https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Short_Stay_in_Hell

The numbers produced by permutations are astounding! Especially compared to the (much smaller) numbers in our actual physical universe.

I would encourage dedicated readers here to aggressively and persistently discount the value of HN as a tastemaker and trendsetter.

HN is actually a trailing indicator on tastes and trends, essentially by design. Things only make it to the front page if they get submitted and voted upward by a large number of people. That means it’s all stuff that is public and seems cool to a bunch of random people browsing a website. Not exactly cutting edge.

Basically every community, online or not, over-indexes on its own importance. Like how random small towns can get so worried about international terrorists targeting them. To folks who love HN, of course the great forces of the world would be attracted to compete here. Look how obviously awesome it is, right?

Paul Graham said HN was set up on the theory that it would efficiently surface great ideas and entrepreneurs for Ycombinator. Needless to say, that did not pan out. (How often do you see PG or any YC leadership here anymore?) Honestly I am mystified as to why YC continues to operate it at all.

Anyone serving hobbyists, commercially or on a volunteer basis, needs to accept that there will be some number of hobbyists “below the line” of what you can reasonably support. Those folks will just struggle with what you can provide to them, and you will never be able to address all their complaints, concerns, mistakes, etc.

You just have to mentally cast them free on their own. At most, encourage them to find fellow hobbyists who can help them level up where they need to in order to engage with your offering.

Correct

I don’t think anyone can look at the company Craigslist in 2026 and say it has spent the last 30 years satisfying a legal duty to maximize profit.

I’d like to provide maybe a clarification here that there is zero existing fiduciary duty in regular corporations to say yes to evil things, or even to turn a profit at all. A for-profit C corporation can legally sell stock, lose money every year, and go out of business, if the board of directors approves that strategy. Fiduciary duty exists primarily in areas of accurate communication and the avoidance of crime, fraud, etc.

A B corp basically is a C corp, but one that has formally published that their strategy includes a commitment to some social benefit. But if a C corp wanted to publish the same message to shareholders it could, and shareholder recourse would basically be to either try to replace the board, or sell the stock.

There is a very high volume of legitimate calls from Africa, and scammers actually have tons of capital to work with.

And this does not even get into the technical difficulty of defining and detecting a “call” “from” Africa. Voice can be tunneled to U.S. infrastructure and then passed to telephony carriers as a “domestic call.”

You’ve definitely hit on the core of the issue with the Snow Leopard myth, though: comparing the final battle-hardened bug-patched version of an OS, to a newly released version. Seems like “Snow Leopard” always gets trotted out whenever someone is unhappy with the latest release.

The one at Natural History lost tons of money. They eventually took it out, sold it for parts, and replaced it with offices and a cafe (which does make money).

They kept the theater at Air & Space, but converted it to IMAX digital. As a result, they are able to easily show pretty much any first-run movie, as well as revivals. That helps them sell a lot more tickets.

The real essential difference in IMAX is the physical shape of the theater. A real IMAX theater has very steep seats that are close to an absolutely huge screen, with huge speakers behind it. As opposed to the “IMAX” found in cineplexes where they just took their largest theater and upgraded the projector.

Films really should be shot differently for IMAX. Closeups need to be a lot less close up. People shouldn’t have to turn their heads side to side just to see one or the other eye of your character. IMO it’s a mixed result in The Odyssey. Directors just can’t resist closeups of actors. And the movie needs to work in regular theaters where most people will see it.

They help convey that I am so smart—and I think so fast—that I have to constantly interrupt myself.

But—and I think this is important—it’s really easy to overuse them.

He was one of the best at this. PowerPC is not keeping up with Intel? Spin it! (Then switch.) Everyone hates DRM? Spin it! (Then drop DRM.) People are nervous about your antenna design? Spin it! And give ‘em a bumper. (But don’t change the antenna.)

What he said publicly was not necessarily a reflection of reality, it was whatever he thought would best position himself and his organization at that moment. In tech they called it a reality distortion field. In politics it’s called a day ending in -y. :-)

Obviously Apple did not have a problem with CD Baby because they did do the contract. And obviously they did not actually have a quality concern about the cheap $40 fee because they kept them even as it went to free.

It’s a classic small business supplier story: the big guys will do what works best for them and the little guy will have to deal with it in order to get the benefit. The most common example is how long most big businesses take to pay their small suppliers. It’s not intentionally malicious, just relative indifference. Like a big truck running over a raccoon because it’s so hard to swerve or stop.

> Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.

Tons and tons of sites have annoying popups. As such, complaining about it is usually off topic; that is, the complaint has nothing to do with the substance of the specific article that was posted for discussion.

The best place for such a complaint is to send it back to the website publisher. Then at least they will know their audience doesn’t like it.

Imagine a healthy person with a healthy lifestyle and 8 hours of sleep every night. But every year, they are awakened 5 minutes earlier. So after 6 years they are only getting 7.5 hours of sleep every night. After 12 years, it’s only 7 hours. Will this have a health effect over time?

Obviously that example is a pretty big impairment. But the concept is what I’m getting at. Small persistent changes compound over time if there is no relief for recovery.

Then a hurricane went where it had never gone before and wrecked their entire neighborhood.

It’s hard to know exactly how a complex chaotic system is going to react when inputs change. And it only takes one outlier to cause a lot of harm on a local human scale.

This is why so much effort goes into computer modeling of the climate BTW. We know our emissions are changing the climate. But predicting local effects is damn hard.

And it doesn’t even make sense financially. The “brand” of your mortgage provider adds absolutely nothing to the utility. When shopping for a mortgage, just pick the lowest possible rate, it does not matter from whom. Loans get sold all the time and that is a good thing as it helps minimize rates through raw competition.

USAA at one time had aims of being a comprehensive financial company and they gave those up years ago. Brokerages got sold to Schwab, IRAs to Victory, etc. Again, this is a good thing as there was no way they were going to be able to compete in all those categories. Specialization is good.