nationcrafting

I wish more of the internet was like this.

I love that they're hosted on their own websits, too. Like the hamsterdance and other stupid things from the 90s.

So much fun stuff nowadays is just memes on Reddit, fb or other social networks. They're still fun, but they close the gardens one joke at a time. Can you imagine how much less conformity there would be if even 10% of fb users also had fun on their own website or self-hosted blog?

You can see this in how ArianneSpace and ULA are trying to get to their next generation of vehicles (which won't be competitive in terms of re-usability)

Arianespace is a company run by bureaucrats. Incredibly frustrating environment. If you ever thought space was exciting, Arianespace will suck the life out of you. Even the areas where the top management know they need deep and impactful change, they'll bring in an outsider or two to bring "a new vision", then tell the outsider to keep working with all the old people who've built their mini-empire around methods that make no sense and keep them in a perpetual state of "irreplaceable ball and chain" on the company.

Are you saying resources get hurled into space when we use them?

Also, value can increase in a finite resources environment. For example, my iphone is worth a lot more, and is a lot more useful, than the materials it's made of.

So, if you're looking at .gov as a service provider, why give it a monopoly on providing those services if that makes its users dependent on it? Roads may be a little tricky, of course, but some services like US Mail could surely do with a few competitors to bring prices down and service up.

It'd be surreal if the stars on their flags were bookmarks.

not once did I see someone question if the government even has a right to determine who is allowed to be married, and why is should be involved at all.

This has literally been the Libertarian Party's position since the early 70s: it's none of government's business deciding whom one is or isn't allowed to marry.

I'm not sure. I was in Maastricht for a few months in 92 when the treaty was being signed. Maastricht is a border town between Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany. Every bar and restaurant I went to, every market stall, and many shops easily accepted 3 or 4 different currencies. Today this would be even easier, since so many people just pay with plastic.

France: "Why use your internet when we've got our own minitel?"

Euro as a common currency makes travel super convenient for example, not to mention the Schengen area and open borders.

Perhaps the various recommendations made in the late 80s and early 90s would be useful to reconsider. Hayek, for example, often suggested that the EEC could make every member nation's currency legal tender in all the others, to create a free market of currencies. He was a big fan of denationalising currencies anyway, and of having currencies compete against each other.

Another proposal on the table for many years was the idea of launching the Euro as a parallel currency to every nation's own currency. So, you could still pay your restaurant bills accross Europe with a single currency if you wanted to, but nations would still be able to fluctuate against it in case of trade surplus or deficit, the very thing that has been putting so much stress on the Euro's frequent deficit members (i.e. Greece, Portugal and Spain), and stress on the Euro itself.

You might be right. Very unusual comments indeed. And ridiculous, too. Everyone's entitled to their opinion, but so much commenting here is literally just a catalogue of received ideas.

Tesla are on a mission to solve massive problems for humankind while taking into account modern humans' lack of commitment to solving those problems in a way that would feel like a step back, or that would create discomfort. Tesla's existence as a market solution to the oil and pollution problems is evidence that you don't always need political coercion to solve problems like externalities: Tesla's cars are not only electric cars - i.e. the answer to a problem that could potentially destroy civilisation as we know it - they are also great cars, by any "petrolhead" standard.

As a company and an investment, Tesla's long term mission, its strategy and its step-by-step tactics have been presented in a way that is extremely rare for a company. Most of the work I do for brands this size involves working with a 5-year plan that is nowhere near as clear as Tesla's, and the plans are 5-years because that's when the owners' exit plan kicks in. Tesla's strategy set a clear path for 15 years at least.

So what's not's not to like? I think many investors feel they may have missed the boat on the next great world company. It's quite normal to sit on the edge for a while, to miss out on the opportunity, and to then find a dozen reasons to tell oneself it was good to pass on it.

Like others here, I don't think WP is terrible if you look at it through the eyes of their typical users.

I also disagree that nobody is building a better WP: I recently started working with Webflow, which is very good, quite powerful, and writes very clean code (better than most developers could write themselves).

