valachio

Humans are natural intelligence. Natural = Created by nature.

Artificial intelligence is intelligence created by humans. Artificial means man-made.

Haha. I can tell you're obviously not Chinese, and has no understanding of Chinese culture at all.

Funny because if China did this, everyone will think of them as evil.

There is no guarantee that pills would've helped your friend.

In fact, these medications can worsen a patient's condition.

I discovered a breakthrough technique in fighting obesity.

It's so simple anyone can do it and see results in weeks.

The technique is "eat less"

I agree that if I end up not liking him (as a person) at all, then it won't work out.

I was planning on setting up like a 3-month part-time working relationship where we can work together on some side project to get to know each other better.

A 3-month work commitment is not much, plus if I go into it and 1-month later I decide things dont work out, I can just leave.

But I'm wondering if it's worth investing time for this 3-month work arrangement at all

Thing is, in my experience I have been able to learn to tolerate someone after spending enough time with them.

It's possible I might learn to tolerate this potential cofounder as well, if I spend more time with him.

It's certainly not my first choice but he and I have nearly identical interests in terms of the startup we want to build, as well as perfectly complementing skillsets.

I appreciate the feedback. You're probably right but it gives us something to dream about. But assuming we do have this cap table, how will investors want to purchase preferred shares in the company?

I notice this trend on hacker news where there are so many pessimistic comments. It's like an ocean of pessimist people.

x is dying, y is dying.

FB is not dying. It is literally a money printing machine and will continue to be for many years.

Instagram, despite being over a decade old (very old in the internet world), continues to grow [quarter over quarter](https://i.gyazo.com/aee60a22bcc2757f446340c51a17b3bc.png). Where in that photo do you come to the conclusion "Instagram is slowly dying"?

Metaverse has not been rejected. If you're like me and follow its progress, you can see making significant improvements year over year but it is still in the early adopter phase. Like it or not, humans want more visceral experiences and putting yourself in a 3D virtual environment is a lot more visceral than staring at a 2D screen. Only a tech boomer would say metaverse is rejected when it's still in its infancy.

I think the opposite is true.

The bigger a ship is, the slower it is to turn.

IBM is a "tech" company that employs 282,000 employees, and when was the last time they invented something? I don't remember the last time I heard IBM in the news about something they made.

The bigger the company, you often times find less innovation and more administration & bureaucracy.

The reason startups can survive is because of its small size that makes it very flexible and adaptable to chaos and change, that gives it the edge over bigger companies.

the answer is - not much.

the power law applies to any big organization. 20% of the people do 80% of the work, whilst 80% of the people are just there for "support".

whatsapp was run by a team of like 20 people or something when they got acquired for $20 billion. for a simple software product, you don't really need that many people. in fact, more people often means bad software. you just need a small group of very talented engineers to run the product and add new features when necessary.

big (and especially public) companies often times need to hire a lot, just to look like a real company.

now that twitter is private, elon has no responsibility to public investors and can focus less on looking like a real company and more on doing what needs to be done to cut bloat/costs and improve product

This post just seriously changed my outlook on cryptocurrencies.

Fair enough. I can sympathize if you had to endure 3 weeks of loud noise. Frankly if I wasn't supportive of the Convoy, I would be pretty upset too.

One more thing I would say is that the fault for how long the "Occupation" went on for isn't entirely with the Convoy. With a large protest like this, it's up to the government to deal with, one way or another.

The authorities didn't take the right actions. They should either come out to negotiate with the protesters, or quickly utilise force to disperse them. Instead, they basically sat still for 3 weeks while Trudeau "fled" Ottawa to some undisclosed location.

So I would lay some blame on the government in its tardiness in addressing the Convoy, as part of the reason it went on for so long. You can't expect angry people who are determined to change government policy to just pack up and go home when the government told them to

You sort of have to, if you want to actually make an impact.

Look at what they did in Euromaiden, or the recent protests in Kazakhstan (200+ dead). If Ukrainian people resorted to peaceful protests, the pro-Russian government would have easily cracked down and suppressed the protests.

If you want another even more brutal example - look at the Tiananmen Protests. Do you think peaceful protest will convince an authoritarian communist government to magically give up its powers?

The government rarely listens to its people (yes that includes democratic countries). If you want the government to listen, you gotta make a lot of noise.

[Here's a popular viewpoint from the left about protests](https://twitter.com/aoc/status/1334184644707758080?lang=en).

If protests were "comfortable", then there would be no pressure for the government to do anything. The point of a protest is to make enough noise (heh) so the government is forced to react.

Look at protests like Euromaiden, or the recent protests in Kazakhstan with 200+ dead. If the Ukrainian people didn't protest at the levels they did, and occupy Kiev for as long as they did, would the government have done anything? I don't think anyone in Kiev was sleeping when people were building barricades and engaging in deadly firefights with the Ukrainian police & army.

I agree with your assessment.

To completely quit news is not a good idea, unless you want to live under a rock, metaphorically speaking.

Fact of the matter is, day-to-day events affect each one of us who live in a modern society. You don't want to be the guy who has no mask and 0 preparation for a pandemic when it hits. You don't want to be the guy who keeps buying/using a product when there's news circulating that it could be unsafe.

The author mentioned reading a 5000-word report, which is great if you're into that sort of things. But the mass majority of people have jobs to work, kids to take of, important things to do. They don't have time to spend hours every day reading deep into all the issues going on in the world.

Most people just want to stay up to date with the latest events, so they can plan their lives better.

Of course you can get addicted to news and let it negatively affect you. But the alternative of having no idea what's going on in the world until it's on your doorstep is not a good idea either.

A balance is good. Stuff like limiting yourself to spending 15 minutes in the morning during breakfast quickly going over important news, and making a commitment to not waste more time reading news for the rest of the day.

Not gloating. I genuinely enjoy eating pork and meat in general. It's the most nutritious food a human can eat in my humble opinion. I hold no shame in eating and enjoying meat.

If I was a scientist and a piggie died as part of an experiment or whatever. I would do my best to eat the piggie and not let any part of it end up in the trash and going to waste.

They end up on my dinner plate as a delicious high-protein meal.

Getting a booster every 6 months vs every 24 months is a 4x difference in the number of boosters you have to take. That's 4x the potential complications (mistakes can happen in science, e.g. thalidomide) and 4x the cost.

And no boosters are not free. I can't wrap my head around how many people believe that boosters are free. No they are not free. If you are not paying for it directly, the government is paying for it with taxpayer money. And tax money doesn't fall from the sky. It comes out of your wallet.

Or the government can print the money and risk higher inflation, which is just an indirect tax on your money.

I remember in the early days of the Internet, people were saying how the Internet would encourage critical discussions and open fruitful debates.

Now I think the Internet actually enforces groupthink and eradicates opposing narratives. Platforms like Twitter allows people to dox those with unorthodox ideas and behaviors and cancel them, which is basically a modern day version of "burnt at the stake". It seems that the Internet also ended up give an even more effective podium for authoritarian regimes to push their narrative, best example of this being the Chinese government.

At the root of all this is human nature. Perhaps technology won't help humanity transcend, but it will only reinforce what's already there.

I have to give Hacker News a thumbs up here. I think Hacker News is much better than a place like Reddit for open-minded discussions. Reddit has become a place where subreddit are often times moderated by a group of mods who act like a single-party state.

There is also the possibility that we will look back on history and realize how hysteria and media fearmongering drove human society to take wholly unnecessary measures and paved a path towards more authoritarianism, more surveillance, a financial crisis due to the government printing trillions of dollars which a lot of it is going into the stock market and driving up companies to insane valuations, creating a generation of software addicts due to the pandemic forcing teenagers to stay home and cope using their computers as opposed to going out and interacting with their peers in person, and a myriad of other problems that we do not yet see in the short-term.

It ends when people say it ends.

There will always be natural disasters, whether it's earthquakes or viruses. If it's a new virus, yes people are going to die, yes hospitals are going to be overwhelmed (in fact I would be surprised if hospitals aren't overwhelmed when a new virus hits, which just means that hospital was over-funded and has too many idle staff).

The virus was a creation of nature (conspiracy theories notwithstanding), but the lockdown and all these governmental restrictions are man-made.

Even if the virus went away, the lockdown can continue if people want it to go on. It can go on for the rest of human civilization if we want it to. Or it can end right at this moment, if the people go out and tell their government that it's time to stop.

I think if this pandemic struck in the 70s or 80s, it would have been shook off as a moderately more dangerous version of the flu, and there would have been no lockdowns or anything like that. Life would go on as normal until natural herd immunity is achieved.

Yeah what you said is pretty much it. And not only will everyone catch COVID at some point, but they will catch it many times over the course of their lives as the virus mutates; you'll get sick but it won't kill you (unless you are really unlucky). Sounds similar... oh right, just like the flu.

Imagine if you stepped on a nail. Guess what, it's gonna be painful no matter what you do. It's better to pull the nail out in 1 go and endure a large amount of pain in a short amount of time, than to pull the nail out 1cm a day and endure a moderate amount of pain over a long period of time. Right now, almost every human society has decided to do the latter and implement lockdown after lockdown; going into total mania over new variants and semi-mandating vaccines and pumping 3 shots (more to come!) of rushed, insufficiently tested vaccines within a single year. I say semi-mandating because if you are faced with a choice of losing your livelihood or getting a jab, do you really have a choice?

Here in Toronto, the government just started another 3-week lockdown. I believe this is the 3rd lockdown we've had.

In some weird way, I'm strangely at peace with everything that's happened. I think I have adopted somewhat of a fatalistic attitude, not towards COVID but rather towards human nature and our ape-like herd-like nature.