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throwk8s

134 karma · joined May 4, 2022

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throwk8s··on House Democrats to propose ban on lawmaker stock trading – report
If anything, people with a track record of amassing wealth should be treated with more suspicion on entering public service.

If all of their other decisions are geared toward increasing their wealth, one has to wonder whether the decision to enter public service is also geared toward increasing their own wealth.

throwk8s··on Ask HN: Is the world suffering from shallow knowledge?
People don't want to do their jobs, but that doesn't mean they're completely unmotivated. Many people with jobs they're indifferent to, also have hobbies they pursue relentlessly.

If you want people to take a deeper interest in their jobs, give them more money. Way more money. Way, way more money. If you want people to pursue deeper understanding of their interests, give them more free time.

To the extent that "shallow knowledge" is a problem, I think it's likely because most people spend a lot of their time doing boring work for not-enough money.

throwk8s··on I got fired for sharing my salary on TikTok
I'm not a lawyer, but the article points out that disclosing your salary is protected by law.

> ...disclosing her salary is federally protected by law under the National Labor Relations Act

throwk8s··on Stop saying “They shouldn't have invested more than they could afford to lose”
Many of the people who lost more than they can afford to lose were naive, not greedy. I believe that's the author's main point.

The problem is that cryptocurrency purveyors have marketing budgets, and cryptocurrency skeptics do not. It's difficult for people to get the message that cryptocurrencies are a scam when the promoters are running superbowl advertisements, and the detractors can only comment on the internet.

throwk8s··on Notation as a Tool of Thought (1979)
I looked at the two-line code sample at the link, and it is extreme.
throwk8s··on WHO declares monkeypox a public health emergency
There's so little content to the references to WHO's COVID handling that I can't tell whether they mean WHO over-reacted or under-reacted to COVID.
throwk8s··on Notation as a Tool of Thought (1979)
I find that terseness has a real downside when debugging code. If you need to get down to the level of what is actually executing, having to unpack all that compact code involves many more things than I can keep in my short-term memory.

Compactness is great for things that are true and work, but when there's a bug in there somewhere, terse code requires a lot of scribbling on paper.

throwk8s··on VCs are scared when they should be greedy
> If your unit economics don't work then you're fucked...

From the company's perspective that's certainly true.

As a regular person I'm more worried about the companies whose unit economics work too well. Companies like Amazon have so much momentum that it seems like they could go on indefinitely, instead of eventually failing and making room for new entrants.

Companies whose unit economics don't work transfer wealth from investors to customers, then get out of the way. Companies that work too well can become an inescapable force.

throwk8s··on TeamViewer installs suspicious font only useful for web fingerprinting
If they said you would "lose service", and you did not lose service, wouldn't that count as making a false representation?
throwk8s··on Be careful how you pay the bills
> Whereas if we do actually do it, we might fail, which will be hard to take.

It's hard to take because unless you've already got substantial financial security, you may end up broke, and may no longer have any readily available "for-the-money" job opportunities afterward.

throwk8s··on Being on call sucks
> 4. You're not up more than 1 week per 1-1.5 month.

That seems excessive if you're expected to be able to log into your work system within X minutes.

Having to be essentially home, near a computer, 25% of the time (1 week out of 4) is a pretty heavy burden, especially for people who prefer to be out, rather than home.

throwk8s··on Tell HN: Internet Archive is facing a Big 4 Publishers lawsuit
> Anyway the IA will remove everything with a very simple, automated text file placed in the root directory.

What if the site is simply gone, or now belongs to someone else who is not the owner of the archived content?

throwk8s··on Mass and angular momentum, left ambiguous by Einstein, get defined
> if we looked in the opposite direction (where such light originates from) we would be seeing stars and galaxies at much more recent time (now)

If the preferred/non-preferred directions were "toward you" and "away from you", then rotating yourself to look in the "opposite direction" wouldn't make a difference.

(Note: not a physicist)

throwk8s··on Manhattan rents cross $5k threshold for first time
> And the award for Most Condescending Comment goes to...

I probably could have phrased that better. In any case I don't think what we're saying is incompatible. One has no choice but to keep up with the cost of living. My point is that the cost of living in a massively "central" city is defined by a lot of people driven to succeed and be seen succeeding, whether or not that's the mentality of one's group of friends.

throwk8s··on Manhattan rents cross $5k threshold for first time
> There is no "displaying their success" or "keep winning bigger" mentality to be found

They may not realize the game they're in. But as long as the cost of living keeps hitting new peaks, inevitably people need to bring in more money, or move farther out or elsewhere. Supply is limited, and it is a competition.

throwk8s··on Manhattan rents cross $5k threshold for first time
People that want to be conspicuous have to display their success where it's going to be seen. Living in a place that is "central" in so many ways is a competition to see who can hang in there. The only way to stay is to keep winning bigger.
throwk8s··on Silicon Valley bets on new transport to counter the rise of remote work
> 18 TPH is what I expect from first class cities in developed countries.

Silicon Valley isn't arranged like a city at all, it's almost rural except for the traffic jams. (San Francisco is another story, but even SF is a very small "big city"). Four trains per hour seems fairly frequent for that type of suburban/exurban environment.

throwk8s··on Crypto’s last man standing
Where is that return of 2% per month coming from, and why are they giving it to you?
throwk8s··on Give up GitHub: The time has come
Why is it baffling? GitHub and GitLab have embraced and extended git so much that it is no longer independently visible to most users.

If you didn't already know git was independent of the SaaS products, you'd have no reason to suspect it was independent.

throwk8s··on Where did the long tail go?
I don't think that necessarily contradicts his point.

It may be the case that the long tail/niche market/counterculture market is also winner-take-all [1], so that non-mainstream content is much more available, yet almost no one actually producing such content can really make a living at it.

[1] Per the article, in the context of "solving a Long Tail problem": "And when I looked at products instead, I found the same distribution: 80% of sales came from 20% of the products."

throwk8s··on Crypto Is Crashing, But Companies Aren't Acting Like It
Anyone who wants to experience volatility can start wagering money in a casino though. If volatility was the objective then investment companies could more easily find it in coin flips, instead of capitalizing new ventures.
throwk8s··on Singapore Got Its Manufacturing Mojo Back
That's trading a temporary advantage for a long-term disadvantage. Eventually labor costs will even out globally, meaning moving manufacturing to countries with a 30:1 ratio isn't a long-term benefit. But "onshored" manufacturing, in the long term, would reduce dependency on potentially unreliable (or adversarial) counterparties.
throwk8s··on I fucking hate Jira
> It's always taken on from the position of "well, it didn't make my specific use case easy"

For customers, their own specific use cases are the only ones they should care about.

I don't know why there isn't a good solution to the problems Jira attempts to tackle, but that's no reason to get philosophical. It's OK to hate every existing option.

throwk8s··on Solend is now voting to reverse the decision to interfere with $170M position
Just to ask the most naive question possible... is this $170M of real money? Like someone put an amount thousands of times bigger than the average person's total savings into this, when they could have put it elsewhere?
throwk8s··on Amazon calls cops, fires workers in attempts to stop unionization nationwide
A news organization needs to attack its owners more often, not less, if it wants to maintain credibility.
throwk8s··on Artificial neural networks are making strides towards consciousness?
I would think that...

1) awareness, even without a sense of self, would still count as consciousness, and

2) describing consciousness in terms of awareness doesn't help to define it, since awareness is a subjective experience that cannot be shared directly

throwk8s··on Talent Cooling (2020)
This post really begs the question as to whether having "top talent" results in positive outcomes for an organization.
throwk8s··on Is social audio already dead?
I never registered for Clubhouse, and forgot about it so completely I can't remember why I wasn't interested. There was a reason but I forgot what it was.

In the meantime I listened to a few interesting current-events discussions on Twitter Spaces, but only by coincidence that I happened to see them as I was browsing right after work. I don't see how anyone can build a business on only this type of content, it's too synchronous.

throwk8s··on Crypto Industry Eclipses Defense, Big Pharma in US Political Giving
That's horrible news for the Democrats.

If they refuse the donations, that's a strong statement on cryptocurrencies, which is a controversial issue they'd probably prefer to ignore, since it's not particularly relevant to their aims.

If they choose to take the money, they risk having to defend that choice if the cryptocurrency industry collapses in disgrace.

throwk8s··on Coinbase is rescinding already-accepted job offers
If looking at percentage of the whole, there are a lot of companies tied for the "win" at ~100%.
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