yowayb

SCIP is a "nod" to SICP

As a nomad, can confirm. Coming back to America, the scale and quality of materials is remarkable.

There has never been a moment in the known history of humanity without war going on somewhere in the world.

I wish there was a way for HN to sponsor scale up so that sites have more availability for the HN hug of death

I've thought the same about a few of my founders/executives.

"You either die the good guy or live long enough to become the bad guy"

The "bad guy" actually learns that their former good guy mentality was too simplistic.

I'm curious if there's any hard data on how LLM SEO compares to traditional SEO.

My gut tells me that LLM SEO will be harder to game than traditional SEO.

I cherish my UCSD education and (equally, if not more) all the socializing that came with it.

The concept (and aims) of university faces the same headwinds of any business based on intellectual property in America: artificial moats of IP law.

China's manufacturing success partially stems from the government's inability to enforce IP law.

Thankfully, ideas want to be free, and LLMs give us the best-yet UI to information.

To me, Hacker News is a university. It's a place where I come to learn (from thousands of "teachers") and these "teachers" are actually also students, learning as well.

I have a theory that corruption+nepotism are unstoppable forces of nature.

Advanced governments only force corruption to distribute and obfuscate.

I think this is why there appears to be some correlation between unpopular behavior and financial success.

Government essentially erects artificial barriers to entry on behalf of the incumbent businesses that fund it.

iirc, when Eliza came out, many people briefly believed it was sentient

I think this paragraph from the wikipedia article captures it nicely:

>Many observers disagree that any meaningful "productivity paradox" exists and others, while acknowledging the disconnect between IT capacity and spending, view it less as a paradox than a series of unwarranted assumptions about the impact of technology on productivity. In the latter view, this disconnect is emblematic of our need to understand and do a better job of deploying the technology that becomes available to us rather than an arcane paradox that by its nature is difficult to unravel.

How is this distinguishable from pump-dump?

So many websites and apps are still broken in so many little ways. Maybe broken isn't the right word. But all kinds of annoyances and breaches still happen all the time.

I generally don't complain/review, and just learn the workarounds/shortcuts, but I very much welcome the increased (albeit perhaps less skilled) workforce leverage, because I think in a year or so we'll see steady improvements accumulating.

I appreciate the fun, but he's clearly messing with them or has Asperger's. You can definitely reduce hoops by knowing the bins, which they helped him with.

And, within high-trust societies (eg Japan, Korea, Vietnam) getting wasted lubricates social bonds in the workplace. I've met successful functional alcoholics. Seriously, they actually function and make lots of money. They're also fun to be around as long as you're not working for them.

First job out of college, I spilled my guts on form 86, ~40 joints, ~10 ecstasy. Denied clearance the entire 3 years. This was 2002.

Makes complete sense. I've spent some time around Southeast Asia and met plenty of vets that discovered many psychoactive substances who also happen to be anti-war.

I doubt anyone in an official capacity is using such techniques, but I can tell you this is common in sales. A lot of people in management with control of budget have at least one of just a handful of human weaknesses.

omg this was my experience. I figured there was no point lying officially, so I listed exactly how many times I smoked weed and took mdma. I was banished to the unclear side for my entire 3 years there. Meanwhile the head of IT was a raging alcoholic. I even wrote their very first J2EE webapp, which required me to be escorted to the cleared side anytime someone needed help with my code. I couldn't touch the keyboards! I was giving vi instructions verbally lol

This particular thread of the argument can go on for a while. I can't well articulate the doubts I have because I'm not in the industry, but many such well-meaning laws have a tendency to backfire once given enough time for bad/poor actors to game it.

Thank you for including southeast Asia (and other humid places) in the discussion :)

I love exposed everything in construction. Every plumbing and electrical problem that required me to call someone involved the thing being hidden for aesthetic reasons.

I'm currently in an old house in Vietnam and I had to add exposed PVC piping to route around a leak inside a wall that was also feeding mold.

Half of the work involved each time I call someone is understanding the hidden stuff + getting stuff out of the way to see the hidden stuff.

"Engineering types" have built much of the world most of us actually live in. Yet a core piece of engineering——maintainability——is pathologically persistent.

And you'll work with moral/ethical companies that slowly become the thing you're trying to avoid

I read there was an actual original Hostess bakery. Imagine a fresh all-natural Twinkie. Mmmmm

I went to Moscow in December several years ago and learned they've got one the world's largest district heating systems.

I worked at a now-defunct defense contractor with the typical inefficiencies of hyper-secrecy and government waste.

A friend once asked, "aren't you conflicted that you're helping kill people?"

At the time, that question put serious doubt in my head. But years after, I realized all the inefficiency slows the machine down. Combine this with negative public opinion, and you've got the perfect machine for creating work that results in busy-ness and reduces actual battlefield harm.

The stories from this place are fun.

I studied Turkish for a few years and remember thinking it could make an interesting programming language (due to the grammatical/agglutinative features). I was gonna call it Ç, but I was never seriously going to make it. Happy to see someone went for it!

In my 40s now, I can recall dozens of "we should..." statements from myself and others. Typically, these statements were driven by some personal mishap, and the statement is basically forgotten (because it was never a big deal to begin with). But occasionally, some well-read/educated (often with a philosophical bias) will allow a small complaint to consume them, forcing them to write extensively about it, while the world continues to change at increasing speed.

But there's a huge market for this kind of writing: it's all the other people that have similar thoughts but not the time to actually write it.

I once rented a "kei van" in Japan once. I think I remember seeing similarly utilitarian trucks, but forget what they were called. I found the kei vans very practical.

I got a drying closet. It's basically a heater in a tent with a few vents. It takes almost twice as long as a similarly sized tumble-drying machine, but absolutely nothing but warm, moist air is exhausted into the room. I even use it to supplement a space heater.

I personally find this opinion typical of HN readers, and I argue that successful influencers/pretty-people can easily beat more serious professions in terms of economic value, because the vast majority of people are more human than the average HN reader.