Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47604245

Points: 171

# Comments: 193

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47579407

Really enjoyed this quote:

> a clerk in a large insurance company in New York, and so here you see his office - drones laid out at desks almost as far at the eye can see. Each desk has a telephone, rolodex, typewriter and a large electro-mechanical calculating machine.

> In effect, every person on that floor is a cell in a spreadsheet. The floor is a worksheet and the building is an Excel file, with thousands of cells each containing a single person. The links between cells are made up of a typewriter, carbon copies ('CC') and an internal mail system, and it takes days to refresh whenever someone on the top floor presses F9.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47579407

Points: 10

# Comments: 1

The first post-revolution organizational system of the US, described in the Articles of Confederation, is very different than the difficult and contingent pivot to a federal system. Almost a million US citizens died in the transition.

> In the centuries after Archimedes invented the Archimedes' screw, developments of propeller design led to the torus marine propeller... it was invented in the early 1890s

"the centuries" indeed. :)

The agentic system that uses MCP (e.g., an LLM) is fundamentally non-deterministic. The LLM's decision of which tool to call, when to call it, and what to do with the response is stochastic.

This might be sufficient for an independent contractor or student. It shouldn't be used in a production agent.

If the administration pressures the Federal Reserve into lowering interest rates, say, right before November 2026, then we lock in a stagflationary cycle. An initial stock rally then long-term bond yields rising on inflation fears. A weakening U.S. dollar, and a Federal Reserve that has no tools to fight inflation in the medium-term.

It misleadingly describes the scale, coordination, and intent. It uses a minor detail to trivialize an act explicitly intended to reduce military capacity.