[HN Gopher] Trapped in the Technologist Factory
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       Trapped in the Technologist Factory
        
       Author : myth_drannon
       Score  : 24 points
       Date   : 2021-04-18 05:19 UTC (17 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (ideolalia.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (ideolalia.com)
        
       | brundolf wrote:
       | This is incredibly well-written. This sentence in particular:
       | 
       | > Chesterton notwithstanding, the fastest way to learn why a
       | fence exists is to tear it down and see what happens.
        
       | karmakaze wrote:
       | This is a fantastic read in terms of the tech it touches upon,
       | the personal journey, and the products.
       | 
       | > My next job was at Factual, a more established startup that had
       | built their product using Java and embedded Javascript, and were
       | beginning to adopt Clojure. Their product was an index of all the
       | places in the world, generated by applying hundreds of different
       | heuristics to web crawl data. Each entry had a canonical id and
       | various properties like name, address, and hours. More
       | interestingly, it also had the equivalent ids from different
       | platforms like Yelp and Foursquare, and we offered an API that
       | could resolve an an incomplete (or even partially incorrect) set
       | of properties to the corresponding entity in our index.
       | 
       | This sounds amazing like a dream job. So many possibilities. It's
       | hard to face that in a capitalist society capitalism prevails.
       | The best that can be done in the setup is to align capitalist
       | goals with a 'good' one for as long as it lasts.
        
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       (page generated 2021-04-18 23:03 UTC)