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

Aren't truck drivers required to take breaks by law?


By Canadian law IIRC it's 30 minutes every 8 hours or so. However it can still be split up to 2x 15 minute breaks, and it's only a break from driving; loading/unloading, inspections, hooking up or unhook, paperwork, etc is counted as as taking a break.

The lower provinces allow up to 13 hours per day of driving and a total 14 hours per day on duty time before you're required to take a 10 hour rest in a single 24 hour period. The northern territories I believe legally allow up to 15 hours driving per day.

That's just what I've read so take it for what it's worth.


I agree with you on the drive time. A buddy of mine has a Model X, and he occasionally will make the 400 mile drive to visit. He stops about halfway to stretch his legs and eat lunch, the same thing he did when he had an ICE powered SUV. The only difference is now the car is charging while he eats.


Amazon doesn't need people with particular credentials on the org chart to bring in VC money. They already have plenty.


That's easy to say if you don't need an organ. And the dangers are mostly theoretical at this point.


If you really needed a lung you would take what you could get.


It doesn't have to replace people on a one-for-one basis to cause job losses. Let's say LLMs make your developers 50% more efficient. Doesn't it stand to reason you can lay off the lowest performing 33% and get the same amount (or more) of work?


No, it does not stand, because you think linearly. Companies can't simply drop 33% of employees because there is competition. If competition uses both humans and AI they will get more value from both. No AI has sufficient autonomy or capability to be held accountable for its mistakes.

There is less upswing in reducing costs than in increasing profits. Companies want to increase profits actually, not just reduce costs which will be eaten away by competition. In a world where everyone has the same AIs, human still make the difference.


You're assuming everyone can compete on service alone, and that's just not the case. If the quality of the product is good enough, price becomes the more important metric.


Think about Meta. A simple example is Metaverse. Mistakes and competition? Then, look at their market capitalization over the last three years.


It also means that with lower costs your service becomes more attractive and maybe attracts more customers, so might even grow the number of workers.

This is known as Jevons Paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox


Yes, and a lot of people have gone broke assuming unlimited demand for the services they provide.


there hasn’t been a single study that concludes any benefits to AI yet.

Either it’s a cover for something or people are a bit too overzealous to believe in gains that haven’t materialised yet.


Have you ever been at a company where the limiting factor was finding stuff to build? I've never seen one personally. If there's any productivity increase, they'll just build even more stuff.

(And that's if we agree about a 50% increase I'd say 5% is already generous)


I have certainly been at companies where the limiting factor was finding stuff to build that someone was willing to pay for.


>What I've found is that only Americans exhibit self-starting and creativity.

Isn't that mostly a function of how incentives are aligned? I had a job with a lot of outsourcing to India. The Indians were given specific bits of code to write. They didn't even know how their code fit into the application.

Their entire incentive structure was geared toward getting them to write those bits of code as quickly as possible, finish, and take another task. There just wasn't any room for "self-starting and creativity".

I have a feeling if the entire application had been moved to India things would have been different.


It could be. But I worked at companies where we had full time employees all around the world, all of whom had full access to the same information the rest of us had. And I still saw this behavior generally. There were of course exceptions.

Interestingly the biggest exceptions were ones that had at some point lived and worked in the USA, and then had returned to their home country for some reason or another.

> I have a feeling if the entire application had been moved to India things would have been different.

I had direct experience with this. We had an office of full time employees in India tasked with a project, but I still had to hand hold them through most of the key decisions (which I didn't have to do with the US based teams nearly as much).


I think what you saw is more related to work/life balance than any innate difference in people. That's certainly my experience.

Employment is central to American's identity in a way that's almost considered perverse elsewhere.


Exactly!!

Its also like, no I don't think a family is supposed to be where some guy on the top extracts all the money and then trickes it down and I get %'s of what I did. This doesn't sound like a family.

Someone create a blog post on this phenomenon as to me, this seems like americans having an parasocial bond with companies (I vaguely remember the stripe CEO had said my name once or something along that lines, a blog post and it felt parasocial man)

I mean, I just feel like americans complaining about indians devs are complaining about the wrong things, like maybe I don't get them but its not true as to what they are saying. I just don't get it man.

I have seen Indian govt jobs to be much more like american private jobs in the sense that employment becomes central to their identity and there is this sense of tightknit community for the most part and maybe that has to do with the fact that the govt isn't usually exploiting its own workers and the tight knit sense of community comes from helping really poor children in teaching, building roads that my uncle flexes on me that I built this road or this college and showing me the absolute chad he sometimes is.


Cultural differences do exist. I don't understand why this isn't a major problem, because it's behavior I've seen again and again and again: Indians seem terrified of showing any initiative whatsoever (including asking), any own contribution, and do what you've asked them and only what you've asked them. They are also terrified of being accused of doing nothing. This goes to extremes, such as purposefully taking a very long time to finish a simple task simply because they haven't gotten a new one, don't dare ask for one, have to be seen to be working, and can't come up with anything themselves.

You want a long list of simple tasks finished? Excellent workers. An endless ticket queue with simple problems? There's a few issues with them not escalating real problems, but ok.

You want an application developed and a lot of problems solved? Stay away.


Well when you are paid peanuts, you do the bare minimum.

And an incentives issue.

Some software engineers work and they do the job and if they finish the work early, the company just start having more expectations of them WHILE PAYING THE SAME. So you are effectively catered if you don't work or take more to do the same atleast in the consultancy or similar business in India.

I feel like a lot of Indians especially software devs don't have this allegiance to a company where we consider a company to be our "family", and I find it really fair. My cousins always tell me that a company extracts 10x more value from you than what they give you back. Not sure how much of that is true in US but some developers are literally exploited in India, they couldn't care less about an application developed if they are this stuck state of limbo where they won't get fired if they do shitty work but they won't really get higher up the ladder either and even if they do the good work, it would take years for the company to notice it and its better to just change companies for that raise.

An incentive issue at its finest which could and is fixed by many people, just because you used a consultancy that sucked or had people that sucked doesn't make us all shitty software devs man.

Its Not a cultural issue, It really offended me as by coating us all in this "culture", you said somethings which are clearly offending.

Maybe I can get the point that maybe software attracts a lot of shy people and so they are shy towards taking the first initiative but that's not a cultural issue.

The culture of our school depends, most schools don't incentivize extracurricular activities that much so we don't do it and that's why we don't usually take initiative, because boom everything matters what you wrote in 3 hours

The incentive system is flawed but maybe I have hope, I mean to be honest, Things aren't that better anywhere else in the world too. I just feel like either the devs I have met irl are absolutely really good from what I've seen or your guys experience hasn't been that good but it isn't that big of a difference and I feel like things are a little exaggerated when I come to such forums.


I have often experienced that it isn't a problem of pay or of incentives. They're terrified of asking for something to do for example. As in scared, and not a little bit. Not underpaid.

I'm not claiming they're well-paid, but I don't think this is the issue, or at least not the primary issue.


IBM / Hofstede has a lot of studies on this.


That's my argument against looking for a 100% remote job. Even if the company is happy with you now, eventually there will be new management that sees your job as low-hanging fruit for expense reduction.


There seems to be no limit to the size of this bubble.


i really only started hearing about AI bubble this year. with the housing bubble, people were talking about it in 2005 and it took years for it to finally break. maybe AI bubble is the same


Except the housing bubble wasn't actually a bubble. Housing prices today are much higher than in 2007. Based on realized results, the mispricing wasn't the peak of the housing bubble but the trough of the crash. With the benefit of hindsight, the peak actually undervalued how expensive housing would get. (Speaking about the US market in aggregate. Not other countries, nor localities like Las Vegas where the case for a bubble is stronger.)


The price of housing is ultimately a political choice. If voters choose to restrict supply of housing through zoning and other laws, prices can be pushed up hugely.


I doubt zoning has any real effect. Henry George realized in the 19th century that if you increase the money supply most of that money goes into driving up the cost of real estate. And the government has been printing money like crazy for decades now.

Where I live there aren't too many restrictions on housing, but a developer friend tells me he can barely make a profit at current prices because of 1) the cost of the land and 2) modern building codes make housing a lot more expensive. You can have cheaper houses if you're willing to give up things like the insulation that forces builders to use 2x6s instead of 2x4s for exterior framing.

That NIMBY stuff is mostly a problem for pricing if you want to live in a big city.


If you adjust your chart for inflation you see a big peak in 2025 and another in 2022. The trough of the crash matches the historical trend.

Yes, the price of housing is crazy. But so is the price of eggs.


Eh.. "peak in 2005 and another in 2022"


Yes it was a bubble. (Also a much larger related credit bubble). A big run up followed by a crash. Many companies went under, many people suffered. The fact that prices recovered a decade later doesn't change any of that.


It's a little more subtle than that. His executive order doesn't ban flag burning as an expression of speech. It only bans flag burning as part of an incitement to violence. I expect the courts will strike it down, but even if they don't it won't be something you get arrested for. It'll be something you get extra time for, like hate speech.


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

Search: