noonespecial

>For starters, the dough preparation, sauce making and baking — the real art of pizza — is left in the capable, five-fingered hands of people.

So all of the stuff that actually takes time is still manual. All this thing does is throw down some toppings. And then takes all the time and more it "saves" to clean it properly and reload it.

Want to see how pizza making is actually automated? Try Totinos. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqULgulLq3Q

>Hacker News generally considers itself liberal but actually holds very conservative views...

I'm not sure that's entirely true. We're(1) a bunch of programmers. We are very sensitive to unintended consequences in complex systems. I think we just tend to be a little more careful with feel-good regulations that might produce these, along with being more evidence based in judging success.

(1) With all of the usual caveats about the monolithic "us".

So what then? A few thousand humanoids would have picked berries for a few dozen thousand years until the next ELE wiped them out and be gone? That's better how?

We've got exactly one planet's worth of resources to consume in our reach for the stars. Doing nothing and doing it wrong gets us extinction on basically the same galactic time scale.

What a tragedy though, to have a real shot and burn it all up trying to get each other to click on ads for plastic crap no one needed.

If you ALAN you can't KISS. You won't know what the simplest thing is. You'll end up with miles of nested "ifs" instead of 4 lines of recursion. A gazillion "else ifs" instead of case etc.

He's got one thing right. He's a poor programmer. "Success" must be mighty loosely defined here.

Yes but with fusion there is a zero. Warp drive etc is just walking away from the table.

We put our bets on everything that might help, long shots included.

I once sold a car to a man for $500 more than my initial asking price because he made me mad with ridiculous haggling.

I thought it would make him just go away. He produced the money instantly. I've always wondered about that...

I always thought that "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." quote attributed to Richelieu was hyperbole (and so not likely to be an actual quote).

I'm no longer sure about either of those assumptions.

>If you're going to travel the world many times, learn to sail and favor trains.

Don't do it just for "the climate". There's something magic about sail and rail. Traveling this way makes the world feel immense. And it is. We just mostly miss it now riding in sky-cans from one Starbucks to the next.

Funny thing about that: Complainers always seem to think that the code that they could have written but didn't is better than the code that you could write and did. The trifling fact that theirs does not, in fact, exist never seems to register with them.

>to use a weigher to weight itself.

Flip it upside down. Like he said, be creative.

I started my kids with abacus as soon as they could count.

It gave them great intuitive understanding of arithmetic later.

Highly recommend.

Ah. Thanks. Doesn't sound off to my ears but that makes sense. I'm going to try and soften that while I can. Thanks for taking the moment to answer.

I think examiners (and non-technical folks who don't think much about it) get fooled by "pseudo-novelty". Progress moves fast in the technology field, especially with computing. Every year things that were impossible last year become possible through simple incremental improvements. If you're not paying attention the new uses might actually seem novel rather than just the obvious applications of the better machine.

Edit: Not sure why that's controversial... Some time around 2009 I finally got my parents hooked up with cable internet vs the DSL they had before and wowed them by playing a movie over the internet from my home media server. I didn't invent "a method and process for transmitting a full length movie over a network without quality degradation", but my mom sure thought so. I did some "computer work" and a "novel" new ability emerged.

Edit: Changed whats in () to something less offensive.

It also goes a long way to explaining why the leaders of so many open source projects are vulnerable when sleazy marketers come around waving life-changing amounts of money.

When one gets little help and support and it feels like ungrateful demands are the only thing anyone ever contributes, it's not hard to see why one might just take the money and ghost.

A moment of respect for what jbk personally passed up to keep VLC free for us.

Don't worry. Too much opulence and political meddling will see some rando show up and nail a list of "suggestions" to the door of the place. Then the real fun begins.

I think I might have just figured out where Daleks came from... and why they're so angry all the time.

That's the big takeaway I wish more people understood. Health is broken not because of fat cats making obscene profits (although there are a few), but because we're fundamentally doing it wrong.

Its not one guy digging a ditch and charging too much. Its that for every 6 people digging, 5 are racing behind them filling it back in and all of them are charging us for the "service".

Well, it will, but the way it does so is to wait a long time and then deliver the solution all at once as a giant slap to humanity's face.

One of my favorite (and most easily explained) unintended consequences of government actions. I call them "perfect or none" rules.

They get together and vote in rules they think will force things to be perfect, forgetting that it's entirely possible they will get none instead.

It's possible. But even if that part is true, the large investment might spur faster growth in electrification which might then be good enough to outweigh that initial downside.

Unintended consequences are hard.

I'm just getting a little fatigued with the fearful "don't do anything, it might make it worse" coupled with the "stop all the everything" approach to environmentalism that seems to becoming ever more dominant. I just don't think that's going to work. Doing nothing won't help, and convincing people to do without doesn't work, so ?

While I largely agree with you, decades on it seems that if the message factors down to "quick, everybody stop doing stuff", it's hard to get political traction.

Every step in the right direction is a good one. Perfect is the enemy of good.

>we should be warning people who want to contribute to Open Source that they should probably spend their time doing their own studying and personal/skill ...

Its Open Source that is chiefly responsible for every bit of that personal skill I have.

In this game, the "giant" corporations are the irrelevant little players that hardly matter. They don't contribute, so they may as well not exist. They can be safely ignored except for the rare occasion that they "fart in our elevator" with their patent nonsense.

I was merely pointing out that if the argument is that a given class is underpaid or systemically has less opportunity, finding a single counterexample that became so by essentially pure luck isn't much of a refutation.

The same would be true for anyone who won the lottery.

Yes, extraordinary luck can radically alter normal circumstances, but that's a meaningless outlier.

I was a delivery driver for dominos in the 90s. It was monumentally bad pizza back then.

It's gotten better. Not great. Better. If you haven't tried some recently, do so. You will be merely disappointed. But no longer hungry...

I worked in a newspaper plant. We did everything you just described for all of the same reasons. The system delivered was worse in every way than the one we ended up building for ourselves in the end, didn't work right anyway, and was "supported" by incompetent temps that damaged expensive equipment as they ham-handedly learned their jobs on our dime.

Sometimes its all just a paper facade over simple stuff we can easily do for ourselves with the smallest amount of courage and effort.

I'd just like to take a moment (in light of some of the comments here) to say that air-conditioning is neither a moral failure nor an ecological disaster.

An incentive to replace aging gas and electric heat with high efficiency modern heat-pumps that can both heat and cool is a clear ecological win.

The question is (as ever) how can we fairly deploy this society changing tech so that those who need it most don't get it last.

A little perspective. $40k/year is about what glassdoor suggests you should make as the manager of a 7-11. A little one.

Don't be afraid of a temporary career change. I've done it twice to save myself from burnout. We get overly attached to a narrative about ourselves as developers and become convinced that we need an unbroken ladder of the latest gee-wiz frameworks and libraries to stay in the game. Outside of FAANG its mostly not true.

But first, start telling that bully no in the most non-confrontational way you can. Take the most unreasonable demand and politely say in response "no I don't think I'm going to do that". You actually have nothing to lose.

Upvote it.

Click on your own HN username at the top of the page.

"Upvoted submissions" is a list of all of the submissions you've upvoted.

I know that's a bit tongue in cheek there but what a fascinating idea. Programmatically transferring liability to different locations or entities that are better able to diffuse the consequences.

Imagine a HFT bidding market like adwords. Guilt as a service. Wonderfully dystopian. Paging Mr. Doctorow....