Outliers', M. Gladwell talks about this very subject and suggests that a persons social upbringing has a lot to do with how you can navigate through the world and have it work for you.

A high IQ is surely a good thing to have and will make it easier for one to become successful, but if you totally lack the skill of 'getting your way' in the social maze that surrounds our daily lives, it will probably be a lot harder.