Tangential, but I almost never read assembly [1], but I do read Java bytecode pretty frequently, primarily because doing that can sometimes be a good substitute for benchmarking [2], which I do not enjoy.
The thing that never seems to stop tripping me up is the different “dup” codes that compile. At some point I really need to properly learn the difference between dup_x2 and dup2_x1 and dup2_x2.
[1] not out of like an ethical objection, just my career has involved almost no reverse engineering and it’s also never been a path I have been super interested in to pursue on my own.
[2] e.g. if two competing chunks of code emit the same bytecode, you don’t need to pull out JMH. My go to example for this is using if statements vs switches, which will usually emit the same code so performance arguments are moot.
Tangential, a million years ago I made a YouTube video on how to do the heat equation PDE. I got a YouTube DM from someone offering to pay me a fairly significant sum of money to do their homework for them. I was very broke, so I initially accepted, and then about a minute later I felt guilty and backed out and made up some excuse as to why I "can't" do it.
I'm glad I ended up doing the right thing, though it does concern me a bit that I accepted it at all. It's one of those moments that made it easier to empathize with people when they do the "wrong" thing.
I was a constant frustration to teachers in high school because I would do well on tests, but I wouldn't do the homework [1]. I'm kind of glad that I didn't know you could pay people to do your homework, since I have to admit that it would have been tempting to do that. I would like to think I would be above that, but it's easy to act high and mighty when you've never been tested.
Similarly, I'm very glad that I finished my undergrad before ChatGPT or Claude was released. It would have been overwhelmingly tempting to get AI to do everything.
For this one I actually do know I would be able to resist that urge, because I only got my masters a year ago and I was able to do that without using generative AI [2].
[1] I wish I had a good excuse for this. I regret not taking high school seriously now.
[2] With the exception of getting ChatGPT to generate BibTeX citations because Easybib is terrible.
As another student who did the same, I similarly regret it, but also realize if I were put in the exact same scenario I would have behaved identically.
I literally had to retake trigonometry, while simultaneously being advanced into pre-calc, because my teacher saw that I aced the exams, but said I had to do the homework.
I ended up doing well enough: I dual-majored in CS and Math in undergrad and then completed a PhD in CS later in life, but I do sometimes think I could have achieved even more had I known better.
> I literally had to retake trigonometry, while simultaneously being advanced into pre-calc, because my teacher saw that I aced the exams, but said I had to do the homework.
Yeah, I passed the Calc 1 AP exam in my Junior year the first time around but I failed the class because I didn't do the homework. I was simultaneously retaking Calc 1 online while taking Calc 2 in school.
I don't think anyone ever disputed that I was good at math in school, that was relatively easy to prove, but I was decidedly not good at school itself. I did mediocre in high school and poorly in college the first time around, though I did eventually complete a bachelors and masters.
I was part of a PhD program but I never finished, but I have had a reasonably good career in software engineering. I do wish that I had taken school more seriously when I was younger, but things worked out ok so alls well that ends well.
> I literally had to retake trigonometry, while simultaneously being advanced into pre-calc, because my teacher saw that I aced the exams, but said I had to do the homework.
I loved one of my early math teachers that caught that out in his statistics. If you started to slip down the slope of "great exams and no homework" he'd reach out and give you an offer-in-compromise to change your grading to exams-only, with the compromise that you can only attain a maximum of a B grade to be fair to those that complete the exams and homework in the course.
I’m a bit baffled by how one could learn math without doing the homework. In my experience the homework is how you learn the math! So the exams would essentially already be testing whether you did the homework.
I was always very active during class, primarily because I would get bored and smartphones didn't exist yet so the only way I could entertain myself was raising my hand for the teacher all the time. I think because of this I was absorbing more than the average student. I probably would have absorbed even more if I had done the homework.
This is why I think I frustrated teachers; I was active in class and clearly willing and able to learn, and clearly based on the tests I was learning this well enough, but they would be kind of forced to give me shitty grades. To be clear, I do not blame the teachers for this at all, that's all on me. They were doing what they had to do.
I think it also helped that my both my parents, and especially my dad, are pretty big math geeks, so even when I was relatively young my dad would be showing me interesting math stuff even outside school.
Did anyone say you said anything untruthful? No, they just called you an asshole. You can both be an asshole and be right.
PS - Just some advice that I learned in sales 101 early in my career...focusing on shit talking the competition generally isn't a strategy that works well.
In case you were unaware, if someone's defense against being called an asshole is to say "well nothing I said was false" they're almost certainly an asshole.
I will admit that sometimes I do have fun playing the game (certainly a lot more when I was younger), but not often anymore. I feel like I "have" to do it, because there's no such thing as a free lunch, and as such stores price in the fees and so I might as well get it back in the form of traveling, but it is very weird that we just expect credit cards to do that.
Even if I concede all of this, and I really don’t, that doesn’t imply that it was a concerted effort to make Microsoft in particular a monopoly, at least not in the same way that they, for example, made AT&T a monopoly.
Are you suggesting that the existence of laws means that monopolies are inherently government ordained? Great, then that means that the standard oil example still holds.
P.S. you can actually keep replying, there’s just an artificial timer as they get nested. You can actually get around that if you click on the date/time (e.g. “2 hours ago”) and reply directly.
Aha! Neat trick to defeat hacker news's attempt to keep us from having long unproductive conversations. Let's keep it going.
Does it matter if the government purposely ordained the monopoly or stupidly made it possible by extending copyright protections indefinitely? The government is the problem either way and they shouldn't have that much power!
All you did was say that Standard Oil doesn't count as a monopoly because you claim that you need a government intervention to be a monopoly, which is not a definition I have heard and certainly does not fall under colloquial definitions. Your big rebuttle to it, as far as I can tell, appears to be "Nuh uh, now prove me wrong!!!".
There are plenty of companies that have gotten to monopolistic or near-monopolistic categories without a government declaring it; Microsoft in the 90's, for example, was famously anti-competitive and actually was briefly declared a monopoly (though that was overturned in higher courts). As far as I'm aware, it wasn't the US government that artificially made Microsoft anticompetitive.
You can have a monopoly without having 100% of the market. Even one of the most famous monopolies, AT&T throughout the 20th century, never had 100% of the market. You know this, so now you're just actively lying.
Microsoft was briefly deemed a monopoly by engaging in anti-competitive practices and abusing its market leadership to squash competition, like artificially blocking the use of DR-DOS to install Windows [1].
Have a look at what children were doing at work, and then come back.
In once case I know of, the children in a textile factory worked all day at replacing spent spools of thread on the weaving machines. They were replaced by a machine that did the same thing, at much lower cost.
Are there any jobs at your work place that would be productively performed by children? Have you ever gotten your kids to clean their rooms or do their homework?
That seems a bit reductive; I don't even know that you're "wrong", but there are a lot of factors that might have led to the United States' success. We have a lot of natural resources and a lot of our land is readily habitable.
Yes, the US also has relatively liberal economics [1], and maybe that's why the US has done well, but I think there are too many confounding variables to conclude it's purely because of economic liberalism.
[1] I mean liberal in the academic sense, not as a synonym for Democrat.
"Prosperous" is a relative term; Russia, even during the USSR days, was still significantly more prosperous than Uganda, for example.
You can say "yes but they weren't as rich as the United States", but if "being as successful as the United States" is your bar then most countries fall short. There are plenty of countries that you would consider economically liberal that aren't as prosperous as the United States.
I'm not going to claim I know "why" some countries do well and some don't, and that's my point. There are oodles of variables that end up being relevant and I think it's intellectually dishonest to pick one and thank/blame it for everything.
The US had to ship wheat to Russia to keep them from starving.
There was a billboard put up in Kansas at the time: "Welcome to the Breadbasket of the Soviet Union".
It would be worth your while to read a history of the USSR.
> pick one
The correlation between prosperity and free markets is a very strong one.
P.S. In WW2, the US supplied all its allies (including the USSR) with massive amounts of food and military aid. And the US fought WW2 in two hemispheres. That's what free markets delivered. The evidence is everywhere you look and is overwhelming.
I didn't claim that the USSR was doing well compared to the US. In fact I said the opposite.
I said that the USSR was economically more prosperous than Uganda, and was not wrong about that. Prosperity is a relative term, and pointing out that the US was/is rich isn't actually demonstrating anything outside of your inability to read.
My point wasn’t Uganda, my point was, and it still is, that “prosperity” is a relative term. I also have no interest in talking about the minutia of Uganda. I was pointing out that the USSR was “rich” by comparison to some other countries.
We're they more prosperous than Uganda? I don't know much about Uganda's history but the 21 million citizens of the USSR that Stalin murdered were as unpropserous as anyone could be. It was an incredibly uneven prosperity if there was any.
I should make it clear that I'm not a supporter of what the USSR was, and I'm not trying to apologize for it. I'm just trying to argue that "prosperity" is a relative term and trying to nail down the "why" of it is more complicated than the libertarian "corporations good government bad" wet dream that WalterBright always spouts.
ETA:
Just to cite my sources, you can look at the GDP per capita of Uganda and Russia in 1985 here [1].
No question, the United State was way wealthier than Russia at around ~$33k, Russia at around ~$12k, and Uganda at around $800.
The USSR was horrible, Stalin was horrible, I wouldn't want to live in the USSR even if it were still around, but my point is that wealth and prosperity are reductive terms, and it's also reductive to look at one factor and say that that's the cause of everything.
Prosperity is so much more than just GDP. But look, this discussion started with someone saying our corrupt government is bad, and then throwway120385 described something horrible and called it libertarian and I just had to correct that label. People then felt the need to jump in with a bunch of mostly orthogonal disparagement of libertarianism which led to all this unproductive arguing. By the way did you see my response to you about the Microsoft monopoly? I couldn't reply because we got too deeply nested so I made it a peer comment. I'm sure it will instantly turn you into a libertarian, lol!
I agree it’s much more than GDP. That’s kind of my entire point! These terms are complicated, and pretending that these things can be explained trivially by “LOL CORPORATIONS GOOD GOVERNMENT BAD AHAHAHAH” is reductive at best.
No libertarian is saying "corporations good!" Oh my gosh, the misunderstanding is huge. Go do some actual research about an idea before blindly arguing against it. Libertarianism is all about individuals and personal property and liberty. Sure people are free to organize into corporations, but libertarianism is not about favoring or giving special advantages or esteem or whatever else you seem to be imagining to corporations. It's about giving power to individuals! The hardest thing about libertarianism is people who are afraid of needing to exercise their own power and judgement. Every other political philosophy wants to make everything Someone Else's Problem. I think libertarianism is scary because it makes you responsible for yourself.
How is putting personal liberty above all else a love of corporations? If a corporation is furthering personal liberty then sure, I'll love them. If they aren't then I won't give them my time/money/attention. Why does everything revolve around corporations for you?
It’s not that “everything revolves around corporations for me”, it’s that every time I have ever criticized a corporation to a self-proclaimed libertarian, it it always deflected and turned into “well actually this is just the governments fault because…”
Walter did this by taking the frankly idiotic position that Standard Oil actually wasn’t a monopoly, and you took the less-idiotic-but-still-bad position that Microsoft’s terrible business was actually just a consequence of government.
I feel like we're really getting off into the weeds here. I think the original question was, could they have achieved their monopoly without government help? I still think no. Their product, software, is given more protection than other types of products by copyright laws. If you sell a hamburger you can't copyright it. If you sell a circuit board you can't copyright it. PC clones kept IBM from becoming a monopoly at the exact same time Microsoft was becoming a monopoly. Why? Government protection.
Microsoft even sued a guy named Mike Rowe for selling software (mikerowesoft.com). That's insane.
The thing that never seems to stop tripping me up is the different “dup” codes that compile. At some point I really need to properly learn the difference between dup_x2 and dup2_x1 and dup2_x2.
[1] not out of like an ethical objection, just my career has involved almost no reverse engineering and it’s also never been a path I have been super interested in to pursue on my own.
[2] e.g. if two competing chunks of code emit the same bytecode, you don’t need to pull out JMH. My go to example for this is using if statements vs switches, which will usually emit the same code so performance arguments are moot.
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