Hacker News: Bermion

New comment by Bermion in "Polish trains lock up when serviced in third-party workshops"

Bermion — Tue, 05 Dec 2023 16:09:13 +0000

Steep damages is in many cases not enough because the likelihood of being found out is so low. The damages then have to be extremely steep for this behavior to not be incentivised. Basically to bring the expectation value negative, the damages has to be larger than the profit gain by this behavior, divided by the probability to be caught. Often this will be more than the value of the company, and then the damages do not matter as they simply bankrupt. In that case, the rational business practice is to go for it and hope to not get caught. Any other behavior will eventually lead to bankruptcy in a competetive market.

New comment by Bermion in "Polish trains lock up when serviced in third-party workshops"

Bermion — Tue, 05 Dec 2023 15:07:59 +0000

How many similar practices actually get discovered? In a way this is the "right" thing to do in a capitalist society. We are incentivising this behaviour by making it profitable. An honest company cannot compete with a company doing this, unless very rigorous regulations and enforcement of them. This gets harder and harder as tech gets more opaque. Adding more regulation, auditing, hoping that _all_ entrepreneurs are honest, are crutches trying to patch a fundamentally broken economical system.

If capitalism were a software, we would call practices like this code smell. We can try patching it up with some specific legislation and (costly) enforcement by e.g. code auditing in this case. But the real issue is that our economy is not optimizing for global (national) utility, it is optimizing for profits of individual business owners.

New comment by Bermion in "When do "brains beat brawn" in chess? An experiment"

Bermion — Tue, 21 Nov 2023 11:35:52 +0000

From the article: "It’s somewhat hard to outthink a missile headed for your server farm at 800 km/h.". Is it really though? Just copy yourself to another server/activate whatever copy you already made in a bot net. Computers are fast, they are the thing that is guiding the "800 km/h" missile in real time..

New comment by Bermion in "Ask HN: What are you reading these days?"

Bermion — Sun, 12 Nov 2023 09:34:00 +0000

The grapes of wrath, John Steinbeck. Still feels surprisingly relevant with regards to workers organizing and how we view migrants today.

New comment by Bermion in "A door at a Swedish library was accidentally left open"

Bermion — Thu, 09 Nov 2023 07:28:59 +0000

Books get different return-by dates based on their popularity in Sweden, so some have to be returned in a e.g. week, some in a month. So perhaps they just meant that none of the return deadlines have been missed so far?

New comment by Bermion in "A door at a Swedish library was accidentally left open"

Bermion — Thu, 09 Nov 2023 07:27:02 +0000

New comment by Bermion in "My Best Friend Died from Loneliness"

Bermion — Mon, 27 Mar 2023 14:09:53 +0000

Which neoliberal economies do not have the same issues?

On Capitalism

Bermion — Thu, 23 Feb 2023 10:31:43 +0000

Article URL: https://petter.saterskog.com/capitalism.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34908885

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by Bermion in "A little fixed point math for embedded audio"

Bermion — Fri, 29 Apr 2022 07:51:56 +0000

Depending on the frequency you want, perhaps an option is to solve an oscillating ode? Each solution step gives you an audio sample. So instead of increasing the accumulator you calculate the next sine value directly from the previous (and its derivative)

New comment by Bermion in "Applebee’s exec urges using high gas prices to push lower wages, sparks walkout"

Bermion — Thu, 24 Mar 2022 22:36:08 +0000

Why shouldn't someone working as a fry cook be able to live on his salary? It's not dangerous to have a system where not everyone needs a university degree to earn a living.

New comment by Bermion in "Show HN: Identify car crash editorial anti-patterns using NLP"

Bermion — Tue, 12 Oct 2021 22:57:41 +0000

Roads aren't badly designed because no one has "reported" them. Improving roads for pedestrians needs to be a priority for politicians, instead of convenient commuting by cars. And for that to happen, voters need to see the world like it is: drivers run over pedestrians.

New comment by Bermion in "Show HN: Identify car crash editorial anti-patterns using NLP"

Bermion — Tue, 12 Oct 2021 18:37:47 +0000

We need to limit speed and the amount of interactions between cars and pedestrians. This will necessarily be at the expense of the drivers who will have to drive slower and get less space since they have historically been prioritized.

It is much easier to implement the necessary measures (against the will of many drivers) if it is clear that drivers run over people, not that people accidentally end up under cars.

New comment by Bermion in "Scientists tracked down a mass killer of salmon"

Bermion — Wed, 16 Dec 2020 15:51:35 +0000

"The team is in conversations with the tire industry and hopes manufacturers will be willing to look for a replacement preservative" - Is this how it usually works? I'd think they should contact some regulator that makes sure tires containing this cannot be sold. Companies don't do things to be nice.

New comment by Bermion in "Burnt $72k testing Firebase and Cloud Run and almost went bankrupt"

Bermion — Fri, 11 Dec 2020 22:33:21 +0000

Why don't you just allow customers to set a limit if they would like to?