saalweachter

It's easy to look at a newly made garden, its flowers all freshly planted and its paths all neatly laid out, and think it finished, but once you see one that's been carefully maintained for decades and how its plants have matured and grown together and how the steps have been worn by human feet, it's clear the project is merely off to a good start.

There's like three groups of developers you need:

The prototypers, who move fast and break things, who throw together shiny first versions that look great and work some of the time;

The architects, who take the prototypes and take the time to build it correctly;

And the gardeners, who maintain the built system for the next 10-30 years, fixing bugs, making incremental improvements to speed or resource usage, and updating dependencies so that it continues to function on modern machines.

The crazy thing is that there are a ton of developers with different tastes who would love to fill each of the roles, but not many companies that are able to manage all three types without pushing everyone into one bucket.

My preferred fix is "corporations can't buy stock, their own or others".

Research does get lost over time. The whole point of the patent system is keeping that from happening; if the drug company goes bankrupt, even if they lose all their internal documentation in the process, hopefully the patents and other public paperwork provides enough information for an unrelated company -- either having acquired the patent rights, or after the patent period ends -- to reconstruct the processes with less investment then the original research.

If a bankrupt AI company maintains enough of a skeleton crew to consolidate and archive its intellectual property it could be sold off to another company, but there are also timelines where it all ends up digital dust in the wind.

Fun fact!

Doing SEO/marketing tricks on behalf of your competitors which gets them penalized by Google is a form of blackhat SEO with a rich tradition & history.

Fun fact!

During the DotCom crash, about $5 trillion in market cap disappeared.

NVidia's market cap is currently around $5 trillion.

Eh, you're off by an order of magnitude or so on both ends.

The iPhone 17 has like 8 gb, the Pixel 10 12.

The original iPhone was 128mb, and the iPhone 6 from 2016-2018 was around 1gb; that puts the iPhone at around 8x RAM per decade, and puts us at 128gb in our pockets at around 2036 or so.

(Incidentally, the big news in phone RAM is that a lot of new phones are dropping back to 4gb because of RAM shortages.)

So the question for all forums is "what is the user funnel?"

For some there's an obvious thing that brings people in, like if you're a forum tied to a webcomic or game, and the forum will live as long as that property does.

For others -- which I think HN falls into -- it's just word of mouth about a cool place to hang out, so it will die when there's a cooler place to hang out.

I just want to derail this thread to note that it was the Chevy Cobalt, the predecessor to the Cruze, which was part of the GM ignition switch thing which killed something like 100-250 people depending on whose numbers you believe in the I believe on-going lawsuits.

AFAIK there were no similar ignition switch failures or associated deaths with the Cruze (or other >2011 model year vehicles), although I think it might have been part of the recall.

I think a lot of people are also missing the value-add of asking a person to Google something for you.

Some large fraction of the time when someone asks me a question, I also end up googling it... and then I use my domain knowledge and experience to weed out bad information and outdated information and identify the right references.

And some fraction of the time when I ask someone else an "easily Google-able question", I've googled the question, found a number of sources, maybe even one I think might be right, but want some confirmation that I'm not going down a rabbit hole.

It's just that in the US, there are 3.6 million babies born each year; even taking the low-end of a $500k one-time payment to one parent, you're already talking a $1.8 trillion / year program, slightly larger than Social Security's $1.6 trillion program.

Social Security is funded by a 12.4% income tax, with half nominally paid by the employee and half nominally paid by the employer.

You'd need a similar tax to fund such a benefit, which would amount to a 15% income tax, assuming the program isn't too successful in raising birth rates.

I've dealt with two kinds of landlords.

The good one(s) acted like their job was providing the service of housing. They had a budget and paid themselves a salary, and if there was money left in the repair budget at the end of the year they used it for improvements to the properties.

The bad ones treated it as an investment. My rent money went into their own pocket, and any expenses -- repairs, taxes, mortgage payments -- had to come out of their own pockets, and they did their best to not pay for any of them.

I know everyone here is heckling calling it a forum, but this is a basic forum feedback loop -- the forum activity declines, so people show up to check less often and get fewer responses to their posts, so the post there less often, repeat until traffic falls near zero.

