prewett
prewett on Hacker News
Let's hope we don't get radical change. I can't think of an instance where it worked well.
The American Revolution wasn't radical change from the British system, but thoughtful improvements on it. The French Revolution, and the Communist revolutions were all disasters. The slave revolt in Haiti has produced long-term poor results compared to the Dominican Republic. The American occupation of Japan is arguable, but given that they kept the emperor and one party was in power for the next 50+ years just like before, I have some doubts.
The author doesn't understand Berkshire Hathaway. They have lots of consumer companies, GEICO being a large one, also a manufactured home manufacturer, See's Candies (not large by revenue, though), a furniture retailer, etc. A fair amount of Berkshire's revenue also comes from dividends from consumer companies, like Coca-Cola and Apple. Buffett's investing principle was to only purchase companies with predictable revenue streams, which has a certain mature consumer-company nature to it.
Except that, as far as I understand, crypto is only anonymous to the extent that getting a debit card under a fake name is anonymous. If someone is able to tie your wallet to you then all your transactions are immediately tied to you. Contrast that with cash: if someone figured out you made one transaction, it does not affect knowledge about other transactions.
So crypto is more like user-unknown rather than anonymous. I expect that normally these are about equivalent, but if you run into edge cases the difference could be catastrophic.
I expect that copyright protection on these would be pretty thin. Copyright doesn't exist on mechanically generated lists (e.g. the phone book) since they do not involve any creativity. Since the page explicitly says that that the fonts include the "charming" warts and all, and they only include the glyphs originally printed, one could make a good argument that their intent was mechanical translation to a digital format rather than a creative process. If you could demonstrate that the glyphs were essentially scanned in, for instance, that would bolster the argument.
Cereal yields are 200+% and nutrition is 50%? That sounds almost like it could be expected. (I mean, I'm not sure I would have expected it, but it seems like a natural result.)
Everything that I have read about hunter-gatherer and tribal societies is that there was a fairly high level of background violence. Here's one study [1]. Bret Devreaux has an article on how Native American-like societies had a lot of small raiding. (I think it is in his "That Dothraki Horde" series.) There are a lot of stories of missionaries narrowly avoiding getting killed by at the border of tribe they were going to, indicating an expectation of attack and shoot first ask questions later tactic. (Some missionaries did, in fact get killed, notably Elizabeth Eliot's first husband.)
[1] https://news.tulane.edu/pr/new-study-reveals-long-history-vi...
It may or may not be useful to you, but when I am constantly tired I've found it can come from one of two things: not eating enough calories, or I need to take vitamin B12 supplements.
Are you sure about ESC? I looked at MacBook Air pictures on DDG, and they all had an escape key in the upper left. I've never seen a Mac without one. If you're using it for VI, Ctrl-[ is also ESC (and avoids stretching your fingers).
For delete, if you mean delete-under instead of delete-before (what the key labelled "delete" does), Fn-Delete is delete-under.
Home/End are either Cmd-Up/Down (doc begin/end) or Opt-Up/Down (line begin/end) (I haven't used a PC in a while, so I can't remember what Home/End do)
Prop 13 isn't for seniors, though, it's for all ages. And the heirs inherit the tax base. A senior-only prop 13 would reset at death, so at least it's limited in duration.
That's about $675k/year, assuming a 35% tax rate. I think that is a small fraction of HN users, but more to the point, if your argument is that the phone is not expensive if you make over $500k/year, I'm not sure that is a compelling argument...
This is sort of tangential to most of the comments, but his comments on temperature made me wonder if humans have a similar sort of temperature. If you put me in the same conditions, I'm likely to make the same response as I did before (unless I managed to observe some bad consequences). I think other people would consider me fairly predictable. But I bet people like artists have a higher temperature. Maybe one of the things psychodelics do is raise the temperature, so you follow less strong neural pathways.
It's great for stuff I don't care about, like figuring out complicated SQL queries, and then turning them into sqlalchemy! There's nothing so unfun as spending a day trying to get a complex query working, as you slowly discover more odds and ends about SQL than you ever thought it could ever possibly have.
But if I end up feeding it JIRA tickets, playing agent management, and being QA on the other side, that's really not the job I signed up for.
> A LLM is more akin to a senior pair programmer.
I don't know, it seems more like every question goes to a contract agency, where a random programmer answers it. Generally they are very good at bringing up relevant things you've never heard of, but depending on who gets assigned to that answer, the implementation might be copy-pastable into production, or it might be a questionable hack, or it might be workable but clearly not the right approach if you're looking for those things. The agency must work by the hour, though, because if you challenge the assertions of the previous guy, the next guy will obsequiously say that you are, of course, quite right and possibly insightful and spit out a new solution more along the lines of the new guidance.
Right answer, but the anti-captialist reasoning is rubbish. The simple reason why you do not want to short a stock is that it can go up infinitely, and nVidia has a four year history of going up. There is also good reason to think nVidia will hit the numbers, both because AI is booming and because nVidia is conservative in its forcasts.
No capitalist conspiracy theory is needed, save the conspiracy theories for the Trumpers.
There's already a noun for this: "resources"
I believe that according to Catholic and Orthodox thought, God is Being itself. If you're familiar with Plato and Aristotle, God is the Form of Being. If not, I guess you could say God is Being as a noun, or God is where the idea of Being comes from. God exists because he is existence itself. (He is also Life and Love, in the same way)
A six week retreat to Bali might alleviate the surface boredom, but it will just self-medicate the emptiness that causes the boredom, though.
Money buys convenience and comfort, but it does not buy friendship, belonging, love, virtue, or purpose. The latter have usually been seen as more essential to the good life.
You can look at the wealthy and get a sense of this. A lot of the artistic output of the 1920s was from rich people who had realized this: "Catcher in the Rye" is about a rich kid who finds life meaningless, and "The Great Gatsby" kills himself when he can't get love. (I think a lot of the current malaise comes from the rich people ["elites"] of that era discovering their meaningless existence--hence Postmodernism, and the rest of us buying into their assessment.) Trust-fund kids are known to go off the rails. The English upper class had a purposelessness (see Dorothy Sayers' main character of her mysteries, a the guy that Jeeves' serves; both again from the same period). In our own day, Elon Musk seems like a guy who is running around like mad, subconsciously covering the emptiness inside. Or our own culture, which is the wealthiest in the history of the world, yet we have rampant ADHD, depression, anxiety, and widespread drug abuse (I see more marijuana dispenseries than liquor stores--we cannot even relax without drugs).
Maybe even something like a small LCD display, and it could be touch sensitive so you could switch directly to an agent? Like ... the Touch Bar? :)
(I always liked the idea of the Touch Bar, but in practice I only used it to change the volume. I still miss that, though. Now I have to Opt-Shift-Volume to try to get the right volume, which is always halfway between the options somehow.)
Technically the first two are still true... No one has seen the edge of the earth because a sphere has no edge. No humans have ever flown, although we have created metal machines to do and when we pilot one of those we call it flying, which is sort of like calling piloting a mecha walking.
Using LLMs for hobby programming is like using a computer to solve sudoku puzzles. The whole point is to do it yourself.
Personally, I find that when I start thinking "hmm, I wonder if I could write a program to automate this" is when I quit the pursuit. After figuring out the basic tricks to sudoku, it turned into busywork. (Or trying to micromanage StarCraft)
(Tagentially, if you want to automate programming, then I'm going to find myself a different field, because I have no interest in the results of sudoku puzzles. I especially have no interest in managing agents, which I see as junior-dev bullshitters, and would not enjoy managing such a team in real life)
Whether that is true depends on what kind of place you want to buy and the amount of the loan. In Boston's north shore, the only available apartments are triple-deckers where you can hear your neighbors, for $2500/month, while houses are something like $800k; I consider renting to be a poor value here. In Cambridge, MA rent is higher, an average of $3500/month and you can choose between a commercial apartment and triple-deckers. An actual house is something like $2 million, although if you are okay buying an apartment or the top floors of a triple-decker, maybe you could get one for $1 million. I'm not interested in buying somewhere where I can hear my neighbors talking, so triple-deckers are out. Here rent is a little better deal (except that living in Cambridge is a bad deal). In the far Chicago suburbs (admittedly not "most metros"), on the other hand, rent for a decent apartment is close to the price of a monthly mortgage payment. And if you can pay most of the purchase price (or the price is cheaper), buying looks better, because you have less interest.
Early in the Industrial Revolution people voluntarily moved from the countryside to the cities despite all that, so apparently a lot of them thought it was an improvement. Some of the cities were proud of the soot, since it showed that they were participating in Progress.
You can see some of this repeating in China. Migrant workers move to the cities because, while what they can earn is low, it is a lot higher than subsistence farming in the countryside. "The Last Train Home" (documentary) follows such a family, although to understand the tragedy in the documentary you need to understand that Mao created the hukou system to prevent exactly this, which means that their children can only receive state education in the countryside.
> Neptune's inner moons may be the only place in the solar system where we can directly observe that material [from the insides of a past moon]
Clearly this means that we need a Neptune orbiter mission! And soon, I'm not getting any younger and I want to see it.
You could try contracting. Perhaps you would like places that are not pure software (some kind of hardware, either electrical or mechanical, that needs software for UI). I'm at one currently, and one of the hardware guys is using AI to generate test US, which seems like a reasonable use, but there isn't a lot of interest elsewhere.
Because confusing two people because of having the same name is much less likely for European names than for Asian names (there are only about 100 Chinese family names, for instance), so it's an indirect dig that Apple wasn't paying attention (since they presumably employ a lot of Asians, and thus should know better). There's no need to bang on the racism drum, it's pretty tiring.
Not the GP, but I have one non-partioning AIX trivia I discovered by accident. Turns out that malloc(0) returns NULL on AIX, but non-null on Linux, SunOS, and Irix. (I was surprised multiple ways on that one!)
Do they see coming the predictable failure-modes of left-wing economies, though? History seems to suggest not. Also, did "the entire left-wing" see specifically a debt crisis through bad assumptions of creditworthy mortgage securities coming, or they just saw "capitalism" as a failure and here is a specific case, aren't we so prescient. That's not a prediction.
I hope you've taken a good look at the alternatives, because historically they've been terrible. Unless you mean "not capitalism but still market economy", or "European market economy 'socialism'", although I don't see how those are much different.