Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | more falcor84's comments login

Exactly, applying the principle of Chesterton's Fence [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:FENCE


Absolutely agreed, but just wanted to mention that it's essentially the same level of access you would give to Zapier, which is one of their top examples of MCP integrations.

That seems fake - diffusion models should evolve details over time, right? This one just feels in the blanks gradually, like an old progressive jpeg.

EDIT: This video in TFA was actually a much cooler demonstration - https://framerusercontent.com/assets/YURlGaqdh4MqvUPfSmGIcao...


Even if true, it's indicative of the UX disease of trying to guess what the user persona needs instead of fucking asking us

As for a business model, I think that we should pay creators, either directly e.g. via Patreon, or slightly indirectly via smaller creator-led platforms like Nebula.

What's wrong with wanking and divorce? These are respectively a way for people to be happier and more self-reliant, and a way for people to get out of a situation that isn't working out for them. I think both are net positives, and I'm very grateful to live in a society that normalizes them.

I'm not implying that divorce should be stigmatized or prohibited or anything, but it is bad (necessary evil?) and most people would be much happier if they had never married that person in the first place rather than married them then gotten divorced.

So "normalize divorce" is pretty backward when what we should be doing is normalizing making sure you're marrying the right person.


This reminds me of one of my very favorite essays of all time, "Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person" by Alain de Botton from the School of Life. The title is somewhat misleading, and I resisted reading it for a couple years as a result. It is exquisite writing — it couldn't be said with fewer words, and adding more wouldn't help either — and an extraordinary and ultimately hopeful meditation on love and marriage.

NYT Gift Article: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/29/opinion/sunday/why-you-wi...


Alain de Botton also published this in video form, seven years ago [0]. If you want the cliff's notes, his School of Life channel has a shorter version [1].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EvvPZFdjyk 22 minutes

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuKV2DI9-Jg 4 minutess


I agree. The title is wrong. It should be 'Why you are sure to think, whomever you marry, that they are the wrong person".

You’re 100% right. That essay is superb and I’m glad I read it!

Thanks for sharing the link.


Making sure you are marrying the right person is normalized. I’d have never even known my ex wasn’t the right person if I hadn’t married her. I didn’t come out of my marriage worse off.

Normalize divorce and stop stigmatizing it by calling it bad or evil.


> I didn’t come out of my marriage worse off

This is good for you, but many people do come out of their marriages much worse off in various ways

> Normalize divorce and stop stigmatizing it by calling it bad or evil

It's not bad or evil, but let's also not pretend that it isn't damaging


We don't have to pretend. The original poster thinks he knows what the world looks like if every marriage that ends in divorce just never happened. Those marriages do happen, though, and to place all the damage generated by that marriage strictly on the divorce is incorrect. Usually one or both parties know the consequences of the divorce and prefer them to the state of the marriage, because the damages are less than if divorce wasn't an option. Claiming divorce is some kind of undesirable 'damaged' state is just as stigmatizing as claiming it is 'bad' or 'evil'.

The alternative to divorce isn't perfect marriages, it is failed marriages that are inescapable.


> The alternative to divorce isn't perfect marriages, it is failed marriages that are inescapable.

I'm sure this has nothing to do with you, but by your comments in this thread, I'm reminded of a conversation I had with a friend on a bus one day. We were talking about the unfortunate tendency, in daytoday, of people to shuffle their elderly parents off to nursing homes, rather than to support said parents in some sort of independent living. A nearby passenger jumped into our conversation to argue that there are situations in which the nursing home situation is for the best. Although we agreed with him, he seemed to dislike the fundamental idea of caring for one's elderly parents at all, and subsequently became quite heated.


Who are you referring to with "the original poster?" I follow from this comment the whole way up to the root of the thread and not a single comment even begins to suggest someone "knows what the world looks like if every marriage that ends in divorce just never happened."

It's pretty easy to create strawmen arguments and argue against those instead of what people actually say, but it makes for at best boring and at worst confusing reading.


