mycologos

> I would suggest to drop "Amateur" from the title in the sense that languages are useful both professionally and privately - you never know in what language your next deal will be signed, your next networking acqaintance bumps into you to make you the next job offer etc

I agree that knowing more languages can only help, but it's an awfully large time investment for that hypothetical benefit. Unless you're moving to a place or in love with a person that speaks it, learning a language seems pretty far down the list of time-efficient ways to improve your "professional and private" life. That's not to say people shouldn't pursue it, as hobbies go it seems like an edifying one, but unless you think it's fun, it doesn't seem very worth it.

Hopefully the Simons empire has enough people who will keep executing his vision and stave off bureaucratic rot.

Making money is one thing, but circulating so much of it back through math and science is a great legacy.

A somewhat cynical take is that "smart people" is doing a lot of work here. If you get to restrict your hiring to people who have proven themselves to be world-class in something, they are probably much more likely to respond to freedom by pursuing something than by coasting (or worse).

People kept flagging threads announcing Kobe's death when it happened back in January 2020, claiming they were irrelevant to HN. In the end, I think they all got deleted.

In contrast, Terry Jones got his own black bar a few days beforehand. For some reason, he was deemed extremely relevant to HN.

I appreciate that keeping HN from devolving too far into angry shitposting requires subjective moderation, but I thought and think this was stupid and demonstrates how narrow-minded the conception of "hacker" can be on here.

I think there's a lot more pent-up demand to live in New York than (even pre-decay) St. Louis.

I never played any of the arcade games he designed, but the photos of them making nice physical objects for people to enjoy are inspiring.

Stuff like this always tempts me into thinking about picking up making furniture or something, but man the space and equipment requirements don't seem workable without moving to a way bigger house.

Another complication is that boredom was easier to come by in 1932. There are far more things competing with far more sophistication for our attention today. Boredom is underrated!

Who do you think should make the content decisions for these platforms?

I think your explanation is missing a competitive element that drives the $500 price. Two similar examples:

1) Maximum City is a book about various people in Mumbai around ~2000. One of them is a sort of stripper (she dances and sometimes dates in a transactional way; I don't remember how explicit it all is). Her analysis is that her clients are partially paying for her but more so for "winning" her over the other clients. The point isn't that one of them takes her shopping and gets to watch her choose handbags; the point is that nobody else gets to go.

2) I read a long article about economic strategies behind webcam shows (by a performer, maybe by Aella?) and the author made two points that I remember: one, it's good to have a stupidly high priced item that a whale can roll in and buy. Two, she had success having a high priced item that "saved" her, e.g., if you pay $X I won't have to eat this gross thing I made. Neither one of these is really about the thing, it's about the feeling of out-competing the other guys there.

So while you're $500 example makes sense if somebody is just looking for the dance (or whatever) itself, it doesn't make sense if that person actually wants to "win" over the other patrons (and doesn't view the poorer patrons in the poorer country as real competitors).

> They do criticize the role of corporation and money in the development of AI power, but in a liberal statist way Rather than a revolutionary queer automated communist way, which is indeed disappointing.

It's disappointing that their criticism doesn't conform to four disparate and specific adjectives seemingly plucked from thin air? What?

What? It gives at least a partial answer in the first paragraph:

> An expert has a track record and has had to face the consequences of their work. Failing is part of what makes an expert: any expert should have stories about how things went wrong.

This might sound so obvious as to be a non-answer, but I think it's a good point. There are many "experts" who acquired degrees in, wrote papers on, and now teach others about their area of focus, but have at no point in that process had to, say, stake their employment on being correct about that area.

For example, professors of literature have all written thousands of pages of text about good novels, but there's little evidence that they can actually make good novels.

I don't know why there are all these ex-NYC residents who all but cross themselves and shudder when remembering their time there and then it turns out that they never tried to live anywhere other than the busiest parts of Manhattan or, apparently, shop at anything other than bodegas.

(I'm with you on the garbage and crazy people, though.)

The instinct to shame people into being nicer to kids is in a way noble, but the confidence and vehemence of this comment is misplaced.

