maehwasu

The consequences of not exposing healthcare and education to cost pressure have already been catastrophic for consumers of both, so I'm not quite sure where you're going with this one.

This is one of those ideas that sounds really sophisticated, but is just wrong.

The fact is that there a tons of people out there representing themselves as programmers who actually can’t perform basic tasks.

The HN population massively selects for competence, so people here have a hard time imagining what things are like from the interviewer side.

Having a way that coders can avoid doing these types of coding problems over and over seems like a positive. Companies that aren’t interested in the approach could not use it.

Most companies today are already using a version of this that is way less respectful of applicant time.

But you’re speechless, so I guess there are strong points on both sides.

I have had similar experiences as an interviewer. It’s one of those things that you really have to see to believe, but it’s definitely a real thing.

I agree that the comment is humorous, but I think by “simple” the author means “that is mostly the full set of things that is happening” rather than “easy to grok”.

It's difficult to participate in an economy like the US where the prices of home purchases (and, by extension, rents), are driven up by competing buyers who have access to copious amounts of cheap credit.

shrug People freak out about national id numbers, even though SSNs are already that.

I don’t know why Americans react worse to certain things, but they clearly do, even in the face of lots of education.

Agree—it’s perfectly reasonable for them to do this, and likely the only way the system could function at good cost and without abuse.

However, the problem in an American context is that people would likely see this as invasive. They’d demand the free treatment without the privacy invasions needed to make it work.

To be clear, I think the tradeoff is absolutely worth it, but America’s track record in making reasonable tradeoffs is awful.

This seems intuitively obvious, and I say this as a former business owner. However, the causality is backwards (as I’d expect from economists).

If things are going well, it usually means you have a monopoly of some kind, which means high margins, which means that it’s easy and important to keep your people happy (including stimulating/challenging them with non-rote work).

It’s when things go south that it all starts to get ugly for everyone.

The causality likely goes the other direction: successful businesses can afford to create better employee environments. If your business sucks, you’ll likely run out of money if you try to first make employees happy and then let that happiness iterate you to success.

I agree that gold and fiat money are both faith-based, and I want to emphasize that I am not a gold-bug--almost all my assets are in revenue-producing real estate.

There is, however, a massive qualitative difference between gold and fiat: fiat has an adverse selection problem. The government that issues it can print as much of it as it wants, and it's more likely to do so precisely at the times when the country is in trouble.

Gold depends on faith, but failure of faith in gold isn't as correlated with failure in the rest of the economy.

I don't mean this at all in a morbid way, but I've long suspected that our lifetimes are slightly too long for our current environment.

If you're a smart autodidact, you can get really far, really fast, to the point where most remaining challenges, especially in a similar field, feel isomorphic to ones you've previously solved.

If you like drawing, and it feels new, and you have enough money to support yourself...go for it! Don't feel guilty; you may well have exhausted most of what programming has to offer you personally.

Anytime you give a person group the ability to distribute necessary goods, you will organically create a patronage system.

That patronage system will out-compete other, non-patronage systems, because it will have a stronger internal power base.

There are only 2 classes of solution that work here, where “work” = “not accidentally create/enable a patronage scheme”:

1. Impose power from outside, non-locally. This is generally frowned on, as it’s basically colonialism.

2. Withhold the flow of outside aid, as this takes away the resources the local power structure is free-riding on to sustain its power base. This is also generally frowned on, as it feels like useful resources are being withheld.

Because both solutions are unacceptable, the status quo and its power structures persist.

What incentive mechanism are you proposing? (Real question, not rhetorical)

Generally, when people ask for an economic solution, they’re looking for a proposal to change behavioral incentives, rather than proclamation of the desirability of someone’s pet cause (as noble as it may be).

He'd likely argue that, despite the prior regimes' professed love of Science!, the same trends were present before. I.e. the podcast's content wouldn't have changed at all in 2016 vs 2019.

Short-term control of the executive branch in the American system is fairly disconnected from the multi-decade incentives that move the directions of scientific research.

The bot could likely just be trained on the 4 or so different games. You’re likely increasing the complexity by a constant factor, nothing exponential here.

“Value betting” and “bluffing” are human heuristics to simplify complicated situations.

The bot doesn’t “know” whether it’s value betting or bluffing—it’s not a relevant question. The relevant question is whether to bet, and what amount, in order to maximize value of the particular hand it has, with reference to the board and opponent actions taken.

You quite literally just independently re-derived the concept of "border" in the same sentence that you rejected it.

Having other people “celebrate” your moving to retirement is a far cry from having meaningful purpose.

I am not suggesting that purpose is only found in work, only that getting others to pat you on the back for being retired doesn’t help much either.

You clearly evaluate doctors and treatments based on multiple variables, depending on the situation.

Many people, perhaps not you, but many, would like price to be able to be one of those variables, as it is with nearly everything else in our society.

The “should we use the judicial branch to legislate” ship sailed a long time ago, and it’s not coming back to the harbor.

For better or worse, the judiciary as legislators is our system now, may as well acknowledge it.

“Corporations” are useful abstractions, but leaky. Google exists as a collection of people, most of whom are shielded from the profit motive. It’s also not terribly controversial to note that, on average, Google employees don’t like that other half of the US people.

The upshot: it’s not very hard for a corporation to end up doing things that are right or good for the members, but bad for the corporation’s survival.

It makes it a lot easier for the Russian gov to sell "control over the internet" to the public.

The fact that Dropbox has access to your files is a nightmare waiting to happen. Yes, I know they currently don’t use them for anything bad. No one ever does, until they do. I’m out.

If you were relying on HN as a place to build your own brand, and maybe a business, in a way that was not robust to the future whims of HN's operators...then no, you should not post here.

If you're like me and just want to fuck around during the day and post a few things, then it's totally fine.

Searching for trivial proofs by contradiction in fields with lots of fuzzy variables is one of the worst habits of math/CS people.

Everyone (or at least most people here) knows that Google has all those advantages. The issue is that we keep falling back on those advantages, rather than doing the work necessary to make owning your own platform realistic.

I also laughed at the irony of OP's site going down, but these are the growing pains that will ultimately be necessary if we don't want the internet to be walled gardens run by 3-4 companies.

Your entire life is open to Google if you use Gmail. Google has demonstrated a willingness to run algorithms to analyze that life. Google can, at any time, for any reason, ban you from its platform.

If something in your life runs afoul of Google, your identity gets shut down. This wouldn't be a big deal if you weren't using Gmail as the hub for tons of your identity and logons--but many people use it for exactly that.

TLDR; non-meta risk is high and unpredictable if you use Gmail as a life hub, much lower otherwise.

Yup, this was the wake-up call for me. I know everyone here is like "duh of course they look at everything," but sometimes it takes a concrete case to really feel what that means.

I switched to Protonmail soon after that, and honestly I barely miss Gmail at all now. I just changed my workflow to not use email as a catchall for everything that I needed to be able to search.

The easy solution to this is to create a culture of using powerful tools, but requiring REALLY good reasons to go far to their edges in terms of metaprogramming.

It's not that much harder to enforce than it is to enforce conventions in less powerful languages, and the convenience of working in a well-designed language is so nice.

Yeah, this is the most apt comparison, and is barely even a metaphor. Shocking that it's not applied to FB.

It's not a non-sequitur if you follow his chain of logic, which is focused on improving outcomes, and not simply on expanding voting for its own sake:

1. Are voting rights missing? (Gather information) 2. If they are missing, would adding these specific rights improve the quality of voting? 3. If the answer is no, then the fact that certain rights are missing is less relevant.

You clearly disagree with him, because you see expanded access to the vote as a good in and of itself. That's a tenable position, but not everyone agrees with it (I certainly don't), and so it's good to see where others are coming from.

tldr; Some people think that more voting always = good, some people are more consequentialist.