There are lots of proven viable alternatives to quick no-fault divorce, the most obvious being waiting periods or separation periods ranging from months to years. [0]. Parental alienation can be gamed, and frequently is. Psychologist evals can be gamed or biased. Expert witness reports can be gamed. Move-away scenarios (by the custodial parent) can be gamed. Making false or perjurous allegations can be gamed, sometimes without consequence. Jurisdiction-shopping can be gamed. It seems pretty obvious that if there are huge incentives (or penalties) for certain modes of behavior, some types of people will exploit those. Community property/separate property can be gamed. The timing of all these things can be gamed wrt dicslosures, health events, insurance coverage/eligibility, job change/start/end, stock vesting, SS eligibity, tax filings etc. Divorce settlements can be gamed too by one party BK'ing out of a settlement/division of debts. At-fault divorce also exists (in many US states), and obviously can be gamed.

It's not a false dichotomy between either a jurisdiction must allow instant no-fault divorce for everyone who petitions for it, or none at all.

> Usually one or both parties know the consequences of the divorce and prefer them to the state of the marriage, because the damages are less than if divorce wasn't an option.

Sometimes both parties are reasonably rational and honest and non-adversarial, then again sometimes one or both aren't, and it only takes one party (or their relatives) to make things adversarial. If you as a member of the public want to see it in action, in general you can sit in and observe proceedings in your local courthouse in person, or view the docket of that day's cases, or view the local court calendar online. Often the judge and counsel strongly affect the outcome too, much more than the facts at issue.

> Claiming divorce is some kind of undesirable 'damaged' state is just as stigmatizing as claiming it is 'bad' or 'evil'.

It is not necessarily the end-state of being divorced that is objectively quantifiably the most damaging to both parties' finances, wellness, children, and society at large, it's the expensive non-transparent ordeal of family court itself that can cause damage, as much as (or sometimes more than) the end-state of ending up divorced. Or both. Or neither.

> The alternative to divorce is...

...a less broken set of divorce laws, for which there are multiple viable candidates. Or indeed, marriage(/cohabitation/relationships) continuing to fall out of favor. Other than measuring crude divorce rates and comparing their ratio to crude marriage rates (assuming same jurisdiction, correcting for offset by the (estimated) average length of marriage, and assuming zero internal migration), as marriage becomes less and less common, we're losing the ability to form a quantified picture of human behavior viz. when partnerships/relationships start or end; many countries' censuses no longer track this or being pressued to stop tracking it [1]; it could be inferred from e.g. bank, insurance, household bill arrangements, credit information, public records, but obviously privacy needs to be respected.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divorce_law_by_country

[1]: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2015/05/11/census-bu...


> It's not bad or evil, but let's also not pretend that it isn't damaging

It’s not any more damaging than getting married in some cases, or staying married.

Marriage is not some sacred thing to be treasured. It CAN be, but it isn’t inherently good. Inherently, marriage is a legal thing, and that’s about it; being married changes how taxes, confidential medical information, and death are handled, and that’s about it. Every meaning or significance beyond those legal things is up to the happy couple, including how, if, and when, to end the marriage.


Something can be both bad and not stigmatized. Divorce is a pretty good example here. It's not stigmatized, and to prove it's not say with a straight face it should be illegal and you won't be able to blink before the backlash hits you. It's not stigmatized at all. Most individuals who get married will get divorced. The way the numbers work out something like 60-70% of all marriages contain at least one divorced partner. Saying it's stigmatized is silly and doesn't line up with reality. But of course it's an objectively bad thing. It's messy, it's expensive, feelings get hurt, often times years or decades of peoples' lives are wasted.

I don't have to say it with a straight face because your sibling poster did it for me. Something can be both common and stigmatized. Yes, divorce can be messy, expensive, emotionally fraught, and take time. Mine was, and it still wasn't 'bad' or even undesirable. Starting a business, learning an instrument, training for a sport can also be all those things. We don't call them 'bad', or 'evil', because we don't assume the end result is undesirable.

