I don't see it as a relic, or a bad one. Some people can't just up and move to a cheaper location for a job they don't know they'll have in a year's time. How do you decide what to pay? Paying based on "experience and merit" needs to be anchored on something, so you just end up either massively over-paying someone in a location that's cheap, or massively under-paying someone in an expensive area. If you want to pay everyone like they live in Zurich, then more power to you but doesn't seem sensible from a business management standpoint and the person in North Carolina would probably be over the moon at half that. Any company with shareholders is accountable first to them (for good or bad) and I'm not sure your board or CFO would agree that paying peak makes sense

> Any company with shareholders is accountable first to them (for good or bad) and I'm not sure your board or CFO would agree that paying peak makes sense

Good thing I have neither a board or a CFO.

But to respond directly, I think you're down playing how much of an advantage over paying (as you've put it) can be for acquiring great talent. Great companies are built by great people. Paying them well for the work they're doing regardless of where they live shouldn't be a controversial opinion.

In a post-covid, SaaS based world I just don't see how location matters at all. If I'm in Omaha Nebraska I pay the same amount for an item on Amazon as someone living in downtown San Francisco. The internet flattens.

I understand the ideal of it, but the main reason why it doesn't work is simple supply and demand. Your employment opportunity will seem compelling for folks that live in LCOL areas, or folks trying to escape HCOL. But for the 5x as many programmers that live in HCOL areas, your pay isn't competitive.

If you want to reduce your candidate pool by 70 or 80%, by all means, go for it, but there's a clear market reason why folks are paid geographically.

Where are you sourcing your stat from? It's hard believe that the millions of developers in China, India, SE Asia, East Europe, etc. are outnumbered by people in New York and San Francisco.

Cripes, US$150k is good money in London and that's a considerably higher cost location than rural Kansas.

Usually remote means US only for US based remote companies.

This is the reality, it’s supply and demand, not “fairness”

I agree that the internet flattens distance. Thank you for paying employees like it's 2020, not 2000.

One thing it does not flatten is time zone. When two team members have 11 hours difference, their ability to collaborate is very limited. It's reasonable to discount the pay of employees who are too far in time. Alternatively, avoid hiring people outside of +/- 4 hours from the mean (unless they are the best in the world in something).

I generally agree with you, but I do struggle with the amount of risk taken by paying the top end salaries. Great companies are made by great people, yes, but great salaries are made by all kinds of people.

Then do you have to pay US salaries at all?

+1. Outside hourly contractors, if you have a clear sense of what impact/outcome you're seeking, time of day or number of hours shouldn't matter. Often I suspect it's a proxy for NOT having a clear idea of the desired outcomes. Removing a requirement for "8 hours a day" can even be a good forcing function to ensure you DO have a clear and well-communicated set of goals and outcomes. Indexing on time (IMHO) can also have unwanted side effects like people just filling in the time "because they have to", which is pointless for everyone involved.

Consider the practice of "work to rule".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work-to-rule

Precisely defining what at employee is to do is not really practical. At some point it's always going to be "do what I mean, not what I say."

Feels like a solution looking for a problem to me. Not only are phones trending away from being "phones" (rather portable internet terminals) but I'd wager the largest portion of smartphone use is content consumption, rather than content creation/collaboration. Both of which would suggest this device is a long, long way from product-market fit.

I think it's in the zeitgeist a bit now. Some people (I'm certainly one) are looking to unhook from their phones - get away from convenience and immediacy and... the internet in general (typing this from Emacs, so it seems more forgivable!).

I know at least 5 people - a large percentage of my close network ;) - who would be interested in this device. I'm sure there's a big enough market for it if the execution is right. Though I'm personally waiting for Librem for the security/privacy aspects.

Your network isn't representative of the broader market. Only a tiny niche are actively looking to unhook. Sure plenty of people will claim they want to do so because they think they ought to. But they're not willing to pay actual money for it.

They raised like 4 million dollars in crowdfunding, so some people are clearly willing to pay for it.

But you can just buy a feature phone now? There are decent ones from Nokia.

But then people cant see you are disconnected ;) They might think you are cheap or dont like tech.

As long as you don't use the phone much, they won't see you have a cheap phone either. The Light Phone 2 seems like a rather small smartphone. Without the music feature (offline Spotify is OK) it is still not very useful to me though. I used to run around with a walkman. Then I had an iRiver H340 with 40 GB (when everyone was running around with ~4 GB iPods). I'm not going back to no music with me, pre walkman years. I had one with me since elementary school because I was so bored.

why not just put the phone down? i have a android phone but i don't check it 24/7 and sometime i even let the phone ring.

you can treat your smart phone as old boring phone by using it like a old boring phone.

You significantly overestimate people’s level of self control and also the amount of money time and effort companies put in to make these technologies addictive.

I don't think you're the target market in that case. This phone would be for people who desperately want to reduce their phone usage but lack the willpower.

Not saying that's a large market, but I do think it exists. At the 350$ price point though it seems more like it would be for wealthier people looking to signal that they're part of a sort of "offline" movement.

I can see this phone being a great fit for certain markets, such as senior citizens who like to talk on the phone, but who get baffled by the complexity of modern smartphones.

I can't see any fit for any person outside of bragging rights. A senior citizen would be better served by a Nokia 3310, which actually has physical buttons.

It's pretty much bragging rights. Or, put another way, it's an aesthetically pleasing signal to those around you that you're part of a movement trying to reduce screen consumption.

The organic foods industry has these sorts of seemingly niche products which are more expensive but become quite trendy because of what they represent for the customer and their peers. Not sure how well it applies here though.

For about $50 you can (still) get a Nokia 3310.

Be careful with this. AT&T shut down its GSM network 3 years ago. The ~only unlocked LTE feature phone I could find a year or two ago for my grandma (who wouldn't be able to learn how to use a smartphone) was an Alcatel Flip 2.

There's a 3G variant of the Nokia.

It still uses 900/1800MHz, so it won't work in the US.

3G was deprecated by many networks too(hello, Verizon).

"a solution looking for a problem" my fave descriptive phrase :-)

I don't think the main point being made is that deadlines are a PITA, I think it's that the trade-off is unmeasured. Successfully meeting a sales deadline looks the same as signing the same contract after the deadline (other than the deadline), but the argument for deadlines in software being bad is that they materially erode quality and long term viability (shortcuts, tech debt, bugs, usability). The product delivered within the deadline is materially worse than the one delivered after. The problem is that it's hard to attribute these issues to "deadlines" although the intuition is that they are a major cause.

Curious as to why having an external IP/URL is a problem. If you're using almost any cloud service that has an API for adminstration (e.g. an API to tear down a VM), then is that really different to a public endpoint secured with platform-managed authentication? (which Cloud Run provides). Is it because you need firewall rules?

Many organizations insist on making everything private, i.e. running on an RFC1918 IP address, within the corporate 'perimeter', cloud included.

True, a cloud has an API, and that tends to be public rather than private, and that doesn't play well with the above approach.

There are some band-aids for this, such as Google Cloud's VPC service controls, which restricts which clients can access the Cloud API, providing a second layer of defence to IAM.

Personally I find this approach retrograde, because it assigns an element of trust to entities within the perimeter, whereas the BeyondCorp zero-trust approach does not, and plays well with the way public clouds have been designed (public endpoints).

It doesn't "exactly" work that way. The instance doesn't disappear after the request is served. It hangs around in case there's another request (for a while), but you only pay while the request is active. In practice "cold starts" are single-digit percentage of most common workloads (# of requests that are cold). Also FWIW it's not just scale to 0. Scaling any number of instances up will hit cold starts, the difference is this happens automatically versus fixed cluster sizes which have to either be pre-provisioned for peak, or tend toward much slower scale up times.

Disclosure: I work for GCP

These averages that always get dropped to alleviate all concern tell me that serverless container cold starts will never be solved.

No platform will sweat to improve the start time of an environment 10x, not when it only affects <10% of executions that tend toward commodity prices.

Individual end-users must occasionally endure the waking up of successive microservices and devs must risk a bad first impression.

It's extremely difficult to correlate this to long-term happiness or well-being. If parents can accelerate their time to retirement they get to spend more time with children as teenagers or young adults. Is that better or worse? More or less memorable? I don't remember much before I was 5-ish. Do we really know that having stay-at-home parents during that time alters a lot? Does having the extra money for "better" college outweigh time in "formative" years? How about having more wealth to transfer to children when you're gone? What if the stay-at-home parent is desperately unhappy with staying at home? Is it better to have a happy, harmonious environment?

It's complicated, and just saying it's better to have a stay-at-home parent versus "minimum wage daycare workers" (who in my experience are actually often highly qualified), is an incomplete perspective (IMO).

Whilst none of those points are necessarily wrong, I think you have implicitly ignored the happiness of the parents in your arguments. Many parents who feel they have to work and then pay for childcare and not see their children in order to make ends meet are definitely not happy about that at all. That shouldn't be forgotten.

The migration of humans out of Africa?

Usually land ownership emerges as a concept alongside the development of agrarian cultures. If you're going to spend time cultivating land, you tend to want to defend it.

It's probably more recent rather than less recent instances which both fit the conditions and are documentable.

The initial African diaspora occurred before historical records were being kept. Odds of either African or non-African land claims matching the condition of both being Terra Nullius and being documented through their entire history of possession are ... slim.

Historically recent island instances are more likely: Pitcairn, Falklands, St. George, etc. Azores as another response notes. Iceland is among the earliest virgin colonisations of land not previously permanently inhabited which has been documented from its start. I don't know enough of its specific history to know that it fits the conditions of continued lawful ownership transfers.

Mainland North and South America fail as they were previously inhabited. The various British Crown possessions are generally newer than Iceland, but might qualify under the lawful transfer requirement.

There might be instances along the Aleutian or Kuril island chains, though I doubt it. Possibly islands north of Siberia as well, though some might consider Communist rule a chain-of-ownership break.

Yeah! I should have rent control! I should be able to live where I want and pay below the market value. Screw the free market, I want to live in someone else's house and pay them less than it's worth. I don't care if their costs go up due to increased maintenance costs, or inflation, or wage increases. I don't care if the value of their property increases due to basic, fundamental, elementary economics like supply and demand, and their property taxes increase. Screw them. It's my right to live where I really really want to live. I especially don't care that nobody else can move to where I live because there are no new houses being built, and therefore no new money into the local economy. I'm not moving to a more affordable area, why should I? And I'm definitely not going to save money for a deposit so I can borrow money at some of history's lowest ever interest rates. Then I'd be working for the man. Screw that, I've got avocado toast to pay for.

Supply and demand isn't a magic incantation that makes a particular process valid. Slave markets have supply and demand, too.

If the fundamental property rights under consideration themselves are unjust, then efficiency arguments are missing the point

Of course, I also oppose rent control, because of the inefficiency. But I very much sympathize with and understand the brutal truth behind how land ownership is acquired. It is a simple matter of force... ownership is decided by whoever wields control over the application of violence.

That fact, combined with the fact that land is not a fruit of labor, means that individual ownership claims are unjust. And even from a pure efficiency standpoint, the ability to own and speculate on land creates a huge amount of idleness and underproductivity. People are able to afford to sit on idle land indefinitely, if there's little cost to do so.

The obvious solution is to tax land by value and use the revenue for infrastructure and public goods, and any remainder should go to a Citizen's Dividend. Wise use of such funds would always flow back into the value of land itself, and thus pay for itself. Without needing to tax production or labor. This would be much fairer than our current process of creating perverse incentives by taxing labor, and then allowing landlords to reap unearned benefits from nearby public works.

On the plus side, anybody who gets in to owning apartment buildings at this point knows the score. The risk is not that you won't be able to find tenants. The risk is that you won't be able to charge them enough to make a profit (because of regulation). If you don't want to roll the dice, don't invest in rental housing. You can't claim that you didn't have notice. If you want good performing investments, you'd better prepare to be a slumlord, or you'd better invest somewhere else.

I say this as an opponent of rent control. The people you should feel sorry for are not the owners. It is all the people who want to come to SF, would have a better life in SF, would have a lower impact on the environment, would be more productive and make this a better country, who can't because housing prices are so high and there are no vacant units.

I feel like this comment is way below par for HN.

It is successful at showing the root cause: people don't want to change.

In which universe is inflation 10%?

https://www.bls.gov/regions/west/news-release/consumerpricei...

Let me restate that, if inflation was 10%, you’d only be able to increase by 6%, so you’d be losing 4% per year, which adds up quickly.