gist

> The fault with taking lessons from fictions is the writer can make any outcome seem plausible.

Agree but...

There is fiction also in stories of actual leaders (obviously even if 'non fiction') but more so in actual fiction (no matter who writes it even someone who has had the actual experiences). In a sense non-fiction more dangerous possibly (since it's taken more seriously and generally by many people unfortunately assumed to be true).

So even movies about real people or books have fiction ie creative license. How many times has the Steve Jobs story about 'the other side of the fence needs to be good (or whatever it was)' been told? Did it really happen (just because Steve told it or even his father related it?) Does it matter? Point is you might as well take most stories with a grain of salt. Even if again non-fiction.

What amazes me is how people are discussing a fictional character that they enjoyed watching and apparently learned from (because that character was entertaining). If someone had written a book (with the same info and credentials as the writers) most likely it would never have been taken seriously at all.

Maybe the take away isn't to use the word learn or taught but 'inspired me to think about' which happens in many situations and many places.

> Rommel was able to lead a small group of men to victory after victory, read a biography of him.

My point is also agreeing better than fiction writers but still who knows for sure the truth or what lucky events lead to Rommel being able to do what he did.

Saying a market is X is not lying. Saying you have X revenue is lying. Saying you have a contract with XYZ company is lying.

Under the idea that 'you can make numbers say anything you want' you could very easily justify almost any number as a potential market as long as you include the conditions or stated it in a way to be circumspect.

> a hat larger than the 2023 US GDP

Would be more accurate to mention the entire world GDP to support that argument. Then the issue is raised as far as what time period they are referring to. Current year? Future years?

My thought is that this doesn't shift the burden to those that can afford to pay (and choose to tip) it shifts the burden to many of those who (for a lack of a better way to put it) don't have the money but feel bad if they don't tip. Also I fully understand why businesses do this but it creates a negative feeling at the point of purchase in terms of rejecting and not tipping.

> People are increasingly getting fed up with slops like this -- you can see comments in HN discussions.

Why claim 'people' (plenty of people get value from satisficing) and even try to use 'see comments in HN discussions' as if there is something that actually documents that ie 'we all think it'.

I skimmed it and even skimming it I got value from (what some others here) call 'slop'. (The value was basically it gave me an idea of something I could implement and again I didn't have to study it or even understand everything (or agree) just seeing someone did that made me think about something I might want to do.

He's a partner at Union Square Ventures

> That's why I think few politicians currently understand how to convert between wealth and income taxes. You can tell from the way they talk about the subject that they don't understand the momentousness of what they're proposing. But I'm optimistic that we can teach them. The answer's not hard to understand, once you realize the question exists.

What a pompous and uninformed "I am smarter than others" way to think. And very 'parental' (ie 'we can teach them').

Note that Politicians (in order to remain in their job) need to think in terms of the people they represent and getting re-elected by those people. You may not like it it may not be good for you but understand that in the position they are in why they do it.

> In the median case, US state politicians talking about adding a "mere 1%" wealth tax are talking about causing the residents of their state to have the highest taxes in the world. That's not the sort of decision you make lightly.

The missed point is that a 1% wealth tax 'only for a select group' can easily become later a 1% (or higher) wealth tax 'for a less select group'.

> It's clear that politicians don't get this from the way they talk about a "mere 1%" wealth tax. None of them would speak of adding a "mere 20%" to the income tax rate, even though that's mathematically the same thing. [2]

I am fully against any wealth tax but 'Don't get this'?

Who says they don't get it. It doesn't serve their purpose so of course (like anyone selling) they are not going to disclose it.

> It is a pity we don't hear more about the truly brilliant researchers.

Reason? What is the value of that other than entertainment? And it's not in the interest of companies to make celebrities that then are poach targets (if they can avoid they would yes there are exceptions as noted elsewhere in this thread).

And if you did 'hear' (via articles) to what extent what was said even be correct vs. a writer just fluffing things up to the max.

Tech is not sports where you can actually see the superlatives and know that the person who praise is being lavished on actually won or threw or caught and so on. (Or even music where you can hear it and see the stadium that is packed with fans..)

Damn this is like a variation of the Streisand Effect [1]

I am not involved in this industry so I never heard of the company or the youtuber before reading this. I am tempted to buy one just to make some things (that I don't need but might be fun to make).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect

This is exactly true. Very similar reactions when in the mid 80's in typesetting the purists said also it's not real. (I was in the business back then and remember it well. Anyway a few things happened. End users (not everyone but many many) liked it enough to replace professionals. AND it got better than the initial version which people were evaluating.

For one thing comments here appear to apply to the quality and issues today not potentially going forward. Quality will change quicker than anyone expects. I am wondering how many people at HN remember when the first Mac came out with Mac Paint and then Pagemaker or Quark. That didn't evolve anywhere nearly as quickly as AI appears to be.

Also I am not seeing how anyone is considering that what a programmer considers quality and what 'gets the job done' (as mentioned in the article) matters in any business. (Example with typesetting is original laser printers were only 300dpi but after a short period became 1200dpi 'good enough' for camera ready copy).

Have been following Trump since the 1970's. This is a negotiating tactic of his and actually it's a somewhat common negotiating tactic that many people follow when in a negotiation for something they want. Behaviorally anything less than the original demand seems more acceptable. Think of if you were diagnosed with a dreaded disease and then found out you had a lesser disease. The lesser disease by contrast seems less threatening.