The comparison can't be to an imaginary world where everyone always picks the best partner. It has to be to the real world where people don't always pick the best partner and the absence of divorce means they're stuck with them.


Eh, I would say it's quite a bit more complicated than you're giving it credit for.

>Making sure you are marrying the right person is normalized.

Absolutely not.

I live in the southern US and we have the culmination of "Young people should get married" coupled with "divorce is bad/evil" and the disincentivization of actually learning about human behaviors/complications before going through something that could be traumatic.

There are a lot of relationships that from an outside and balanced perspective give all the signs they will not work out and will be potentially dangerous for one or both partners in the relationship.


Yeah and the "sex before marriage is bad" thing makes it even harder to experiment and find a partner that really suits.

The innocent machine can't do either. It's akin to having no mouth, but it must scream (apologies to Harlan Ellison)

That is a fair point, but it would then apply to everything else we teach it about, like how we perceive the color of the sky or the taste of champagne. Should we remove these from the training set too?

Is it not still good to be exposed to the experiences of others, even if one cannot experience these things themself?


Thanks for saying it's a fair point, but it's more of an offhand joke about "an innocent machine". In reality, a machine, even an LLM, has no innocence. It's just a machine.

Having studied biology, I never accepted the "just a machine" argument. Everything is essentially a machine, but when a machine is sufficiently complex, it is rational to apply the Intentional Stance to it.

Gets a bit more complicated when we start giving these machines agency.

Having gone through a divorce... no. It would be better if people tried harder to make relationships work. Failing that, it would be better to not marry such a person.

People sometimes grow in different directions. Sometimes the person who was perfect for you at 25 just isn't a good fit for you at age 40, regardless of how hard you try to make it work.

The state of having married the wrong person, will always occur. To stigmatize divorce is to put people who made the wrong choice once in a worse spot.

Marriage should be made less artificially blown up with meaning and divorce should not be stigmatized. Instead, if done with a healthy frequency, people divorcing when they notice it is not working, should be applauded, for looking out for their own health.

At the same time people also should learn how to make relationships in general work.


> Marriage should be made less artificially blown up with meaning and divorce should not be stigmatized. Instead, if done with a healthy frequency, people divorcing when they notice it is not working, should be applauded, for looking out for their own health.

> At the same time people also should learn how to make relationships in general work.

And most importantly, knowing when to do the one or the other.

I think this thought that divorce is bad comes from religion which would end up having to care for abandoned kids (especially when contraception didn't exist so having kids wasn't as much of a choice)

I don't really hear it so much here in Europe except from very religious people. Most people are totally ok with divorce, many aren't even married (I myself never married and I had a gf for 12 years from a Catholic family who also didn't mind at all) and a lot of them are even polyamorous :) I have a feeling that would not go down so well in rural America.


Europe is less extreme in terms of Christianity and its partly outdated values. Sure, in each country you can find hardliners, but I think much less than in the US.

I'm also a big fan of perplexity, using it for about a quarter of my searches.

If I were to write a "hard" sci-fi story of how the devil might take over the world in the near future, AI would be my top choice, and it would definitely fit with The Usual Suspects' "The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist".

Exactly, and of course there's a relevant xkcd (Average Familiarity) https://xkcd.com/2501/

But my reading is that the parent wouldn't have tackled this at all without the vibe coding, and would have used an off-the-shelf extension. So in that case, it's a pure win, no?

Yeah I could have framed it better. I was responding to:

>I've been using AI to get smaller examples and ask questions and its been great but past attempts to have it do everything for me have produced code that still needed a lot of changes.

In my experience most things that aren't trivial do require a lot of work as the scope expands. I was responding more to that than him having success with completing the whole extension satisfactorily.


Consider applying for YC's Summer 2025 batch! Applications are open till May 13

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

Search: