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

> I mean... we did put nearly all the horses out of a job. Ditto oxen and other beasts of burden.

Don't forget farmers. Most americans were farmers in the early 1900s. Today it's about 1%.

Sure, jobs were eventually created for the unemployed farmers but "robots taking all the jobs" was a cataclysmic event in the early 1900s. You could argue it was the driving force for much of the 20th century. WW1 was primarily a result of european and american societies having excess population to "thin out". The excess population was also a reason for the anti-immigration movement that dominated the first half of the 1900s.

"Robots taking our jobs" isn't the end of the world. But it can be very painful.


> WW1 was primarily a result of european and american societies having excess population to "thin out".

No. Some actual reasons for WW1: Franco-German animosity, the famous web of alliances, advances in weapon technology and accompanying arms races, nationalism, and cold geopolitical calculus (Germany thought their power relative to the other Great Powers would decline in the future).


> WW1 was primarily a result of european and american societies having excess population to "thin out".

Source?


I actually wonder if the farmer metric is true ?


Get outta here robut!


Google isn't banned. Google simple chose to leave china because they refuse to follow chinese laws because google is a state controlled corporation.

Repeating the same lies doesn't magically turn it into a truth.

The difference between google and tiktok is that tiktok follows all the laws and yet still is getting banned.


You say Google is not banned, then try to open google.com through any Chinese ISP, can you get anything but connection timeout? Also check Google's transparency report.

Which Chinese law didn't Google follow? Failure to implement the never public admitted content censorship?

Did Chinese government ever acknowledge it's internet censorship?

While banning TikTok is not fair to me, saying Google isn't banned in China is lying.


That's like saying low end PRC cars are banned in US for not meeting US safety regulations. Bing operated in PRC for years after other platforms were blocked and Google's Project Dragonfly was a thing precisely because there was a legally compliant path for Google to operate in PRC. There's a fuckton of public regulations from ministry of public security, commerce, information tech stretching back 20+ years. There was nothing to acknowledge or admit because it was never opaque just onerous (expensive).

As for the law didn't Google follow, disregarding they pulled out due to moral considerations over Operation Aurora, they got hammered along with twitter and facebook post 2009 minority riots for not adequately censoring/filtering calls for violence that at the time required expensive moderation teams which every PRC platform had invested in to stay compliant. Western platforms not following obeying was as much a moral stance as economic - competitive advantage of not sinking shitton of expensive human resources. That wasn't going to fly.

Wasn't until social media driven violence in west i.e. NZ shooting that western platforms were presured to form comparable levels of moderation - incidentally alsoaround time when FB and Google started initiatives to reenter PRC market. After they build tools to minimize violence in west. If you need a specific law, it's covered under art5 of Computer Information Network and Internet Security Protection and Management Regulations from 97 that disallows inciting terrorism, hatred etc. 101 stuff that that any prescient state would enforce. And it took multiple mass casualty evens for PRC to finally and firmly put foot down on western platforms. Like response was to actual instead of hypothetical (but justified) risk.

Generously western platforms are blocked in PRC but not banned. Or that US efforts to ban tiktok exceeds what even PRC gov would do - force sale - vs setting up very restrictive JV like Oracle proposal. At end of day US free to ban tiktok for whatever reason, but for a freespeech advocate, it will be using methods more draconian than even CCP.


> Did Chinese government ever acknowledge it's internet censorship?

Yes?

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

> While banning TikTok is not fair to me, saying Google isn't banned in China is lying.

No. You are lying or you are dense. Google operated in china til 2010 or so. It tried to foment a color revolution in china like google did throughout north africa, middle east, ukraine, etc. So china instituted more stringent laws to reign in google. Google chose to leave china because the laws would prevent them from spying and destabilizing china.

So you could call it "banned" if you like, but it isn't "banning" in the same sense as tiktok being banned.


We've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the site guidelines. Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with.

For all I know you're entirely right in all your views, but still you can't abuse other users like this, you can't post egregious flamewar and so on, and you can't use HN primarily for political/national/ideological battle, regardless of what you're for or against.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html


Why? You want to host a blog in the afterlife? All kidding aside, why not just hand over your internet assets to a trusted family member who will handle everything when you are gone?


> which doesn’t really make sense to me when I consider the weakness of the currency

When there is war, financial crisis, etc, money seeks the safest harbor. The safest harbor in the world today is the US. Rising interest rates, war in ukraine, competition with china, etc means that the world is buying treasuries. Demand for dollars goes up, demand for most other currencies goes down.

If there is a significant crisis in the world and the dollar doesn't gain in strength, then we'll know a paradigm shift has occurred.


There's a theory in economics called "sticky wages". Salaries don't decline due to layoffs or temporary economic downturns.


Neither Database Systems, Concurrent Programming nor Network Programming are foundational knowledge for CS. They are good knowledge to have for a specialized programming job, but not foundational computer science.

It's like asking why someone with a degree in theoretical physics cannot fix my car.

The real question is why so many people with CS degrees don't know what CS is really about.


The UK government banned tiktok on government phones a few days ago.

https://apnews.com/article/uk-tiktok-government-ban-470538b4...

The BBC is british state propaganda. So of course they have to ban tiktok too.


