david927

Yeah, something like that but more utopian and closer to Jacques Tati's Playtime.

And I think that's what would make it funny: the affordance of the efficiency in design creating that expectation of a correctness in delivery which is slightly subverted.

I thought about writing a comedy, set in the far future, where everything looks beautiful but nothing works right and it's just accepted (almost unnoticed) as a running gag throughout the film. Now I wonder how prescient that would be.

It was famously Dijkstra, so they were almost certainly quoting him. He was responsible for a lot of great aphorisms; I think he was as quotable as he was irascible.

"Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes," Edsger Dijkstra

I always liked that quote because telescopes can introduce artifacts, so astronomers absolutely have to know them in a foundational way, just as the artist needs to know the brush and the canvas.

I don't care for computers and I hate all programming languages but I love computer science.

That sounds fun! Very cool project.

Nice

I also stumbled onto Crime and Punishment at 18 and expected it to be difficult and was blown away with how Dostoyevsky wrote one of the greatest novels of all time, to be sure, but as the author here says, also how engaging he made it.

The scene where he commits the crime is an absolute stunner, edge-of-your-seat, thriller. Who does that? Who can pull that off? Dostoyevsky

I think we're past that point; they're absolutely useful already for a lot of tasks. I think it's about costs, convenience, and benefits of a frontier model for what you're doing.

I loved this when it came out. Lars von Trier was one of its creators and has a collection of amazing films. Check out Dancer in the Dark (2000) if you haven't already.

But it should be remembered as returning to an earlier technique. For example, one of the two or three greatest directors to ever live, Abbas Kiarostami, has a film called Where is the Friend's House (1987) which is pure -- and pure magic.

Thank you for taking the time to say that. I really appreciate it.

When YouTube was new, a guy named JT Helms made that top one (Once Upon a Time in the West cut to Arcade Fire) and when Bruce Springsteen was asked if he liked anything on YouTube, he said that. And it made me happy because it was my favorite too. And I thought we were on the cusp of something like a new art form.

I still think that. I'd like to see short films shot to music as well.

Fair use copyright covers areas such as this.

I'm using an old domain to put together a curation of film edits set to music

https://brodlist.com

The DoD was running illegal bioweapons labs in the Ukraine? This is huge.

I'm a huge believer in this. It's something we need to do more, in our industry, and everywhere, honestly.

When I moved back to the Bay Area after having lived in the south of France for years, one of the first things I did was set up a sort of "salon" of people I found interesting in the space I liked -- and it worked like a charm. We met once a month for the entire time I was there, with eventually the coolest collection of people. All it took was setting the calendar date, inviting people, and prompting good questions to discuss. Recommended.

When I was in high school I was a reckless driver, and with each narrow escape, I became more confident and certain that I was in control and a bad outcome wouldn't happen, couldn't happen. Your comment was downvoted with the same hubris. Success is not a teacher.

I have to defer, you're a lot closer to these things than I am, but I remember since the 90's the "this-for-that" analogies were around and became hot at some point, so that you were even encouraged by some to put it into that form for a while.

Where I see a difference is that it used to be about creating unique combinations and now it's more about deployment. "What about the known tool for this market?" It's banal. I can honestly say, it's not that I don't remember -- I do -- it's that I'm waiting and hoping to get excited about a startup again.

HN is a mirror on the tech world -- which is dead. There is dearth of original ideas, generally. There are no cool startups, no investment, nothing happening.

You're definitely looking for something other than the writing and even the plot. For example, the novel "The Firm" had a ridiculous ending but they fixed it for the screenplay.

I dropped of a book to this guy that I had just finished called "The Hotel on the Roof of the World," and he later told me that they optioned the author. Unfortunately the film never got made, but if you read it you'll see it has the bones of a really nice film.

I think it was a combination of right place/right time, knowing everything about film-making (and you're right, what makes a good adaptation) and was just a naturally cool, interesting guy, so that everyone who met him just liked him.

It didn't last forever. The last time I saw him was one of those wild random coincidences. I was visiting Cannes during the festival (as a tourist) and ran into him on the Croisette. We went for coffee and he told me that he had become a television producer.

I had a good friend who did this -- was a reader for a movie studio, looking for adaptations. Everyone teased him for having such a great job.

A CAPE ratio of 40x and record-high margin debt; what could go wrong?

Exactly this. They're a necessary evil and they require constant vigilance to minimize the "make what you measure" effect.

The original author's point is interesting, seeing rules as the constraints that, in one sense, spur creativity, give life. The reason the trumpet is the instrument of jazz isn't in spite of it having merely three valves, but because of it.

My theory is this civil suit was used to expose Sam's (and Greg's) self-dealing and perjury. This was civil, now comes criminal.

The Spirit Level by Pickett and Wilkinson argues convincingly that the pursuit of equality and social safeguards makes life better for everyone, rich and poor.

San Francisco used to be my favorite big city in America; now it's a hellscape. The experiment, whatever experiment we're running, failed.

I remember in the couple years before the dot com crash in 2000, there was a lot of satire being written which was being taken very seriously. You couldn't tell what was serious and what was humor because both were absurd.

In 1961, Peter Benenson, a British lawyer, read a newspaper story about two Portuguese students who went to jail for making a toast to freedom. He wrote letters to the Portuguese government and got others to do so as well, and it got media attention, and they were freed.

That was the start of Amnesty International, which to this day, simply asks people to write a letter when they see an injustice. The spray painting potholes story has the same theme: "Better to light a single candle than to curse the darkness."

I heard what they're saying, and while I don't personally agree with it, I can see it's shared by a lot of people.

Personally, I'm not sure a separate thread makes sense. What if people mark their project as "[ARTISAN]" like they do with [Remote] in Who's Hiring? Any other ideas?

Hi, I'm David and I run the "What are you working on?" posts. I hear what you're saying and yet I think it's just the new reality. There will be more projects and some of those will be quickly-made vibe-coded projects. I'm not against it.

In Moveable Feast, Hemingway talks about being opposed to ski lifts (which were probably fairly new at the time). He thought, if you're fit enough to hike up the mountain, you're going to be fit enough to ski down without getting injured; it opens skiing up to people who maybe shouldn't be skiing. I deeply prefer ski lifts. :-) And I love agentic AI coding.

I guess what I'm saying is that we shouldn't compare it to the past, because that's gone. And yet, each month the number of comments breaks 1000, so "drowning" is a fair word for just number of projects alone. And I don't have any answers.

Anyway, you (and anyone reading this) can feel free to email me. My email in my profile.

On the second Sunday of every month, there's an "Ask HN: What are you working on?" post. Feel free to show your projects there!

Raid? They're committing a crime.