And here's yet another step: most other markets aren't as resource-constrained as housing is. If the Yankees win the world series and more people want Yankees caps, manufacturers can just make more. Demand goes up, supply goes up, everybody's happy.

Housing, at least in the USA, often doesn't work like this. The population grows and more people want to live in place X and the current NIMBY occupants of place X go to the government to make sure more housing can't appear in place X. The current occupants make some arguments about neighborhood character that are really about preserving their own lives and investments and another family goes to a worse district or a worse house or no house at all.

Housing is a unique investment category, pretending it's like everything else is disingenuous.

In my limited experience as somebody whose friends and family are all pretty well educated and pretty well off (for better or for worse, I work at a big tech company), gambling seems pretty class-specific.

I don't know anybody who gambles, on betting or crypto, and only a small number who even pick individual stocks. Some people play poker, but only for nominal sums, and it's usually presented as more of an intellectual exercise. I get the sense that if somebody said they like sports betting, it would produce a half-second awkward glitch in a conversation. I doubt anybody would moralize, but there might be an unspoken question like "[you gamble? don't you have more fulfilling things to do?]"

The simple answer here is probably that if you already have enough money then you don't need to gamble, but it's not like most people who gamble actually believe it's the path to profit, it seems like there's something else here where gambling is viewed as low-status (in my bubble).

Yes, skiing and gambling are very similar, that's why there are all those hotlines you can call for help quitting skiing

> Unless you have an addiction to it there's no inherent difference between spending a $50 on a night out with your friends of losing the same amount at the casino.

I dunno, people who do the former seem a lot happier the next day.

One quarter thought out software project, mild overthinking conspiracy theory, and a non sequitur misspelled reference to Dunning-Kruger. This is like a parody of a Hacker News comment

"unforgivable level of puffery" seems like an overreaction.

Apple's total sales in 1978 [1] were only 30% higher than Vector's in 1979 [2]. Yeah, the industry growth at the time means comparing even consecutive years gets dicey, but I don't think the gap between the two was enormous at that point. Comparable to Apple in the late 70s sounds pretty major to me.

Also, it is reasonable to say "major" is an absolute description that just means "pretty big" not "one of the biggest". As you mention, their sales peak (IMO, past the company's relevance peak) is pretty big in absolute terms.

Extrapolating this disagreement into "much of the article may be false" is ... confusing.

[1] https://guides.loc.gov/this-month-in-business-history/april/...

[2] http://www.s100computers.com/Hardware%20Folder/Vector%20Grap...

IIRC that's the name that friends and colleagues used to refer to him. It pops up in a lot of their quotes.

Fair point. I think a lot depends on how "real" the protagonist is. I have read and enjoyed several works with protagonists who make choices that extremely different from my own. Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson comes to mind. Hardly any character in it is good or admirable, but it is written well enough to illuminate why they behave that way, and the rewards that offers. IMO, TFA doesn't pull that off.

Ramanujan is an interesting comparison. He was an outstanding mathematician, but it feels like his prowess came from a deep love of math and concomitant time spent on it. There's an anecdote somewhere about child Ramanujan working his way through thousands of elementary lemmas for fun, and I wonder if this gave him the almost occult intuitive ability reported by his collaborators. The stories about him have a tone of awe, but not fear.

In some contrast, von Neumann seems to have been able to take his enormous fluid intelligence and speed and apply it to pretty much whatever problem he decided, and he did it across many areas, including non-scientific ones. The stories about him are tinged with a little unease, and it's a little harder to see the human underneath his achievements.

Deliberately making art that people think sucks seems like kind of a low bar?