You may have like a handful of weirdos who never leave and develop their own little community in the wreckage, especially if the cost to continuing to run the forum is trivial, but it's basically a death spiral every time.

> If you want to incentivize people to have kids, hand out $500K-1M to anyone who wants to have kids. Don't penalize those who don't.

Where does the money come from?

The primary feathers of a bird's wing are anchored to the bird's "hand bones". In modern birds these bones are kind of grown together into a big lump, but the outermost five primaries are attached to the five fingers, or what used to be digits in the bird's ancestors.

> Features are often defined by committee members who may not use modern C++ in their daily workflows, leaving it entirely up to the individual implementations to catch up.

Eh, all of the committee members I've known are obsessed with modern C++, and "can this feature be implemented?" is definitely a blocker; numerous features got kicked down the road from C++0x to later versions because compilers weren't ready for them.

For the US to institute a language standard, we'd first have to agree on an official language at the federal level.

There's a tier of quality that's just fine... as long as you don't move it much, either from home to home or just rearranging too much.

If you do, then the unglued joints decay and it becomes wobblier and wobblier.

I mean, rocket guys have a long history of not minding advancing the agenda of a Nazi.

To some extent, volunteering for any sort of medical study is signing up to be tortured in the hopes that someone down the line might be saved by the research. Most cancer treatments, for instance, are objectively terrible to go through, and when you're testing and developing the protocols you're pumping already sick people full of poisons and hoping for the best.

There's some fraction of people who would prefer to be kept alive as a brain in a jar, depending on the alternatives, but getting to that point is going to require a bunch of people to volunteer to undergo excruciating torture as we learn how to keep the brain alive, how to keep them comfortable, how to keep them conscious, sane and let them interact with the world.

Also, different species flower and release pollen at different times.

A monoculture forest releases all its pollen at once, instead of a fraction of it always being in flower throughout spring/summer.

Musk only owns 42% of SpaceX; he only takes 42% of the loss as if he continued to own Twitter outright.

That was the study without a control; for the placebo controlled study, they don't give the numbers, just say "statistically significant improvements" on several metrics.

(Without a control group, you have questions about how people of that age generally progress, and what other treatment/therapies they receive over those 2 years. The phase 1 trial was with children whose parents presumably sought ever possible way to help them, while the placebo controlled phase 2 was adults who may have plateaued.)

I believe the best procedure is actually sticking it in your nose.

(They run a tube through your nose, down your throat, through the stomach to the top of the intestines, and introduce the bacterial slurry there.)

It's frustrating to try to have a discussion when any source contrary to the desired position is met with "this person is underinformed"; it's why I don't really bother with any "provide me sources or I won't believe you" on the internet. People don't believe you anyway, so why bother?

> Assuming you can point the orbiting panels at the sun and remain direct, you lose 80% of your power through the atmosphere (from angle and day/night). On the ground you lose 25% even if your panel is directly below the sun pointed exactly at it, which is never the case in many latitudes.

When people say "you don't lose that much power on the ground", it's in the context of cost.

So a solar panel is 5x more efficient in space. You solve that in the ground by buying 5x more solar panels.

Solar panels cost -- rounding up -- $10/kg.

Lifting things into space costs -- rounding down -- $1000/kg.

For the same amount of money, you can put 100X solar panels into a ground based array as a space based array. You don't lose that much power on the ground. You aren't overcoming that difference because solar panels are more efficient in space.

Accredited investors did mind for the longest time; dual class shares were banned outright for like 40 years by the NYSE (and they'd declined to list individual companies before that because of investor outcry).

They only allowed them again in the 80s as part of the larger wave of "let's stop regulating capital".

Super voting shares were a mistake to allow in general.

I mean, if someone wants to pay you to do a lot of very interesting R&D that will never result in an alternative to ground-based datacenters, more power to you?

It might even be useful in other circumstances. Better radiative cooling systems, hardening commercial high-end compute for space, etc etc. R&D you can feel proud of, even if your bosses are only paying you to do it to fleece rubes who think it's the next trillion dollar industry.

Isn't that how stores used to work, before store owners decided it'd be cheaper to just let shoppers bring up a basket of goods? You'd go up to the shopkeeper behind the counter with a list, they'd get it all for you?