Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | jshen's commentslogin

We may need to create a community driven version of SO. Hard for it to be a successful business these days.

https://software.codidact.com/ was created after one of the many SO dramas. It doesn't come up in searches though and I didn't have reason to use it...

thanks, that's exactly what I was imagining.

Except for the part where he says that he found Go infuriating to use as a developer prior to LLMs.

> This is annoying but only needs to be solved once at the start, either by the LLM or the human guiding it. A single prompt of "Set up a uv project in this directory with Python 3.13" is enough that it's never an issue again for that repo.

This isn't true. I'm mostly using python and UV with claude and it periodically decides to try to run scripts directly instead of using UV.


I think it's people that do that, not capitalism. This happens in every system that has existed in human history.


Absolutely not. The default economic system is anarchy, also known as sharing and mutual aid. You see this even in the reddest of US states, where disaster victims help each other, and a huge pastime is sharing food via potlucks. But all evidence points to anarchical/egalitarian cultures as the baseline mechanism of human organization from prehistory.

Externalities don't exist in anarchic systems, because there is no hierarchical separation between producer and consumer. You can't push off costs to some members of the community when they have equal power to retaliate in kind, and there is no incentive to do so.


> Externalities don't exist in anarchic systems

Sure they do. I do a thing, it benefits me but causes a problem for my neighbor in the process, I say "oh well fuck him", that's a textbook externality.

> they have equal power to retaliate in kind

A convenient fiction often engaged in by proponents of anarchy. In practice if you compare pairs of people at random you will find almost none that can reasonably be described as equal. Equality is something imposed by the law in an attempt to improve our lives on average.

Anarchy lasts exactly as long as it takes people to start banding together and no longer.


Ok so you’d win a community upstream on a river and you build a dam and hive off the water

Downstream 500 miles away another community loses their water source

Those externalities still exist


The far left tends to treat humans as essentially good and plastic — corrupted by unjust systems, but redeemable once those systems are dismantled. Remove capitalism, hierarchy, scarcity, and people will naturally cooperate. The far right tends toward a Hobbesian view — humans are greedy and lazy by default. Without the discipline, consequences, and hierarchy, civilization unravels. Hence “if you tax people more they’ll stop working.”

Both are cartoon versions of something real, and both fail in predictable ways. The more honest picture comes from behavioral economics and evolutionary psychology: humans are neither blank slates nor rational maximizers. We’re a messy bundle of cooperative instincts and tribal ones, capable of extraordinary generosity within in-groups and breathtaking cruelty toward out-groups. Our “goodness” has always been conditional and contextual.

What really undermines the anarchist vision specifically isn’t that people are evil — it’s that they’re biased and self-deceiving in systematic ways. There’s a well-replicated finding that when you ask members of a team to estimate their individual contribution to a group outcome, the percentages sum to well over 100%. Everyone genuinely believes they pulled more than their weight. This isn’t malice — it’s a predictable artifact of how memory and attention work. We have more access to our own effort than to others’, so we weight it more heavily.

The practical consequence of this is underappreciated: it means that even in a community of genuinely well-meaning people with no bad actors, you’ll still get persistent grievance and conflict, because everyone will sincerely believe they’re being shortchanged. This isn’t a solvable problem with better norms or more transparency — it’s baked into human cognition.


Haiti is in Anarchy. All sharing and mutual aid is shadowed by resource and power struggle. It is even worse than communism and fascism.


> Haiti is in Anarchy

This is what people say when they have no idea what people mean by the POLITICAL system of Anarchism (Libertarian Socialism).

Anarchism, the political system, is not "chaos". That is propaganda that started during the 1930's. If you want to learn about it, real the Anarchist FAQ.

(I have a degrees in American History and Economics if that matters).

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/the-anarchist-faq-ed...


Yeah, and communism has never been given a fair shake, either. For that matter, neither has laissez-faire capitalism.

At some point, you need to accept that your favorite "-ism" has an impedance mismatch with human nature.


Anarchism means "without hierarchy". This how humans organized until the populations of sedentary agricultural communities exploded. I will argue, and keep arguing despite downvotes, that anarchism has the least impedance mismatch with human nature out of every system, because it was the status quo before civilization became the norm.


pretty sure humans had hierarchy from the beginning.


Externalities don't exist in anarchic systems

Neither do computers.


You didn't really address his main point. Will this lead to higher levels of pollution that will have real health consequences? Oddly you suggest it's not valid to raise concerns around health consequences.


I honestly can't tell what conclusion you want us to draw? The vast majority of cows raise for agriculture are not raised in the ways you describe. Beef is the leading cause of deforestation in the rainforest!


You can absolutely survive and thrive on a vegetarian diet, and there is decent evidence suggesting you're health will be better.


what?!?!


Corn produces something like 15M calories per acre, soybeans like 6-8.

When you feed those 36M calories to chickens, you get back 12M calories of chicken, which is actually less than 6 x 3 = 18M calories for the soybeans, so I'm misremembering something (maybe it's just an equivalent amount of protein? maybe chicken feed is a 3:1 corn:soy ratio?) or was just wrong.


It's the leading cause of deforestation which is a major factor in climate change. It also is a major contributor to climate change for other reasons. Since you mentioned energy, it's also much less energy efficient.

Isn't this something to care about?


If you're trying to link clang, this laptop is not for you. It's for people that would consider a chromebook for their use case.


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: