lunaru

I think people understand the odds are small. However, perhaps they perceive their chances of meaningfully turn around their life in other ways have even smaller odds. i.e. improbable vs actually impossible. At least the lottery doesn't care about your current circumstance and everyone has an equal (equally small) chance.

Secondly, because everyone realizes the chances are small, the real product being sold is Hope. Even the advertisements for the lotteries address this. The thing you're buying is 30 seconds of daydreaming so you can comfortably tackle the rest of the day.

Great to see you launch this! I know you've put a lot of work into it and I've found it fine going through the samples. (Disclaimer: family member of the OP)

Bit of feedback: It would be a little easier to jump into the Learning mode if it defaulted with more UI space.

Speciation of archaic humans is an attempt at applying discrete categorization to continuous phenomena. It's like looking at a rainbow and trying to figure out where red ends and orange begins. Also interesting is Homo Longi, which can be argued to be Denisovan, or maybe not, depending on where you want to draw the lines on the raindow: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_longi

If any language was written like Chinese has the same answer -- the written form of Chinese was not necessarily meant to be phonetic, although there are portions of it that have evolved to be phonetic. The characters have meanings and the grammar is very fluid to the point where a sequence of characters stringed together (such as in poetry) can be interpreted and debated.

Cantonese and Mandarin are considered dialects, so I won't use that as an example, but this problem has already been solved in Korean. For a long time, Hangul did not exist and Korean scholars used Chinese as the written system despite speaking in a completely different language. This is obviously an old article (1999), but the fact that it doesn't consider how this is a solved problem from a real historical use case makes the musing incomplete.

Vacheron Constantin was founded in 1755 by Jean-Marc Vacheron, a watchmaker, who later took on a partner François Constantin who traveled the world managing sales of their highly complicated watches. In fact, the two (Vacheron and Constantin) barely ever met and communicated solely through letters. The "Overseas" model of watches, which is their most popular sports model, celebrates this fact in the name (that the company was literally built through communication over oceans) and VC is arguably one of the top 3 swiss watch brands that still thrives today.

I'm not saying that the business didn't have a physical location (it clearly did for manufacturing) but if two co-founders could build a remote-first startup using 1755 technology, there's no reason why early stage startups today with the power of Slack, Zoom, Email, Git, etc can't build the next generation of business in a fully remote fashion. Startups like this will naturally have a competitive advantage when hiring as well, as they'd be able to tap into a world-market, rather than a local-market.

Remote work is here to stay and companies that can find a good hybrid of remote and in-person will thrive going forward, as has always been the case, whether it's 1755 or 2055.

The real joke is that we as a society still give weight to institutions like Harvard. We as a whole are much more educated now and the idea that legacy institutions should serve as gatekeepers of education or validation thereof based on reputation alone seems outdated. These schools should be judged by the rigor and quality of their curriculum rather than the reputations of their past. And I say this as someone who graduated from one of these top schools.

To clarify, this math doesn't work because the price I mentioned is just labor and materials. Land is not included nor are soft costs like architects.

That 2BR apartment for $300,000 can't happen because the land and soft costs, as well as considerations like developer margin are additive to that.

I think everyone understands this barrier already, it's well discussed and my point was not to diminish the well-known challenges to the problem. The economic reasons I mentioned are another (much less discussed) angle that most people just aren't even aware of and is absolutely a barrier to large scale housing development.

What’s so special about it?

Nothing. That's exactly what I mean when I say the cost is labor. The quoted price $450-$550 per square foot does not include land, permitting, soft costs, etc. That's just labor and materials.

Just offering up a food for thought, as I recently did some research in the cost of construction (for the Bay Area, California): I see a lot of comments denouncing NIMBY-ism for the lack of construction or other reasons to answer the question of "Why not just build more housing?" but I suspect this, as true as it is, is the most popular talking point because it's politically a juicy topic to talk about. However, at least in HCOL places like the Bay Area, there is also another very basic economic reason: Construction is simply too expensive.

The cost per square foot of standard construction (wood frame, slab foundation, nothing fancy in terms of doors and windows) is about $450-$550 per square foot. This sets a real hard lower bound on the price of net-new housing. If you're talking larger buildings (more concrete, steel frame, drilled pier foundations in consideration of soil conditions and structural weight) the costs start sky rocketing to unbelievable numbers. Sure we can point at bureaucracy and the permitting process, but when we're talking about large scale construction of SFH and multi-unit residential buildings, the permitting and legal barriers are a small slice of the overall cost pie.

In the Bay Area, and I suspect soon in various geo areas, labor is simply too expensive. (And labor is an input to a lot of costs along the supply chain as well, like wood, concrete, steel, and glass.) In a culture where we all strive to be white collar workers abstracted away from the real physical reality that our world still runs on physical objects, most importantly housing, perhaps "learn to code" is not the universal answer and there needs to be just as much "learn to plumb" or "learn to concrete". And I know this last point is politically touchy, but big buildings housing hundreds and thousands of residents simply don't get built by an all-middle-class society. You need cheap labor (or better yet cheap automation?) so that this housing problem is tractable at an economic level.

It bears repeating because this is a common mistake in inflation discussions: a decrease in inflation metrics means price increases are slowing down, it doesn’t mean that prices are going down （that would require a negative CPI print).

Also, this number is year over year, so the decrease just means the price increases between Oct 21 and Oct 22 are not as steep as between Sept 21 to Sept 22, which is not hard to achieve because Sept 21 to Oct 21 had a bigger month over month jump.

The right way to interpret this number is that high prices have plateaued a bit. Yes that means your groceries are going to be x% higher than in 2020. Short of deflation, they always will be.

A rare watch is an IYKYK item and the iconic pieces are immediately noticeable from across the room. I do wonder if the deflation in asset prices (driven by increase in interest rates) will put downward pressure on some of the craziness right now.

But for someone who is outside looking in, and wondering what the fuss is all about: A watch, especially Patek Philippe is much better for signaling status to those you want to send that signal to, while completely being unnoticeable by an audience from whom you don't want negative attention. At the same time, it appreciates like fine art that you can take with you on your wrist. It has a lot of the characteristics of investment assets that are desirable.

It's crypto v0.1.

I'm not familiar with Magic Wormhole specifically, but I think this may be to solve STUN: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STUN.

Specifically if the clients are behind NATs, having a third party server coordinate can help.

We need to start expanding the scope of our anti-trust laws so that internet communication channels go back to what they were meant to be: de-centralized.

The fact that the internet and web was designed to be decentralized and then somehow ended up being concentrated on 5 or 6 websites is a bug, not a feature.

I'm not proposing we just do this overnight though -- too much of the US economy and software sector is propped up by these companies to just yank it all out, but we need to head back to decentralization by revisiting our definition of monopolies as it applies to communication channels.

Xi'an (on this list as one of the oldest cities) has a fully preserved (but often refurbished) city wall: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortifications_of_Xi%27an

It's complete so you can still walk the entire 4 sides of the wall in one hike, or rent a bike and circle the entire city in ~1 hour or so.

When you're atop the city wall, there's definitely a sense of being in two different times, both ancient and modern, at the same time as the modern Xi'an skyline makes up the background while you trek on stones that are hundreds (thousands?) of years old.

I didn’t see any contact info on your profile but if you’re looking for a Rails gig, let’s chat. Ping me at my profile email.

Re:amaze | Full-stack software developer | San Jose, CA | REMOTE (U.S.) and INTERNS welcome | https://www.reamaze.com

Re:amaze is a multi-channel customer support and messaging platform. We focus on helping businesses support, engage, and convert customers in a variety of ways.

We're looking for software engineers/developers who have a strong product sense and those looking for the challenge of not just implementing software, but also having a strong stake in defining the product. Working here includes autonomy, decision making, hard/interesting design decisions (both front-end and back-end), and direct interactions with customers.

Founders and current team are all experienced in SaaS and startups.

Email lwang [at] reamaze [dot] com with subject "HN Job Listing" if interested.

How about a balanced culture that can appreciate eduction, sports AND drama? We don't need a culture where everyone strives for excellence in one dimension. That's a very boring world and implicitly creates a pyramid/caste system where the high academic achievers get the lion's share of attention and praise. There's a reason National Exams in Asian countries are sometimes viewed negatively.

A huge part of Shopify's revenue comes from Shopify Plus. We're also fellow app developers[1], and we've noticed that if you offer value to their higher end businesses, you'll be running at churn rates that are much lower than what you'd think you'd get with the "average Shopify merchant".

Something like 70% of small businesses fail[2], so it's not surprising you'll see a large amount of churn if your audience is the broad set of all merchants, including those that are probably just kicking around the idea of spinning up a drop shipping business on the side. That doesn't mean there aren't great businesses in the Shopify ecosystem.

[1] https://apps.shopify.com/reamaze [2] - https://www.fundera.com/blog/what-percentage-of-small-busine...

I just want to make a note that Tobi (Shopify's CEO) has made great contributions to Rails open source ecosystem with projects like Liquid and ActiveMerchant, which he started:

- https://github.com/Shopify/liquid/commits?author=tobi

- https://github.com/activemerchant/active_merchant/commits?au...

We leverage these projects daily, so it's awesome to see his company doing so well. In addition, we're on Shopify's platform as a app developer, so his company has added a lot of value, both commercially and non-commercially to developers, not just e-commerce merchants.

Kudos to them.

Also tangentially related, but apparently, moon rocks were once fed to cockroaches and injected into mice: https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/29/us/nasa-lunar-samples-testing...

On related note and I believe posted in HN before, I've always found the Tea/te vs Chai/Cha naming of tea very interesting and this article shows the spread of the word geographically: https://qz.com/1176962/map-how-the-word-tea-spread-over-land...

Before rolling out this exact feature in our own chat product we resisted doing so because of the concerns being echoed here. However, it was becoming obvious from the demands from our users that this was make-or-break feature in a modern chat system.

After rolling it out and enjoying this for ourselves as we handle our own customer support using our own software, it's become a "why didn't we do this earlier?" type of thing.

Overall, there's already a ton of asymmetry of information when a customer contacts a support team (e.g. our product pulls in order history, subscription details, stripe transactions, etc) that streaming a text preview is really just a drop in the bucket, and it's actually a win-win for both sides since it leads to faster answers.

Also keep in mind that any questions you ask may be used to feed machine-learning systems, like chatbots, which is true for our product as well. Just something to be aware of, that I think is a fair tradeoff for better customer experiences long-term.

Disclaimer: I'm the founder of https://reamaze.com

For my team, this article comes at some interesting timing, since we're bumping into some of the same issues with Rails.

Rails is now a mature framework and part of the problem is its lack of consideration for large existing codebases running in production. While there are nice tools to help migrate (e.g. rails:update) that hit surface issues, the deep problem is that there are a lot of decisions made going from version to version that are obviously unfriendly to established projects. e.g.: https://github.com/rails/rails/issues/27231

Additionally, there are a lot of gems that are losing momentum, which are near-core to Rails. e.g.: https://github.com/thiagopradi/octopus/issues/490. This is a side effect of the above issue, where the alternatives to Rails are taking a lot of the community away to focus on newer/shiner things. Fortunately, we have companies like GitHub and Shopify that are still very much invested in the success of the ecosystem.

All that said, it's still a great framework to go from 0 to production with a new idea or project.

Other ecosystems we're entrenched in (Node for example) have their share of issues as well, but we won't go into those.

The web has come a long way and expectations from consumers have evolved over the years. While admittedly a lot of the bloat likely comes from negative things like trackers, ads, etc there are also assets loaded on a typical page that genuinely enhance the user experience. On the list, Google Mail scores the highest in terms of bloat, but it's a full web app and daily users probably have come to be spoiled on some of the UX niceness that makes Google Mail enjoyable to use. Users would rather have that vs a plain HTML page with links. The empirical evidence is clear on that, otherwise the web would not have evolved as it did.

Software is built on layers of abstraction[0], and necessarily, there will be bloat as a byproduct of layering. If we had to map out complexity of what's really going on in a typical computer, the "bloat" floating at the top layer caused by JavaScript would be put to shame by the complexity in the underlying browser and the OS underneath that, all of which arguably are too "bloated" for 90% of daily use.

[0] https://xkcd.com/676/

When it comes to navigating China and your choices are Suit, Network, or Code, you take the Network every time. Alcohol tolerance is a plus.

The funny thing about Google as a Gatekeeper is that it's already a Gatekeeper via search. Even in a world where there are no 30% distribution shares, most products still live and die by their ranking on search results for either brand searches or long tail keywords. It's not uncommon to see brands buying their own name as keywords just to rank #1 on search results pages that are more and more fully loaded with ads above-the-fold, including competitors who buy keywords against well know brands.

The Play store is just additional icing on the cake. They're not losing sleep over the one unicorn exception known as Fortnite. 99.9% of other companies do not have the word of mouth to overcome the various gates, whether it's Google or Apple or Steam.

Re:amaze | Full-stack software developer | San Jose, CA | REMOTE (U.S.) and INTERNS welcome | https://www.reamaze.com

Re:amaze is a multi-channel customer support and messaging platform. We focus on helping businesses support, engage, and convert customers in a variety of ways.

We're looking for software engineers/developers who have a strong product sense and those looking for the challenge of not just implementing software, but also having a strong stake in defining the product. Working here includes autonomy, decision making, hard/interesting design decisions (both front-end and back-end), and direct interactions with customers.

Founders and current team are all experienced in SaaS and startups.

Email lwang [at] reamaze [dot] com with subject "HN Job Listing" if interested.

I recommend Journey to the West out of the four. Kind of like an RPG-esque journey about a monkey and his gang traveling in search of Buddhist scriptures. You'll get to learn about Sun Wukong, who is the basis for a lot of Chinese, Japanese, and (I believe?) Korean spin-off characters, like Goku from Dragonball[1]

Another good option is Romance of the Three Kingdoms which will cover a good portion of Chinese history (in a mythological way). A lot of the characters like Zhu Geliang [2] are still highly influential in modern Chinese culture.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Wukong#Influence [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhuge_Liang

Most discussions regarding Chinese literature would start with the big four (novels): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classic_Chinese_Novels