People keep saying I’m “anti woke and anti tran$”.
But it’s things like this that give me pause. Why not just not read the books you don’t like??
I love to re-read books I like every few years.
Similarly If someone said that people should accept the fine ladies from the local gentleman’s clubs coming over to teach an 8 year old kid about their lives - everyone would be up in arms.
Instead why not allow the fine ladies from the gentleman’s club to teach their 8 year old kid these things at home and then the local butcher can teach their 8 year old kid about their lives and principles at their home also? Shouldn’t classrooms be for the basics?
And I (as a 58 year old black man) loved the original little mermaid! I remember going to see it with my girlfriend decades ago - was a magical day.
Instead of changing the original story and characters, why not do something original instead?
See how all of this stuff does not make sense anymore?
Now because my eyes are going bad I listen to audible. Will I have to listen to a changed version of these books instead?
> Instead of changing the original story and characters, why not do something original instead?
It’s also kind of bullshit that like Italians got their own new content and original characters (Rocky, etc.) and everyone else has to settle for being ret-conned into existing content.
SpaceX is a private company so they don't publish revenue numbers. Also your revenue estimate is from 2018. Current estimations put their 2022 revenue at $3.2B. And BDS does much more than orbital rocket launches. They are the third largest defense contractor in the world. Most of their revenue comes from manufacturing aircraft. Except for ICBMs, BDS's orbital launches are conducted by ULA, which has less revenue and fewer employees than SpaceX.
But employee count and revenue aren't the most accurate way to compare the two companies. The best metric is, "How much payload did you launch to orbit?" Last year SpaceX sent twice as much mass to orbit as the rest of the world combined. They have landed more rockets than ULA has launched. SpaceX also holds the record for most consecutive orbital launches without a partial or complete mission failure. This year they have averaged one orbital launch every 4.5 days. ULA has not launched a single time this year.
There are many good criticisms of Elon's companies, but it's silly to claim that SpaceX isn't the biggest rocket company.
Plenty of people that make the world we live in are not dicks. This take is very reductive towards all those people while overmagnifying Elon’s personal role in his companies’ successes.
As an example, Iceland’s 2022 person of the year also founded an agency that was hugely influential for tech messaging and branding over the last few years, and he has a reputation as being a really great guy.
Old boy's company was acquired by Twitter, with a contract where he was retained. If it's the standard deal, he only gets paid out if he stays the term in the contract (because old boy was a huge part of the 'assets' that were acquired). Now, instead of explicitly firing old boy (which would then require Musk fulfill the acquisition contract and pay dude) Musk/HR get super squishy. Real men keep their promises and fulfill contracts that they have made. It's not just that Musk is a dick, it's that we're seeing he's not a man of his word but a creature of convenience to himself.
The fact the he's screwing someone who instead of letting the fact they were dealt a bad hand stop them but instead pushed to be the top and what they could do (so like the highest idea of a man and what is impressive in a person) makes the contrast even sharper.
16px is the default text size in most browsers. Text below this size gets harder to read, so it’s safest to avoid it for body text. The higher you go beyond 16px, the easier the text is to read."
Out of curiosity, I played around with HN font size: by default on my monitor is 12px, at 13px is almost the same, at 14px is great, 16px is not better than 14px so it is wasting screen space. I think it depends a lot on the pixel physical size, that means diagonal and resolution.
Hacker News was designed by someone who considers design a waste of time and a distraction from the purity of information, and who made the site ugly and awkward on purpose to keep normies away. Honestly we're lucky it looks as good as it does.
IMO, HN looks better than many sites created by professional designers. It allows you to actually read the content instead of waiting ten seconds for the page to load, then scrolling through kilometers of whitespace and unrelated “hero images”.
>It allows you to actually read the content instead of waiting ten seconds for the page to load, then scrolling through kilometers of whitespace and unrelated “hero images”.
I'm able to read the content on every site I visit even when it has whitespace and images but to each their own. I'm glad Hacker News serves your needs.
Text should have the same size today is it did in the 90s. If your monitor has a higher resolution then please use DPI scaling isntead of wasting screen space for everyone else. That way old websites will still be readable without having to update everything.
HN would have rendered at the equivalent of 16px (exactly, actually) on a 90s computer. The issue here is that Apple and Windows assume two different default DPIs for a 90s computer (72 vs 96dpi), and as result, what 1pt is can differ by 1/3rd.
Hustle bros were there since the beginning of time.
Think about that.
Every new thing for thousands of years someone always jumped on it for short term $$$ gain.
The hustle bros have a firm place in the ecosystem and the internet has just put a magnifying glass on the movement and made the hustle faster and easier.
Don’t hate the player (or the game), for they are as old as time.
"for they are as old as time" really isn't a justification for not disliking the player or the game. Shit is also around since the beginning of time, and we still generally avoid rolling in it.
>Nanni created the cuneiform letter for delivery to Ea-nasir. Inscribed on it is a complaint to Ea-nasir about a copper delivery of the incorrect grade, and issues with another delivery;[9] Nanni also complained that his servant (who handled the transaction) had been treated rudely. He stated that, at the time of writing, he had not accepted the copper, but had paid the money for it.
You can hate the player and the game. It’s not old as time. Capitalism and our current economic model as we know it isn’t as old as time.
Yes there were always hustlers and con artists, but they’re not exactly well revered. Jumping into a space and f*king it up for short term game doesn’t deserve respect?
Con artists before the modern era were reigned in by their local communities. A grifter would gain a bad local reputation and find themselves unable to continue running their scheme as they'd run out of rubes to dupe. They'd have to leave to the next town if they wanted to keep grifting. But now with social media, grifters can instantly find a new audience of rubes who are unaware of their past exploits
I think it was easier to be a grifter back in ancient times. Low communication among victims. No photographs to identify you , no permanant records (or at least not like the internet)
Capitalism is as old as time. People save resources, build wealth, and reinvest it. Happened in ancient Assyria, Greece, Rome, Persia, forever. Trade is an emergent phenomena.
The hyper restricted model of capitalism we have, where every last damn thing is regulated and taxed, is the innovation that began in Amsterdam and has continued for 400 years. But the concept of markets, trade, investment, and building wealth is as old as humanity.
>There are, it has been said, two types of people in the world. There are those who, when presented with a glass that is exactly half full, say: this glass is half full. And then there are those who say: this glass is half empty.
>The world belongs, however, to those who can look at the glass and say: What’s up with this glass? Excuse me? Excuse me? This is my glass? I don’t think so. My glass was full! And it was a bigger glass! Who’s been pinching my beer?
>And at the other end of the bar the world is full of the other type of person, who has a broken glass, or a glass that has been carelessly knocked over (usually by one of the people calling for a larger glass), or who had no glass at all, because he was at the back of the crowd and had failed to catch the barman’s eye.
This article reminds me of some guy on Twitter who says nothing in AI space has changed since 2020.
Maybe so.
But you know what’s changed? Someone decided to get their a$$ out of the AI labs, write a really simple interface just to “get it up” and released it to the world.
Most SPA is totally unnecessary and a big waste of time.
People are worrying about the speed of SSR when they should be worrying about the developer time on the client which is several orders of magnitude more.
I think people have fallen in love so much with complex Javascript frameworks that they’ve forgotten how easy it is to get to an MVP with SSR.
Speed is important.
Speed of development is even more important for businesses in this era who have to get to revenue faster.
And that’s why things like Phoenix LiveView and its counterparts in other languages is catching on so quickly.
People are getting fatigued with the latest flavor of the month JS framework.
But what do I know… I’m just a lowly “developer” working for crumbs. Never even finished a CS degree. Sigh.
For simple projects it really doesn't make much difference. Depending on your available tools, client-side or server-side rendering might be easier. In the end the only difference is what is going down the wire: data or HTML.
That said, client-side rendering is strictly more general than server-side rendering. So I prefer to use client-side rendering everywhere so that I don't have to switch between two different modalities and maintain two sets of tooling (or worse switch in the middle of a project!) I gather this is against the current fashion but whatever.
There comes a point in a project where the amount of client-side features requested makes you wish you had started with a fully-fledged modern framework like React. New features could be a single React component plus some updates to existing callbacks, and a new API call, but instead requires adding to a big accreting ball of HTML templates and a hodge-podge of vanilla (and maybe jQuery) js amounting to a bespoke framework that someone had to develop to manage the complexity.
I absolutely love Django and old-style web frameworks, but they are not without their own complexity risks.
The rest of the world treats Japan as something "special". All the media/manga/anime/pr0n/temples/culture and people.
What I've learned traveling to various countries in the region?
There's nothing really special about Japan, it's people, or it's media.
The country and its denizens have been blown out of proportion with a kind of reputation that's out of this world... for the past 50 years. Yeah I look forward to going back and meeting more people next time -- but it's just a super-ordinary place.
I've lived here for over ten years and generally agree with you. I love it here, but I also feel that some westerners treat Japan with a "specialness" or "exoticness" that it doesn't quite deserve.
Yes. I've been here almost that long. Mostly in the rural areas. It's just a nice normal place.. I think there are a few problems with perceptions of Japan. not being part of the anglo-sphere, most of the everyday stuff doesn't make it in front of western eyes. What does is filtered through journalists, like the BBC guy, who have to fit their stories into certain safe tropes. Another big place of interflow of culture is with manga/anime subcultures, which are produced and consumed by a very specific part of Japanese society in the first place, then exoticised a great deal by the types of internet communities where it is popular.
> Another big place of interflow of culture is with manga/anime subcultures, which are produced and consumed by a very specific part of Japanese society in the first place, then exoticised a great deal by the types of internet communities where it is popular.
More niche but in a similar vein I was a bit disappointed to find not everyone was an extreme metalhead in Norway and that most people were normal too.
It's not a straightforward example of capitalism because it doesn't earn enough through its service to support itself, and must be propped up by an otherwise external entity.
The concept of "private ownership" is not definitionally identical to the concept of "capitalism", I hope you realize...
Private ownership and the protection of those property rights are exactly what capitalism is. As long as there is no coercive entity dictating what YC can and cannot do with it's capital then HN absolutely is a product of capitalism.
Capitalism doesn't mean "earn[ing] enough through its service to support itself". Why do you think that people are not free to finance sites that promote other branches of their business under capitalism?
For what it's worth, I Googled "Define: capitalism" and when I saw:
> an economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit.
I synthesized this to what I wrote above. If you disagree that's fine, but I think "for profit" is a critical aspect of capitalism, and while it's arguably true that HN provides YC with "a profit" it's an intangible and indirect one, which to me is not "straightforwardly capitalistic".
I'll admit I was a bit snarky but my thanks was genuine - I enjoy learning why people believe the things they do.
Anyways, my final argument is if an individual asset of a company doesn't directly generate revenue yet increases company profit, would it not be "un-capitalistic" if that company were to extinguish that asset? It seems to me that throwing away profit would be antithetical to that definition of capitalism.
The $30k espresso machine in the Google office does nothing to generate revenue, however it helps Google become more competitive in the labor market which (at least they think) increases profit. None of these situations are edge cases, they are just natural outcomes that exist when people are free to compete. If it is expected that a decision will lead to a profit, it seems straightforward that one would make that decision.
It was fun discussing this with you, I hope you have a good day.
That's an interesting question. It's true that HN doesn't earn revenue and that it could not stand on its own. But it's also true that YC is more valuable with HN than without it. I think you have to mark that in capitalism's column, even if it's a weird edge case.
Maybe more companies should be more open to more weird edge cases and maybe that would make them richer and therefore more capitalist? I don't know.
A lot of my reason for googling was to find facts or answers for what I’m writing or coding.
Now I use ChatGPT as an “assistant” to do a lot of tasks that I would have normally done with laborious searching through google.
It truly saves a lot of time.
Google is right to be quite worried.
Sure I still use google but really, maybe only 40% of as much time as I did before.
Why research: “give me 30 of the most common health conditions related to the human liver” and spend a lot of time in google, when the Ai can spit out that in seconds?
And worse I can ask the Ai to write a short couple of paragraphs about each one.
Then I can confirm the output and clean up the generated text into my own style.
What do I do?
I do online marketing and programming to support online marketing activities.
I write. I plan. I code. I hire.
We just taught a junior employee who is not great as a writer to use ChatGPT to help her with a good start to writing.
The training for her was how to formulate detailed and highly specific “prompts” and to use google as a backup to confirm facts in the AI generated output.
It’s not there to replace people’s work. It’s there to make them much, much more efficient.
These arguments are just like the old days when wikipedia showed up. Don't miss the forest for the trees. ChatGPT is a huge threat to google and a bunch of other industries.
Not comparable. Wikipedia has always had a strict policy on citing sources. ChatGPT can't cite sources by design, because its answers are based on synthesis.
It wouldn't be too hard to program at least gpt3 to basically take a chatGPT answer, go to google, scrape results and verify if the chatGPT answer was factual or not and maybe give it a score or rating of factual-ness.
Simple answer adhd, if I could ship a product I'd already probably be rich, instead I'm scraping by as a freelance dev. Though, chatGPT probably could help me code it anyways lol.
It’s funny because when I was in high school the argument was always “books, published articles and other print media are actual source material, Google doesn’t give you that”
Or Google. There are plenty of pages out there that (e.g.) claim that Alzheimers is caused by drinking out of aluminum cans, or that the world is controlled by grey aliens from Zeta Reticuli.
Absolutely as opposed to those things. With Google, if you use a reliable source like Mayo, NIH, even a WebMD, It is clearly more likely to have accurate information than something that proves even numbers are prime. Certainly all those things can be inaccurate but where in the world you think ChatGPT pattern matches it’s information from?
Exactly. ChatGPT is clearly very impressive and useful, but nothing from its output should be treated as valid or factual to any degree.
Information generated by humans will include things like transpositional errors, logical errors, popular misconceptions, and misinterpretations of data. Mistakes happen, but human mistakes are at least tethered to real thoughts/information.
On the other hand, AI will happily spin up a complete fabrication with zero basis in reality, give you as much detail as you ask for, and dress it all up in competent and authoritative-sounding prose. It will have all the style of a textbook answer, while the substance will be pure nonsense.
Still a great tool, but only with the caveat that you approach it with the mindset that it's actively set out to catch you off guard and deceive you.
> AI will happily spin up a complete fabrication with zero basis in reality, give you as much detail as you ask for, and dress it all up in competent and authoritative-sounding prose.
You can't take such articles seriously unless they have been independently reproduced multiple times. So, your hypothetical "ChatMD-GPT" would have to also filter on that basis and perhaps calculate some sort of confidence level.
And it has already likely been trained on correct information and yet it produces bad results. It certainly has been trained data that explains what prime numbers and yet it produces what it produces, whereas using Google and hitting a credible source directly is more accurate and efficient.
Let's say ChatGPT gives you false information 50% of the time. It is still useful.
Just like it is harder to find primes numbers than verify that a number is prime, it is harder to dig up potential tidbits of information than to verify a piece of information handed to you is true.
50% is still useful? A broken watch is useful in that sense as well I guess. I can only see that has useful if you don’t include efficient in the definition of useful.
I feel like I've seen this on hacker news before, on other subjects. Someone will gush about how new technology X is great, but they give reasons that seem really odd to me. I've never really found Google laborious for searching for facts or especially coding solutions, and when it does provide me with differing options there are almost always great reasons why those options might all be relevent. With ChatGPT you're going to get one verbose answer that's probably wrong and presents none of the context as to why it might be wrong. So sure, if you're only using ChatGPT to answer questions to which you know the answer, it could be quicker.
>Why research: “give me 30 of the most common health conditions related to the human liver” and spend a lot of time in google, when the Ai can spit out that in seconds?
Because it's not going to be right! If you actually need to know the answer to that question you need to actually find a reputable source. And that's what Google gives you. I'm quite certain that the most common health conditions for the human liver vary by country, will ChatGPT give you the actual answer you're looking for? Maybe, some of the time. Will it save you time, no! because you can't use the answer unless you google it to confirm.
It sounds like your using ChatGPT to pump out worthless marketing SEO. Yes, that's a niche where creating volume of material with no value is common place. The aim shouldn't be to make that more efficient, it should be to find ways to entirely filter that out of the internet. What you're producing is literally the only material people should be using ChatGPT for instead of the web - low quality verbose text that is indifferent to fact checking.
> I can confirm the output and clean up the generated text into my own style... to support online marketing activities.
it sounds like you're using AI generated output to do content marketing to support SEO activities for a healthcare client at a marketing agency
if this is the case, when humans search for [organic] content on health conditions related to the human liver (on Google) you are hoping they land on ChatGPT generated content you published (for your client), to help the client avoid buying Google Ads to get those customers
at some point your content will rank well enough that other SEOs will do the same thing to compete, leading to dilution of overall quality content as it's all SEO optimized content, which makes Search generally unusable.
This, to be fair, has been happening well before ChatGPT, but will only accelerate.
Compare with an actual expert because the list from ChatGPT is almost certainly incomplete and will inevitably contain plausible-sounding but completely wrong claims. One of the big challenges here is when you don’t know the field well enough to know what ChatGPT didn’t include on it’s list at all or be able to tell when there are multiple similar sounding things being conflated.
I don’t really get your example. You could search for common liver conditions and then get a link to WebMD or Mayo Clinic very, very quickly and you can be very confident that it is accurate. If I’m a 4th grader using ChatGPT to cheat on my math homework, I might be quite satisfied with the answer that 42 is a prime number and even provide its great proof.
Sure you can bleat on and on that it’s not GPL blah blah.
But I see some VA’s who have English as a third language step up their game and be able to be more efficient?
They don’t have to pay a cent. Just have an internet connection and an e-mail address and they are on the same playing field as you.
That’s open enough for me. And for the vast number of people outside the HN ivory tower.