Few things are as matter-of-factly depressing as an old person shuffling down into a seat, working blank-faced through a stack of garish little scratch-offs, and then throwing them all away

Sequoia put out a PR piece about SBF [1] a few months before it all blew up, and it's pretty amazing, and has made it a lot easier for me to believe that VC partners are maybe not necessarily that smart:

> [Sequoia partner Michelle] Bailhe remembers it the same way: “We had a great meeting with Sam, but the last question, which I remember Alfred asking, was, ‘So, everything you’re building is great, but what is your long-term vision for FTX?’” That’s when SBF told Sequoia about the so-called super-app: “I want FTX to be a place where you can do anything you want with your next dollar. You can buy bitcoin. You can send money in whatever currency to any friend anywhere in the world. You can buy a banana. You can do anything you want with your money from inside FTX.” Suddenly, the chat window on Sequoia’s side of the Zoom lights up with partners freaking out. “I LOVE THIS FOUNDER,” typed one partner. “I am a 10 out of 10,” pinged another. “YES!!!” exclaimed a third. What Sequoia was reacting to was the scale of SBF’s vision. It wasn’t a story about how we might use fintech in the future, or crypto, or a new kind of bank. It was a vision about the future of money itself—with a total addressable market of every person on the entire planet. “I sit ten feet from him, and I walked over, thinking, Oh, shit, that was really good,” remembers Arora. “And it turns out that that fucker was playing League of Legends through the entire meeting.” “We were incredibly impressed,” Bailhe says. “It was one of those your-hair-is-blown-back type of meetings.”

There's plenty of other stuff in there. It's not just pumping up a promising bet that went bad, it's hagiography on a scale that is almost impossible to believe, approved by an organization that is really supposed to know better.

[1] https://archive.ph/GQkCp

> Hence the angry replies and downvotes.

Nah, I downvoted because "I didn't read the article, I just want to say the little rant I always say about this broad topic" is a comment genre I want to see less of.

I've now watched several dudes go through this process by following their blogs:

1) Build a small to medium size following writing about technical or entrepreneurial stuff

2) Make it to some kind of financial success (sell a company, advance at a big tech org)

3/4) Reflect and find yourself unhappy and make big personal life changes, leaving your wife/partner and leaving your company

5) Adopt an increasingly effusive, emotional, and untethered style of writing and living ("today I cried my way to a beautiful and uncomfortable conversation after a three-day retreat on an island with other former tech workers. Also I tried some drugs. I can't wait to reflect more!")

I guess this is kind of unkind, there are plenty of worse ways of living. And TFA is not fully an example of it. But it's strange to see it play out repeatedly. Maybe some component of emotional repression is more common in software people and when financial constraints fall away it presents itself as the next thing to optimize, or maybe nobody writes blog posts about living a conventional life committed to a small group of people, but it almost feels like a cliche at this point.

(The author has since added a correction.)

TFA addresses all of these questions.

Briefly, the author's beliefs appear to be:

> If the elections are rigged how did he “win”

The election is partially manipulated by gerrymandering but won in the sense that Bukele's overwhelming popular support is real, and the gerrymandering only pushed him from "clear victory" to "almost total victory".

> If he is responsible for the crime reduction, how did he do it in such a short time

The crime reduction came because it happened at a time when both of its opponents (the gangs themselves, as well as anti-Bukele government forces) were weak. It may also have benefited from a decline in murders that had already started before Bulele took office.

> how were the police trained so fast

The police and army were less "trained so fast" than having been relatively competent for a while but hamstrung by insufficient political will/funds (this point is less well explained -- maybe because the gangs trade so much off honor rather than actually paying off economically, reasonable people find the police/army a more enticing career path?).

> If the original crime reduction was due to gangs hiding the bodies is it really that unreasonable to think that what actually is happening is that the government is more effective at hiding the bodies?

Maybe the government is fudging things, but even anti-Bukele organizations and media don't seem to think so, and Bukele's popular support in the absence of repression (yeah, Bukele is not a champion of free press, but he doesn't yet seem to police the actions of everyday civilians to the extent that they would all be scared and lie to a visiting ~journalist) suggests that the murder rate really is down, and not just faked.

> But that doesn't reduce the gangs in people's lives.

TFA says that before the crackdown gangs directly extorted money from civilians, and frequently threatened and murdered them. As far as anybody seems to be able to tell, the current government is not doing that. You can maybe argue that they are harming any innocents swept up in the crackdown, but the scale of civilian suffering seems far lower now. I don't get how that isn't "reduc[ing] the gangs in people's lives".