akudha
akudha on Hacker News
Maybe they will fail, maybe they will do very well - time will tell. Even if they fail badly, it still can't be as bad as an authoritarian rule, right?
This is a wider problem than just the tech industry. The kind of rhetoric, words used in political rallies, debates, on TV etc just sets the tone for society as a whole to become a bit more meaner, nastier...one step at a time. Even religious talks, sermons etc aren't immune to this
How much money did they spend? A few million, few tens of millions perhaps? That is not even a rounding error for them.
Maybe the delay and opportunity cost caused them some pain, but whatever they invested in contracts, labor etc is probably pocket change for them
Yes, Finland can also tighten the rules on future permits etc. But after all this, Google will simply pay a fine and look for another country/forest to exploit. It will also not bring back the 250K trees they destroyed.
What is the point? They will pay a fine and move on to their next exploit. Maybe the punishment should be to force them to spend as much money/time/effort as needed to regrow the entire forest, all 250,000 trees, and then some. Even if it takes 20-30 years - pay for reforestation, hire crews, pay for inspections/watchdogs to monitor etc
Ah ok, understood. Thank you
But there are lots of boring business applications of IDP, right? Invoice parsing, open data PDF parsing (from data.gov for example) and so on? Not sure about national security implications here
Posted by
akudha on Thursday October 29, 2026 @10:27AM
from the ask-hn dept.
Just curious - what does your day-to-day look like? What kinds of documents do you process, what tools do you use? Do you enjoy it?Trying again, as the first time didn’t get any response :(
Unless we have a well planned distribution channel, SaaS is tough now that code has no moat - correct?
Consulting might still be around at least in the short term, I guess…
Posted by
akudha on Monday October 26, 2026 @03:00PM
from the ask-hn dept.
I expect more and more professions getting affected in the next 3 to 5 years, not all on the positive side. Software dev is already changing.What are your plans? Are you planning to quit software altogether? Or stop coding and adapt, accept AI but stay in software field? Or something else? If you’re not in software, what plans then?It would be helpful if you can include what career level are...
This is what I want to do too. If I had money, I would also like to build a small community (maybe 20-50 people max) who can live off the land, and just do what they like - compose music, write software etc etc. Maybe build a library with only physical books, only those that were published before 1980 (or some timeline like that).
I'm no fan of FB, but the problem is deeper than FB. If FB vanishes overnight, some other service will take its place, and the same people who posted on FB will post on whatever the new website/service is.
Yes, it would be nice if FB fades into obscurity. But what would be nicer is if people had some basic decency and responsibility (everyone, me included) before posting clickbaity, flammable, junk stuff. I have no clue how to achieve this, but the internet used to be a fun place (for learning, niche topics/ideas etc) - those days are gone, and it sucks
If they harm a billion people, but it benefits trillions in some theoretical glorious future, then it's the right thing to doBy the same logic, if harming one billionaire benefits million normal people, will they be okay with it? None of this makes any sense. Who gave them the right to decide all of this anyway?
Plus robots (software and hardware) will increasingly be used to invade even the most basic privacy, to control people etc. They are not just productivity tools anymore, they are also mass surveillance tools and every bad thing that comes with it.
Example: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ca7ufSI1Qxg&ra=m
Most depressing part is humans are training robots to replace themselves
Forget Billions or even 100s of millions. If I had a single digit million dollar fortune to my name, nobody will hear from me again. I'll go to a quiet corner and just read books or garden or whatever. If I can be of any help/use to those less fortunate than me, I will. If I can't do that, then I'll keep quiet and live out my life.
I cannot fathom going out of my way to create chaos, to be cruel, to make lives miserable for millions of people, and worst of all, call it "progress". I just don't understand how these people think. Maybe I am just too poor, too dumb...
I’m wrong with no real evidence or, and this is verbatim, “it doesn’t feel safer.”At in part due to media fear mongering and lying 24/7? Fear, lies, doubts, hatred, division... all of this gets clicks, gets the ad dollars.
So the lesson here is if you are a criminal - commit multiple crimes, hope in case you get caught then it is for a lesser crime, so you can trade secrets of a bigger crime for leniency?
I wonder what victims have gotta say about that...
Why do car manufacturers brag about hitting 60 mph in 1, 2 or whatever seconds? For a normal person, does this really matter - what is the big deal if a car hits 60 mph in 5 seconds instead of 1? There are more important things like safety, repairability, longevity etc right?
My guess is - legal or not, Facebook might’ve calculated the consequences (aka, fines) and decided it is worth the cost. Most publishers will not have the resources to fight them in court anyways
I understand logistics is an insanely hard problem, but can't sellers create a co-op? Not on Amazon's scale, but start on a much smaller scale (gotta start somewhere). Maybe at a city level - if a bunch of sellers in Chicago (for example) rent a warehouse and serve only within Chicago, it is worth a try, no? Or is this a stupid question?
I remember hearing about a Uber like app (I might have seen it on More Perfect Union channel, I think). So I guess at least some people are thinking along the same lines, maybe?
As an individual, I guess the only thing I can do is shop as little as possible on Amazon (which I am already doing). Not sure what else I can do to help
There was one old Soviet book from Mir publishers - I can't remember the name now, I
think it was called
The happy family or something like that. It has 3 or 4 stories, I only remember one of them. It is about two kids who get 15 fresh farm eggs and try to incubate them with home made setup - bulbs for heat, books to adjust the height, their little sister's kitchen play set for cooling etc. It was beautiful.
I had that book for a loooonnnng time, until I loaned it to a friend for reading and he lost it :( It was very well written and as a kid, it was very interesting to me.
Funny (sad?) thing is, none of these you listed are hard to predict. The details of some issues are more complex (like global warming) but overall problem in a nutshell is not hard to understand at all. It is just common sense that a bigger/taller truck makes it hard to see pedestrians. People
still do not care, some even pretend to not understand.
Most people will not care about something until it affects them directly and immediately. We can debate the reasons for this, but that time might be better spent in working around humanity's apathy. Maybe make renewable energy super cheap and easy, better tech to track pedestrians so as to not hit them etc
Awarding the peace prize only posthumously isn't a bad idea at all. The one downside I can think of - someone is awarded the prize after their death, few years later their not-so-nice actions are discovered, now what?
Are there any awards that are without controversies (or at least, little controversy)? I am sure there are unknown people quietly doing great work in this world who deserve the recognition, I suppose the tricky part is finding them. In any case, it is not an easy task to pick a person that most (if not all) people would agree on.
Ah, apologies for the bad wording :(
Your calculation is right (there were some loans that were refunded, so it is a bit higher than 2720). You could ask ChatGPT (or use Excel) for a quick calculation. $25 a month is such a small amount in the west, if anyone wants to do it (I did it inconsistently, some months $0 some months $200).
All this to show - a dollar goes a LONG way in parts of Asia, Africa etc.
Her entire 18-month master's program (tuition, registration, fees, books, supplies) comes to 3,060,000 TSh, about $1,161.
$1,161 - that is a shockingly small amount for a 18 month master's program!
Another org I admire is https://watsi.org/ Costs listed there is so small (compared to the west) that every dollar can help
There is no profit/interest for lenders. I do it through kiva.org
Kiva doesn't make the loans directly either - they partner with local organizations in the countries they operate in. Any interest these local orgs charge, is for their operating expenses. Lenders on Kiva do not get interest. There is also a chance of losing money if loans are defaulted, due to currency exchange loss etc (I have to check the exact amount, but I have lost some due to defaults)
https://www.kiva.org/about/how
I also tried a couple of other Microfinance orgs (can't remember the names now), but kept going back to Kiva. Been doing it for 15 years, so it slowly adds up, even though I wasn't consistent.
This is my experience with Microfinance
I've been funding Microfinance loans, $25 at a time, for a while now. Just checked the numbers - I have spent only about 5K in total, made almost 68K for ~2900 loans (keep recycling the money when repayments come in).
Lost motivation for a few years in between, after Covid. Used to think it is just $25, what difference can it make? I was totally wrong. $25 won't even get a good pizza these days in most American cities, it is not a lot in the west. But it can have amazing purchasing power in Africa, parts of Asia etc.
What I am trying to say is - even if we have just $10, it is okay, it can be of immense help to someone. There is Watsi, there is Kiva, Doctors without Borders and many more great projects, like Tanzania Education Project.
Here is a very simplistic (and optimistic) calculation by ChatGPT - simply loaning $25 month consistently can help more than a 1000 people in 20 years
https://chatgpt.com/share/6ac80150-feb8-83e8-a6b0-4b162c056a...
I used to think I need lots of capital to help, this shows how wrong that line of thinking is.
One would expect food (and everything else) to cost more in Manhattan vs Brooklyn, no? It is annoying when stores don't display prices or change prices depending on the time of the day ("more $ for lemonade when it is hot" style) but comparing prices across zip codes seems like a stretch?
Maybe they haven't learned anything. Or maybe they crunched the numbers and decided losing a percentage of users to piracy was worth the risk? The only thing that is crystal clear is the greed - no amount of money/profits will ever be enough.
As a user, probably the best thing to do is get a library card and read books published prior to 1980 or thereabouts. Much of the movies/shows produced these days is not that good anyways, and anything that is good gets canceled after a season or two
Posted by
akudha on Wednesday September 23, 2026 @11:15AM
from the ask-hn dept.
Just curious - what does your day-to-day look like? What kinds of documents do you process, what tools do you use? Do you enjoy it?
Why is it tough to balance? There are ridiculously cheap ad ridden phones sold in Asia - it makes sense because ads subsidize those phones. How does it make sense to show ads in a $2000 phone, especially from a company that prides themselves for "taste", "courage" and a bunch of other buzzwords? And a company that is already far, far ahead of its competitors when it comes to profit margins in the smartphone business? I don't understand.