Hacker News Reader

chmod600on Proposed Oklahoma skyscraper gets redesign to become USA's new tallest building

Are tornados a threat to skyscrapers?

chmod600on Americans don't believe middle class can afford homes

Doubling or even tripling in ten years is not a ridiculous rate of growth.

Are there other examples where the law crushed fundamental technological shifts?

(Not just delayed briefly by starving investment or something.)

chmod600on Bad stuff going down at the American Sociological Association

"what kind of (productive) gatekeeping the society brings to the table that is not and cannot be fulfilled by a peer review process"

I don't think "cannot" should be the standard. If the same or better standard of peer review isn't provided (empirically) by some other system, then that's a legitimate criticism of the other system.

chmod600on Bad stuff going down at the American Sociological Association

"But obviously free access is better for science as a whole"

That's not totally obvious without sorting out the details. Similar to copyright, it seems to be inefficient (in the sense that it artificially restricts supply) but certainly a lot of people think it helps improve the overall supply of creative works.

chmod600on What's Gone Wrong at Boeing

But there is a lot of regulation and supervision. It kicks in late in the cycle, though, because doing so early is a hard problem (e.g. detecting rot in the engineering culture).

chmod600on What's Gone Wrong at Boeing

Competition makes a lot of things better, but it's not super clear that safety is one of those things.

I mean, sort of... but with something as complex as aviation, the feedback cycle into the market is slow and noisy.

chmod600on What's Gone Wrong at Boeing

The root of the problem is that it's hard to quantify engineering quality. That means it's hard for shareholders to hold it to a high standard to preserve long-term value. But it's just as hard for socialist planners to do that.

chmod600on What's Gone Wrong at Boeing

How many times must we re-learn "Good. Fast. Cheap. Pick Two"?

The two of those that are easy to measure will always get chosen. It's not that people don't want "good", it just takes a lot of effort to figure out if you are getting something good or not.

Reputation is one way, but that can be, and often is, spent for short-term gain.

chmod600on What's Gone Wrong at Boeing

This new orientation was encapsulated by something that Harry Stonecipher, who had been CEO of McDonnell Douglas and was CEO of Boeing from 2003 to 2005, said: “When people say I changed the culture of Boeing, that was the intent, so that it’s run like a business rather than a great engineering firm.”

What's wrong with a great engineering firm? And is it possible to somehow reflect that greatness in the stock price better so that people don't feel a need to come in and change it?

chmod600on Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare

"That might be more a result of capitalist motivations"

People wanting to get more stuff faster is a universal motivation not limited (in theory or in practice) to capitalism. To the extent that anyone is exploited, that's just selfishness, again a universal motivation.

chmod600on A site that tracks the price of a Big Mac in every US McDonald's

It's evidence. What it means is up to interpretation, but I doubt it would be blocked entirely. It would be up to the prosecutor to challenge the assumption that you and your phone are in the same place, or that there was some other flaw in the data.

chmod600on I'm sorry but I cannot fulfill this request it goes against OpenAI use policy

I wonder how long before "Electronics" is no longer a useful categorization because everything other than food is electronic.

chmod600on Procrastination is connected to perfectionism

One of the best ways for me to avoid procrastinating on task X is to have some other task Y, and to procrastinate on Y by working on X.

Obviously this requires some mental gymnastics to eventually complete both X and Y, or to come up with some task Y that feels important but actually is not. But it works great.

chmod600on Asking your customers what they want doesn't work

The XY problem is poorly-framed.

First of all, it's often a false dichotomy: you can answer the X directly and dig deeper to find Y.

Second, it places the questioner in a "normal" bucket: surely they must have the same boring mundane needs as everyone else, and we just need to figure out which one it is (Y). But some people really are working on something interesting, and need to understand X to do so.

Thirdly, even if Y really is better for them, they still might benefit from an answer to X to avoid asking future variations of X.

chmod600on Asking your customers what they want doesn't work

What's USP?

chmod600on NY Times copyright suit wants OpenAI to delete all GPT instances

Isn't copyright tethered somehow to a notion of "expression"? That is, the same ideas and facts expressed differently are a different work?

Sure, when something is clearly derived, or just expressed in a new medium, then I'm sure it's still covered. But if it goes through an LLM and the result bears little resemblance, how can that still fall under copyright?

chmod600on The End of Enlightenment: Empire, Commerce, Crisis

How do you differentiate between a "reaction" and a natural consequence? Maybe as religion / superstition diminished, that left an identity vacuum which was filled by nationalism?

chmod600on Most 16-year-olds don't have servers in their rooms

The concept of memory address needs to make sense, first. The idea that memory is a big array of typeless bytes, and that all data exists in there somewhere. That an address is just an array index into memory, and you can use it to point to the first byte of an integer or struct or string or whatever.

I mean, it kind of makes sense but it's not obvious.

chmod600on Cisco to acquire Isovalent

That may be true for Cisco specifically; I don't know. But some acquisitions really go well and make sense for everyone.

I don't think YouTube was profitable before acquisition. Now it's profitable and a great product.

chmod600on Cisco to acquire Isovalent

Much like different companies need a different set of people, the same company at different stages needs a different set of people.

Some people are great at the research / experimentation phase but not great when it comes to scaling up. Other people aren't great at scaling up but are great during the operational phase.

The operational phase is the only place profit is generated, but the other people need to get paid, too.

chmod600on Suspects can refuse to provide phone passcodes to police, court rules

Are we supposed to tell the prosecutor that they can't ask the police witnesses questions about how their legal, warranted search went? Or that the police can't answer?

chmod600on Suspects can refuse to provide phone passcodes to police, court rules

If I were SCOTUS, here's how I would settle this question:

The accused can't be compelled to produce a password, and the prosecution can't use the defendant's silence as an argument against them. BUT the police can explain in court that they were unable to search and/or seize what's listed on the warrant due to an unknown password and unbreakable encryption.

In other words, they can't say "Joe wouldn't give us his phone password and that means he's guilty". But they can say "we were unable to search his phone or collect these documents listed on the warrant due to unbreakable phone security".

There's not a huge difference between those two statements when it comes to the jury. They'll understand that evidence is missing, and that the defendant can probably produce it but won't. Maybe civil libertarians won't like that, but I think that's misplaced: there is a warrant, remember, it's not just a random search. And the defendant can always produce it if it's exculpatory.

chmod600on Suspects can refuse to provide phone passcodes to police, court rules

They had a warrant. It seems less like a 4th issue and more like a 5th issue.

chmod600on To revive Portland, officials seek to ban public drug use

My mistake.

My question stands, then: does "legalize and regulate" mean that there would be regulations preventing the stated problems in Portland, and that they'd be actually enforced? Or is it essentially just the same as plain legalization?

chmod600on To revive Portland, officials seek to ban public drug use

"what has the war on drugs really ended up accomplishing?"

A lot of comments here have a "Portland was a lot better before decriminalization" theme. So at least some people might think the war on drugs was working out better than the current policies.

I'm not saying we should bring back the war on drugs, but the argument you are making can no longer be taken for granted.

chmod600on To revive Portland, officials seek to ban public drug use

You're the one who proposed the regulation ("particular establishments or at home"), and now you are already second-guessing whether it should actually be enforced (asking if it's "genuinely dangerous... maybe").

Regulation sounds good, but it doesn't just happen because it's written down. Enforcement is the messy part.

chmod600on To revive Portland, officials seek to ban public drug use

So you'd arrest all of the homeless addicts and put them in jail for consuming in an unapproved place?

chmod600on To revive Portland, officials seek to ban public drug use

150 years ago was very different. If you didn't do useful work, you and your family could be in serious and immediate risk.

Now there's more of a safety net (money, foster care, and ambulances/ERs) which is largely good, but provides more opportunity to enable addicts.

chmod600on To revive Portland, officials seek to ban public drug use

"To do that experiment and do it right, it needs to be nationwide."

I'm immediately skeptical of any idea where bad results become evidence that the idea should be deployed more widely.