adamc

Been a couple years, but discord on linux was... much less stable than it was on Windows, and I was using it to play a lot of D&D at the time, so, I ended up reverting to Windows.

I think you have to distinguish what the author can imagine and what the audience could likely accept. Part of writing stories is engaging the readers, who have biases of their own.

No. The past year has substantially nudged things in the other direction.

Ignores the totally exceptional nature of some of the US changes/instabilities of this administration. I say "not true" because that is my read of where things are going, regardless of preferences.

Not really relevant to why there is de-dollarization. And I am not a Trump fan.

Suffers from no government having a stake in it. If it causes them problems, it can easily become illegal.

Probably a mix of things, including commodities like gold.

Not true. Some, like myself, love the idea of the shining city on the hill, although we often find the behavior of the actual city less than shining.

I would like for the US to continue being a beacon of freedom where people can come and build great lives.

But that is not the direction we are going, and one might reasonably forecast that no country can maintain indefinite dominance. Paul Kennedy wrote "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers" almost 40 years ago. Regression to the mean and all that, but also, great powers tend to overstep.

In many ways, this is the real problem.

I read it as side-stepping Hacker News' tendency to kill comments that get into politics.

The shutdown goes far beyond TV news-style topics. But whether by design or by fiat, Hacker News is no longer a place for intelligent discussion.

This is where MAGA leads.

I'm gradually tuning out Hacker News, because it persistently tries to ignore the politics that are destroying the United States and freedom of enquiry.

There is a dead comment below that tries to raise an argument but was killed instead. This is no longer a place to go to discuss ideas.

I think you are criticizing an idea for not being a study. I think it's a reasonable and interesting idea, but at most it is something to consider, not some infallible axiom. More akin to "the Peter Principle" than a theorem.

Point 2 is... neither important nor really germane. (I don't care what engineers say, and Musk isn't an engineer anyway.) The point is that people understand their customer bases, and sell to them, and then imagine that means they understand how to succeed in the business their customers are in, and... not so.

It's basically a reminder that understanding the customer is everything. No matter how good the tech is, if you don't solve the customer's problem... they aren't buying.

Sure, in all cases, acquiring knowledge of what the (potential) customers want is difficult. The point of the article is that vendors of layer N tend to think they know what it takes to succeed at layer N+1, but they don't, because that customer base (N+2) is different.

The other (more important, maybe) thing the article points out is that building layer N-1 turns out to be easier, because layer N is the customer and understands those needs already.

This. Actually, I would buy a cheap guitar (but not from Amazon), say $400-500, for a purpose like having one to place when visiting relatives at Christmas. But I wouldn't buy a nice guitar without inspecting and playing it.