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Ask HN: Article on software only increasing complexity?

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Re: Ask HN: Article on software only increasing complexity?

#21

Post by stillwithit »

Timpy wrote: post #11

I think there's a fair argument to be made that computing is the most complex synthetic thing humans have ever conceived all on our own. If we're talking about making systems in the broadest sense, then any category of problems that we create systems for could conceptually be managed on paper and pencil. Let's say "number of things that could go wrong multiplied by the difficulty a layperson would have in fixing such…

Complexity hidden from a user is there for someone to manage.

This reads like empty circumlocution in defense of programmer jobs.

My boring EE and math degrees are from another era, before all this cool software jargon captivated the world. I am not really sure what all the verbosity of the DSLs, config formats, and many programming languages really solves from an engineering perspective. Much of it feels like baggage from the era before graphical computing first; iPhones don’t boot to a CLI, right?

Humanity burns a lot of real resources preserving computing history when the first computers were human mathematicians. What does a Commodore and Borland have to do with mathematics? Feels like nostalgia more than engineering.

I will keep iterating on personal computing experiments. Ye olde cranks of software lore and genius CEOs are just normal people hallucinating about their essentialness to society. Yawn. (I’m doing it too!)

The real energy vampires are not the sarcastic, but the toxic positivity crowd peddling Ponzi schemes passed on from dad and his 80s bitching Camaro crowd. Yes, yes, you did something within the constraints of physical reality. Ooh wow an expensive agency manipulating boondoggle; can I subscribe to your newsletter?

The next generation grew up on the internet. They’re aware of the hustle, whereas the aging out elders were maybe a bit less discerning given lack of education and experience; how were they know it’s just arithmetic and Boolean of memory addresses and semantic babble? Their special boys seemed convinced and the elders might have been a bit more accepting of hallucinations given their religious upbringing.

I ended up in software expecting to have a career in industrial controls, but entered that field at the tail end of offshoring, never got my foot in the door as networking became harder, internet was not so socially organized back then. Couldn’t figure out where to be at the right time.

I’m fucking sick of “software” as we know it. It’s elementary DSL parsers and git pull github.com/everything.git which given how things work with software is great but that that’s how things work in software is ridiculous.

Re: Ask HN: Article on software only increasing complexity?

#22

Post by actuallyalys »

Yujf wrote: post #10

http://www.berglas.org/Articles/ImportantThatSoftwareFails/I...

The article presents an interesting case study, but it's unclear how generalizable it is from a single example.

One idea the author suggests is that tax agencies will grow to take up roughly 1 percent because 1 percent of the budget is so negligible. The U.S. provides an interesting contrast. In 1955, the IRS was 0.08 percent of GDP [0] [2]. In 2008, it was 0.093 percent of GDP [0] [1]. So it's much lower, but also has remained fairly steady between 1955 and 2008. Looking ahead, the new IRS budget is around $20 billion, which is 0.072 percent of GDP [0]. To pick another example, the Canadian Revenue Service was about 0.2 percent of GDP in 2018 [3] [4].

One other assumption is that the Australian Tax Office does the same, at least when normalized to GDP. I'm not sure that's true, but investigating that would take more time.

[0] https://taxfoundation.org/blog/irs-budget-increase-technolog... [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYGDP [2] https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/title/budget-united-states-gov... See page 1000

Re: Ask HN: Article on software only increasing complexity?

#23

Post by nopeYouAreWrong »

actuallyalys wrote: post #22
Yujf wrote: post #10

http://www.berglas.org/Articles/ImportantThatSoftwareFails/I...

The article presents an interesting case study, but it's unclear how generalizable it is from a single example. One idea the author suggests is that tax agencies will grow to take up roughly 1 percent because 1 percent of the budget is so negligible. The U.S. provides an interesting contrast. In 1955, the IRS was 0.08 percent of GDP [0] [2]. In 2008, it was 0.093 percent of GDP [0] [1]. So it's much lower, but also h…

expense as a percentage of gdp is a nonsense number. expense as a percentage of the actual budget makes far more sense. why are we accepting silly statistics here?

Re: Ask HN: Article on software only increasing complexity?

#24

Post by actuallyalys »

nopeYouAreWrong wrote: post #23
actuallyalys wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article presents an interesting case study, but it's unclear how generalizable it is from a single example. One idea the author suggests is that tax agencies will grow to take up roughly 1 percent because 1 percent of the budget is so negligible. The U.S. provides an interesting contrast. In 1955, the IRS was 0.08 percent of GDP [0] [2]. In 2008, it was 0.093 percent of GDP [0] [1]. So it's much lower, but also h…

expense as a percentage of gdp is a nonsense number. expense as a percentage of the actual budget makes far more sense. why are we accepting silly statistics here?

There are pros and cons to every statistic. Percent of GDP accounts for the fact that the economy is growing, which means more to tax. I used it primarily because the article does. I think percent of receipts makes more sense as receipts are essentially the agency’s product.
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