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

That's assuming the hydrogen is just loose in the area, like it'd been released from a balloon in a chemistry classroom. That amount of hydrogen is extremely small, from an energy standpoint. Equivalent to a teaspoon of gasoline or so.

If you assume a realistic fuel capacity for a hydrogen vehicle, the hydrogen tank will be both much larger than a gas tank and the hydrogen will be under extreme pressure. A tank like that in your car would be extremely dangerous even if it were filled only with inert gas.


What if instead of allowing the agent to act directly, it writes a simple high-level recipe or script that you can accept (and run) or reject? It should be very high level and declarative, but with the ability to drill down on each of the steps to see what's going on under the covers?

I wonder if there is a viable business model where for each article, readers can pay to unlock it not just for themselves, but for everyone. The price would obviously have to be higher since you aren't just buying it for yourself. But perhaps the sense of "I'm helping build a better-informed world and helping broadcast my values" would encourage people to pay that higher price.

What you're asking for is the system we already have, except at a micro level rather than a macro level. Rich people buy out newspapers to signal-boost their own preferred messages to the public.

I think it's questionable that the "news that people feel is actually valuable" is what really ought to be spread. Some of the most valuable news is local reporting on the daily business of municipal governments. Regular people are notoriously uninterested in local politics, despite the outsized impact it has on their lives. Many of the most mundane decisions made in municipal councils go completely unnoticed yet they can destroy whole communities in the long run.


>Many of the most mundane decisions made in municipal councils go completely unnoticed yet they can destroy whole communities in the long run.

They go unnoticed because of scaling issues, not because people are per se less interested in local politics than national politics. If you write a story about a decision on the local city council, it is of interest to maybe a few hundred thousand, whereas a story about Congress is of interest to tens of millions. Even if people were ten times as interested in local news (as measured by their willingness to subscribe or the amount of ads they are willing to be exposed to), it would still make more sense to send a reporter to the Capitol before City Hall.


> not because people are per se less interested in local politics than national politics

Actually I believe this is exactly the issue. Most people are interested more in national politics than county or even state politics. Of the people I know who vote in national elections, very few vote in local ones or even go to city council meetings.


I think a lot of our issues today are because people are too engaged in federal politics. It's turned into a massive spectacle on the same level as the NFL.

That seems to be the point; WWE USA: Blue Team vs Red Team, The Democracy Simulation Show. Everyone has the same and equal meaningless vote.

> Everyone has the same and equal meaningless vote.

There is one vote that is not meaningless: the primaries. A lot of the issues y'all have is that Democrats and Republicans alike don't bother to vote in the primaries. That is how you got people like MTG or Trump, that is how you get people like Chuck Schumer stuck in office for far too long.

AOC/The Squad and Mamdani both proved that it is possible to succeed in a primary and offer voters an actual alternative to the corporate owned shills.


After Bernie got shuffled out in 16 I'm not sure anyone cares believes that primaries matter either.

You don’t have choice in the primary either. See what happened with the democrats and trying to stymie a sanders candidacy.

You mean the primary where Biden ran virtually unopposed and then Harris got the nomination?

> Rich people buy out newspapers to signal-boost their own preferred messages to the public.

Right, but micro level difference matters here. If a middle-class person can help an important story reach an audience, that's helpful for democracy. When a billionaire buys a newspaper, it isn't.

This is also why I think suggesting it work like a kickstarter where multiple people can pool money to unlock an article would be helpful. It naturally collects the will of many people in a democratic way.


This is basically political fundraising, where rich people signal-boost their preferred candidate and help them attract lots of donors from the public.

I think the fundamental piece you're missing is the Pareto principle. In any popularity contest, the most attention accrues to the most popular. This naturally leads to a power law distribution in popularity.


I'm actually wondering if Citizens United will prove to be a stabilizing force.

https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/18/politics/texas-senate-primary... shows that, in this year's Texas race, the centrists are getting more funding than the culture warriors even though the culture warriors are more popular.

Granted, that's only a single data point.


It sounds quite aligned with how assurance contracts[1] work.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assurance_contract


The solution to increasing interest in local government is to strengthen the federal system (repealing the 17th amendment) & even extending it into state government (state senators should be appointed by, say, the city councils of the 24 largest municipalities in said state).

This decentralization of power would bring the peoples' focus back to their own neighborhoods, where they can actually hold government officials accountable.


That’s a recipe for corruption and minority rule. It centralizes, not decentralizes, power, in the hands of fewer people. I would advise looking to effectively any senatorial appointment from the gilded age to see why the 17th was needed: monetary exchanges for senatorial seats was widespread, race-based disenfranchisement was a reality, and in one state, Utah, a theocracy was nearly cemented. A greater focus on local rights, and greater federalist powers, should not preclude senatorial elections.

That’s assuming a developer owns all the codebases they work on. Many don’t, because they work for an employer with a large team and a large existing codebase. If the language evolves and the project manager is 100% keen on adopting new features then it’s going to affect everyone on the team.

s/developer/development team/

“Your transfer has expired, civilian, you’ll have to pay another fare!”

Said the bus driver in the mirrored shades.


That's not true. Plenty of Discord communities have dozens of channels with long-running post histories, pictures, FAQ content, beginner guides; server roles and titles, permissions, custom emoji, stickers, etc.

Migrating all of that stuff to a new service (which may not even support it all) would be a huge pain.


Yeah, Steve would've smashed that phone on the floor if that happened to him in rehearsal, and then fired the whole team responsible.

autocorrect suggesting words that I've never typed before

Ahhh yes, there's nothing like when autocorrect turns because into Decatur!


That's because "matches" are the wrong criterion to look at. In aggregate, matches don't matter. What matters is the population of marriageable (or otherwise amenable to long-term relationships) people. And that's what the dating app calculus works against. Every time 2 marriageable people get together, they remove themselves from the pool. If there is not a significant influx of new marriageable people then over time the marriageability of the pool will decline. As it drops, the concentration of "serial daters" goes up.

In a high concentration of serial daters, no one wants to pair off because there isn't anyone worth pairing off with around.


> If there is not a significant influx of new marriageable people then over time the marriageability of the pool will decline

That seems to be extremely unlikely, people have finite lifespans and are only in the marriage pool for a small fraction of that. More importantly your website could easily be targeted to an even smaller pool say 25-45 and ignoring deaths and divorce your already ~10% turnover per year if you own 100% of the market. Actual numbers depends on what percentage of the pool starts married, becomes a widow etc but their’s plenty of new people to make up for any couples. Further, happily married couples are great advertising.


1 The number of people using these apps. 2. The age group using the apps 3. the type of people using the apps 4. the culture that it has replaced and infiltrated 5 It is the social norm by now to be asked if your on TiXXXr or some other app

The modern interaction have eroded, it is awkward or weird to be approached in public, every middle aged woman or elderly woman has her purse on while shopping at a grocery store, locking the car 6 times and looking back while doing it as if its a James Bond movie. I live in middle class neighborhood and this is the things i see on a daily bases. it is sad.


> Every time 2 marriageable people get together, they remove themselves from the pool. If there is not a significant influx of new marriageable people

But there is. It's all the people aging into the dating apps. That's how it works. The rate of people leaving is balanced by new people arriving.


No, they aren't. If you're in your 40s you aren't looking to date people in their 20s. Where's the influx of other people in their 40s to date?

> If you're in your 40s you aren't looking to date people in their 20s.

My building is full of divorced 40-somethings dating younger. You see it all over media too. Leonardo DiCaprio is famous for this, and he's hardly the only one.

Women date younger too. My wife's TikTok is full of women empowerment videos; the number of videos on her feed that talk about this is not inconsequential.

Plenty of people to date.


What do you mean? From recently divorced people, of course, if you want to look at that age bracket. But it's the same principle.

Younger women wanting older mature partners is as old as time.

There is even a subgenre of romance writing with this as a theme .. age gap.


But where’s the growth?

It's a truly sad state of affairs that human relationships are reduced to this clinical technobabble.

Technology was promised to solve our problems, yet it has created so many more.


It's just a reinforcement loop where the more of something you have the more it accelerates. It happens in many places: bank runs (as soon as people start taking money out, more start doing so), the dead sea effect (where the best people leave and people start leaving as the median quality of coworker drops), hiring (where the more capable you are the more likely you are to get hired, so it gets harder and harder to hire the later you are to the game - most obvious with when you're interviewing interns or whatever), and so on.

I've never been comped at any restaurant or bar.

I always thought that was a casino thing (to keep you drinking so that you gamble more) but I've never been to a casino. I live in Canada though, so we might have laws against that sort of thing.


Have you tried being really, really, ridiculously good looking?

Ahhh, I see. So the GP's whole spiel was just a humblebrag.

you don't have to be good looking. you just have to go to the same place frequently, and be friendly.

You don’t have to be, but it helps not to be bad looking.

i think it is truly irrelevant

like, a good looking person will get the occasional comp on the basis of that, but you'll never be friends with the staff on the basis of that. whereas anyone can be friends with the staff, if they are friendly and earnest about it.


I guess you missed the part where I talked about being friendly (or friends) with the waitstaff. Nice to know that you think I'm good looking though!

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

Search: