8 ms·

“Choosing San Francisco in 2020 is like choosing Java in 2010... Proven, but makes it harder to do simple things and doesn’t give you an advantage over incumben

“Choosing San Francisco in 2020 is like choosing Java in 2010... Proven, but makes it harder to do simple things and doesn’t give you an advantage over incumbents” -Balaji S. Srinivasan

mburst 7y ago
Funny quote, though it should be noted San Francisco isn't included in the shut off area
- paulsutter 7y ago
  Maybe not this week I was in SF for the deliberate rolling blackouts in 2001 EDIT: it’s different in the reason, but it’s equally preposterous to have such badly managed infrastructure
  - inferiorhuman 7y ago
    I was in SF for the rolling blackouts in 2001 (and all around the bay area) This is quite different, and the rolling blackouts were statewide. Edit: The rolling blackouts were the result of letting Republicans draft hamfisted deregulation legislation. The resulting greed saw Texas energy companies fuck California about as hard as they could. What's happening now is also related to greed in that it's cheaper for PG&E to shut off power to prevent wildfires than it is for them to maintain their equipment. PG&E burned down huge swaths of California over the past couple years so they're being a bit more cautious now. The big difference is that while most inhabited parts of the state will want reliable power, the risk of fire is not equal. So where previously we all got fucked by PG&E's greed, now it's just those situated where PG&E runs high voltage transmission lines near combustible materials.
    - paulsutter 7y ago
      Quite different because badly managed infrastructure vs badly managed infrastructure?
      - inferiorhuman 7y ago
        Yes, the situations are quite different because you're looking at environmental factors versus purely financial greed. As fun as it seems to be for folks to shit all over San Francisco, neither the rolling blackouts of the early 2000s nor the preemptive blackouts this week have anything to do with city or county management.
    - masonic 7y ago
      the result of letting Republicans draft hamfisted deregulation legislation California's ludicrously gameable "deregulated" energy market of that time was set up by the leadership of the Democrat-controlled Assembly and the Democrat-controlled California Senate, then signed into law by Democrat Governor Gray Davis. CA Republicans were powerless to "draft" anything.
      - inferiorhuman 7y ago
        California's ludicrously gameable "deregulated" energy market of that time was set up by the leadership of the Democrat-controlled Assembly and the Democrat-controlled California Senate, then signed into law by Democrat Governor Gray Davis. You need to go back a bit further than that, back to Republican governor Pete Wilson and Republican author of the bill Jim Brulte. Wilson knowingly set up his successor (Gray Davis) to fail.
        masonic 7y ago
        Republican governor Pete Wilson and Republican author of the bill Jim Brulte. 'Democratic State Senator Steve Peace was the Chairman of the Senate Committee on Energy at the time and is often credited as "the father of deregulation".'[0] Again, Democrats controlled both the Assembly and Senate throughout the process, and ever since. Bill contents are amended at will both in and out of committee, and "gut-and-amend" (removing a Bill's language wholesale and replacing it with that of a completely different bill to avoid rules about committee review) is so common, that term was coined for it. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_electricity_crisis#New_regulations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_electricity_crisis#...
        inferiorhuman 7y ago
        You conveniently missed the next two sentences: The author of the bill was Senator Jim Brulte, a Republican from Rancho Cucamonga. Wilson admitted publicly that defects in the deregulation system would need fixing by "the next governor".
    - opportune 7y ago
      We should just force them to maintain power when doing this even if it costs more than whatever fee they have to pay residents. I don’t even live over there but this is a huge inconvenience and I wouldn’t mind spreading out the extra costs for making sure it’s done safely to keep giving these people power. The biggest bullshit is that now that PGE knows they’re too big to fail, they don’t even have to give a shit when they piss people off. If North Berkeley residents sued in a class action suit the state of California would probably just bail them out.
      - inferiorhuman 7y ago
        PG&E makes an excellent case for municipal power (sadly they fight every effort tooth and nail). Rather than forcing PG&E to do anything I'd settle for jail time for the management.
      - nradov 7y ago
        PG&E should be forced to do better safety maintenance. But it's too late to do anything else this week. They have to de-energize lines in high risk areas. We can't have a repeat of last year's fires.
      - lacker 7y ago
        PG+E isn’t “too big to fail” at all, they just went bankrupt! The real issue here is that PG+E is responsible for wildfires caused by power lines, and they don’t have many ways to deal with it. They aren’t allowed to raise rates to pay for more anti-fire measures. They can spend their fire prevention budget smarter, but at some point the gains there are maxed out. One of the few things they can do is to shut off power during times of high fire risk.
        inferiorhuman 7y ago
        They aren’t allowed to raise rates to pay for more anti-fire measures. They don't need to. They could cut back or eliminate their dividends, cut back executive compensation, stop buying back stock, etc., etc. They cut back their line crews ages ago (plenty of cost savings there), and if San Bruno is any indication, PG&E hasn't bothered to keep records (additional cost savings) for quite a while.
    - Aloha 7y ago
      Texas managed to deregulate power around the same time, and it's worked out pretty well, moving from Washington to Texas I saw a near 20% reduction in my energy rates. The problem isn't deregulation alone, it's that generation was stripped from distribution, but retail sales wasn't decoupled from distribution.
      - CalChris 7y ago
        The ‘deregulation’ in California was designed to allow Enron to game the system. The blackouts were Enron gaming the system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_electricity_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_electricity_crisis
        Aloha 7y ago
        Your assertion for designed isn't backed by your source, and had California fully deregulated the market, the swindle by Enron likely wouldn't have been possible, as public opinion would have goaded the legislature into action - but because the end consumer wasn't feeling any pain, no change was possible.
        CalChris 7y ago
        Enron lobbied at both Federal and state levels for their version of partial deregulation which they could (and did) game. That's also covered in my cite.
      - inferiorhuman 7y ago
        Texas managed to deregulate power around the same time, and it's worked out pretty well, moving from Washington to Texas I saw a near 20% reduction in my energy rates. According to Texas Coalition for Affordable Power (TCAP): "deregulation cost Texans about $22 billion from 2002 to 2012. And residents in the deregulated market pay prices that are considerably higher than those who live in parts of the state that are still regulated. For example, TCAP found that the average consumer living in one of the areas that opted out of deregulation, such as Austin and San Antonio, paid $288 less in 2012 than consumers in the deregulated areas."
  - ojbyrne 7y ago
    All of California. And people went to jail (Enron): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_electricity_crisis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_electricity_crisi...
  - mc32 7y ago
    Ah, yes. Buy back your own power at markup while idling other power plants in order to not meet demand locally. Thanks Enron and the deal makers in the great state of California.
  - BurningFrog 7y ago
    I really doubt SF will ever be deemed a high forest fire risk area.
cobookman 7y ago
Yet Java is still a defacto choice even today. Arguably minimal fuss & stable. Java code written today will still run without change in 5 years. Can't say the same of other languages. What other language would you recommend for a large eng organization of 1000+ ppl?
- rebeccaskinner 7y ago
  I would argue that in an organization with 1000+ developers, trying to pick a single language is doomed regardless of what that language is.
- mpiedrav 7y ago
  Python (3.x, as 2.x is mostly deprecated) can do and there are plenty of libraries around. Not just for data science, but about everything under the Sun. For performance-critical sections, you can plug in C/C++, wrapped in Python APIs. A 500K SLOC project in Python might be unwieldy, though.
  - philwelch 7y ago
    > Python (3.x, as 2.x is mostly deprecated) can do and there are plenty of libraries around. Not just for data science, but about everything under the Sun. Unfortunately there's no great way of managing all of those dependencies for build and deployment.
- koolba 7y ago
  > Java code written today will still run without change in 5 years. Can't say the same of other languages. That’s only half true now that Java actually has a steady release cycle. There were plenty of breaking changes from 8+.
  - stickfigure 7y ago
    As a polyglot, I have to say this is a misleading and false equivalence. The upgrade treadmill in Java is nothing like the upgrade treadmill in any other popular language - certainly not Javascript, Python, Ruby, or Go.
ronnier 7y ago
Java got a lot better since 2010. I really enjoy writing Java though I'm writing mostly Go lately it seems.
nostrademons 7y ago
Worth including the rest of the quote: "We’re in an interesting transitional era where San Francisco / Delaware is obviously* wrong but incorporating on-chain and going full remote is not yet obviously right." (i.e. he's advocating using blockchains to define your legal entity and building a distributed team worldwide for your employees.) https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1149073637325979648?lang=en https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1149073637325979648?lang=...
- novok 7y ago
  If you replace the SF part with the distributed team part, is there any real advantage to using 'blockchain' corps vs delaware corps?
  - nostrademons 7y ago
    A lot cheaper, with less administrative hassle. DE C-Corp incorporation will run you a couple grand, with minimal annual fees in the few hundreds, and you have to do various administrative tasks like file your annual reports (on a website that looks like it was made in 1995), hold annual meetings with minutes (even if it's just yourself), re-elect yourself President every year (even if you are the only shareholder), etc. If there are any disputes or anything is done incorrectly, you're looking at tens-to-hundreds-of-thousands in legal fees. The blockchain dream (which still needs a lot of tooling and infrastructure) is that you fill out a form once, incorporation and annual maintenance is basically free, and most of the mundane legal stuff is enforced by software for very small fees. He also mentions nation-states as a configurable parameter: basically this would mean that moving your company's legal jurisdiction would be as simple as updating a form field, and nations would have to compete to retain businesses.
    - godzillabrennus 7y ago
      Formation costs aren’t that high these days unless you need a lawyer for special circumstances: https://www.delawareregisteredagent.com/incorporation-form https://www.delawareregisteredagent.com/incorporation-form
undefined3840 7y ago
Why is this the top comment. What does that have to do with this story at all?

“Choosing San Francisco in 2020 is like choosing Java in 2010... Proven, but makes it harder to do simple things and doesn’t give you an advantage over incumbents” -Balaji S. Srinivasan

mburst 7y ago

Funny quote, though it should be noted San Francisco isn't included in the shut off area

paulsutter 7y ago
Maybe not this week I was in SF for the deliberate rolling blackouts in 2001 EDIT: it’s different in the reason, but it’s equally preposterous to have such badly managed infrastructure
- inferiorhuman 7y ago
  I was in SF for the rolling blackouts in 2001 (and all around the bay area) This is quite different, and the rolling blackouts were statewide. Edit: The rolling blackouts were the result of letting Republicans draft hamfisted deregulation legislation. The resulting greed saw Texas energy companies fuck California about as hard as they could. What's happening now is also related to greed in that it's cheaper for PG&E to shut off power to prevent wildfires than it is for them to maintain their equipment. PG&E burned down huge swaths of California over the past couple years so they're being a bit more cautious now. The big difference is that while most inhabited parts of the state will want reliable power, the risk of fire is not equal. So where previously we all got fucked by PG&E's greed, now it's just those situated where PG&E runs high voltage transmission lines near combustible materials.
  - paulsutter 7y ago
    Quite different because badly managed infrastructure vs badly managed infrastructure?
    - inferiorhuman 7y ago
      Yes, the situations are quite different because you're looking at environmental factors versus purely financial greed. As fun as it seems to be for folks to shit all over San Francisco, neither the rolling blackouts of the early 2000s nor the preemptive blackouts this week have anything to do with city or county management.
  - masonic 7y ago
    the result of letting Republicans draft hamfisted deregulation legislation California's ludicrously gameable "deregulated" energy market of that time was set up by the leadership of the Democrat-controlled Assembly and the Democrat-controlled California Senate, then signed into law by Democrat Governor Gray Davis. CA Republicans were powerless to "draft" anything.
    - inferiorhuman 7y ago
      California's ludicrously gameable "deregulated" energy market of that time was set up by the leadership of the Democrat-controlled Assembly and the Democrat-controlled California Senate, then signed into law by Democrat Governor Gray Davis. You need to go back a bit further than that, back to Republican governor Pete Wilson and Republican author of the bill Jim Brulte. Wilson knowingly set up his successor (Gray Davis) to fail.
      - masonic 7y ago
        Republican governor Pete Wilson and Republican author of the bill Jim Brulte. 'Democratic State Senator Steve Peace was the Chairman of the Senate Committee on Energy at the time and is often credited as "the father of deregulation".'[0] Again, Democrats controlled both the Assembly and Senate throughout the process, and ever since. Bill contents are amended at will both in and out of committee, and "gut-and-amend" (removing a Bill's language wholesale and replacing it with that of a completely different bill to avoid rules about committee review) is so common, that term was coined for it. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_electricity_crisis#New_regulations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_electricity_crisis#...
        inferiorhuman 7y ago
        You conveniently missed the next two sentences: The author of the bill was Senator Jim Brulte, a Republican from Rancho Cucamonga. Wilson admitted publicly that defects in the deregulation system would need fixing by "the next governor".
  - opportune 7y ago
    We should just force them to maintain power when doing this even if it costs more than whatever fee they have to pay residents. I don’t even live over there but this is a huge inconvenience and I wouldn’t mind spreading out the extra costs for making sure it’s done safely to keep giving these people power. The biggest bullshit is that now that PGE knows they’re too big to fail, they don’t even have to give a shit when they piss people off. If North Berkeley residents sued in a class action suit the state of California would probably just bail them out.
    - inferiorhuman 7y ago
      PG&E makes an excellent case for municipal power (sadly they fight every effort tooth and nail). Rather than forcing PG&E to do anything I'd settle for jail time for the management.
    - nradov 7y ago
      PG&E should be forced to do better safety maintenance. But it's too late to do anything else this week. They have to de-energize lines in high risk areas. We can't have a repeat of last year's fires.
    - lacker 7y ago
      PG+E isn’t “too big to fail” at all, they just went bankrupt! The real issue here is that PG+E is responsible for wildfires caused by power lines, and they don’t have many ways to deal with it. They aren’t allowed to raise rates to pay for more anti-fire measures. They can spend their fire prevention budget smarter, but at some point the gains there are maxed out. One of the few things they can do is to shut off power during times of high fire risk.
      - inferiorhuman 7y ago
        They aren’t allowed to raise rates to pay for more anti-fire measures. They don't need to. They could cut back or eliminate their dividends, cut back executive compensation, stop buying back stock, etc., etc. They cut back their line crews ages ago (plenty of cost savings there), and if San Bruno is any indication, PG&E hasn't bothered to keep records (additional cost savings) for quite a while.
  - Aloha 7y ago
    Texas managed to deregulate power around the same time, and it's worked out pretty well, moving from Washington to Texas I saw a near 20% reduction in my energy rates. The problem isn't deregulation alone, it's that generation was stripped from distribution, but retail sales wasn't decoupled from distribution.
    - CalChris 7y ago
      The ‘deregulation’ in California was designed to allow Enron to game the system. The blackouts were Enron gaming the system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_electricity_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_electricity_crisis
      - Aloha 7y ago
        Your assertion for designed isn't backed by your source, and had California fully deregulated the market, the swindle by Enron likely wouldn't have been possible, as public opinion would have goaded the legislature into action - but because the end consumer wasn't feeling any pain, no change was possible.
        CalChris 7y ago
        Enron lobbied at both Federal and state levels for their version of partial deregulation which they could (and did) game. That's also covered in my cite.
    - inferiorhuman 7y ago
      Texas managed to deregulate power around the same time, and it's worked out pretty well, moving from Washington to Texas I saw a near 20% reduction in my energy rates. According to Texas Coalition for Affordable Power (TCAP): "deregulation cost Texans about $22 billion from 2002 to 2012. And residents in the deregulated market pay prices that are considerably higher than those who live in parts of the state that are still regulated. For example, TCAP found that the average consumer living in one of the areas that opted out of deregulation, such as Austin and San Antonio, paid $288 less in 2012 than consumers in the deregulated areas."
- ojbyrne 7y ago
  All of California. And people went to jail (Enron): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_electricity_crisis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_electricity_crisi...
- mc32 7y ago
  Ah, yes. Buy back your own power at markup while idling other power plants in order to not meet demand locally. Thanks Enron and the deal makers in the great state of California.
- BurningFrog 7y ago
  I really doubt SF will ever be deemed a high forest fire risk area.

cobookman 7y ago

Yet Java is still a defacto choice even today. Arguably minimal fuss & stable. Java code written today will still run without change in 5 years. Can't say the same of other languages. What other language would you recommend for a large eng organization of 1000+ ppl?

rebeccaskinner 7y ago
I would argue that in an organization with 1000+ developers, trying to pick a single language is doomed regardless of what that language is.
mpiedrav 7y ago
Python (3.x, as 2.x is mostly deprecated) can do and there are plenty of libraries around. Not just for data science, but about everything under the Sun. For performance-critical sections, you can plug in C/C++, wrapped in Python APIs. A 500K SLOC project in Python might be unwieldy, though.
- philwelch 7y ago
  > Python (3.x, as 2.x is mostly deprecated) can do and there are plenty of libraries around. Not just for data science, but about everything under the Sun. Unfortunately there's no great way of managing all of those dependencies for build and deployment.
koolba 7y ago
> Java code written today will still run without change in 5 years. Can't say the same of other languages. That’s only half true now that Java actually has a steady release cycle. There were plenty of breaking changes from 8+.
- stickfigure 7y ago
  As a polyglot, I have to say this is a misleading and false equivalence. The upgrade treadmill in Java is nothing like the upgrade treadmill in any other popular language - certainly not Javascript, Python, Ruby, or Go.

ronnier 7y ago

Java got a lot better since 2010. I really enjoy writing Java though I'm writing mostly Go lately it seems.

nostrademons 7y ago

Worth including the rest of the quote: "We’re in an interesting transitional era where San Francisco / Delaware is obviously* wrong but incorporating on-chain and going full remote is not yet obviously right." (i.e. he's advocating using blockchains to define your legal entity and building a distributed team worldwide for your employees.) https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1149073637325979648?lang=en https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1149073637325979648?lang=...

novok 7y ago
If you replace the SF part with the distributed team part, is there any real advantage to using 'blockchain' corps vs delaware corps?
- nostrademons 7y ago
  A lot cheaper, with less administrative hassle. DE C-Corp incorporation will run you a couple grand, with minimal annual fees in the few hundreds, and you have to do various administrative tasks like file your annual reports (on a website that looks like it was made in 1995), hold annual meetings with minutes (even if it's just yourself), re-elect yourself President every year (even if you are the only shareholder), etc. If there are any disputes or anything is done incorrectly, you're looking at tens-to-hundreds-of-thousands in legal fees. The blockchain dream (which still needs a lot of tooling and infrastructure) is that you fill out a form once, incorporation and annual maintenance is basically free, and most of the mundane legal stuff is enforced by software for very small fees. He also mentions nation-states as a configurable parameter: basically this would mean that moving your company's legal jurisdiction would be as simple as updating a form field, and nations would have to compete to retain businesses.
  - godzillabrennus 7y ago
    Formation costs aren’t that high these days unless you need a lawyer for special circumstances: https://www.delawareregisteredagent.com/incorporation-form https://www.delawareregisteredagent.com/incorporation-form

undefined3840 7y ago

Why is this the top comment. What does that have to do with this story at all?