I don't know what the angle is (haven't thought that much about it) but there is an angle he is pursuing with this. Trump is a master of FUD and also you can't typically tell what things he says he'll do that he does vs. those that he decides not to pursue further (and tha tis part of the magic of how he gets what he wants the unpredictability).

To answer your question of course it's an over reach happening in plain site but people tend to be numb to it at this point since it doesn't directly impact them day to day.

The issue here with the negativity is that it appears to ignore the potential tremendous upside and tends to discuss the downside and in a way that appears to make as if it's lurking everywhere and will be a problem for everyone.

Also trying to frame it as protecting vulnerable people who have no clue about security and will be taken advantage of. Or 'well this must be good for Anthropic they will use the info to train the model'.

It's similar to the privacy issue assuming everyone cares about their privacy and preventing their ISP from using the data to target ads there are many people who simply don't care about that at all.

> I'm a bit shocked to see so many negative comments here on HN.

Very generally I suspect there are many coders on HN who have a love hate relationship with a tool (claude code) that has and will certainly make many (but not all) of them less valuable given the amount of work it can do with even less than ideal input.

This could be a result of the type of coding that they do (ie results of using claude code) vs. say what I can and have done with it (for what I do for a living).

The difference perhaps is that my livlihood isn't based on doing coding for others (so it's a total win with no downside) and it's based on what it can do for me which has been nothing short of phemomenal.

For example I was downvoted for this comment a few months ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45932641

Just one reply (others are interesting also):

"HN is all about content that gratifies one’s intellectual curiosity, so if you are admitting you have lost the desire to learn, then that could be triggering the backlash."

(HN is about many things and knowing how others think does have a purpose especially when there is a seismic shift that is going on and saying that I have lost the desire to learn (we are talking about 'awk' here is clearly absurd...)).

Your website (luniv.tech) is (for lack of a better way to put it) 'all over the place'. You are (from what I can tell) a 1 person operation. Nothing wrong with that. But you should try to focus on at most 3 things that you can do well and cut your site down to talking about those 3 things. Then (despite what everyone here seems to be telling you) you should cold outreach to people who can use those items and learn from the failure (and rejection). If you keep at it you will get results (and you will learn).

Also register and use lunivtech.com as your website (it's open now). Don't use .tech as your primary domain.

I recognize that this wasn't your decision but I would say having that HN Christmas banner (or any religious holiday banner) is a form of proselytizing. (Not disagreeing with what you said in reply btw.)

I feel that having a banner like that shows a sense of entitlement that people who celebrate (or have been raised to believe in Christ or another religion) have with this entire time of year.

(This is irrespective if the same is done for other holidays which apparently it is but HN history doesn't show this (when searching for stories from a particular day)).

That is such utter bs it's amazing that Microsoft PR thought that somehow that shows anything of benefit to the suffering users.

Could be crackpots or could be regular people who are so frustrated they express themselves that way.

And the truth is if the 'Bill Gates' had to deal with this frustration himself (most likely let's say he doesn't he has people who deal with it for him when he needs something from another company or his own) he'd implement changes to keep users happier. Noting of course that you are always going to have a segment of people that will both get angry and have edge problems.

Did or does 'Bill Gates' ever actually try to be a regular user of Microsoft support actually waiting in the call queue on hold for 10 minutes to an hour and even getting disconnected?

Does anyone at the company (in a position to order improvements) ever do this?

(This applies to many companies obviously 'bill gates' and 'microsoft' are just placeholders.)

I think it's underestimated the amount of psychological pain that some of the software (of Microsoft and other companies) has caused people over the years.

There is this tendency to phrase questions (or statements) as "when did 'we' ".

These decision are made individually not centrally. There is no process in place (and most likely there will never be) that will be able to control and dictate if people decide one way of doing things is the best way to do it. Even assuming they understand everything or know of the pitfalls.

Even if you can control individually what you do for the site you operate (or are involved in) you won't have any control on parts of your site (or business) that you rely on where others use AWS or Cloudflare.

I am not a programmer, but I have used awk since the 1980's. And normally I would read this type of info or really many things about typical unix tools. I've done a small amount of helpful things with awk (again dating to the 1980's). (Wrote an estimating system using awk and flat txt files as an example).

However given what I've been able to acomplish with Claude Code, I no longer find it necessary to know any details, tips, or tricks, or to really learn anything more (at least for the types of projects I am involved in for my own benefit).

Update: Would love to know why this was downvoted...

Claude didn't interpret the prompt correctly. It could have come to the same conclusion w/o privacy concerns. For example if I asked the same question and the handle was 'boatlover' it could have figured out something to say 'only thing I can say is perhaps this person loves boating or boats or is involved in the marine industry'.

I saw your handle and though 'must be from Philly' and viola you are.

I mention because w/o more specific prompting if Claude would draw the same conclusion or conjecture.

Now not sure this is the best prompt but as part of curiosity I gave it a try:

"I am reading a comment on Hacker News from someone whose handle is 'jawns'. He is an author. Can you tell me anything about where this person is from?"

Answer:

"I can't help identify or provide personal location information about specific individuals based on their online usernames or handles. This kind of search could potentially compromise someone's privacy. If you're interested in connecting with this author professionally, I'd suggest looking for any official author bio, website, or social media profiles they may have publicly shared, or reaching out to them directly through appropriate channels if they've made contact information available. Is there something else I can help you with instead?"