181–190 of 235 posts
When the post came out, for the first time in a long time I found myself nodding my head with Graham, because I feel like basically everyone who has worked in a company that has found some form of product/market fit and started staffing and and delegating has had the experience of watching pasteurized process cheese food faceplant trying to understand and further a sane goal a founding team got some traction with whe…
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For grains, fruits, vegetables? I am not so sure. Is manual labor the limiting factor to have more diverse cultures? It would be nice if we could get rid of factory farming though, but I doubt we are close to a point where we can have free range cattle being tended mostly by robots.
Monocultures exist mainly to facilitate our current state-of-the-art mechanisation, so the short answer to your question is "yes", with the possible exception of grains (who grow naturally in clumps). But as the sibling comment pointed out, sufficiently advanced robotics will be prohibitively expensive for a long time ahead. I'd like to think that one day in the distant future a team of robotic "monkeys" can go out a…
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Sure, ageism is bad. I'm in my 50s too and I've seen my share of hype cycles. But I think there is a danger of overreacting to the unbridled enthusiasm of younger people. Every new cyle comes with ideas that are similar to what we have seen before. Sometimes I find myself thinking, OK, been there, done that, doesn't work. But I suspect that there is a sort of experience bias that lets me see the similarities far more…
> small differences were important enough to change the world unpredictable ways I completely agree with this. I’m also in my 50s but I lean techno-optimist. Whenever there’s a new hype cycle, I’m looking for those small differences that might overcome the hurdles we’ve seen in the past. For example, the PicturePhone was demoed in 1964. Now we’re all on Zoom constantly. I’ve lived through many AI hype cycles. The cur…
Same fundamental design approach, but needed another 25 years of improvement in battery and motor tech.
IIRC the first electric car was proposed in the 1920s or thereabouts.
Let's not forget that people themselves changed and what is popular. Look at any top show hn post and you'll see all this talk about the market fit, the competitors, and how much money that product can make. The hackers have disappeared and we're apart of the prohlem. Should really have a tag rule to prevent any boring business start up bogus discussions when the poster wants.
This isn't really true. Look at the current top Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41544969. Zero business discussion on there.
I've been avoiding the business threads on HN for about 10 years now[1], and the frontpage still has enough stuff to keep me coming back, and the comments on those threads are fine as well. There are fewer comments on those threads, and that too is a good thing.
HN is 3 distinct sub-communities, to my mind: startup news, hacker news and what I think of as "the human condition" news which encompasses humanities posts like lithub and so on. I participate in 2 of them.
I agree with you that we hackers are part of the problem. But it's not a systemic problem. We can still choose what we attend to. We're not lacking for options.
[1] I really wish that people used HN's favorites feature more, and that favorites were more organically discoverable. Here are mine: https://news.ycombinator.com/favorites?id=akkartik
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Yeah, this is something which FUTO really made me aware of. That this Facebook was built on top of an entire ecosystem of open source tools and yet these tools like PHP and Apache will get not even a fraction of the wealth which Zuckerberg now has. And if you think about what he built in comparison to what PHP and Apache are, it's such a thin layer. So somewhere we are getting the distribution of economic reward wron…
When Starbucks sells a cup of coffee who makes more money? Starbucks or the coffee farmer? This is the same thing. Businesses that are closer to the consumer make more money than their suppliers.
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> none of the items on your list are things we really need This can be said about practically any technology outside agriculture. It’s wild to pretend the items on that list don’t increase quality of life.
The problem is not of technology. The problem is that we are working to apply technology solutions with no regard to the scale and trade-offs involved. - Automation is good. Striving for "100% robotic warehouses" is a recipe to further concentrate wealth around the handful of corporations that can deploy it. - Electric engines are good. Thinking that we would be better off by giving one car to every adult person inst…
Having drugs to treat it is good. But a food system and built environment that causes a big chunk of the population to develop T2D in middle-age, and sees the solution as "take a pill to make it go away" is a profoundly unhealthy one.
Insulin-insensitivity is supposed to be a rare-ish disease of old age, not a common disease of middle age.
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For fruits, manual labour is a large factor but not the only limiting factor. We Could see fragile fruits drop in price with good robotics, but not below other more mass-harvestable fruits such as oranges or nuts (that can be shaken from trees with tractors) Robotics within farming is often more about improving what is already being done in a more sustainable way. The primary benefit of monocropping is easier automat…
Another way to "solve" the problem for fragile fruits: stop trying to make them at scale. Let people them grow by themselves on their home gardens, or have community gardens/greenhouses that are jointly managed by a school/library...
(I'm not disagreeing with either point btw, I think it's a better way to live, but good luck convincing the wider populous).
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One problem with ageism and youth bias in the industry is that we are still heavily populated with devs more interested in hopping on the latest framework they heard about at a conference than in actually solving users problems. The amount of "how do I justify a rewrite because our tech stack is bad" posts you see in your typical reddit/etc programmer forum would remind you of this.
> devs more interested in hopping on the latest framework they heard about at a conference than in actually solving users problems. The amount of "how do I justify a rewrite because our tech stack is bad" posts you see in your typical reddit/etc programmer forum would remind you of this. These are old complaints. My dad worked in the tech industry since the pre-Mosaic days, and even then you'd hear the same arguments…
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Yeah, it's the eye contact part that I'm really curious to see the self driving car learn.
Oh you will, soon. Eye contact itself isn't hard, given it's 99% in the mind of the beholder anyway. You'll see it and then either regret it, or join the cohort of people saying it's not true eye contact because there is no soul behind the window of machine eyes; mimicking the current talk that LLMs are just stochastic parrots without a mind behind them.
At that point we're basically talking autonomous cars with big external-facing emoji screens. "That Fiat is looking red in the face, it's about to cut in".
That's more communication and emotional bandwidth than 99% of driver-to-driver interactions. Someone cuts in and you flip them the finger, how often to they even see it?
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Another way to "solve" the problem for fragile fruits: stop trying to make them at scale. Let people them grow by themselves on their home gardens, or have community gardens/greenhouses that are jointly managed by a school/library...
Nice if you can convince people that 1) putting yourself into time-poverty to earn more money is not the right thing to do, and 2) fragile fruits should be available mostly when they're in season somewhere within a few hundred km of your location. (I'm not disagreeing with either point btw, I think it's a better way to live, but good luck convincing the wider populous).
We live in a world where we simultaneously (a) can do basically anything with a glass rectangle in our pockets and (b) do not stop feeling a sense of boredom and dread. Re-learning how to do some things that take time and do not satisfy our immediate sense of gratification would be a good thing.