And, on a more wysiwyg level, there are plenty of new companies like Squarespace offering a service targeting the same user-base as WP.

If your kid learns the alphabet at 4 or at 8, what's the difference?

It's a huge difference. As soon as a kid can read, they can learn in a way that isn't just you telling them stuff. They can self-direct their learning, read books about stuff, go online and devour Wikipedia, etc. It's not just "hey, can anyone not read a newspaper by the time they leave school?", it's "how soon does this kid have the tool to satisfy their natural curiosity about things that require more than someone telling them about it?" which establishes their relationship with learning itself, with knowing how to learn.

The fundamental problem is you can't have a partial union.

I imagine you're talking about the monetary union, because it is of course possible to have partial unions in the EU (many EU countries are not in the Eurozone, and many non-EU countries are in the EEA or in the Schenghen zone, enabling free trade and free movement of their citizens in and out of the other Schenghen countries).

But even in a monetary union, you can absolutely have a common currency without a common fiscal policy. A currency is just a measure of account, a medium of exchange and a store of wealth. We've had centuries of common currency in the form of gold equivalence (i.e. a hard gold standard). The moments we got into trouble with gold currencies are not inherent in the gold standard itself, but in the attempts by sovereigns to jiggle around with it (seigneurage, mixing gold with other metals, creating pretend gold-standards that allow them to create more paper currency than there is gold backing it up, etc.)

I've been directing creative brainstorms for many years, and reconsidering things we take for granted, like square wheels, is exactly what we do to trigger new ideas and solutions to problems.

We live in a fast-changing world. Just because something was good for Germany/Greece once, doesn't mean that is still the case.

I'm reminded of something PG wrote in a recent essay: "When experts are wrong, it's often because they're experts on an earlier version of the world."

Not quite.

The gold bull run of the 70s peaked at $850. So, even if you bought an ounce of gold at its peak, you'd be getting about $1300 for it today.

Cash, on the other hand, would have inflated away quite a lot, so your 100 bucks would buy you about 40 1980-dollars' worth of goods and services today.

the only reason people purchase a stock is for that stock to be worth more in the future

It depends on what you're interested in. Warren Buffett buys shares in companies he never plans to sell, like Wrigley's, Heinz, Dairy Queen, See's Candies and Coca-Cola, because he's more interested in the annual return on investment than in increasing the capital itself. To Buffett, owning shares in a company means owning a share of the company in every sense of the word. He's often quoted saying "you should only buy shares in companies you're happy to own for 10 years should the stock market close tomorrow".

Indeed (in der Tat), it's a remarkably easy language to learn for Anglo-saxons. Many words are even spelt the same way.

Lamp lamp Light licht Arm arm Hand hand Finger finger

Often words that are spelt weirdly in english (compared to how they're pronounced) make sense when you know the way they're pronounced in German e.g. eight (acht).

The only real complications are to do with declensions (nominative, accusative, genitive, etc.), subject-verb-object syntax, and composed words. But any programmer who can work in different programming languages will find those rather easy to learn.

Indeed. Sorry, I guess I'm showing my age assuming everyone knows which one I meant.

Here it is: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/90/Apple_iM...

Funnily enough, I too have often wondered about that.

I've also often wondered why your gender is the state's business at all. One way to make the whole gay marriage thing a non-issue would be to say it's nobody's business what you have between your legs, except your doctor and your partner.

There are a couple of scenarios where it would be an issue, like if you go to jail and there are no mixed gender jails, but it's likely that a little bit of imagination would fix that.

Good point re: keyboard and mouse. Especially the round mouse, just looking at that gives me a funny feeling in the metacarpals.

Re: Stanislaw Lem. You're right, he definitely feels like he belongs in the Soviet writers context. You can tell the difference in culture, context, commercial preoccupations, etc. when you compare Soderbergh's film version of Solaris with Tarkovsky's version. Both films were enjoyable, of course, but Tarkovsky was much closer to the depth of the book.

Design has always taken more prominence at apple over usability

I strongly disagree with you there. In fact, I'd say the exact opposite.

The experience of using the product has always been at the very core of Apple's design philosophy. The entire desktop metaphor, include the Trash, the files in folders, etc. is about simplifying the user experience with the computer.

The fact that anyone can just pick up an iPhone and pretty much immediately know what they should be doing, without reading a manual, tells you exactly that usability has been so thought out that it has become invisible. You just do what you want to do, without having to think about how to do it. So, it's the embodiment of the Steve Krug "Don't make me think" mindset: usability is design.

Simple.

You don't need to measure anything like intelligence or creativity to arrive at someone's market worth. Just measure, or estimate, the value of their output.

So: how much value are they creating that other humans are prepared to pay for?

I think they're fascinating from a Hayekian point of view, namely that small centralised groups of directors have only a fraction of the information necessary to direct large groups, compared to dispersed but dynamic information flows you get from market economies via the price signalling system. Which explains the vast misallocation of resources and overall malinvestment.

Funnily enough, the person to first advocate as little interventionism as possible for government was Chinese philosopher Laozi, who compared governing a nation to frying small fish for lunch: too much stirring and lunch is ruined.

Back when we still used Shockwave and Flash on the web, I often used Pong as a quick test to see if designers could program Lingo and Actionscript to a useful level, and how elegant their code was.

I'm not sure why so many people still keep advocating elections in an age when it ought to be clear to any objective observer that the average voter is sleepwalking into a new dark age.

Perhaps it's intellectual laziness, or perhaps it's a trait inherited from a time when a single person's voice still made a difference because communities were only a few hundred or thousand people.

Buckminster Fuller said something that I'm sure will resonate with many HNers, and that seems more likely to bring about positive change:

"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, design a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."

Beautiful! I saw another way of rendering these recently, which shows the increasing definition on the fly, here: https://guciek.github.io/web_mandelbrot.html#-0.5;0;2;1000

Or 18+, for when you can't get no satisfaction.

Hello das2, sorry for the late reply. Yes, it was down to Fujimori.

It's true that Fujimori is in jail right now, but not for corruption. He's in jail for his overzealous approach to the antiterrorist campaigns that took place in the early 90s.

When the Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path, a Maoist terrorist group that nearly managed to overthrow the state in the late 80s/early 90s) were at their peak, Fujimori came to power. Very shortly thereafter, the SL hijacked the Japanese embassy on a night when they had a big event on, kidnapping everyone from the Japanese ambassador to the directors of large Japanese corporations (Toyota, Sony, etc.).

Fujimori ordered a replica of the embassy to be built in the desert, and special forces trained there for weeks in preparation to storm the embassy. The operation was a great success, the kidnappers were killed, only one soldier died, none of the hostages died.

High on this amazing success, Fujimori ordered more campaigns against SL, and managed to pretty much eradicate them from the country. Two campaigns, however, did not go as planned. One at a university called La Cantuta, one in a poor district of Lima called Barrios Altos. Innocent people died in these campaigns, which had received his direct, personal go-ahead. That is what he went to trial for, and the reason he's in jail now.

Fujimori took over when the state itself was a failed state: hyperinflation of both the old Sol and the new Inti, had all but destroyed everyone's savings, political processes were sclerotic, there was enormous bureaucracy, no foreign investment, etc. Fujishock, as it has come to be called, was the process of undoing all this. Fujimori created the new Sol currency which has been a very stable currency ever since. Parliament was closed and replaced with one single congress and a super-simple process of election that elects both the percentage of parliamentary representatives and the president. Bureaucrats were sent home and the machinery of government simplified a great deal.

A lot of investment went into infrastructure, too: where it used to take more than a day for a farmer to take his produce to the nearest city, it can now take just 3 or 4 hours, which means they don't just go once a year but once every month, which puts them more in touch with the market and more responsive to price signals. Many things that would take forever to start (companies, brand registrations, etc.) can now be done online in a couple of days. The country has seen between 6 and 9% annual growth ever since the mid-90s, reducing poverty from over 50% to around 20% today.