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And as far as I am aware, there are many prints. This was sold as an early mass market item. It was very popular.

I'm not sure if he had multiple print runs from fresh carvings, or whether he only carved it once?


> The moat created by seriously delighting your customers at a young age is large.

I'm not sure that's enough: most kids wouldn't be able to tell a genuine Lego brick from a knock-off.

(Lego famously has insane quality control on their tolerances. But I haven't had any trouble with knock-off bricks so far either.)


I'm sure that Lego still captures virtually all of the revenue in this category, no?

Alas, for Silicon Valley Bank they went with 'too big to fail' and also covered uninsured deposits. That's moral hazard and endangers the core purpose of the insurance.

Agreed. That said, FDIC would have not been able to cover all $150 billion or so of uninsured SVB deposits directly from the insurance fund, so had that been the only available option for making depositors whole, then FDIC would have had to pass.

Why would that be necessary? For most people, liquid funds are something that's electronic anyway, and in most countries banks can't run out of customers' electronic money. (Safeguards kick in pretty quickly.)

Most of the talk in this discussion is about personal emergencies, like being locked out of your accounts; not about system-wide bank collapses.


You can be locked out of all your accounts simultaneously by a court order, for one.

There is no one reliable place. You must hedge with diverse custodial and non custodial forms of store of value for best assurance.


You can have multiple accounts, yes; but you can also diversify via friends and family.

As a good friend, if I know that you are good for the money, I'd happily spot you even a few tens of thousands for a few days or weeks. (I'm actually more reluctant to do that with some family members, because I might be less likely to get the money back.)


Looks more early modern to me. :)

Here in Singapore NAC is sold to make muckus more liquid to alleviate coughs.

Apparently for some people it also helps with lessening tolerance for their ADHD meds, but I'm not so sure about that.


> Apparently for some people it also helps with lessening tolerance for their ADHD meds, but I'm not so sure about that.

I'd believe it. I first heard of NAC on the nootropic subreddit in a past lifetime. The benefits vary, but generally it's a safe thing with a low chance of making anything worse, but a possibility to improve things. Many neurodivergent folk have written about how they benefit.

I'd give more info on the exact benefits they found (iirc OCD and rumination loops could be broken more easily), but unfortunately my memory is failing me.


You'll find a detailed description oft potential effects and uses here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acetylcysteine (aka NAC)

My anecdotal experience is that NAC makes me much more tolerant to alcohol. As in, I can drink a lot more without feeling the effects. Since I don't get the same buzz, I care less about reaching for a beer.

How is nac (acetylcysteine) delivered there? I can buy dissolvable tablets here in Europe but from what I see that’s less helpful for mucous, things like mucomyst require inhalation, which isn’t in otc products I know of.

In the Philippines it's available as an effervescent tablet to be dissolved in water. They still tend to work better than the western remedies (guaifenesin etc) even in this form IME.

Usually here in Canada it's available in capsule form which I find less effective.


Same here actually, I find it slightly helpful but the effect’s useful time is limited. I’ve wondered if I could capture the gas released while bubbling and inhale that…

Dissolvable tablets & powders are still useful for getting rid of mucus. Maybe inhaling is better, but anecdotally the tablets seem to work.

The dissolvable tablets completely fix a runny nose for me. Much better than any nose spray, which tend to irritate the nose and lead to chronic runny nose if taken for too long.

Have you tried a neti pot or similar?

Same where I'm from, it's in pill / capsule form

> Nothing we've built comes close... either in capability or efficiency.

Only when you look at stuff that the brain is specifically good at.

You can surpass the brain with even simple mechanical adders or an abacus in certain subdomains.


General intelligence I mean. What calculations even need to be performed and when, still comes from our brains.

> Trying out jj is super low-risk--since it uses git as a backend, you can test it out and bail back to git without any drawbacks other than a detached head state.

Btw, the risk of trying out other modern version control systems is nearly as low: most of them are compatible with git and you can convert back and forth. That definitely includes mercurial etc.


> That definitely includes mercurial etc.

People tried mercurial. They went back to git.


I tried Sapling (Facebook's fork of mercurial with more polished git-compatibility layers) and never looked back for any of my own projects.

I recently started a new job where the vanilla git CLI is the only git frontend installed on company servers, and the regressions in user-experience are painful :(


Some did, sure. I made a more limited claim: you can convert back and forth between mercurial and git.

> Some did, sure.

Not some. I mean, even the few source code repository services that supported mercurial started dropping it.

See Bitbucket's announcement:

https://www.atlassian.com/blog/bitbucket/sunsetting-mercuria...

> According to a Stack Overflow Developer Survey, almost 90% of developers use Git, while Mercurial is the least popular version control system with only about 3% developer adoption. In fact, Mercurial usage on Bitbucket is steadily declining, and the percentage of new Bitbucket users choosing Mercurial has fallen to less than 1%.


Yes, they definitely slowed down innovation and decreased consumer surplus compared to the counterfactual of just taxing the behaviour you don't like (like taxing fuel or emissions).

They tax the fuel as well, don’t you worry.

Sure, but they could have taxed it more and not have any official fuel efficiency standards.

(And compared to most of Europe or Singapore, US fuel is taxed very lightly, and their CAFE standards are especially stupid. Especially since their loopholes led to the replacement of practical station wagons with silly and dangerous SUVs. With a more car-agnostic fuel tax, this wouldn't have happened.)


You stumbled onto the pain point. The problem isn’t the intention but the execution. The EU historically has done a better job at nailing the execution of this type of regulation.

If it slows down innovation is debatable but even so there’s still a solid principle behind it, a small speed reduction can grant a huge efficiency gain. It’s usually a worthwhile compromise. You don’t run tour engine only in the red zone because that’s where it makes the most power.


> [...] a small speed reduction can grant a huge efficiency gain.

And customers directly benefit from the efficiency gain by burning through less fuel. So no need to decide for them.


In that same sentence I mentioned the slowing down of innovation, not cars.

The government gets to decide for the people because that’s what a democratic majority wants. If you don’t want it go full anarchist. Just don’t come crying to the government to protect you when you inevitably take it on the chin.

For example would you want laws that ban giving people the mother of all beatings in the street? Or just tax it really high? Someone might just have some money burning a hole in their pocket and an intense desire to teach a lesson in regulations. Everyone has some strong opinions about their own freedom until someone else’s freedom punches them in the teeth and then they’re little lambs lining up to ask for regulations.


Huh? Just because democracy is better than many alternatives, doesn't mean that your neighbours need to vote on what underwear you are wearing.

> doesn't mean that your neighbours need to vote on what underwear you are wearing.

You’ll be happy to find out that they in fact don’t. They only vote for representatives which then decide on important topics especially if they have impact on the wider population. Enjoy your freedom to pick your underwear while respecting all the fuel and speed related regulations.


The externalities affect everyone, including people who dont own cars.

There's a (finite) level of fuel tax that internalises all the externalities.

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