Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | vasco's commentslogin

Becoming? We all live under the American empire. Pretty much every international institution is dominated by American money, most high level positions in such institutions are cleared by Americans before they are appointed, they have military bases in almost every other western country and a law that allows them to invade the Netherlands if the international court ever tries someone they don't want to be tried. What illusion are we under?

It's ok to think it's a benevolent dictator type situation but it is what it is. In fact the usual reply to this isn't a rebuttal but rather "what alternative is better?" to which I have no answer.


Vets kill themselves a lot so I guess it's easier to propose crazier stuff because the alternative is very bad.

Veterans also make it easier to get wider political support for legalizing the treatment.

Though notably never anything really crazy like “let’s stop doing war”

I mean, that does sound pretty crazy. Specific wars are often ill-advised or largely pointless, but "stop doing war" presupposes that all other countries in the world will also "stop doing war", otherwise what you're suggesting is just unilateral surrender under the guise of stopping war.

You're strawmanning I think.

My interpretation of the parent comment is: Americans should stop aggressing other countries, slaughtering the population, and then publishing scientific breakthroughs on treating ptsd among the killers.

I'd say the comment says nothing about wars of survival, which is not what veterans have ptsd for. No one is 'doing war' at America.


Game theory and history say otherwise. If you want to be a fool, have at it. Just don't expect the rest of us to go along or respect you because of it.

Just because it used to happen doesn't mean it should continue. It will be death of all of us collectively.

But didn’t you know: game theory!!!!

Nash equilibrium is the religion for millennials who didn’t get sucked into the boomer/gen-x Ayn Rand bullshit


Hey if that’s the world you wanna live in then continue to do what you’re doing

I once tried mobile development in semi early days android. At the time I made a free Hackaday reader app because I was a daily reader and loved it.

I remember spending 4 hours to make a scrollable element that wasn't jumpy or buggy. There were several stackoverflow answers full of gotchas explaining all you had to do. I finished and published the app but never again. Native stuff has terrible developer experience.


And to misdirect the acquisition of Solar City, famous for being run by Elons cousins to basically pocket all the tax credits, but which was not going well.

You forgot tourism which is their largest money maker.

Tourism is relatively big there but only relatively to the population numbers. I'd argue gambling contributes more to the GDP, while tourism only keeps the light on on the economy. Tourism allows the citizens to make money but it's a small country so it doesn't scale. Gambling scales globally.

I have no numbers to back this up.


But the internet does, and it is 12% for gambling, against 15-25% for tourism (whichever source you believe).

[1] https://timesofmalta.com/article/the-15-billion-question-is-...

[2] https://www.emcs.com.mt/emcs-tourism-malta-economy/


Tourism scales globally in the same way unless you mean the island would be at 100% occupancy rate already. Also my point is it's hard to trust you when you ignore the top export while talking about exports.

My first ever was Stripe CTF in 2012 I think, I still wear the shirt I got (now super fainted) from passing some challenges. I was a student in portugal and remember receiving the shirt for it and thinking, maybe those Americans aren't any better than me and I can compete at the same level.

I never got super into security but it gave me the confidence to play in the same field and lose the stupid aura I had that somehow "rich americans" would be better than me at everything because they had better universities or because of Hollywood or something.

Sad that another cool thing is lost to AI but I guess kids will learn in other ways.


In quite a few languages they are called clitoris in various slangs colloquially. I didn't know the real name for this device for many years.

Bean is also slang for clitoris, at least in the UK. Ploopy has a good sense of humour, the Knob page being the prime example.

Yeah, I knew exactly what this was gonna be before I read the second half of the title.

Now I'm wondering if putting a bean on the knob would be taking it too far.


> and not longer after that I saw it up on jacks in a neighborhood auto shop

Things that didn't happen for 200 please


#NothingEverHappens

In the real world, sometimes grownups have to actively do things to make their worlds nicer. We can’t all just sit around being cynical or nothing ever gets done.


In the real world, in a city as big as San Francisco, probabilities say otherwise.

A thing I've noticed is that everyone thinks they prompt better than the next guy.

This. I have this buddy, who is not an idiot by stretch of the imagination and more adventurous than me in some ways ( I don't really run agents on my machine ), but when I was looking at his prompts, I sometimes question how he gets anything done at all. It is vague and angry demands.

Not sure about the angry part, but vague sometimes works really good. The important part is to have enough good context pushed into the context window beforehand (codebase explorations, docs, etc). Then a vague prompt of the general direction gives the autocomplete more “freedom” to figure out the “best” approach given the context.

Doesn’t work well ofc in a one shot situation with no context.


Yep this is like comparing master craftsmanship with a production line. You're gonna get good attention to detail and a masterpiece from one, and a limited thing that will break after few years from the other. But for majority of use cases the second one is enough. And pointing out the master craftsmanship is "better" is besides the point.

And with one you need to train a guy for 25 years and with the other you need plan mode for a few minutes and then it runs 24/7.


Our society needs more experts, not less.

Do we? We have many buildings built and very little master masons or whatever nowadays. The amount of craftsmen needed to build a 10 story building is very limited. That's what we should aim for software, much less experts needed for the same outcome so more people can benefit from software.

I want the people building the buildings I live, work and shop in to know what they’re doing so those buildings don’t fall down or let in the wind and rain or require too much maintenance.

And the equivalent for software. It’s usable, intuitive, responsive, stats up and running, and doesn’t leak my private data.


Ok but you do want the people building your home to be experts at building homes, yes?

No house I ever lived in was ever made by experts. The apartment building I grew up in was all built by minimum wage guys that may or not even speak the language of the building overseer and had zero specific training or certifications. Some architect somewhere did the plans for a standard building, which the developer purchased and just used.

Then the only "experts" (not even close, just a guy with a form and some technical training) are the building inspectors who come at the end to verify if some stuff is done up to code.

Other than the original architect who draw the plans that got used for many buildings and the electrical engineer that cleared the electrical, no experts were involved. This is basically how the whole city and most of the country was built.

There's no expert mason or painter or whatever involved. Just a dude that can hold a paint roller. That's the same as going from a craftsman programmer to some dude with claude. Individual quality goes down, but more importantly price goes down way more and so many more people get access to much better quality than having nothing.


there is a large incentive for computer programmers to build themselves up in importance. higher wages, better love lives, more status. but most software is pretty mundane and straight forward, or at least should be. fancy architectures rarely pay off and the best solutions are sometimes the most obvious. although i could be suffering from that phenomenon that people in maths have where they struggle to understand then once they grasp it they feel dumb like "ofc i should have known that!"

It’s the old developers who have been doing it the longest who pick the simple and obvious solution.

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: