someone's vetted the code, right? I'm not just texting my drug dealer for the NSA to tell the DEA to then later parallel reconstruction me, to listen in on with this thing, am I?
> Technical people suffer from what I call "Engineer's Disease". We think because we're an expert in one area, we're automatically an expert in other areas. Just recognizing that helps.
I think the more interesting question is why this symptom mostly happens to "engineers".
I've seen enough engineers presume they can easily become experts in law; I haven't seen many lawyers presume they can easily become experts in engineering.
It's certainly not _just_ engineers; you see it in the hard sciences and medicine to an extent, as well. Someone recently posted a study purporting to show harm caused by masks to HN, say; while its authors didn't appear to include anyone with expertise in the relevant medical specialties, they did include a chemist and a veterinarian. And, if you're a fan of Matt Levine, you'll know that dentists stereotypically tend to think of themselves as being experts at high finance.
But it definitely does seem to be especially pronounced with engineers.
(NB. I am a software engineer, and not a sociologist, so, argh, this is potentially getting a bit meta.)
Re: dentists. I have a few friends who are MD's who say they went into it to "help people," and that if they "just wanted to make money," they would have been "one of those tech CEO's." But when you look at how they run their offices and finances, you see that there is very little crossover between their medical skill into business. They just assume that they would be a successful CEO.
I've noticed it as a pretty widespread phenomenon for anyone who has the subjective experience of being competent and thinking that's enough to translate to other fields.
Super common in hot takes on politics, medical contrarianism, etc.
Though it's probably true that certain fields are more predisposed to it than others.
IMO, there's a certain level of arrogance intrinsic to engineering: To build something new, you need a belief, first and foremost, that you can build it at all, and almost as importantly better. Weeding out all the people who don't have, at least to some degree, that belief, and you end up with a disproportionate fraction of people who think that way about everything.
I can confirm I think this way about almost everything. Because I can’t see why I can’t be a lawyer, or a farmer, or a dentist given that I spend enough time to learn it.
Parable - The Mexican Fisherman and the Investment Banker
An American investment banker was at the pier of a small coastal Mexican village when a small boat with just one fisherman docked. Inside the small boat were several large yellowfin tuna. The American complimented the Mexican on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took to catch them.
The Mexican replied, “only a little while. The American then asked why didn’t he stay out longer and catch more fish? The Mexican said he had enough to support his family’s immediate needs. The American then asked, “but what do you do with the rest of your time?”
The Mexican fisherman said, “I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take siestas with my wife, Maria, stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine, and play guitar with my amigos. I have a full and busy life.”
The American scoffed, “I am a Harvard MBA and could help you. You should spend more time fishing and with the proceeds, buy a bigger boat. With the proceeds from the bigger boat, you could buy several boats, eventually you would have a fleet of fishing boats. Instead of selling your catch to a middleman you would sell directly to the processor, eventually opening your own cannery. You would control the product, processing, and distribution. You would need to leave this small coastal fishing village and move to Mexico City, then LA and eventually New York City, where you will run your expanding enterprise.”
The Mexican fisherman asked, “But, how long will this all take?”
To which the American replied, “15 – 20 years.”
“But what then?” Asked the Mexican.
The American laughed and said, “That’s the best part. When the time is right you would announce an IPO and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich, you would make millions!”
“Millions – then what?”
The American said, “Then you would retire. Move to a small coastal fishing village where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take siestas with your wife, stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play your guitar with your amigos.”
That would be the exception that proves the rule then. If he's able to SEO the whole first page for Thai restaurants, that would seem to say the rest of them are terrible at the web.
His main tactic is that he grabs all the "internet real estate" that he can, that is he has a landing page for his restaurant in absolutely every place a restaurant could have a landing page.
But all that information goes to the large platform vendors (eg DoorDash, Uber Eats) if you use their app instead. What makes the business-specific app worse in this regard? At least with the business-specific app, there's one less middle man involved.
Maybe. Or maybe they just see that as their additional source of revenue. For instance there are third party libraries that you get paid to include in your app which leak all kinds of data about you. Easy money for the app vendor.
Again, I would assume that UberEats and DoorDash have been paid to install all of those third party libraries, so it still feels like a lateral move to install my local pizza app instead. The only argument I see at the moment against the belief that the major apps have installed these trackers is that they feel they can negotiate for more money when they sell my personal information, but I don't see a scenario where I'm ordering on a phone and my personal information isn't being tracked and sold.
It's a reference to the concept in US law of protected class - discrimination is entirely legal against certain kinds of people. It's only protected classes that it is illegal to discriminate against. Specifically the law prohibits discrimination based on race, color, national origin, religion, sex, age, or disability. But if your restaurant wanted to charge people named Thomas or left-handed people $2 extra, that would be totally legal.
It's still the case! Upload speeds (especially on consumer-grade Internet connections) haven't kept pace, and AWS will send you box for you to copy your data into that you mail back to them. If you have a lot of data, they'll send you a shipping container!
> You act like there are actually fullstack developers and not just people who do both poorly.
If you haven't worked with someone who's smarter and more motivated than you are, then I can see how you'd draw that conclusion, but if you have, then you'd know that there are full stack developers out there who do both better than you. It's humbling to code in their repos. I've never worked with geohot so I don't know if he is such a person, but they're out there.
