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

Bruder, komm nach Berlin or frère, allez à Paris

I arrive in 2026. Decide to start a startup. By the year 2038, the state mandated reader of legal documents has finished reading out aloud to me and my co-founder. Now we find a VC. His documents need to be read to us both. But the Y2K38 problem strikes. He thinks we are in the year 1970. He needs to read us the "ancient company addendum". While he's reading he chokes and keels over, dead from the emissions from his Volkswagen. Our ARR may be zero, but what about our government grants? Also zero.

My friend. He starts in France in 2026. The government mandates that the retiree earnings to worker earnings ratio must be fixed by law to what it was in 2025: 130%. For every employee I hire, I must also pay a retiree 1.3 times his salary. He visits me via train in 2038. I ask him how his trip was. Turns out he actually got on Deutsche Bahn train back then in 2026. I just didn't know because he spent all his time on Twitter explaining why the US approach to startups won't work. He's lucky. Pretty short delay for DB train.


This was crafted with a subtlety that captures the continental combination of infrastructural petrification and untethered pride perfectly. Wonderful

Reminds me of how often you hear Austrian Railways announcing that they apologize for the late running of a train "which was subject to delays in a neighbouring land". They never name which country but it's always Germany.

Error 404, Berlin apartment not found, or current tenant wants 11k for "the furniture" if I want the honor to be allowed to rent the apartment

Come to Germany, the letters from Rundfunkbeitrag and Waldorf Frommer are already waiting for you!

You've not heard of the UK's TV license then.

Oh come on. You get the BBC for that money. I gladly pay it byt then I work in tech.

The GDP should be banned as a metric for being a life quality proxy, it's insane how so many people still refer to it although proven to neglect so many parts of what counts into LQ. To OP: Go check out Doughnut Economics - the book does a good job clearing up economical fallacies & mismodelling of such things.


Super interesting article. Thanks for sharing - the ISIS story was thrilling.


I am happy they are careful with new technologies, especially one like AI, and also set the right impulses. Enough non-political reasons to have that stance, especially taking in societal implications and how technology affects everyone and not just stakeholders and techbros. In a time when tech in the US is just accelerating by the top-down agenda of figures like Andreesen, Thiel & Co., that is very much needed imo.


I damn love CCC, so excited to be there this year. God bless!


See you there!


I do partly disagree because Game Theory is based on an economic, (and also mentioned) reductionist view of a human, namely homo oeconomicus that does have some bold assumptions of some single men in history that asserted that we all act only with pure egoism & zero altruism which is nowadays highly critiqued and can be challenged.

It is out of question that it is highly useful and simplifies it to an extent that we can mathematically model interactions between agents but only under our underlying assumptions. And these assumptions must not be true, matter of fact, there are studies on how models like the homo oeconomicus have led to a self-fulfilling reality by making people think in ways given by the model, adjusting to the model, and not otherwise, that the model ideally should approximate us. Hence, I don't think you can plainly limit or frame this reality as a product of game theory.


Hopefully without spoiling it, Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time has an interesting take on game theory at the end


Probably, else the sum wouldn't have worked out the way it did, if we are talking about 5.9€ million as of today.


Just change the underlying economic incentives - but nobody is even barely there yet, except maybe the EU. Doughnut Economics, when are you going to save us (& the planet)?


"It is a just a business" is crazy to say if your founder was Peter Thiel and you ostensibly merged already halfway with the operating goverment (US, DoD)


I would like to use LLMs more to also learn and have fun - but it's about Output Maximization and that's a waste of time, to learn & apply myself.


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

Search: