Congrats to the tailscale guys. I remember when tailscale was not a networking company. Amazing to see where it's ended up and obviously having bradfitz onboard is useful too. I'm always curious to know what the internals of a company looks like with a lot of ex-googlers running it. Does it look like a mini Google or something else? Not sure if apenwarr is here but always interested to learn more.
Microservices was a sort of drop in the bucket point in time moment of 2015-2016 and the term lingers on for a description for what is services development. It's a step change to what SOA was and then Lambda and serverless became the next exploding function after that. There is still definitely merit to that type of development, but within the right context and scale of organisation. See, microservices and services development in general solve organisational problems first, not technical. Breaking out the hot paths in your code to separate services logically only gets you 10 services at best. But when your engineering org is tens if not hundreds of teams, the cross functional dysfunction becomes very apparent and that's where APIs, services and microservices do well. I think like all hot shiny trends, it was taken to an extreme by a lot of people or touted as the hammer to solve all problems. In reality, it best serves orgs bigger than 200 people and scaling rapidly. As someone who spent a decade working on microservices tech, I can vouch for the exhaustion at this point and the desire to go back to a more macro/monolith type of development. Yet still, I understand when and where microservices play a role, the key being, its an evolutionary architecture, you don't just "do" microservices, your org evolves in that direction, and then standardisation plays a huge role. Hence why I wrote a framework for it -> https://go-micro.dev
Do you have any exposure to venture capital or are you just taking a position on the wording of the post? I didn't name names for a reason. This is about ethics on a broad scale. VC is an industry that has to collaborate and cooperate, meaning people are fully aware of the compromised and storied nature of many of these firms and partners, as well as the incentives that drive them. I used a broad brush to generalise the ethics of it but essentially VC is about return on investment regardless of the "funding tech for societal good". I don't have to give the examples because they are in broad daylight and in techcrunch articles every other week. I will admit there are some, even many, investors I have met who I highly respect for their knowledge and experience and on the surface level it seems as though they have good integrity but even they have faltered in the face of difficult decisions. So the question was honestly, where are the ethical VCs, because the values seem to bend and break when push comes to shove and money and returns have to be put front and center.
I've operated in the startup space for 20 years and over that time I've seen all sorts of things. You could pin that down to the individuals or the collective firms themselves. I don't think people initially intend to be harmful but over time for some reason power wealth status, whatever it might be corrupts many of them. I'm not always in a very specific right versus wrong way, but in a way where they feel they're justifying their actions as being something good. The problem is the good of the elite society is not quite the same as the public good. And quite frankly, the moral values can be questionable at times because they change based on whatever they need. It sounds like I'm painting the whole industry as a terrible thing. I don't think it's meant to be, but again people are easily corrupted. Maybe corrupted is the wrong word, but they are easily swayed to give up a certain stance all in the face of making money, achieving a higher status or whatever justification is given.
I should also say as someone who raised VC funding that also corrupted me. I find that power and money goes to most people's head. I didn't come out of it unscathed. In fact, I was incredibly arrogant and I am regretful for many of my actions. All in the pursuit of what I thought was a way to help people but effectively caused me to question what I was doing.
So basically what you're saying is don't expect more from VC than what it is. Take it at face value and don't try to make it something it's not. I think that makes sense. Then I need to seek out other forms of investing and charitable like work e.g societal impact companies or cooperative funds specifically geared for that purpose. I think some things as a coop would make more sense tbh.
If you want to see how charity is done properly, watch the youtube vid (watch?v=490TsUYe5f4) of Pat Morita telling the story about how the legendary comedian Redd Foxx gave him ~$4000 (IIRC) and said that he never wanted to hear about it, but that Morita should pay it forward to someone else some day.
That is the way the world could work, instead of how the wealthy have historically treated it, and are still treating it with even more vehemence here in 2025. The joke's on them, however, for their reaping such unhappiness in their lives is their own doing in the face of how the universe works on its most sublime level. They, of course, conflate pleasure with happiness, which are incomparable.
Joy and happiness require a compassionate input; nothing else will suffice.
And we ALL reap what we sow, for good or ill. It's in the fabric of the human universe.
I wish you all peace and happiness and success, my friend.
Very succinct and powerful words. In Islam we have something called Zakat which is effectively donating 2.5% of your wealth yearly to the most impoverished people. In that you're not looking for a reward in this life but that it's going to help you fellow man in the struggles that they're in. The reality is any of us could be on the other side, less fortunate than we are. We're truly blessed.
Three months before 9/11 (thank God I got in under the wire, so to speak!) I accepted Islam thanks to a Jewish Sufi housemate. I did so to become a better Christian which has worked out better than I could have ever hoped, or that most people are willing to accept. Oh well, that's their choice to ignore the truth that "Islam" means "peace" as well as "submission (to the Divine Will of Love)".
The real shame of the world is that neither the Islamic world, Christian world, nor Jewish world has truly accepted Christ's teachings of the ultimate importance of love in all our worldly affairs. Hypocrisy and willful ignorance (of Love) are but two of the 19 vices of the human heart (nefs), and, boy oh boy, are they playing out belligerently on Earth here in 2025.
We Sufis have, however, taken His teachings to heart (pun intended) because the only reason God has given us any messages is to help us be happier by avoiding conflict within and between ourselves. As communal beings, we must work together to succeed, so loving each other helps keep us peaceful and efficient and less brutal to our beautiful Mother Earth.
Of course, even a person not involved in religion can choose to love their neighbor, be charitable and kind and manifest the other 17 virtues as well. It's all our choice; it's just that being prayerful can help the "better angels" side of our potential prevail, but seeing how so many Muslims mistreat both other people and even their own folks, it's obvious that most folks aren't praying to be better people.
However, some of us are, my dear brother, Muslims, Christians, Jews, Buddhists, ... , ALL the forms of religion, even atheists and agnostics, so take heart! Love is all that matters in this world, and we are each only responsible for the love we manifest, not how others fail to know and live the truth of Love.
Wow, how surprising, I had no idea. It opens up all sorts of questions. What do you do? How do you operate in a world like this? I was born into a muslim family but it wasn't until much later in life that I started to understand everything for what it is, now at 40, I feel like that's why its seen as the coming of age in Islam and when the prophet Muhammad (pbuh) received revelation.
I mean what do we even do? Where do we even start to correct so many of the societal problems. It feels like Islam has the solutions but people feel averse to it because of the continuing islamic terrorist connotations and related extremism or "backwards culture" that's not inline with western values.
We first must learn how to self-evolve ourselves out of our own selfish mistakes, borne of vice, and become more virtuous. That is the starting point for ALL human beings' advancement, alone and in our societies. Only after beginning that process can we then learn how to educate our contemporaries about how our societies have strayed from compassionate, humane service into selfish, animalistic predation. And we ALL start in an unevolved state, as per our cultures' less-than-virtuous tendencies, plus our own susceptibilities to vice, so we all have correctable ideals, attitudes, and behaviors.
Our teacher (Murshid) passed away just before the COVID outbreak. His teachings are presented in many languages at mihr.com .
Our most senior student is his successor, a Kurdish-Turkish Ph.D. nuclear physicist named Dr. Abdulcabbar Boran, who lives to spread our teacher's Sufi teachings of Love.
If you want to see a picture of a fully-submitted lover of all human beings and the happiness that shows on their face, Dr. Boran's site is zwwa.de , but is only in German.
Send me an email and we can talk about more our personal situations there. I am grateful for the HN folks to allow this conversation, but I don't want to use any more of their bandwidth for personal stuff.
To sum up the answers to your questions about how? I will say that people have misrepresented the teachings of the Quran since the third generation after Prophet Mohammed, having removed how everything must be viewed in terms of love via zikr and wishing to reach God with our spirit (Ruh) to cleanse and purify our soul's heart (nefs' heart), thereby removing over time our selfish tendencies, leaving only loving service to one and all.
That ethos should be inculcated into our societies: that we should be acting for the betterment of all human beings, especially the most downtrodden, irrespective of which groups they belong. No one should be persecuted because of their religion (or lack thereof), ethnicity, sexual preference, or gender identity. What a person does in the privacy of their own home is their own business, so long as they are not oppressing another human being there. We are to be just in this love, preventing oppression and being merciful and loving (especially) to those who fight this love (when possible), so that they can change course and join the ranks of the happy.
Happiness is our choice, but only if we learn how to treat others, and then choose to do so. It really is a very simple math, but difficult to manifest without the help of our Creator.
Always love. Teach to always love. Never hate. Teach to never hate.
Be sure to hear other side of the ESG, namely Aswath Damodaran's take on it [1] - although it's heavy on the financial/finance side. That's just one video, but you can find more about his position.
In between figuring out what to do after a decade of work on Micro (https://github.com/micro), I started a new project called Reminder which tries to provide a single clean app and API for the Quran, Hadith and names of Allah. Maybe some of you would find it beneficial. It tries to put English first since most of us are non Arabic speaking and cultural from the west.
The name of your app reminds me of one I had started working on when I was out of employment: the app was going to send periodic reminders of stuff you've bookmarked/saved on various social media sites.
I was just about working on the Twitter api when Musk bought the company and restricted access. Real bummer. I got employment weeks later.
That's definitely the right name for periodic reminders right. Years ago I wrote an API called remindme which was supposed to provide pings for when you were in proximity to a location and it would remind you if you needed to pay someone, buy something, do something, etc. Never went anywhere but totally unrelated to this.
The Quran itself is referred to as the reminder. Because it's supposed to remind us of why we're here, our purpose, who made us, and all that.
I was wondering what happened to micro recently (loved the m3o domain). Sorry to hear it’s over. Have you written a post-mortem? I’d love to hear more about it — if you don’t feel too downbeat about it.
Haven't written a post-mortem but maybe at some point if it felt useful for others. Startups built around open source are generally very hard. About as bad as social consumer products. Both micro.dev and m3o.com are for sale yes.
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