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Imagine telling 2010 devs that in 2025, collapsing a div would require $8/ month

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Re: Imagine telling 2010 devs that in 2025, collapsing a div would require $8/ month

#141

Post by bmicraft »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #69
lores wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, yes, some stuff scales badly for sure, but for example farming scales hugely! Medieval societies required 80-90% farmers in Western Europe, it's now somewhere around 1-2%.

Yes, but we seem to have plateaued there. Also, that 1% to 2% is for grains and other stuff that can be easily harvested with large machines, which is awesome, but the delicate fruits and vegetables and nuts from more tropical places seem to be far above 1% to 2%.

> Yes, but we seem to have plateaued there.

Completely autonomous farming vehicles have only been a thing for a few years and not been universally adopted yet (partly due to the high cost). I suspect there are still some ways to go here.

Re: Imagine telling 2010 devs that in 2025, collapsing a div would require $8/ month

#142

Post by disqard »

kibwen wrote: post #140
disqard wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Governments [...] don't have a perverse incentive to make things worse. I hate to break this to you, but in the USA, this has happened multiple times: for instance, allowing Govt to shutdown due to spending limits, to push some extra pain + score political points, and then paint oneself as a savior when the shutdown is eventually lifted. You could argue that they're not making things worse for the folks that actual…

The political gamesmanship in the US is beyond shameful, but that's different in an important way. When the government passively denies you a service by shutting down, that's negligence. When the government actively makes a service worse, that's cruelty for the sake of cruelty, and rightfully gets called out. But when a company actively makes a service worse to induce demand, that's a fat bonus for a PM, where instea…

I see the nuance you have articulated. Thank you!

I can also see a "unifying mental model" -- whatever increases the "health" is pursued.

A corporation needs to "feed" on money, so its actions reflect this (e.g. PMs worsening services intentionally, in order to be able to charge more and thereby boost revenue).

A party in power needs to "feed" on support from its "base", so its actions reflect this (you said it best: "for the sake of cruelty")

Re: Imagine telling 2010 devs that in 2025, collapsing a div would require $8/ month

#143

Post by 93po »

ahstilde wrote: post #138
aurareturn wrote: post #2

Y Combinator company, ladies and gentlemen.

what are you saying?

i think there's been some recent events of yc companies being a bit controversial, and as much as im sure a lot of us appreciate HN and that we have YC to thank for that in some capacity, given the site we're on it's noteworthy when yc companies do... strange stuff

Re: Imagine telling 2010 devs that in 2025, collapsing a div would require $8/ month

#144

Post by BrandoElFollito »

finnthehuman wrote: post #133
micromacrofoot wrote: post #66

This is absurd, I do agree with this framing... but rather than trash the company in the comments I'm curious about what people think. Would ads be better? If JSFiddle were your project, what would you do to provide yourself a salary? I think we've discovered that the "buy me a coffee" strategy is just that, enough to generate a little bonus income... but is it simply unreasonable to expect that a project on the web…

> Would ads be better? It has ads. Did you forget to turn off your adblocker? Or are you talking like even more ads?

Some sites have useful ads. I cannot remember if it was jsfidfle or regex101 that asked to unblock them because they were serving tech ads.

I even discovered a good tool (that I purchased) thanks to that.

And after that I started to pay more attention to their ads

Re: Imagine telling 2010 devs that in 2025, collapsing a div would require $8/ month

#145

Post by akoboldfrying »

rchaud wrote: post #102
akoboldfrying wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Software is the only industry where the marginal cost of the product is ZERO. The same is true of anything where all the value is in the bytes -- news, film, music, the written word.

Not so for movies, the marketing budget and press junket tours end up costing as much as the film production itself. Music is also pay-for-play, but buying off radio stations and promotional spots on Spotify is not nearly as expensive as movies.

Marketing doesn't affect the marginal cost of a movie -- the cost of allowing one more person to watch it.

Re: Imagine telling 2010 devs that in 2025, collapsing a div would require $8/ month

#146

Post by milch »

lolinder wrote: post #127
9rx wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> also it simply isn't true that software developers make double the median - that's just true for the sv bias here and a few other hot spots. On a US national basis it is basically true. Median weekly earnings for full-time workers is $1,192[1]. Median hourly pay for a software developer is $62.58[2], which, assuming a 40 hour week, is $2,503.20. [1] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/wkyeng.pdf [2] https://www.bl…

Yes, this. SV and similar are even more extreme, but if you take all software engineers across the country and compare to the nationwide workforce, we make double the median. That may not be a fair comparison to the extent that software devs are concentrated in high CoL areas, though, so you don't see a ton of us out in the cheaper and poorer regions. The effect of that is somewhat ameliorated by taking the median in…

I think if you compared the median wage of people holding at least a bachelors degree with just software developers they'd be closer together as well

Re: Imagine telling 2010 devs that in 2025, collapsing a div would require $8/ month

#147

Post by akoboldfrying »

littlestymaar wrote: post #129
akoboldfrying wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Software is the only industry where the marginal cost of the product is ZERO. The same is true of anything where all the value is in the bytes -- news, film, music, the written word.

In fact most industry have marginal cost which is zero or otherwise negligible, as was remarked by French economist Maurice Allais in his discussion about the train to the city of Calais . Think about a restaurant: the food has been bought and will rot if not sold, the cook and the waiter are being paid and so is the rent, so the only truly marginal cost in such a scenario is the cost of the energy needed for the sto…

> Think about a restaurant: the food has been bought and will rot if not sold

This is a good point to raise, though I think we can refine the meaning of "marginal" to preserve a meaningful distinction between, say, restaurant meals and software:

Although the ingredients for making the meals have already been purchased, so there is no direct causative link between an additional customer arriving and additional ingredient cost, there remains a statistical link: Ingredient purchases are done based on a statistical model of what number of customers, with what preferences, are likely to arrive in the near future. I would very roughly characterise this as: There is some duration x such that if n more customers than expected show up during the next x days, n additional portions of ingredients will be purchased sometime later (in anticipation that this increased demand is now "the new normal").

The above could do with improving, but what's important is that software (and media) do not have any such statistical link: If 100 people buy your program this month, 200 the next month, 300 the next month, there is no additional cost outlay for you to make in order to meet the requirements of selling an (estimated) 400 copies the following month.

Re: Imagine telling 2010 devs that in 2025, collapsing a div would require $8/ month

#148

Post by 9rx »

milch wrote: post #146
lolinder wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this. SV and similar are even more extreme, but if you take all software engineers across the country and compare to the nationwide workforce, we make double the median. That may not be a fair comparison to the extent that software devs are concentrated in high CoL areas, though, so you don't see a ton of us out in the cheaper and poorer regions. The effect of that is somewhat ameliorated by taking the median in…

I think if you compared the median wage of people holding at least a bachelors degree with just software developers they'd be closer together as well

That figure is in the above link as well: $1,705. So, yes, only one and half times more than the median bachelor degree holder. What is sadly absent from the report is the median weekly income of those who own a Ferrari. I expect that gap is even smaller.

Re: Imagine telling 2010 devs that in 2025, collapsing a div would require $8/ month

#149

Post by littlestymaar »

akoboldfrying wrote: post #147
littlestymaar wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fact most industry have marginal cost which is zero or otherwise negligible, as was remarked by French economist Maurice Allais in his discussion about the train to the city of Calais . Think about a restaurant: the food has been bought and will rot if not sold, the cook and the waiter are being paid and so is the rent, so the only truly marginal cost in such a scenario is the cost of the energy needed for the sto…

> Think about a restaurant: the food has been bought and will rot if not sold This is a good point to raise, though I think we can refine the meaning of "marginal" to preserve a meaningful distinction between, say, restaurant meals and software: Although the ingredients for making the meals have already been purchased, so there is no direct causative link between an additional customer arriving and additional ingredi…

That's entirely true. I just like to point out that the marginal cost is an impractical concept in most cases.

The only thing that matters IRL is the average cost, and as you point out, it is always monotonically decreasing for software and other IP-based businesses, which isn't the case doe for other kinds of industries.

Re: Imagine telling 2010 devs that in 2025, collapsing a div would require $8/ month

#150

Post by seec »

lolinder wrote: post #48
catapart wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Music pretty squarely fits that bill. We used to beam it out over the air, now we transmit it through the internet, but everyone has always expected it to be free. And musicians are still expected to make a ton of money off of their music, if a lot of people like it.

Your last sentence is inaccurate, though: there's a broad understanding that only the absolute top performers will make money on music and everyone else will make an amount that rounds down to nothing. Software stands out in that even the median software developer is making about double the median salary in the market as a whole, all while the products of their efforts are expected to be free.

It is a lie to pretend that only a select few at the very top can live decently from their music. There are not a lot of musicians making big bank like your typical pop star, but there are plenty that just live decently from their craft.

Very often they are making less than a career in a lucrative field would bring but still more or at least equal to a median job. And they have a lot of benefits that are just not very easy to put a price on (freedom to do what you love is priceless for some).

I think there is a distortion coming from the "bottom of the barrel musician" that spends way too much time complaining instead of trying to improve (or moving on to something else if they don't have what it takes). The reality is that the vast majority of music produced/performed is so bad it has absolutely no value commercial or otherwise.

I don't think the software craft is very comparable, it's just not the same incentive and constraints at work...

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