TheAlchemist

I don't qualify as young anymore, but I'm attempting to follow a somewhat similar path - doing and learning things that have no immediate benefit.

But strange as it is, I feel very confident that somehow the dots will connect down the road. Just hope I won't run out of time.

I believe the reasons for this system where initially good - don't want too many political discussions, keep it on tech only.

The issue is, that the tech is not a niche thing anymore - the biggest companies on earth are all tech now, and they played a very major role in installing the current US government. This topic is a great example too. Any current or future authoritarian state will be a very heavy user of technology, so it may very well be worth it debating these things here on HN.

One may genuinly debate the genocide, racism, imperialism etc. But I can guarantee you that the 'opressed working class' in the US had it 100 times better than the non opressed Eastern European one.

I'm contemplating it, but I'm not that old yet !

Of course there was always a bit, sometimes a lot, of propaganda everywhere. But at least it was (mostly) for the right causes and ideals. Right now, US is being governed by what I see as the worst possible people, with 0 morals.

It's a fantastic book, highly recommend to read.

There is also a TV series based on it (on Amazon Prime I think), but as usually, it's not as good as the book.

"Doing it badly is doing the thing."

This one works for me, and I've learned it from a post on HN. Whenever I feel stuck or overthink how to do something, just do it first - even with all the flaws that I'm already aware of, and if it feels almost painful to do it so badly. Then improve it a bit, then a bit, then before I know it a clear picture start to emerge... Feels like magic.

As a fellow Eastern European of similar age, I suddenly feel quite nostalgic.

I really wonder how my life would be different if someone told be that the US, which for me was as close to a paradise as it gets, will go down the same road in the future - I think it would shatter quite a lot of my dreams of a better life.

US is nowhere near as bad as it was on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain, but it's on a fast track to it for sure.

You could hardly write something more generic - they could maybe add some calls for world peace and universal prosperity...

How is this kind of bullshit upvoted here ?

Yep. I keep posting them though, because the idiocy of it all gets crazier and crazier every week.

I even start to wonder if tech people believe Tesla propaganda machine by now.

Americans, where will you realize that the longer you wait, the worse it will get ? The whole country should be in the streets now. You guys are fast tracking your way into a dictatorship, and unfortunately you may drag the entire Western world with you.

The videos from this are numerous and very clear about what happened. And yet, all the officials are telling that a guy is a domestic terrorist and approached ICE officers with a gun, with intent to kill them. How crazy is that ? And if they do this in cases where everything is filmed, you can only imagine what's happening behind the scenes.

It's a very good post.

From my personnal experience, this describes perfectly why people coming from poorer backgrounds struggle to get good jobs. Quite often, you just can't wait for the right job - you need to pay the bills so you take the first one available, even if you know that it's not the best choice for you. But it's the only realistic one, because waiting 3-6 months for the good opportunity is simply off the table. Then the job you take, it takes you a lot of time and effort anyway so this right opportunity 3 months later is no longer realistic neither.

Not surprising at all. Wasn't most of pro-Trump content during 2016 election campaign actually generated by some kids in Macedonia who figured out how lucrative fake and sensationalized news can be ?

Social media is increasingly the poison of the society.

I struggle to understand who pays for OF content and who follows them ? From what I've read 99% of OF is porn in some form or another. So there are millions of people who create accounts and pay for it - linking their personnal info to this thing ?

As for the visa, it's not surprising and obviously idiotic for the society, but from the 'merit' standpoints it feels about right - if somebody has 10M followers, it's not that different from a radio or tv star.

> The current administration will end

They way the current administration act, I start to think that their plan A is to stay for a long long time. There is so much open corruption that half of them would land in prison really quickly and they don't seem particularly bothered by that fact.

I grew up in Eastern Europe. For 90% of people there at the time, US = paradise. Maybe it was propaganda, I don't know. Later in life I got travel a lot and meet a lot of Americans and for most, their moral and ethics are at the exact opposite of what the US is showing now.

Regardless of weather it's true or not, they have a huge interest in saying so.

What's really crazy (even by today's US standards) is how Trump and his clique speak as if he annexed Venezuela and he can do whatever he wants.

It was discussed 100 times here already, but the damage to the myth of US as the 'good guy' that is immense. I personally see the US now, as the same that say China or Russia and have no intention of going there again, unless absolutely necessary. If you told me that some years ago, I would think you're crazy.

Because news shouldn't be what is on the front page on HN, and I generally agree.

However, we're not living in normal times. US is speed running the book to become a dictatorship, or probably worse. And it's in no small part thanks to the tech community, which HN is all about.

Recent story about how Grok is used to produce naked pictures of any women or girl, including young kids, was killed very quickly on HN. I feel like a lot of people working in tech should take a good look in the mirror.

I like the title - average food in the US is absolute shit - both in taste and from health perspective. It doesn't even taste like real food most of the time. Just like sugar with some flavour...

I don't get the 'For decades we've been misled' though - what guidance prioritiezed highly processed food ? From the look on both pyramids, they pretty much recommend the same things, in different proportions (more proteins now, less carbs) - but I don't think any reasonable guidance promoted highly processed sweet carbs before.

The thing I really struggle to understand, is what's their exit plan ?

He and his family, they always disregarded the law, but for guys like Marco Rubio ? He knows damn well the consequences of what they are doing and at some point they will need to pay for it, once they loose an election. Will he argue that he was just obeying orders, trying to limit the damage etc ?

The only time NATO intervened militarly at the request of a member (through Article 5) in its history was actually for the benefit of the US.

Not really. Ferrari is a great car, but with punctured tires or bad driver, it won't win any race.

Although I do agree, that in war only the final outcome is important. It's just that in this case it failed not necessarily because of technology, but because of humans.

Something like this more or less happened during the initial Israeli strike on Iran ?

From what I remember reading, they were able to gain air dominance not because Iranian air-defense was bad, but because it was put almost completely out of service for a brief period of time by people on the ground - be it through sabotage, cyber-warfare, drone attacks from inside, allowing the Israeli jets to annihilate them.

What if France 'donated' some nukes to every EU country (okay, maybe not Hungary) ?

It won't happen, but I wonder what could the US possibly do about it.

It got upvoted quite quickly, then flagged. The way the algorithm works, if a hot topic is flagged for some time, the story will never show up on the front page.

Some certainly will, but not many I think. There are very few westerners outside of the US, who want to have anything to do with what the US are doing now.

What's amazing to me is that this is silenced by HN. It should be a major topic of discussion here.

Why don't you ask for a refund ?

Nobody disputes that the car can drive itself 99% of the time. It can and it's a great system (well, opinions diverge, I mostly agree). But it's very far from a Robotaxi - for any reasonable person, Robotaxi means unsupervised rides, which Tesla is not currently doing at all. And they argue pretty strongly in court that any talk about unsupervised is just 'corporate puffery'.

This is similar to why one needs to keep an eye on todlers. 99% they are fine, but that 1% of time they will do something very dangerous.

In SF ? That would be illegal, as Tesla don't even have the permit to do that:

https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/vehicle-industry-services/auto...

They only can test with a driver for now. Can you take a ride in this Robotaxi and film it, so we can all see ?

I'm always very curious about why people argue some obvious lies like that about Tesla. Invested ? Paid shills ? Just Musk distortion field ?

From the outside yes - money and career wise, he accomplished everything he wanted.

His personal life is much more complicated though - impossible to know if he was happy or not, but for sure it was not usual.