agent281

I understood their comment as going from

$100 / hour * 100 hours

to

$100 / hour * 500 hours

not to

$500 / hour * 100 hours

I appreciate this example. This does seem like a pretty difficult feature to build de novo. Did you already have some machine vision work integrated into your app? How are you handling machine vision? Is it just a call to an LLM API? Or are you doing it with a local model?

IMO, Haskell is less helpful for an LLM because of its advanced language features. The LLM is reasoning about the language textually. Since Haskell is very tense, the LLM would need a very strong model of how the language works.

I think languages with more minimal features and really good compile time errors would work well with LLMs. In particular, I've heard multiple people say how good LLMs are at generating Go.

Personally, I like languages with type inference so this wouldn't be my preference.

Have you heard of the War of the Currents?

As the use of AC spread rapidly with other companies deploying their own systems, the Edison Electric Light Company claimed in early 1888 that high voltages used in an alternating current system were hazardous, and that the design was inferior to, and infringed on the patents behind, their direct current system.

In the spring of 1888, a media furor arose over electrical fatalities caused by pole-mounted high-voltage AC lines, attributed to the greed and callousness of the arc lighting companies that operated them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_currents

Fair enough!

Maybe? But it destabilized the Middle East, caused the migrant crisis in Europe, the migrant crisis caused a rise in right wing movements in Europe, it caused the rise of ISIS (lots of Iraqi ex-military), ISIS was involved in the the civil war in Syria, it caused a loss of faith in the American government, created a generation of disillusioned combat vets, so on and so forth.

I really think we're still recovering from the damage caused by Bush administration.

I agree with GP. I would amend their claim with "most problems* could be solved by building high density housing and services in areas with jobs." I.e., build real cities.

Building homes on federal land in the middle of no where will not do anything for people. We just need to allow people to build housing where there is a demand for labor.

Some things I think would be solved include:

- the housing crisis

- mobility => it would be easier for people to move to other parts of the country because they would be less tied to their homes - labor mismatches

- climate change => less reliance on cars

- funding infrastructure => more dense infrastructure means you don't have as much infrastructure to repair and you have more people paying for it

- city government budgets => high density areas are more tax efficient

- home insurance => the homes on the outskirts of cities are most likely to burn down; if housing is cheap the cost to insure it will be cheaper as well

IMO, if housing is 30-60% of peoples budgets and transportation is another 10-20%, if you can bring those costs down you can de-stress a lot of people. That might make politics less intense too.

* "Most problems" is not strictly accurate. But "more problems than you might think are directly related to housing" doesn't really roll off the tongue.

Yeah, I think we should keep that aspect of prop 13. That is what it was originally billed as.

It just doesn't make sense that golf courses pay taxes that are more aligned with the 70's property values.

If there was ever a major change to prop 13 taxes, I think we would need to phase in the new taxes over a five to ten year period. Otherwise, the market would be thrown into chaos.

You would need to overturn the proposition directly. The state Congress can't overturn it so you would need another proposition. That's a "simple" majority vote, but it's the third rail of California politics. We almost got it removed for businesses, but COVID happened and people were not in the mood for raising taxes.

I would not describe LA to SF as a consistent experience. I had an 8:30 PM flight delayed until 1:30 AM. Actually, the only consistency I've had with those flights is that they are consistently delayed.

I've heard that the flight delays cascade throughout the day. So if the first flight is 10 minutes delayed, all SF-LA flights are delayed for the rest of the day. Since SFO has a lot of fog, my understanding is that it's often delayed.

Maybe it's okay coming from Burbank, but I live on the Westside so I have to take LAX.

I would love to have another option. Ideally, a train would decrease the load on the airlines so that they could handle delays better.

To answer your question directly, no I don't have to do work trips every couple of days, but I do have work trips from LA to SF every couple of months.

I live in America. I have all my life. I've ridden on nice trains in Europe and Japan. The culture in the last 80-100 years has revolved around cars, but before that relied heavily on trains.

I much prefer riding a spacious train to riding in a cramped airplane. I like to be able to get up and walk around while the train is traveling. I prefer the minimal security processes on a train to an airplane.

Driving 6-10 hours is pretty miserable. I would much rather take a train or fly unless there are specific reasons why I need to drive.

It may be like comparing apples and oranges, but some people prefer apples. The good thing is that you can still eat oranges if you like.

California can't raise property taxes unless Prop 13 is repealed and that's a very high bar to pass.

Porque no los dos?