> I don't want to reduce what you've said, but the fact is that Taiwan grew rich because of US support that helped integrate it into the global economy, and that wouldn't have come without its opposition to the mainland.

Taiwan didn't get rich because of the US. Taiwan got rich because of mainland china. The rise of Hong kong, taiwan, singapore and even to some degree south korea all resulted from the opening of china in the late 60s and 70s. The chinese elites' decision to open up trade with the world is what resulted in the rise of the asian tigers.

> Similarly, China wouldn't have grown rich had it not been a pawn against USSR.

Had nothing to do with the USSR. China was never a pawn for or against the USSR or US or anyone else. China got rich for the same reason saudi arabia got rich or any other nation got rich. China decided to utilize their greatest resource ( a billion relatively cheap labor ) after the USSR fell.

> People underestimate the power of the Anglo-Empire which the British passed over to the Americans, one they continue to run to this day, without so much as a squeak from the mainstream.

Who underestimates it? The entire world order is understood to be an american world order by everyone on earth.

> Given that the West is banking on India to do their bidding, I doubt anyone will halt China's growth

Barring ww3, I doubt china's growth can be slowed. We shall have to wait and see.


> Zero toxicity and probably several magnitudes more meaningful conversations with people from all around the world.

In other words, you've built yourself a tiny echo chamber. The only way you have "zero toxicity" is that the group is exceedingly small or you force group-think.

> (3) I once saw a post from a German IT mag (heise, I think from November 2022) that claimed that they have more traffic through Mastodon than through any other Social Media thingy.

That's not a good thing. It means that the german IT mag has no readers.


It's not just a matter of our subjective experience of time, it's a matter of the laws of thermodynamics and entropy. Time moves in one direction is another way of saying entropy always increases. If time could move in the opposite direction, then entropy decreases which breaks our understanding of physics.


The direction of causality should also be reversed from what I can tell. Instead of a bullet slowing down as it hits air molecules and pushes them out of the way, the air molecules push on the bullet because the bullet will be sucked into the barrel in the future.

More on topic, I think our existing theories of reality tell us that the future probably affects the past, or at very least, is predetermined. If you know the solution to a differential equation, you know the state at any point in time. There's no going off the rails, so to speak. And if the system is constrained in any dimension (i.e. it's nonholonomic) then the state at any given moment relies on the full trajectory up to that point, as opposed to just the previous state. But you can flip that on its head and say that the future state determines the present trajectory. E.g. to turn a bicycle left, you have to first turn right.


but what about reverse falling cartridge? Will spacetime around Earth change from "hole" to "hill"?


I think it's the same thing. The future energy state of the cartridge is that it's in the chamber, so it gets sucked up. It's problematic though, because the direction of gravity doesn't change.


That's not going to be necessary.


It's really interesting to think about how we struggle to express the idea of the future having a causal impact on the past. I reckon this is because our language and our understanding of time are limited.

Our brains like to process events in a linear sequence, from past to present to future, but this view of time might not fully capture how everything in the universe is interconnected. It's possible that our language just can't handle these complex concepts.

So, I don't think anything mentioned in this thread contradicts the idea that "time always moves in one direction" and "entropy always increases".


Right. "Time only moves in one direction" is not saying much more than "our consciousness experience time moving in one direction". The very idea that time "moves" is entirely related to our vantage point. If our perception were not bound to time, then the nature of cause and effect might look completely different.


Just commented about interpreting the Probability Law as sort of "Inverted 2nd. Law of Thermodynamics".

I'll expand here how if the arrow of time actually doesn't exist, the future could change the past without breaking our - current - understanding of physics (tragiclly because we will probably have maybe hundred of years till we change our minds about what are the properties of the universe).

In a range or probabilities of one event, one of the probabilities will always be the one is going to actually happen. Closer to the event to occur the most certain you can be about which one of those, could be the one that will happen.

Here's the catch, you have to change your mind a bit, in our current understanding of physics, the information of the future event which has not happen yet, already exists here in the past for that event.

Now, if you know - and you know - the outcome of an event, you most certainly will be able to choose if you go along that path, or you choose to change the future event to something else. Whoalá, the future changed the past.

Brains of earth continously do this, every second of our entire lives, animal brains do this too, almost all life on Earth has some neurological, physiological, chemical predictive mechanism in place.

An example, you're about to walk across a street, you see a car coming, now your brain "predicts" you'll be hit by that car if you just keep walking, you stop walking to avoid certain death, done, the future changed the past. The information - really close to 100% of probability of death - extracted by the brain from the sheer reality of the universe, allowed you to survive.

And no current understanding of physics got harmed anywhere along the way of the future changing the past.


I don't think the idea that "the future can influence the past" is the same thing as saying that entropy decreases or that time can move in the opposite direction. I think these are different concerns


The "arrow of time" conception of entropy: 1) does not work locally and only works at large enough scales, and; 2) is essentially isomorphic to the concept of time.

So no, it's not at all incompatible with retro-causality. When you think about retro-causality, the idea that time "moves" is completely superfluous. Time is probably not even a real thing.


Consider applying for YC's Summer 2026 batch! Applications are open till May 4

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

Search: