It's opposite Gell-Mann-Amnesia: I am a SWE and I come here because I find it one of the best places to keep abreast of the broader software world, not just the little corner of it that I'm currently working in. So in the things that I know well, I trust it. My wife is a medical professional, and so I know just enough to see that most medical conversations here are complete and utter nonsense.
So the mental model I have of the average HN contributor is basically that they are all SWE's- they know software engineering extremely well, and the farther you get from that the less valuable the conversation will be, and the more likely it will be someone trying to reason from first principles for 30 seconds about something that intelligent hard working people devote their careers to.
After the crash, the Wright's built a new plane, the 1909 Military Flyer. It came back the next year to Ft. Myer and became the first plane, anywhere in the world, to be bought by a government (1). Orville Wright taught three Army officers to fly on that plane, and then, the Army being what it is, a fourth guy got a letter from Wright explaining how to fly and told "take this plane to San Antonio and teach yourself to fly at Fort Sam Houston." After he had done about 40 more flights, only some of which ended in crashes, the 1909 Military Flyer was retired in 1911. It was given to the Smithsonian. While the other Wright airplanes (2) in the Smithsonian collection have been cleaned up and restored, made to look more like they did when brand new, the Military Flyer has been kept in its 1910 parts: there is a stain on the bottom wing (right below the engine) that is from the use of this airplane more than 115 years ago.
1: The contract was for a plane to fly for an hour, at 30mph out and back, carrying two people (pilot and observer). There was a 10% penalty on the 25,000 for every mph by which the plane was slower than 30mph, and a 10% bonus for every mph by which the plane was above 30mph. The Military Flyer averaged 32 mph on the loop it did, so the Army paid the Wright's $30,000.
2: There are 8 surviving original Wright Airplanes left in the world, the Smithsonian owns three of them: the 1903 Wright Flyer, the 1909 Military Flyer, and the Model Ex Vin Fizz.
Then they should have mentioned that in their court filings!
The reason that the tariffs were collected while there was doubts as to their legality is that the US Government promised, in court filings (courts literally marked this as estoppel in a ruling: they are unable to change their mind on it, locked in argument) that they could repay this easily, and so courts allowed them to collect it while they figured out the legality. When they promised this, if it did require software changes, they should have done that then, or else they were lying to courts.
This is why the judges are not giving them any slack here. They promised to courts that this could be done easily, in such a way that they can't change their mind now. This is all very basic tenets of law that even non-lawyers can understand.
Because this hypothetical memo was paid for by our tax dollars, not your own private money! That means it belongs to the American people, not individuals for their private gain. Using it for your own gain would be theft from the American public.
In this hypothetical case, of course. There is no evidence that such a memo exists. But if it did...
> That means it belongs to the American people, not individuals for their private gain.
This is a strong case that there ought not to be any such thing as a secret opinion or confidential advice from the White House OLC - and I agree with that opinion if that's what you're saying.
But it doesn't transform the information contained therein to nonpublic.
I'm not saying this whole thing wasn't a total scumbag move - it was - but it's not quite the same crime as insider trading.
> But it doesn't transform the information contained therein to nonpublic.
The legal opinion itself was non public? If they couldn't use that they would first have to put up the money to pay the legal fees to find out how likely their bet was to pay off.
And just to put this in writing too, I would be shocked if we don't find out later that a lot of the volatility was a way for a few people to make a lot of money. You can make a lot of money when there's more volatility. So all the flip flopping on tariffs yes/no might very well be manipulating markets...
TFA talked about the difficulty of division, and waved at the idea that farming was different from pastoral societies because of the ease of division: farming land is more valuable as it is concentrated (because of the well known dangers of having many very small plots that are difficult to work and improve) but a herd (or fishing tools) can be split and merged far more easily. So agriculture drives to unigenture.
A blog post like this is mostly hand-waving at complex ideas, but that was her argument for it.
Based both on family history (farmers both sides) and experts such as https://acoup.blog/2025/07/11/collections-life-work-death-an... - I have grave doubts as to the downsides of having many small plots of land in early agricultural conditions. The critical issue is having enough total land (measured by productivity) to feed your family in bad years.
And whatever nice-sounding things TFA might suggest about diving a herd, it's obvious that 8 cattle are worth 4X as much as 2 cattle. And any "leave 1/4 of my herd to each of my 4 children" division will result in a 4X downgrade to the next generation's standard of living.
(Oh, yeah - the TFA has plenty of optimistic hand-waving.)
And even the Apollo 10 mission which went 99.99% of the way from the Earth to the moon, just 15km from the surface (but couldn't have landed on the moon- LM structure was too heavy) was incredibly important step. The sort of thing that people today would want to skip, it doesn't seem flashy or necessary. Why take all the risk of going into lunar orbit and separating the modules (requiring the very first rendezvous not in in Earth orbit) but not actually land on the Moon? It was about getting all of the ground crew proved and worked out, and proving that the rendezvous would work and they could get home, so that the actual landing mission could focus their efforts on just working out the last 15km, confident that all of the other problems were already dealt with. Trying to do all of that in one mission would have been a gigantic mess- A11 crew felt a lack of training time as it was.
Orion doesn't seem operationally or financially capable of launching more than once a year. It's not that they don't want to do test flights, it's that they can barely do anything.
The thing is, as an outsider to Twitter but with 20 years of experience doing software dev including some time at internet scale web and mobile, I don't think that the basic "fetch a timeline" backend plus two front end apps and a web interface is that hard, a small team (<100 engineers) definitely could do that with modern cloud infrastructure. But that's not what the Twitter product was. We've just described nothing more than the bait to lure the product, which was advertisers running ads.
Most of the effort in the original Twitter- engineering and everything else- was about getting advertising revenue. That meant
1) Having good data mining to identify user interests to match ads against
2) Having a strong user experience like Meta Ads or AdSense for the ad buyers
3) Keeping the conversations such that advertisers wanted to be associated with it, both automated and manual censorship
4) Having good relationships with advertisers, both large clients and agencies
That was where the majority of Twitter's (dev and non-engineering both) effort was going, to bringing in the revenue from advertisers. When Elon Musk purchased Twitter advertising fell dramatically immediately, at basically the same time he gutted all of the people doing the advertising. That was why he tried "buying a blue-check" and so many premium features, because he got rid of all the infrastructure necessary to have a serious ads platform. And premium doesn't work, of course, as anyone with experience in the Internet world could have told him. Which is why the value of the company- and its revenues- have declined so dramatically since the acquisition.
Bluesky is basically doing the same thing as X right down to also not running ads, which is how they also manage to run on a small team. Last I checked they'd raised less than 20m, and have basically no revenue, so they are able to operate very lean. It's for the same reason that Twitter is a lot smaller now: ads are a huge engineering and non-tech effort. As Alphabet and Meta remind us, it can be insanely profitable, but you need a lot of people to get it right.
As someone who volunteered in a museum right near the Newseum, their biggest problem was the competition. The Smithsonian and the National Gallery of Art being some of the best museums in the world, right across the street, with much better stuff and totally free was always going to be hard to compete with. The only private museum that has managed to survive is the International Spy Museum, which went all in on fun and interactives, and much less on education, and has a lot less prestigious footprint.
Not just that the establishment, but the entire educational complex, from the large research universities like JHU to the community colleges, were built around a 1950s-1970's American economy and the society that supported that. And now that that is gone, what happens to all of the universities? They've been just as corrupted and degraded as the rest of it. My wife and I were talking last night about how Disneyland lines are the perfect metaphor for what has happened to American society.
From the 1950's to the 1990's there was basically no way to avoid standing in the lines, everyone was in it together and you just had to stand in the lines. Then in the 1990s they added FastPass and you could, if you were clever and planned a bit, skip some lines but you were still going to be standing in lines with everyone else, and they were free and reasonably fair process. Then in the 2010's they started to do book ahead FastPass and if you were staying in a hotel on site you could book all the good times for all the rides, to try and encourage hotel stays. And now with Lightning Lane's they are incentivized to make the line process so onerous to get you to fork over $25/person/ride to skip them. And that's where we are today: an enshitified product that is designed to give a good experience to the very wealthy, while making it worse for everyone else.
And that's the same path we've gone in entertainment, in housing, in education, in healthcare, in so much of modern American society.
The community college I went to was doing this same crap. I remember going to the opening of a new arts building that provided less usable space then the building it replaced, and sitting around with all the donors and school administration paying themselves on the back. Meanwhile they didn't have enough room for most of the departments, and the tutoring programs were getting slashed.
Yeah I can see this enshitification occurs everywhere, not just in Disney land. It is sad. But at the same time it gives me some reflection about my choice of entertainment -- like, do I really need those things? Do I really need Netflix/Youtube/etc. that badly? Should I sit down with my kid, before an offline computer and a paper manual, and program in QBASIC together, or run some typing games altogether, just for fun?
I was astonished to learn from my friends that they saw not one, not two, but a percentage of young people who went through colleges but still don't know how to do simple things like printing from a desktop or using a word processor.
My understanding is that they are so used to mobiles and pads, that their parents actually did not buy a computer for them (sometimes it is ignorance and sometimes it is poverty). The kids did take a couple of computer classes in colleges (you know they are everywhere, like basic MS Office or simple programming), but they were not interested enough to make any effort other than getting a D or C, and sometimes they just cheated it through.
I'm still struggling whether I should introduce DOS or Linux to my son. On one hand, DOS is a dead thing and Linux is the present and the future. On the other hand, I really don't agree with the philosophy of Linux cli, and I still think DOS and early Windows (up to XP) presents the best for that P in PC.
Of course, he is going to be 6 when I gift him the box, so I won't teach him programming. Instead, I prepare to go 100% offline with a Rpi 4B + DOSBian (https://cmaiolino.wordpress.com/), buy a used QBASIC manual, and program QBASIC completely offline, and invite him to watch. I'll program a typing game and ask his input into it so he might feel some "ownership".
I'm not sure how he will react, because there will not be instant sanctification. I want him to feel my frustration (fake a bit) and know how to handle it. But man, my son is not someone with patience, so I'm not sure...
What don't you like about the linux cli? is it a UNIX thing or a GNU thing that you don't like? What makes CP/M like systems (CP/M, DOS, OS/2) better in that regard?. Personally I strongly recommend the Pi 400 for a first computer. Of course, that all depends on the child of course but the Pi 400 and 500 desktop kits are really great and the Pi 400 is cheap enough to not care that much about it breaking while still feeling more accessible than just a Pi in a case (or any desktop computer really, I feel like AIOs and Keyboard computers are the most accessible)
Now that I think about it, actually I don’t have anything against Linux cli. After all it is my daily driver. I just want to jump into QBASIC and show him how I program simple stuffs. In fact, DOSbian is from Ubuntu AFAIK.
I know raspbian comes with scratch which is how I first got into programming (and still mess with from time to time, made a bf interpreter once). For the basic concepts i feel its easier for a little kid to grasp since the sytax is graphical
So the mental model I have of the average HN contributor is basically that they are all SWE's- they know software engineering extremely well, and the farther you get from that the less valuable the conversation will be, and the more likely it will be someone trying to reason from first principles for 30 seconds about something that intelligent hard working people devote their careers to.
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