Hacker News: Ambolia

>"Bombshell: Oliver Sacks (a humane man & a fine essayist) made up many of the details in his famous case studies, deluding neuroscientists, psychologists, & general readers for decades. The man who mistook his wife for a hat? The autistic twins who generated multi-digit prime numbers? The institutionalized, paralyzed man who tapped out allusions to Rilke? Made up to embellish the stories. Probably also: the aphasic patients who detected lies better than neurologically intact people, including Ronald Reagan's insincerity."

New comment by Ambolia in "Ask HN: Is it just me or techno-optimism died in the past few years?"

Ambolia — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 16:22:59 +0000

Energy usage per capita peaked in america in the 1970s[1]. After that, maybe there were efficiency gains, but by using more energy you get crazy progress in the early 20th century, like doing 100x or 1000x more work per person. With efficiency gains I doubt you'll even get 2x the work in most cases.

There's also the Productivity Paradox[2] where progress in IT (computers, internet, ...) didn't translate on higher productivity in society. There's different theories about this, like it being caused by the change from industrial economy to a service economy.

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/04/10/176801719/two-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox

New comment by Ambolia in "Cloudflare Global Network experiencing issues"

Ambolia — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 13:46:52 +0000

It costs a lot of money to move, you don't know if the alternative will be any better, and if it affects a lot of companies then it's nobody's fault. "Nobody ever got fired for buying Cloudflare/AWS" as they say.

New comment by Ambolia in "Failing to Understand the Exponential, Again"

Ambolia — Sun, 28 Sep 2025 14:48:58 +0000

I will worry when I see Startups competing on products with companies 10x, 100x, or 1000x times their size. Like a small team producing a Photoshop replacement. So far I haven't seen anything like that. Big companies don't seem to be launching new products faster either, or fixing some of their products that have been broken for a long time (MS teams...)

AI obviously makes some easy things much faster, maybe helps with boilerplate, we still have to see this translate into real productivity.

New comment by Ambolia in "Nostr"

Ambolia — Fri, 19 Sep 2025 07:48:57 +0000

It would be cool if you could somehow form chains of trust with this, maybe even with links to other social media, where you could "follow other people that this guy has vetted". I want my social media censored and curated, but I want to choose my own censors and curators.

AI Economic Meltdown: The Coming Expert Squeeze

Ambolia — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 05:31:00 +0000

Article URL: https://twitter.com/cirnosad/status/1967598082520154219

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45258368

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by Ambolia in "Why Barcelona Bought the Building That Symbolizes Its Housing Crisis"

Ambolia — Sat, 22 Feb 2025 11:05:14 +0000

It's a publicity stunt to score points while solving nothing. Same issue in Spain with squatters, it allows the goverment to confront tenants with landlords while the goverment does nothing.

New comment by Ambolia in "How to use Postgres for everything"

Ambolia — Sat, 07 Dec 2024 14:15:19 +0000

What about binary blobs? I hate having to store them outside of the database and that you can't just do a dbdump/import to clone a project.

New comment by Ambolia in "The Vast Emptiness of Social Psychology"

Ambolia — Sun, 04 Aug 2024 09:36:33 +0000

I like the rule of thumb: "If the result of a social psychology experiment doesn't agree with your grandma, it's probably fake."

New comment by Ambolia in "The man who killed Google Search?"

Ambolia — Wed, 24 Apr 2024 08:33:41 +0000

For me what killed search was 2016, after that year if some search term is "hot news" it becomes impossible to learn anything about it that wasn't published in the last week and you just get the same headline repeated 20 times in slightly different wording about it.

After that I only use search for technical problems, and mouth to mouth or specific authors for everything else.