lkrubner

21 ms·

181.
by lkrubner 4y ago
Marvin, the suicidality depressed robot from Hitchhikers Guide, was apparently a Microsoft technology from 2023. Who knew?
182.
by lkrubner 4y ago
That's exactly the reference I also thought of.
183.
by lkrubner 4y ago
For awhile, starting around 2016, they poured money into an attempt to compete with Amazon. Not just compete, but get ahead of Amazon. They wanted to invent a 3D online retail experience, sort of like what Facebook started to do, but specif
184.
by lkrubner 4y ago
In his autobiography Akio Morita (founder at Sony) tells a story in the 1960s, they'd hired an American salesman, who had done very well for them for many years, but then the guy thought he could make better money elsewhere, so he chan
185.
by lkrubner 4y ago
"Banks borrow funds from the central bank at a certain rate" Right, but banks don't have to borrow money from the Fed. Banks also have the deposits from their customers, and so banks can make new loans based on those deposits
186.
by lkrubner 4y ago
The stimulus in 2020 and 2021 was historic and caused rapid economic growth, therefore companies hired in response to that growth. The rise in interest rates from 0.25% to 4.75% is meant to slow economic growth, therefore companies need to
187.
by lkrubner 4y ago
"I have long suspected that computers help a ton in a few ways, but are net harmful in a bunch of other (more common) situations" I think this is key. Those of us who love tech tend to ignore how rigid it is. A database schema is
188.
by lkrubner 4y ago
Except the incentives are unexpected. Back when labor unions were strong then labor was getting 75% of all productivity gains. In Belgium, from 1950 to 1970, labor got 110% of all productivity gains (so national income shifted from capital
189.
by lkrubner 4y ago
This is also what I focus on. Energy is fungible for a great deal else in the economy. Energy is fungible for transport. Energy is fungible for food. Given enough energy, cheap enough, then energy is even fungible for salt-free water. There
190.
by lkrubner 4y ago
"After that it just snowballs faster and faster." That is the theory. The problem is the actual historical record: the slow down after 1970. If the theory suggests that the process is supposed to snowball faster and faster, why di
191.
by lkrubner 4y ago
"people can work only so many hours a day" All productivity numbers are per hour, so they are not effected by how many hours in a day people work. "why isn't growth the same as when we were rebuilding after the last war&
192.
by lkrubner 4y ago
You are simply describing the fact that when we speak of growth of the GDP, we are averaging millions of things together. How else would you measure economic growth in a modern, diverse economy? That some sectors boom while others fade is w
193.
by lkrubner 4y ago
"There's a commonly noted productivity slowdown in the Western world starting in 1973 that I and some other people here have written about." We don't remark on this enough, but it is truly surprising (and worrisome) that
194.
by lkrubner 4y ago
This is a very good article. The bit at the end was especially strong: ----------------------- "Be disciplined about your build processes and what you put in your source tree, so there is at least the possibility of making the project
195.
by lkrubner 4y ago
I enjoy these parodies very much, but on a deeper level, we need a good analysis of why this keeps happening. We've had many movements that have aimed for simplicity and commonsense and ended up a bureaucratic nightmare. Is there a way
196.
by lkrubner 4y ago
"Because of that, I am firing myself" A team does terrible for awhile -- should the coach be removed? A company does terrible -- should the CEO be removed? This is what accountability means. Just this year I was hired by a Board O
197.
Ask HN: What self-hosted CMS can import from WordPress?
17 points by lkrubner 4y ago|13 comments
198.
by lkrubner 4y ago
It's not mean, it's just a statement of a fairly obvious pattern in his career, which should influence how much weight we give to one of his predictions.
199.
by lkrubner 4y ago
That's aspirational rather than reality. The Supreme Court had no problem with the Patriot Act, which introduced extremely broad electronic searches. You could say the 4th Amendment should restrict searches to specific individuals, tha
200.
by lkrubner 4y ago
Why did my comment get downvoted? I'm sharing something that I learned back when I was doing serious research about entrepreneurship, and I'm pointing out that it applies to Elon Musk, an observation which should be relevant to th
201.
by lkrubner 4y ago
It used to be common to point out that 1/3rd of all of the self-made multimillionaires in the USA eventually go bankrupt. I don't know what the current statistic is, but 20 years ago I studied the issue in some detail, and the pat
202.
by lkrubner 4y ago
Right, I don't think there is a good phrase for it, but I believe when economists make this statement they mean Britain, Canada, the USA, Australia and New Zealand. I could say "Anglosphere" but some people think that phrase
203.
by lkrubner 4y ago
Not sure how far we can go but Japan's debt is currently 266% of GDP, so the USA debt of 120% is less than half of the Japanese debt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_debt_of_Japan Furthermore, this number o
204.
by lkrubner 4y ago
I should have been more specific, this is about paying the capital and interest on national bonds.
205.
by lkrubner 4y ago
>> therefore, lots of debt that'll never get paid back The last time the national government of an English speaking nation defaulted on its debt was on January 2 of 1672, with the Stop Of The Exchequer: https://en.wiki
206.
by lkrubner 4y ago
"got greedy and made high risk investments? Can't Google or some company just make their own stablecoin" Interesting that you contrast "greedy" with "Google". Why would Google want to ruin its own profits
207.
by lkrubner 4y ago
How can we reconcile this with the relative death of small business: "More people are working in big, bureaucratic organizations than ever before. Yet there’s compelling evidence that bureaucracy creates a significant drag on productiv
208.
by lkrubner 4y ago
Perhaps this happens on a diversity of time frames and in a diversity of contexts? The French historian Fernand Braudel says that during the 1600s the European merchants in India deliberately bought more than they sold, so that Europe was r
209.
by lkrubner 4y ago
This sentence is either incoherent or directly contradicted by the article that I linked to: "Europeans have ancestry have that goes back beyond 40000 BC" I cannot figure out what you mean, but I think you misunderstood what I wro
210.
by lkrubner 4y ago
"painted and engraved non-figurative signs from at least ~42,000 BP and figurative images (notably animals) from at least 37,000 BP" At least so far, no one has found any DNA trace of these people among modern Europeans. At least

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