I read worryingly little (no?) counter to the sentiment expressed by the lyrics as part of your message and the comments here. And the implication that people in other countries wouldn't spend $10MM of government funds to save a family instead of watching them ditch in the water is ridiculous.
- "The World" has jumped in to help Americans often. It's just that USA, due to their advantageous geographical position, never being bombed to bits, and having economic and military absolute supremacy, hasn't often been in a position of need where other countries can help out significantly.
- An example of where the world has helped significantly: Post 9/11 wars
- A recent example of when the world has helped: Californian wild fires
- And separately from that, of those "five thousand times" where the USA has helped other people in trouble, I guarantee a lot of those actually had considerable benefits for USA, meaning it wasn't a charity thing but the USA got something they wanted out of it, as well. Which is fine but let's not kid ourselves about those motives.
Just opening Wikipedia on the San Francisco earthquake, under the heading "Relief" it gives some indication of the international support given:
> During the first few days after news of the disaster reached the rest of the world, relief efforts reached over $5,000,000, equivalent to $169,560,000 in 2023. London raised hundreds of thousands of dollars. Individual citizens and businesses donated large sums of money for the relief effort: Standard Oil and Andrew Carnegie each gave $100,000; the Dominion of Canada made a special appropriation of $100,000; and even the Bank of Canada in Ottawa gave $25,000.
And if we're allowed to go back as far as the San Francisco earthquake to "judge" the world, maybe we can extend that just a little further towards independence, where France provided significant support to the fledgling nation.
"The Americans", is frankly, ridiculous, and anyone subscribing to the sentiments within betrays the same (and wrong) isolationist understanding of the world as they ironically indeed blame others to have.
> The World" has jumped in to help Americans often. It's just that USA, due to their advantageous geographical position, never being bombed to bits, and having economic and military absolute supremacy, hasn't often been in a position of need where other countries can help out significantly.
The only time Article 5 was called, was by America... And most of the Europe obliged.
Danes too. Who are now being threatened by the new administration.
“I’m not going to commit to that,” Trump said, when asked if he would rule out the use of the military. “It might be that you’ll have to do something. The Panama Canal is vital to our country.” He added, “We need Greenland for national security purposes.”
This is just Trump being Trump, blustery and vague. It barely qualifies as saber-rattling. The guy loves to posture, but the level of hysteria around it is absurd. I’m not a fan of this kind of rhetoric, but Europeans acting like this is a genuine military threat instead of just laughing at him is ridiculous.
Anyways, what were we talking about? Something inspirational I recall.
> This is just Trump being Trump, blustery and vague. It barely qualifies as saber-rattling. The guy loves to posture, but the level of hysteria around it is absurd.
It used to be posturing and blustering around acquiring territories was absurd.
People are hysterical because they aren’t sure if Trump is being serious or if he just is sh*t talking. Greenlanders who feel like they might be invaded by the US aren’t just being sensitive snowflakes.
Danish PM Frederiksen:
"I cannot imagine the United States would use military intervention in Greenland, and it is up to the people of Greenland to decide what they want."
Oh, interesting. I think that’s called self-determination, a key underpinning of democracy.
> Greenlanders who feel like they might be invaded by the US aren’t just being sensitive snowflakes.
Greenland is a critical strategic asset, and Denmark is incapable of defending it or its people. If Greenlanders are worried about being "invaded" by the U.S., they should be a hell of a lot more worried about Russia or China making moves in the Arctic. The world would objectively be safer if the U.S. took custodianship of Greenland, full stop.
I’m no policy buff, but I’d bet that if someone were willing to make a rational deal, like perhaps allowing the U.S. to offer security in exchange for a slice of Greenland’s massive untapped resources, this entire situation would be resolved, and everyone would be better off.
Again, I stress that the rhetoric around what is clearly a negotiation is not my style of doing business, but no serious person can argue that something has to be done about securing Greenland, nor do they think Trump is actually going to use military force.
Edit: I must insist that I'm not trying to be inflammatory at all. I'm sincerely concerned about this geopolitical implications of this potential attack vector and it feels like pride is getting in the way of our security in the West.
> This is just Trump being Trump, blustery and vague.
Still not taking him seriously? He's followed through on many boundry-destroying actions in just a week, not to mention the prior 8 years. Remember the raid on the Capitol to stop ratification of the election, and he just pardoned the attackers.
Turboprops are awesome and underrated. They have some advantages over jet engines such as faster response times (they can angle the blades instead of having to rev up RPMs), easy reversing (no pushback mule needed), and higher efficiency. They fill a niche really well.
I don’t think this makes much sense in the real world. Shit happens and plans change. What if an aircraft needs to do a go-around, do they suddenly face 45m of delay or immediately need to divert, because The Sequence is immutable?
No, they’d move things around a bit. SFO decided that this plane wasn’t going to land there as soon as they asked for ILS, instead of doing their job and making a gap.
> What if an aircraft needs to do a go-around, do they suddenly face 45m of delay or immediately need to divert, because The Sequence is immutable?
You would be surprised, but if it is a busy time, they will not be put in the sequence right away and will be put at the back of the line, which will take as long as it is going to take.
If you do a go around, you will be passed to APP which will decide what to do with you.
As a manager in technology I'm starting to really detest stories like this, because they are often bandied around by IC's with a very narrow view or opinion of why it's bad to do new change X or Y "because here is a story", which on the surface may be similar to what happened here but is in fact a good idea. In reality things are always so much more nuanced, or require much more context to judge, than what people naively think.
In this particular case, I can think of a few reasons why the original scenario that this team was in would still be considered "bad". For example, maybe Tim received tasks to do and he didn't do them, now the company is behind on things. Maybe the other people are not as good as their job as they should be, but because of Tim's interference that's being hidden. Maybe the expectation is that the other people are as good as Tim, so why are they not helping each other out as much as Tim is? Should Tim get a promotion, or are the other people performing badly compared to their position and salary? Maybe the tasks that Tim was supposed to do are more important than the ones he's helping others with. Maybe the company didn't budget this much investment (2 people) for a specific thing that needs doing, and as there's just so much engineering time going around, what other tasks are now receiving less time than budgetted?
There's so many ways where this story may fall apart in a real context. Obviously, something has to change (expectations, budgetting, salaries, job levels, etc...) to align reality with the direction that the company wants to go into, and that change is not necessarily (limited to) "keep Tim around and have him help everyone out and everyone will be OK and this is the optimal scenario and management bad".
The implication also being that "evaluating people on story points is bad", but that completely disregards the fact that doing this has surfaced an issue in the department that needs resolving (and before I get pitchforks thrown at me - that issue may very well be that Tim needs a change of job title and a promotion) - but obviously expectations and reality didn't align beforehand, and the story point metric surfaced it and allows for resolving it. In that sense, the story point thing yielded benefits that otherwise wouldn't have been had.
This seems a lot like trying to invent a problem to justify your metrics rather than acknowledging that your metrics don't align with the actual performance of the team.
There's no indication in the article that the team was struggling or under-performing, and there's no reason to promote someone out of a position they're thriving in just because the way they deliver value doesn't neatly align with how you're measuring value, especially if you can plainly see the value.
Here's what I've seen in the past: exactly the scenario you described, the "Tim" is promoted to team lead or architect or something similar, and now their calendar is booked up and they no longer have time to do the thing that brings value (and that they enjoy). No one on the team is happy, everyone is stressed, and in a year or so you'll start bleeding members. Tim either hangs around and is a mediocre whatever position he is, or he leaves to be a whatever position somewhere else where he can start with a new context and without loaded expectations.
I agree that firing people based on delivered story points is probably wrong. I disagree that measuring the amount of story points someone delivers has no benefits. In this case, it surfaced a very interesting dynamic in a team that apparently the company wasn't aware of, and now that it is surfaced, it can align that team better to the goals of the company. I would really wonder, for instance, how Tim was evaluated on performance, if the expectations of him didn't align with the role he was doing.
I think the part in the article where a manager wanted to fire Tim because he delivered 0 story points, and the teamlead (?) refused, is made up for dramatic effect. I can't imagine any manager seeing those type of results and instead of asking the teamlead what's going on there, jumping to the conclusion that Tim should be fired.
At the end of the day, it's all emotional and biased human beings subjectively evaluating/judging other human beings. This guy that worked with Tim believed that he added great value to the team. A manager came to a different conclusion. It's impossible for them to determine who is "correct," let alone us. Of course we can come up with all sorts of potential scenarios but it seems pointless and unfounded without first-hand knowledge of the situation. The skill of being a manager is deeply understanding the specific and individual nature of their team rather than trying to apply a more generalized "playbook."
Edit: By that I mean that I am highly skeptical of metrics used to evaluate people. It's a lazy way to make the job easy and avoid doing the hard work of getting in the trenches, gaining unquantifiable insight into what's going on, and effectively communicating that up the chain.
Of course. My point is that this exact same situation, at a different company, may have surfaced a Tim that actually should be PIPed because he wasn't doing what he was asked to do, or his contributions weren't as valuable from an objective point of view (but of course all his peers love him taking some load off and them being able to get all the credit), or he was forcing a team dynamic that should be "fixed" because Tim is actually a Brent (from Phoenix Project) that had to have his hand in everything and the team couldn't survive without him, yet it may be difficult to discern these situations from the situation described in the article where Tim (sounds like) he was definitely bringing more value to the team than a replacement would.
Yeah it's a few hypotheticals onwards, and there's probably better ways to surface those problems, but companies are messy and no one is without flaw or 100% competent, no engineer and no manager.
(Note that I'm not saying evaluating a person based on delivering story points is optimal, or even useful)
I personally don’t understand the outrage. Reddit obviously has costs, and if it wants to make a profit it should not subsidise third party apps that cost double - both no revenue and no ad views.
The cost of 0,00024 per request seems reasonable, and according to Apollo’s creator the cost per app user would be just 2,5 a month. Keep in mind that currently this app probably has no incentive to go light on the requests, so with some tinkering the creator could probably get that down. Maybe some proxy caching or what not.
Of course free is going away, but paying users at say 5/mo or 50/yr should still work for Apollo.
That's assuming that Apollo brings in enough revenue to cover the costs and they want to run a business.
I'm not a user of that App so excuse me if I am mistaken, if Apollo is currently free and without ads then the developer had a lot less to worry about then than now.
Additionally the outrage, as far as I am aware, has less to do with Reddit needing to make money rather it's way of going about making money is killing the user experience which kills the point of the website.
No, that's not the thing, they are already a business. They sell three tiers of the app, one of which is a subscription. The current price of the subscription is $13/year.
> Additionally the outrage, as far as I am aware, has less to do with Reddit needing to make money rather it's way of going about making money is killing the user experience which kills the point of the website.
It's not killing the user experience, it's making the nice user experience "just" more expensive, which I covered in my first comment.
This is a very naive, simplified, and wrong take on a generally well accepted concept.
Point 1: increased demand for stocks will increase the price of it and thus the market cap.
Point 2: the higher the market cap of a company the more capital it has available.
I'm saying point 2 is only true if the company wants to issue shares (unless you are talking about second-order effects like cheaper bond rates). Apple is actively repurchasing shares, so they don't have more capital because the price went up.
Yes, it theoretically means they could raise more money by issuing shares, but that's not happening.
So, it's depends how they do that. In 2022, Apple seemed to buy all the Apple stock they used for RSUs in the open market. So, absolutely not in that case.
But they don't have to do that. They could issue the shares for RSUs. If they issue new shares (either to sell to the market or to use for RSUs) then the market cap directly influences how much they can generate in work or cash from such a transaction.
I often encounter the opposite. I would have a complex problem that I can legitimately solve by something reasonably simple yet I don’t posses the expertise on. Asking how to do Y, I need to spend an godawful amount of time wasting to convince people that no, it really is not an XY problem, and could we just focus on the literal problem description, which you could answer in like 3 minutes, instead of you trying to score points by being able to claim it’s an XY problem.
This is because I was not up front about all of the context of course, but to fully explain the context and constraints that I’m working in, which I have already synthesised into my original question, would take two days due to complexity of the problem.
Let’s just get on with the problem solving instead of playing the meta game.
(I understand that knowing more context might be necessary to answer the question. I am referring to situations where that is not the case)
I like to call this the "YZ answer"; I'm asking Y, which is the actual question I have, but someone else tries to convince me that my "real" question is "Z" because they happen to know the answer to that.
Tangentially related, but does anyone else besides me have an irrationally strong dislike of the name "XY problem" for this phenomenon? I feel like that name could apply equally well to basically any problem where you have two things you could call "X and Y", which is...a lot of problems. Why not call this something like the "mistaken question" problem or the "incorrect premise" problem?
I refer you to Mark-Jason Dominus's original explanation of what X and Y had to be. It got renamed "XY Problem" after the fact, and that name didn't take off for a long time, really not until Stack Overflow appeared and became popular, well over a decade after MJD posted about this and well after many of us had for that time not been calling it this on volunteer-support mailing lists and Usenet newsgroups.
On Stackoverflow in particular, there is also a ~YY answer. You explain that you specifically don't want Y, then someone tells you you are wrong and to simply use Y.
Might as well just call this the "Stackoverflow problem", although it is really a family of problems where either the requestor or (typically) the responses are less than helpful.
As a third party searcher looking for answers to a specific problem, I would prefer to see a direct solution to the stated question first, even if it is followed by admonitions that "you probably don't want to do that" or "this other thing is a better approach".
Well, yes, but many of the times people on SO say they don't want to use Y, it's because of some assumptions they have about Y, and actually they do want to use Y, or use it differently than usual etc.
I'm sorry, but if people often do this to you, maybe reflect on them actually being right? Or that you're legitimately asking a stupid question given your self-proclaimed lack of expertise?
People don't answer that way to be smug or so. They do it because the thankless person they're spending their own free time helping will just come back with a new asinine question the moment one answers their posed question. It's from experience after helping thousands of people, not pettiness.
If perhaps you're the one in a million case where this isn't applicable, just add the context, then. Don't be angry about having to do it, that's quite entitled given that you're asking people to solve your problem for free..
Did you reflect on the case that actually you might be the smug one in this scenario, assuming that every person who asks a question doesn’t know what they are talking about, and you know better than them?
I have experienced this many times, and it’s extremely frustrating, when people ask for the context, and I answer something to the effect of:
> the context is quite hard to explain but I assure you I thought through this question and this is precisely what I need to know
And people will still insist that you don’t know what you are talking about and this must be an XY problem.
Even in the case that someone might be wondering down the wrong path, it’s more valuable for the community to let them make their own mistakes and learn from them. That’s how we become experts, not from blindly trusting the “authority” of people who spend a lot of time earning karma on Stack Overflow.
I think it’s good to answer a question in the form: “this seems like a strange question because X, but here is the answer”. It’s also fine to ask for context.
But it’s quite arrogant to harass someone into providing context until you are satisfied they are solving a problem in a way you deem worthy. If you don’t like the question you’re free to not engage with it.
> > the context is quite hard to explain but I assure you I thought through this question and this is precisely what I need to know
I dunno, I mean, to me this just sounds like the "senior developer" phrasing of the same logic that the noob was using in the linked page. The core problem is that you don't know what you don't know, right, and no one is immune to that, regardless of age or experience.
IMO that we should all try to avoid believing things that sound like "I assure you I thought through this question and this is precisely what I need to know", since -- while we may be right pretty often (maybe even more often than not!), there will be times we're wrong, and in those times, our attitude about it will make us even harder to help than the "noob".
In some cases the context is hard to explain because it's complex, or it relates to something about the domain of the use-cases which is very particular to this implementation. If all you need is some small detail, like how to accomplish something with X library, it would be a waste of everyones time to write several paragraphs to explain some context which will be irrelevant to everyone else.
> the context is quite hard to explain but I assure you I thought through this question and this is precisely what I need to know
Oh man, I field questions on a technical subreddit, and you wouldn't believe the sheer number of non-expert askers who confidently believe this. It doesn't take much follow-up to realize that not only is the context easy to explain for anyone who truly understands it, but the asker is actually asking about X.
You are one in a million, congrats. The vast majority of people who say what you said are bringing their own arrogance, simultaneously accepting that they need help while preparing to reject the help of the actual experts they are appealing to.
> “this seems like a strange question because X, but here is the answer”
This is a good first response and how I answer suspected XY Problems. It often leads to the asker reevaluating their assumptions, which is a valuable teaching moment and the goal if my true motivation is to help people.
The simplest way I can put it is, be careful that you're not rationalizing when you ought to be reasoning.
The former is the main source of the XY problem, and comes up very often in cases where people are stuck and asking for help. The main issue they would be having is that they're framing the problem incorrectly in their heads and working through the logic of the ideal solution based on faulty grounds.
I would like to point out the subtle irony in responding to these comments with a meta-scale XY problem: you think your problem is other people don't see the Y for what it is (people don't understand my questions are really about Y and not about X), while you are yourself blind to the X (I may not be framing my problem correctly in my mind which is leading to my overconfidence that it is Y and not X).
If you know what you're talking about so well, why is it so hard to explain the context? You know the old saying about if you can't explain something, you don't really understand it.
If you know what you're talking about so well, why are you unable to solve your problem? Perhaps the context would help someone help you.
If you can't be bothered, don't bother asking for others to use their own time to help you.
Oh, man, if it's such a bother, just don't. Nobody is forcing you to spend your own free time.
But well, let's be clear. This is a Stack Overflow problem only. And it's Stack Overflow only because every interaction on that site includes a veiled threat of "do what I say or I'll make sure nobody ever answers your question and you are blocked away from this site".
Any unreasonable comment on a random forum is just a bunch of text you can jump over. Any unreasonable comment on SO is a demand from unforgiving authority that people do your bullshit. People have every right to be pissed of the people making those comments.
> If perhaps you're the one in a million case
From the answers I see on SO, the odds there are around 80% that you are wrong.
From me reviewing thousands of questions in the review queue, odds are you're the one in the wrong. You perhaps only see the cases that actually survived.
When you have to weed through a hundred questions to see the one of any actual quality, it's no wonder people seem a bit jaded. I know it's a meme here that SO is super bad, but no one would visit if it didn't have the strict moderation. It would be a waste field of low quality stuff.
Were this only to be true. I first encountered this issue on a coding forum before StackOverflow even existed. Though the term XY problem hadn't been coined yet, there was a regular poster who would come in and accuse people of asking the wrong question. Someone would ask how to make an HTTP connection in Objective-C and he'd explain that Objective-C was the wrong tool for that job and that they should be using C#. The poster would then explain that they were writing an iPhone app, ruling out C# in early 2008, but he would then explain that an iPhone app was the wrong tool for the job and that the poster should be writing a Windows desktop app. Someone would point out that making an iPhone app was a decision made at the CEO level and beyond their capacity to change and this fellow would say that they should quit their job and work for a company that makes desktop apps for Windows.
the general gist of what you’re saying is fair, but I’m extremely sceptical of the claim that there’s no smugness involved. these kinds of forums are full to the brim with smug, vindictive assholes who can’t wait to point out how silly and misguided you are. in my experience there’s no correlation between your propensity towards helping people online and a positive disposition
in fact there are definitely people who, if they aren’t helping as an excuse to be rude in the first place, feel it’s okay to be rude because they’re helping. you get this offline too. Gordon Ramsey is a good example
Even if they're wrong, why not answer their question as stated?
If they're asking how to delete all the files on their root disk, tell them how, they can try it, and either you've solved their problem or they've learned something valuable. But more importantly, maybe someone else will come along who actually does want to delete all the files on their root disk and be helped by your answer after the fact.
Of course, because every time it happens, unless I don't want the answer, in order to move forward I do need to explain the context.
So I do. And invariably either the original responder goes radio silence, or admits that my question is the correct one and they can't help me with it.
People do it often because it's a cheap way to feel smart without putting in any effort. It's the same reason how people mention Dunnking-Kruger any chance they can.
I doubt adding full context would help much in terms of getting a quality answer. Someone who answers questions in good faith will answer if they are there. All it would do is remove all the XY people I guess
Yeah the whole premise of the "XY" problem seems like it was written up by someone who regulars Stack Overflow. It's pretty frustrating when the highest-upvotes answer to a question is "actually you don't want to do that. do something else instead".
The goal of asking a question is not to get the exact answer to the words you spoke, it is to solve the problem the question is inspired by. It's a funny psychological thing, though, where people perfectly comfortable with the idea they don't know the answer to a question are easily offended by the implication that they don't know what question would lead to a solution, even though the foundational knowledge to answer the question is often the same as that required to ask it.
The reason people assume it's the wrong question is because they've seen a thousand other people ask the wrong question. This assumption is not a reflex that comes naturally, it is learned.
Experienced people who really have the question, understand XY just fine and start off with the context, but are happy to provide more; experienced people who say they are offended at common assumptions of XY tend to be in complete denial about legitimate cases of XY.
> Experienced people who really have the question, understand XY just fine and start off with the context, but are happy to provide more; experienced people who say they are offended at common assumptions of XY tend to be in complete denial about legitimate cases of XY.
That's not how it works on Stackoverflow and similar sites. Here's what happens when an experienced person who really does have the question, understands XY just fine, provides context, and is willing and able to provide more context is needed tries to get an answer on Stackoverflow.
1. They do a search and find that people have asked X before on Stackoverflow.
2. They read those questions and answers and find that in all of them the answerers decided that it was an XY problem and answered Y. Maybe the answers were right or maybe they were wrong, but in either case nobody answered X.
3. They post a new question asking X, explaining that the existing questions and answers do not apply because the person actually needs X and provides sufficient context to show this.
4. The question quickly gets closed as a duplicate of one or more of the others.
It wasn't. Mark-Jason Dominus was the cause of that name.
I, Raymond Chen, Charles Cazabon, and Eric S. Raymond didn't use that name at all.
I, in particular, chose a name that reinforced the an important part of the concept, missed in this discussion here, that the problem was nonsensical as posed.
That's why I went with "cause" not "coiner". (-: People took your "X" and "Y" and ran with them, and the fact that "X" and "Y" are not blatantly nonsensical together caused some of the meaning to be lost. I've watched this happen over the years on the likes of Stack Exchange.
If Greg Bacon had gone with "Bacon and Hand Drill Problem" instead, perhaps this wouldn't have become so distorted. Although I know a group of Wikipedia writers who would no doubt insist that bacon logically goes with everything. (-:
I think this is because people Googling a question often end up at a SO post that answers a slightly different question. But since the keywords blazed a trail to a certain answer, that's the one that gets the upvotes, even though it's not the "correct" answer.
That’s incredibly common and so frustrating. The title will be “How do you delete a column from a dataframe?” and then they’ll include a bunch of super specific code and paragraphs of context. The only answer will be “You actually don’t ever use that column. Just don’t add it in the first place.”, which is not an answer to the title question at all.
It does happen very often when person trying to fix the issue is not an expert in the domain they are tinkering with and it is just some extra needed for their job and not main part of it.
We see it all the time with developers for example:
"I need sudo access to do XYZ"
"Why?"
"Because I can't access this directory"
"Ok, I fixed permissions and put it in CM, test it without sudo"
"Oh, it works, thanks".
But, of course, on SO you don't have that context.
That's why a good question gives some context regarding the motivation, or says something like "I have to do Y for reasons. Please don't answer about problems X or X' or X'', I just need to do Y."
Yeah, it's a false positive identification of the XY problem.
The audience falsely identifies your problem as an XY problem. This is, IME, due to the audience wanting to refactor the problem into something they can understand.
It's worse in JavaScript probl ms, where, due to the actual inability to do something simple like pause the runtime for 5s, the experts all spend tons of effort trying to convince you that there is no situation in which this is reasonable rather than simply say the runtime environment is too crippled to allow this.
It’s true that with the way JS is designed, you almost never want to freeze up the entire program like that because it doesn’t exactly have threads so it would freeze the whole page or application even if you could. You can get a similar effect using async functions which can pause for a bit while still allowing events to be processed (or do it the old way using callbacks)
So both are true; yes, you almost never want to do that, and the reason you don’t is because is because of JavaScript’s design, which you could argue is a flaw but it does also have advantages
I think this highlights that the usefulness of the XY problem framing will depend on context.
As a platform product manager working with customers (both internal and external/paying), the most important thing I can do is know with certainty what problem I’m trying to solve and why. Maybe it’s annoying right now, but it ensures we don’t spend 6 months building something that solves nothing. I can’t count the number of times someone asked for features instead of describing their problem and after returning to the problem it quickly became apparent that the feature ask was not the only path forward and probably not the best path forward.
In the context of engineers seeking help from other engineers, I can understand why this can quickly become something else.
As with all things, context matters. Don’t insist on understanding X to the nth degree just because you encountered xyproblem.info. But don’t assume that someone trying to understand X is just trying to assert their superiority.
Pretty much stopped asking any questions on web forums because of this. Some people tend to "XY" you whenever they don't immediately know the answer to a complex question.
I’ve seen a pathology where people ask for irrelevant details to stall for time. As in: “hmmm what version is your operating system? And what’s the version of every package/dll on your computer?”
> Let’s just get on with the problem solving instead of playing the meta game.
I feel like a lot of things in tech have become --- for lack of a better word -- memes, that people trot out to make themselves appear smart. The XY Problem is one of them. Sometimes we have actually thoroughly explored our problem space and know what we need to do, just not how to do it! But someone else seems to think they're going to get Cleverness Points by uselessly derailing the discussion.
Yeah it’s often like speaking to ChatGPT, you have to put in an enormous preamble saying “answer exactly what I’m asking, I promise I’ve thought about it, I know it’s weird”.
(not a rebuttal on your comment, just a continuation of the conversation)
I found it an interesting criticism, and from what we know about the project I don't think I agree with the author.
In the space of what database to use, there are really few differences between Postgres and Postgres' peers, that "using what's available" is a perfectly sound reasoning to use Postgresql over, say, MySQL. I think around that time MongoDB was a possible alternative as well, however it was experimental and often mocked. Postgres and Mysql are pretty much feature parity, even in 2011, except for very niche use cases, which this project did not sound like it would have.
Factoring in that Heroku's PG UI is great, and to use an alternative would mean to have to set things up yourself (in 2011 the Heroku marketplace was not yet as expansive iirc), or at least have another account at another SaaS company with dubious maturity, the decision to use PG seemed to have been given the correct amount of critical thinking ("will it be able to support all that we need? most likely yes").
The author may also not have been aware that for RoR applications the code is pretty DB-agnostic, an unawareness he hints at in other parts of the story as well. Meaning that in the span of the year that they're working on rebuilding the site in RoR, if they discover a use case that another DB would be extremely helpful with, they could relatively easily switch over to this other DB without having to rewrite all of the code. At most it'd take rewriting of some migrations for FK's and possibly some (hopefully few) custom SQL queries. Remember that they had a one-time-switch-over when the site was done being built, so during this year of development time, the database did not accrue live user data that would have made such a change more difficult.
You’re not wrong in your assessment but I would still expect a company architecting a total replacement for an existing system to know why they are choosing critical components. In this case it was an extensive lack of database consideration in many decisions.
As everyone's "hate-boner" will be personal, to me a part that stands out is that Columbus seemed to be a conspiracy theorist akin to the flat-earther. The reason why his expedition took so long to get funding, is not because he was the only one who thought the earth was round, but it's that he used wrong calculations in order to calculate the size of the earth, and he was under the impression that it was much smaller than it actually is. Now at that time, similar to how everyone knew the earth was round, people had a pretty good idea of the actual size of the earth as well - it was already known in ancient Greece after all.
So when he claimed "I can reach the far east by sailing around the other side of the world in X days, as it's just a distance of Y miles" that was against common knowledge of that time, and everyone knew that a trip like that would take 2Y or 3Y miles, something unfeasible with the technology of that time.
The only reason his ship didn't perish halfway like everyone expected them to, is that there just happened to be a continent halfway that they stumbled upon. Columbus is a prime example of "task failed successfully".
It seems using the wrong numbers was more of a marketing trick to attract investors. Otherwise, everyone else wouod just have used the known route to the east.
- "The World" has jumped in to help Americans often. It's just that USA, due to their advantageous geographical position, never being bombed to bits, and having economic and military absolute supremacy, hasn't often been in a position of need where other countries can help out significantly.
- An example of where the world has helped significantly: Post 9/11 wars
- A recent example of when the world has helped: Californian wild fires
- And separately from that, of those "five thousand times" where the USA has helped other people in trouble, I guarantee a lot of those actually had considerable benefits for USA, meaning it wasn't a charity thing but the USA got something they wanted out of it, as well. Which is fine but let's not kid ourselves about those motives.
Just opening Wikipedia on the San Francisco earthquake, under the heading "Relief" it gives some indication of the international support given:
> During the first few days after news of the disaster reached the rest of the world, relief efforts reached over $5,000,000, equivalent to $169,560,000 in 2023. London raised hundreds of thousands of dollars. Individual citizens and businesses donated large sums of money for the relief effort: Standard Oil and Andrew Carnegie each gave $100,000; the Dominion of Canada made a special appropriation of $100,000; and even the Bank of Canada in Ottawa gave $25,000.
And if we're allowed to go back as far as the San Francisco earthquake to "judge" the world, maybe we can extend that just a little further towards independence, where France provided significant support to the fledgling nation.
"The Americans", is frankly, ridiculous, and anyone subscribing to the sentiments within betrays the same (and wrong) isolationist understanding of the world as they ironically indeed blame others to have.