etothepii

If we are going to tax things that we want less of; would not taxing stupidity seem like good public policy?

Is the issue primarily caused by the English language?

(Google Workspace) CLI vs Google (Workspace CLI)

Because Google has there name in the product for which the CLI was produced it looks like he's using the Google brand when he's only using a descriptor of what his CLI was for. Trademarks are funny, but if I build a thing that only works with Google Workspace wouldn't it be a bit weird to not say that?

Some Hong Kong money definitely goes to startups. I got flights paid for to go to a pitching competition.

What you know and what you can prove are different things.

I think most people would blow the whistle if they had evidence of personal-enrichment fraud. Suspecting that incentives are producing strange outcomes is one thing; accusing specific people of criminal conduct is quite another.

Hilariously, in the one case I heard about where an MD was eventually fired for taking kickbacks from contractors, the department then struggled to recruit competent staff. It turned out he had only been skimming from people who could actually do the job.

Lots of shouting on one particular occasion left me with the impression that they genuinely had not anticipated this consequence of simultaneously pulling the "no contractors to be renewed" lever and the "any MD can sign contracts up to $1m with approved suppliers" lever.

The people involved weren’t stupid. They were trying to achieve one outcome and got a different one because the rest of the organisation adapted to the incentives in front of them.

As a junior software engineer, I worked at a large UK bank.

Senior management routinely seem baffled that they could announce redundancies or hiring freezes, yet technology costs would continue to rise.

One pattern I saw repeatedly was a contractor being let go, only to return via a large outsourcing provider. The provider must have added a substantial markup despite supplying the same engineer back to the same team, without having incurred any procurement costs.

I once asked a more senior colleague how this made any sense. His answer stuck with me:

"You can’t stop people from doing their jobs. If someone thinks their job is to deliver X, they’ll find a way to deliver X. Sometimes that means working around processes and incentives in ways that look very strange from the outside."

Some people.

If you write 3 bullet points and produce 500-pages of slop why would my AI summarise it back to the original 3 bullet points and not something else entirely?

This will never stop as it would require either the reference date to be changed or fir all dates in all saved spreadsheets to be off by one.

The US has traditionally solved this problem by having dozens of political entities that can compete (at least for elites) and, since the creation of the interstate highway system, the oppressed can flee.

In the UK open banking was essentially a response to GDPR this has allowed (to a limited extent) a variety of tools to be built on top of bank accounts that others would not have been.

Can someone explain to me what the difference is between a union in which everyone is a member and a government.

This might be the biggest benefit of AI coding. If I have a large legacy code base I can use AI to ask questions and find out where certain things are happening. This benefit is huge even if I choose not to vibe code anything. It ends up feeling a lot like the engineer that wrote the code is still with you or documented everything very well. In the real world there is a risk that documentation is wrong or that the engineer misremembers some detail so even the occasional hallucination is not a particularly big risk.

This.

Once you have revenue you have downside to protect. Pre-revenue the worst that can happen is that you have to start again knowing more than you did.

That would not have made it to the top of HN.

I would pay for YouTube premium again if I could switch off shorts.

I actually stopped paying for premium to make YouTube less appealing.

Having used sunglasses that project a monitor on to them products I am very surprised that the speedometer is going to move with the wheel.

That said an electric Ferrari is not a car built for me. If I could justify such a car I'd want something practical or that makes a great noise. "Fun" to drive would not be on my agenda.

My outsider view is that there are more people and more volume of crypto involved in the speculative & scam sector than in the human-rights sector, but I'm willing to be wrong.

I would assume this is true, but is it the right metric?

Would it be ok if it was 51:49? If $1m of crypto lets 100 Russian dissidents get out of Russia does it matter that there are $10b of pump and dump schemes? What if it's only $10m? What if its grannies having their life savings scalped? This feels like trolley problems all the way down.

I ask because writing a paper with someone is a non secret operator.

I suspect there is no way to establish, if one has an Epstein number >2, what it is.

How is this defined?

This was a lot of fun.

The game mechanic of a count down timer made for much better play.

I was most surprised for bluebottle to be replaced with man o' war. We know the man o' war here in bermud by that name whereas a bluebottle is what I would call house fly.

If first class was full lie down from LAX it must have been transcontinental to JFK or BOS.

The sleepwear in First Class is by far the most bizarre thing about the whole experience.

I've never understood why First and Business Class that are so clearly mainly used by people travelling for work don't focus more on the business aspect. British Airways call it "Club" which I'm sure can only make it harder to be approved by finance. American call it "First".

In the main lounges provided by American Airlines there is often a person whose job it is to provide unlimited champagne but not a comfortable place to respond to emails.

Perhaps this is a feature not a bug.

High rents encourages startups to be founded by those who haven't coupled up and who choose to live together.

A company of 3 single founders in their mid twenties that rent a two bed flat and then live and breath nothing but their startup collapsing on the couch each night can make two $50k angel cheques go a long way.

Edit: SEIS allows a friends and family seed round if up to £250k in London that the government will rebate 78% of in taxes (50% immediately and 28% if the company eventually goes bust).

London pays more taxes per capita than the rest of country.

Do you have any numbers on the number that get some number of upvotes? What about a chart of upvotes on Show HN?

I assume the vast, vast majority never get any upvotes.

Because English has become the lingua franca for Europe. I suspect that now UK has left EU it will be much easier to accept this.

I'm amazed by how few people appreciate the quote attributed to Abraham Lincoln, "If I had more time I'd write a shorter letter."

Why aren't people using LLM to shorten rather than lengthen their plans? You know what you meant so can validate whether the shorter version still hits the points you care about. Whereas if I use an LLM to shorten your email there is always a risk I've now missed your main point.

Cleaning up grammar, punctuation spelling etc is a good thing worth doing but adding padding is exclusively irritating.

Deliberate planning is great but serendipity is important too. Some of the richest people I know made most of their wealth as a consequence of being in a position to act* when opportunities presented themselves.

My guess is that it's important not to be overly focused on the intermediate goals and the more debt you have the less able you feel to take risks.

*it may be more appropriate to say start than act as in the two cases that immediately come to mind they were both 10+ year journeys.

The million dollar earn is a fantastic example.