Last time I checked (2020) there were already a few rejected proposals to shorten the syntax for this. It seemed like they were pretty exasperated by them at the time.

Isn't it being a method call not quite equivalent? Are you able to define the method over arbitrary data types?

In Elixir, it is just a macro so it applies to all functions. I'm only a Scala novice so I'm not sure how it would work there.

I know HN has a bit of a click-bait love relationship with Erlang/Elixir but it hasn't translated over to adoption and there are companies that are just burning money trying to do what you get out of the box for free with the Erlang stack.

Do you or the community have a sense why that is?

I wonder how much the workforce plays into it.

If you have a bunch of people who work at companies that are trying to maximize eyeballs then they shuffle around to different companies, are they going to adopt the goals of the new company? Or is their existing perspective and skills going to shape the new company?

I imagine it's a bit of both. Given how big Google and Meta are and how much talent circulates among big tech companies, this might cause companies to lean a bit more heavily into the attention economy than they might otherwise need to.

Also, attention is just easier to measure than satisfaction. Makes it easier to fall down that path.

Did you ever see Crystal? It's more or less a typed Ruby. I've heard that you can port some code directly.

https://crystal-lang.org/

I think there are a couple of bugs in the pseudo-code:

traverse_node(page, version, key): retry: # Read the page pageCopy = copy(page)

    # BUG1: version is an argument so it likely won't be correct on retry
    if version != atomic_load(page.version):
        goto retry;
    
    # Go to the next page
    childPtr = binary_search(pageCopy, key)
    nextPage = load(childPtr)
    nextVersion = atomic_load(nextPage.version)

    # BUG2: seems like we should be using nextVersion instead of version
    # Validate that no writer overtook the reader
    if version != atomic_load(page.version):
        goto retry;
    
    # Safely traverse to the next node
    page = nextPage

Then after that, they passed Hawley Smoot Tariff Act to make up for the budget short fall. That caused an already bad situation to get much, much worse.

Given how companies operate internationally, is it fair to compare the stock market valuation against GDP? If Apple moved to a New Zealand based stock exchange, would that mean that the stock market in New Zealand wasn't healthy?

Also, could an increase in internationalization explain the relative difference between the Buffet Indicator today vs 25 years ago during the DotCom boom?

No doubt his administration will cast a long shadow. I was only responding to the allusion that he could become a long term dictator.

TBH, I am one of those people that's a little too young to remember Yeltsin. I know him generally, but wasn't aware of the direct through line to Putin. Overall, that's a pretty sobering analysis.

Trump is pretty old at this point. Even if he decided to go full dictator, how long does he have? Maybe 5 to 10 years? I don't think it would be quite as "stable" as Putin's Russia.

But it's weird to me to see these articles that are so excited about being able to install Python easily when that's been doable with conda for ages. (And conda has additional features not present in uv or other tools.)

I used conda for awhile around 2018. My environment became borked multiple times and I eventually gave up on it. After that, I never had issues with my environment becoming corrupted. I knew several other people who had the same issues and it stopped after they switched away from conda.

I've heard it's better now, but that experience burned me so I haven't kept up with it.

Hilarious because I watched this while my code was compiling.

If you have been using git for 30+ years, you need to take me to your time machine. It turns 20 this year.

If it happens, I call dibs on the name "AI Nuclear Winter".

Musk did backtrack on the $2 trillion goal.

'Musk told political strategist Mark Penn in an interview broadcast on X that the $2 trillion figure was a “best-case outcome” and that he thought there was only a “good shot” at cutting half that.'

'That figure was quickly dismissed as implausible by budget experts, who said the entire discretionary budget was only $1.7 trillion. Musk hadn’t waved people off the number until Wednesday, and it has been widely cited in reports about DOGE’s plans. '

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/elon-musk-say...

Even in the HN thread on the essay, it felt like hardly anyone actually read and understood it, just brought their own assumptions and intellectual allergies and let them run wild. It would be great if people could discuss these issues rationally, but the vast majority can't. Everyone is on a hair trigger.

I think the essay was a rorschach test for readers. On its face, it has a very reasonable and measured tone. It also has some nods to the other side like the disclaimer you mentioned. However, it starts from some uncharitable premises (e.g., its definition of wokeness) and contains unnecessary gibes (e.g., against social sciences). More importantly, it takes the tone of a social sciences essay, a discipline that he mocks, without any of the rigor. There are not sources for his claims about the origins of wokeness or how universities operated from the 80's until today, you just have to take him at face value. It gives the illusion of being erudite without doing any of the actual work.