Hacker News Reader

rmahon Productivity Versus Alignment

This article seems to miss the entire point of alignment: getting everyone to agree on what to work on. Thus, without alignment, your organization might be very productive... but at the wrong things. Which, at its extreme, is essentially the same as 0 productivity. Thus, while yes, increased communications overhead does detract from productivity in the abstract, the real question is: does it detract from productivity on the things the organization should be working on?

rmahon Alternative clouds are booming as companies seek cheaper access to GPUs

Most Americans don't realize just how huge and extensive medicare/medicaid is. They cover 65mil and 88mil people respectively, including 40mil children. That's 153mil people out of 330mil population -- that's 46% of the USA's population. Total spending is $1.9T for both. A cost of $12,400/person covered. $1.9T is 7.5% of the total US GDP of $25.44T. Medicare/medicaid is a massive program. Bigger than social security at $1.4T. It's crazy huge.

rmahon Greenhouse gas emissions might have already peaked

The other elephant is mentioned: "Last year, more solar panels were installed in China — the world’s largest carbon emitter — than the US has installed in its entire history."

rmahon Our biggest ever river catch?

How do you know they didn't stop to ask if they should? And concluded after, detailed and deep study, that yes, they should. Perhaps they (or someone else) already did studies of the impact of blocking rivers partially or totally? Are you, perhaps, making assumptions about what they did without first stopping to think if you should make such assumptions?

rmahon Our biggest ever river catch?

Are those rivers, by any chance, the rivers along which most people live? Weird that.

rmahon Quantum mechanics is the operating system other physical theories run on (2007)

No, that's not why. It's because models are not reality, they are a (mathematical) description of reality. And descriptions rarely perfectly match reality.

rmahon 350 tons of of chocolate and wine arrive on world’s largest cargo sailboat

Relative to all oceangoing vessels, there are no large sailing vessels.

rmahon 350 tons of of chocolate and wine arrive on world’s largest cargo sailboat

At end of life, cargo ships are cut up into scrap steel. That scrap is then melted down and re-used to make new steel. I strongly suspect that, if you take into account the energy used to manufacture the ship, sailboats will turn out to have a far higher carbon footprint per ton-mile of shipping than normal cargo ships. Cargo ships, as dirty as they seem on a per-ship basis, are crazy efficient on a per ton-mile basis.

But all that aside, sailing cargo ships are nothing more than a curiosity. Their capacity is tiny, they are very slow, are limited in their routes, etc. And as far as I can tell Grain de Sail's business is NOT shipping. It's some sort of luxury wine & chocolates with an eco theme. I suspect the boat is just a way for the owner to have the company pay for his yachts (the boats only make 2 cargo trips a year) .

rmahon Persistent interaction patterns across social media platforms and over time

Given that every commenter eventually leaves a discussion after reading/replying to some post, doesn't that mean that a that what they're actually measuring is how long discussions are?

rmahon Commission opens non-compliance investigations against Alphabet, Apple and Meta

Something is very wrong with your iPad storage. My Apple Music (also mostly unused) takes up a grand total of 28 MB, of which 23.5 MB is the app.

rmahon How to Start Google

You're mixing up percent that succeed (a statistic) with percent chance of success (a probability). IOW, the fact that 1% of businesses succeed does not mean that a particular business has a 1% chance of success. The reason is that business success is not a function of pure random chance (like a die roll). Sure there are random factors but there are also non-random factors (which, IMO, dominate). The problem is that there is no way to determine what your business's chance of success actually is.

rmahon How to Start Google

> The standard way of getting "rich" is to get into a good career that

> pays a lot. Before Silicon Valley, people got "rich" by working at

> Wall Street, law or Congress

I'm afraid this isn't really true. Through most of the industrial revolution and after (i.e. after the early 1800's), professionals (lawyers, bankers, accountants, doctors, etc.) made a smaller multiple of unskilled labor wages than they do today. In America at least, the way to get "rich" has always been to start your own business.

This was true in the 1800's and it's true today. There have been repeated waves of change as new technologies spread: textile mills, cotton production, mining, railroads, telecom, electricity, appliances, automobiles, department stores, advertising, aviation, broadcasting, computing, etc, etc. Each wave of innovation saw the creation of thousands of new businesses. Sure most eventually fail, but hundreds did pretty well and a handful got insanely wealthy.

American culture and laws (usually) rewards this sort of risky behavior. One can debate whether it's, moral, just, or good for society. But generally speaking, not much has changed wrt this facet of our culture over the last 200 years.

rmahon Super Micro Computer has gone from an obscure server maker to $60B market cap

Their competition is the enterprise hardware divisions of HP, Dell, and IBM. SuperMicro makes reasonably good quality, lower-cost server equipment. They are, IMO, a pretty good value if you don't want high-end support from the hardware vendor.

rmahon Technical Skills Are Overrated. Focus on Your Attitude

The title of the article, is, of course, just click-bait. And the author of the story could only make Chen (the subject of the story) an offer because they had others on staff who could be tasked to train him and/or cover the gaps in his technical skills.

I guess the main point was that enthusiasm, self-awareness, openness, curiosity, leadership, etc. are of important. Of course they are, does anyone disagree with that? But I think an important point lost in how the message is presented is that these things are not in opposition to technical skills. You can have both.

rmahon What Luddites can teach us about resisting an automated future

While I certainly don't condone the way the English state put down the Luddites, if it had not, it's quite possible that England would not have led the way in industrialization. And that spurred other nations to push too or be left behind. England changed radically during the 1800's as they pushed the industrial envelope.

rmahon Old vs. new growth trees and the wood products they make

In fairness, everyone has been doing it to each other for millennia.

rmahon The Dawn of Cultural Schizophrenia (2023)

It seems pretty clear to me that the author means "has meaning" means "is important".

rmahon Rabbit: LLM-First Mobile Phone

I can't even tell what that gadget is for. I can't tell what it does. There is nothing about what it can do for me (or anyone for that matter).

rmahon Methane under the seabed is thawing as oceans warm

If there's no way back, then why bother with painful mitigation efforts?

But seriously, this sort of "it's over, there's only doom ahead" is, IMO, counterproductive and hurts the efforts to help the environment more than it helps.

rmahon Submarine Cable Map 2023

It's interesting how Europe-Asia interconnects are so small relative to US-Asia and US-Europe.

rmahon Was Atlantis a Minoan Civilization on Santorini Island?

Civilization to early man was not global, it was local. And yes, the Chinese myth you mention doesn't include a guy saving animals on a boat. But the indian Manu and Matsya myth does. As does the Ziusudra myth and the Gilgamesh flood myth of the Sumerian. And the And the Videvdad of ancient Iran, and the Pu Sangkasa-Ya Sangkasi of ancient Thailand (though here it's a giant magical gourd rather that a ship), and many many more.

What is common is that "everything" gets destroyed, a few survive to rebuild.

Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_flood_myths

rmahon Was Atlantis a Minoan Civilization on Santorini Island?

Did the rest of Asia not realize they existed?

rmahon Was Atlantis a Minoan Civilization on Santorini Island?

There's no need to go searching for the "real" Noah and an "actual" flood in the distant past. It seems that most early civilizations that developed on alluvial flood plains come up with flood myths that explain the destruction and rebirth of civilizations because they saw floods and rebuilding on a fairly regular basis. Ancient Egyptians, Mesopotamians, Chinese, Indians, etc. all have flood myths that are strikingly similar to the Noah myth. Sometimes even building a boat to save the animals because the gods told him. IMO, it's almost certain that the ancient Hebrews picked up on one (or more) of these myths and incorporated it into their own culture.

rmahon 'Not of faculty quality': How Penn mistreated Katalin Karikó

Universities could afford to pay more if they redirect funds from paying for "administrator" to paying for instructors and researchers. Or diverting funds from beautification projects. Or from the mass of consulting firms they hire for various things. There is now an average of only 2.5 faculty per administrator at universities and many of the better research universities have ratios closer to 1:1. Really, it's a question of incentives and priorities.

rmahon Marc Andreessen Is Wrong About Everything

Indeed. I'm sure a reasonable case can be made to oppose Andressen's screed. But this author doesn't make one. The entire article can be summed up as: I disagree, and Andreessen is a poo poo head! It's sorta ironic that the author writes for gizmodo, literally living off the backs of what tecno-utopists built (or at least financed). The lack of self-awareness is just... I can't find the words.

rmahon Americans Must Earn $114,000 a Year to Afford a Typical Home

People have been complaining on HN that "houses are too expensive to buy" almost since it started 15 years ago. Yet 65% of Americans currently own their own homes. This is not as high as the peak in 2005 of 69%, but higher than the low in 2016 of 63% [1]. And IIRC, home ownership rates are near historical highs. Home ownership rate was almost always below 50% before ww2 and rarely exceeded 65% until the housing bubble of 2000-2010 [2].

The simple fact, as unpalatable as it may be, is that buying a home is always "expensive". In the US anyway, the price seems to be set by people's income. That is, their ability to pay. What does change is the size and quality of the homes.

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N

[2] https://www.getrichslowly.org/homeownership/

rmahon Climate change: Six young people take 32 countries to court

Um, mass quarantines of healthy people is not unprecedented. It was, in fact quite common through history when outbreaks seemed to be getting out of control. First they'd quarantine families. Then neighborhoods. Then entire cities. In fact, during the pre-industrial times, entire cities would be quarantined and sometimes, if anyone tried to escape, they would be executed. While a reasonable arguments can be made about whether the various flavors of Covid quarantines were necessary or effective, to say they are unprecedented is simply wrong.

rmahon ‘Less than half’ fresh produce sold globally makes any profit

This graph will make things a bit clearer... https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/food-expenditure-vs-gdp

rmahon IBM promised to back off facial recognition, then signed a $70M contract for it

$70 mil is not what IBM would consider a large contract. Certainly not large enough to risk actions like kickbacks. Now if it was $700mil, then maybe.

rmahon A case for dynamic scoring of high-skilled immigration

In fairness, that system wasn't designed to increase the # of skilled workers in the US, it was designed to propagate and spread "American values" overseas.

A half century ago, the idea was that you bring a lot of the best and brightest of poorer foreign nations to the US for a university education. Then they return to their home nation and eventually work their way up to positions of power. Hopefully, their positive view of the USA will influence their decision making. In addition, many will have maintained contacts they made during their school years.

It's not a crazy tactic given that the cost was mostly borne by the foreigners.