Hacker News Reader

Economists universally think tariffs are dumb policy.

https://kentclarkcenter.org/surveys/steel-and-aluminum-tarif...

Literally 100% of the 50 expert economists polled by the Kent Clark Center think tariffs overall make Americans worse off.

Nobody in politics can say this simple truth because the rust belt states are critical swing states.

Hammershafton Trade (and Tariffs)

Have you ever heard of comparative advantage?

Hammershafton Trade (and Tariffs)

Economists universally think tariffs are dumb policy.

https://kentclarkcenter.org/surveys/steel-and-aluminum-tarif...

Literally 100% of the 50 expert economists polled by the Kent Clark Center think tariffs overall make Americans worse off.

Nobody in politics can say this simple truth because the rust belt states are critical swing states.

Hammershafton Trade (and Tariffs)

Economists universally think tariffs are dumb policy.

https://kentclarkcenter.org/surveys/steel-and-aluminum-tarif...

Literally 100% of the 50 expert economists polled by the Kent Clark Center think tariffs overall make Americans worse off.

Nobody in politics can say this simple truth because the rust belt states are critical swing states.

Hammershafton Trade (and Tariffs)

Economists universally think tariffs are dumb policy.

https://kentclarkcenter.org/surveys/steel-and-aluminum-tarif...

Literally 100% of the 50 expert economists polled by the Kent Clark Center think tariffs overall make Americans worse off.

Nobody in politics can say this simple truth because the rust belt states are critical swing states.

Hammershafton Trade (and Tariffs)

Advanced manufacturing requires cheap global inputs.

Before tariffs, unemployments was ~3.5% and real wages were rising, and part of why wages have been rising is because the cost of goods like TVs have been falling.

Hammershafton Trade (and Tariffs)

It's just an immensely dumb policy.

Unless we plan on manufacturing our own shoes and clothes, competitive advanced manufacturing is going to require cheap industrial inputs from around the world.

Hammershafton Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra

I find MacOS miserable even if the hardware is good.

I can vouch for Aerospace, it brings i3 windowing to MacOS well.

Hammershafton The service XCancel is stopped until further notice

I think the signal on X has been deteriorating for years. Many valuable communities that existed purely on Twitter have scattered across the internet after Elon's transformation, often to many disconnected small communities across X, Mastodon instances, BlueSky, and reddit.

Hammershafton Sticky wage norms and the real wage cost of unexpected inflation

Reforming tax incentives to prevent health insurance from being coupled with employment would be a major improvement on this front.

Hammershafton What's the best programming language for coding agents?

Clojure's performance improves dramatically with an MCP REPL server. Part of that improvement is that the LLM gets parens balancing for free.

Hammershafton Position: LLMs Can't Jump

I'm skeptical a counterexample is good evidence of creative intuition.

Hammershafton Danube's record low levels force shutdown of Hungary's only nuclear plant

I hadn't heard any of these claims before.

Without a source, I decided to ask chatgpt. Its assessment is that essentially every claim in this comment is false. If you think chatgpt is wrong can you explain why?

https://chatgpt.com/s/t_6a72ee6f965c81919cc6e4bf8da64262

Hammershafton Danube's record low levels force shutdown of Hungary's only nuclear plant

How is it irrelevant? It establishes the base rate under specific regulatory regimes.

Most of the nuclear plants that make up that base rate were built when nuclear regulations were much much more lax than they are now, and yet Nuclear ends up with the safest track record out of all energy sources.

Hammershafton Danube's record low levels force shutdown of Hungary's only nuclear plant

Most of the nuclear power that makes up that chart was built when there was significantly less regulation on reactors than there is today.

Even if deregulation increased nuclear deaths per watt by two orders of magnitude (which I strongly doubt!), nuclear would still be orders of magnitude safer than the fossil fuels that have replaced it across the western world.

Hammershafton Danube's record low levels force shutdown of Hungary's only nuclear plant

I think you're seriously misunderstanding the statistic I posted.

I didn't post aggregate deaths from different power sources, I posted deaths per terawatt-hour of energy produced!

This figure includes deaths from every nuclear accident, and yet it shows getting energy from nuclear power is orders of magnitude safer than getting the same energy from the fossil fuels that have replaced nuclear power in countries that have phased them out. (like germany)

Hammershafton Danube's record low levels force shutdown of Hungary's only nuclear plant

https://www.nuscalepower.com/press-releases/2020/nuscale-pow...

"NuScale spent over $500 million, with the backing of Fluor, and over 2 million labor hours to develop the information needed to prepare its DCA application. The company also submitted 14 separate Topical Reports in addition to the over 12,000 pages for its DCA application and provided more than 2 million pages of supporting information for NRC audits."

Hammershafton Danube's record low levels force shutdown of Hungary's only nuclear plant

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...

People die from the operation & externalities of every energy source, it's just that Nuclear power has orders of magnitude fewer deaths per kilowatt-hour than the dirtier energy sources these regulations have pushed energy production towards.

I'm sure some lives would be lost if Nuclear Power faced the same regulatory costs that other energy sources do, rather than the egregious and absurd costs they face today.

But many many more lives would be saved by deregulating nuclear energy and making it more cost competitive with coal and natural gas.

Many children wouldn't contract asthma & the other respiratory illnesses they do today if nuclear energy hadn't been killed via overregulation and replaced by coal and natural gas.

Hammershafton Danube's record low levels force shutdown of Hungary's only nuclear plant

The harms of radiation are massively overhyped.

Nobody from the Fukushima accident died from radiation sickness or radiation syndrome, and so far there's been no evidence of long term elevated cancer rates either.

Meanwhile the nuclear industry has been drowning for 50+ years from egregious layers of overregulation.

It costed NuScale $500+ Million just to write the documents required for regulatory approval for a new reactor design.

Microsoft is spending $60 Million a year to build an LLM whose only purpose is to automate writing nuclear regulatory documents.

I don't support the Trump admin one iota, but I'm also saddened that democrats tend to be too safetyist to do an honest cost benefit evaluation of some of these insane regulations.

Hammershafton Is this the end of the once-mighty GoPro?

The cost of your proposed policies to consumers, to the Americans who can create because of cheap great Chinese printers and wouldn't be able to create under your policy... is much greater than the abstract industrial policy benefit.

Hammershafton I also filed the corners off my MacBook

If you struggle with Yabai I'll reccomend Aerospace, which I think is more performant & reliable.

Hammershafton Amber the programming language compiled to Bash/Ksh/Zsh

Another alternative for writing Bash is Babashka, which is a Clojure dialect.

Hammershafton SimPolitics: America’s quest to solve politics with computers

I think it's less that politicians think short term, and more that voters think short term. Politicians are just responding to the incentives created by willfully ignorant voters.

Hammershafton California AB 2047 makes 3D printers off-limits to students, educators, business

It's amazing that California has so many horrible problems with housing shortages, poverty, and basic governance... and yet this is what representatives choose to concoct.

Hammershafton [dead]

I think the author is selecting good gifs and structuring arguments, but the prose is painfully AI generated.

Hammershafton Swiss voters reject proposal to cap population at ten million

Isn't that a consequence of Zurich housing & zoning policy?

Hammershafton How to earn a billion dollars

AirBnBs are not responsible for the housing crisis. Voters that vote to block development at the municipal level are responsible for the housing crisis.

Hammershafton Claude Desktop spawns 1.8 GB Hyper-V VM on every launch, even for chat-only use

Has hacker news lost it?

Maps & Gmail & Search all have plenty of accumulating flaws... but they also completely defined their product category and today are among the most popular software products ever made.

Hammershafton It's death

If you're a materialist and you think there is no afterlife then I don't believe there would be a void. There's no mechanism for "you" to perceive a void or perceive time.

Its the difference between:

"I see nothing when I close my eyes" (actually you 'see' darkness over time)

and...

"I see nothing through my elbow" (You really don't see anything through your elbow because the capacity for it just doesn't exist.)

Even our basic perception of time is mediated by the structure of our brains... and without that there's no difference between one second and a trillion^trillion years.

Hammershafton Three of our worst VC stories

I mean the goal is that the money invested increases the value of the company so that the founder's reduced stake is worth considerably more than the founder's full stake of the counterfactual company where he didn't take VC money. VCs can be strongly positive sum.