Hacker News .hnnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | outside2344's commentslogin

Less headaches, free futbol matches!

Trump has blundered like an idiot into this in Iran ...

... but the upside is that the same dynamics are making it possible for Ukraine to beat back Russia too.

It is a bad time to be an invading force.


That's how low in MAGA think.

Like an idiot?


And running out of Patriots

Looks like Iran is doing what i suggested Ukraine should have done to Russia https://hackernews.hn/item?id=42529638

Absolutely. A big part of the western Ukrainian defense was solely to drain the Russian military apparatus and drain they have. It will take Russia decades to rebuild their fighting force. Now Russia and China are doing it right back to us and the intelligence gained from this conflict is extremely valuable. Come to find out the US has been sitting on ego in its military more than actual might. The previously untouchable machines of war in the sky are now very much touchable. All that's left is for them to sink a battle ship. If Iran can shoot them down, you can bet China can inflict exponentially more harm. Drain our intercept missiles, destroy radars, corrode relationships, etc. At this point, China has the world on a silver platter if they want it.

Russia has rebuilt their military, which was neglected at the beginning of the war. The Russian and Ukrainian armies have adopted to drone warfare, which the rest of the world lags behind.

They haven't rebuilt the manpower. They've lost no less than a few hundred thousand fighting age men over the course of the war. It will take them 20-30 years minimum just for those births to occur and those newborns to make it to military age.

In case you haven't been following Ukraine, that's what it's doing. It has multiple cheap long range drones (FP-1, FP-2, etc) plus more expensive ones (FP-5), and it's making them in the millions a year, I think.

They just took out 40% of Russian oil export capacity.


no, the million or two is small battlefield drones, mostly quadcopters carrying an RPG warhead or similarly sized payload. The long range drones - and they carry only relatively small, like 20-50kg payloads - are well under 100 thousands. FP-5 was declared 1 per day half a year ago. By now i think we've seen may be 10-20 such missiles used - they use real turbo jet engine, there isn't much of them available, and they are expensive.

>They just took out 40% of Russian oil export capacity.

Yes, Ust-Luga and Primorsk. Very successful hits. Painful for Putin. Yet it isn't a knock-down. Russia is like a big drunk guy in a street fight - just delivering painful blows to him doesn't help, you have to deliver a knock-out blow, and unfortunately Ukraine still seems far from it.


There will be no knockout punch here, instead it will be death by exhaustion.

North Vietnam didn't die of exhaustion, nor did Afghanistan (2x), Iraq.

For reference, it's likely Ukraine is making more medium cheap drones per year than Iran, the current boogeyman.

This war will end the same way, probably around 2030.


Countries aren't human. You don't deliver a "knock out punch".

WW2 wasn't ended by capturing Berlin, it was ended because the German military was destroyed or surrendered as they were forced back towards Berlin.

By the time it fell, there wasn't an effective German military left.


That works for Iran because US air-defense is still comprised mainly of advanced and expensive systems (like the Patriot). It doesn't work as well in Ukraine or Russia because both have figured out drone interceptors quite well. Both countries do the type of attack drone clustering you suggest. I read somewhere that a strike like from Russia that might include 60-70 drones + ballistic missiles in the hopes that one or 2 get through.

you miss that i was talking about 650km/h "drones" (because, yes, it was already 3rd year of war, and 200km/h drone like Shahed became much easier target - this is why Russia has started to also use the 600km/h modification of Shahed with RC jet engine). There is related discussion under that comment addressing your point about interception.

>Both countries do the type of attack drone clustering you suggest

Ukraine still isn't completely there. They do attack Russia with up to 200 drones/day. They seem to never cluster more than a few, and the drones they are using are comparably small - 50kg warhead - and slow, 100+ km/h, almost always less than 200km/h. So they are easy to intercept/shoot down, almost never penetrate Moscow air defense, and do noticeable damage only when hitting flammable targets like oil/gas industry related.


Running out of patriots as well.

If S&P change their rules, I am going to sell my index funds, taxes be damned.

Sadly, this is not the only trash that is going to be hoisted on us retirement investors. OpenAI is waiting in the wings as well.

I am sure I am not the only one. That doesn't seem like it will be good for the market.


I am considering the same. Of course this happens to be a bad time to sell with the Iran war. Maybe we finally found the real reason for the war (only 90% sarcastic).

> Of course this happens to be a bad time to sell

I mean… it is still up 63% over the last 5 years. It’s not a bad time at all.


There were extensive discussions previously about passive investors being taken for a ride:

https://hackernews.hn/item?id=47392550

And Michael Burry also wrote a long post about it:

https://x.com/michaeljburry/status/2032483200404992209

The question is what can we do about it? Nasdaq finalized these rule changes already. It seems like this got rammed through and now it is happening. And I don't expect Trump's corrupt SEC to do anything about it. Who else can we appeal to?


I still want to be long in the market so my initial thought is switching to equal weight funds.

If equal-weight funds got more popular, couldn't they end up distorting the price of the smaller-cap companies within an index

It's a good point, maybe? Even the smallest market cap is $22B though, hard to say.

I'm invested in VTI, VXUS, and VT in various places, so I'm definitely going to be buying it whether I want to or not

If it's any consolation , VTI is free-float weighted so won't pick up very much SpaceX initially.

I sent a note to my rep at Vanguard warning that they better not change the VTI rules to buy into this scam.

VTI is market cap free-float weighted, as is VOO and SPY. So what ETFs would this IPO be an issue with if not these?

So far only the Nasdaq-100 has gone along with SpaceX's special weighting chicanery. The biggest fund which tracks the Nasdaq-100 is QQQ. Suffice to say, if you have money in QQQ you should be re-considering that position.

[flagged]


You can praise the technological achievements while still thinking the underlying business is trash. Plenty of horrible companies have generated great advances, but your money in them before mine thank you very much.

It is trash. They took one of the most successful private companies in the history of the world and made it baghold xAI.

At least it’s not Meta Llama

I used to agree until the xAI acquisition. Now IPO buyers will be buying debt from a shit tier dumpster fire to get access to SpaceX.

I hate that I will have to invest in this crap with my retirement index funds

Not sure why you are being downvoted. This is exactly what is happening and why OpenAI is trying to IPO to dump their garbage as well.

because its not accurate. they're milking the market. not dumping on the market.

they're only (sic) going for 75 billion. with an evaluation in the trillion mark.

This is just more speculative investment. you'll see this again in another year or so with a bigger evaluation on it... it's how the modern economy now "works".


maybe it's the histrionics? Thse personalities are inevitably inflating their own balloons in order to cash out, but that doesn't mean the reality is these companies are worthless. The downvotes come from comments like "OpenAI is trying to dump their garbage". At best that's a silly thing to say. We can argue "fair market value" but it's not zero.

What is the fair market value of an AI company that loses >$10B/year? Of course they have assets that could be stripped and sold for profit but public creditors come last. It's also going to be no where near their private valuation.

We really are trying our best to make Terminator reality aren't we?

Maybe drones will make human soldiers unacceptable in the future.

“It occurred to me that if I could invent a machine - a gun - which could by its rapidity of fire, enable one man to do as much battle duty as a hundred, that it would, to a large extent supersede the necessity of large armies, and consequently, exposure to battle and disease [would] be greatly diminished.” ― Richard Jordan Gatling, 1877

Should write a MIT case study on that in "Bad Hypotheses 101"

It's hard to explain without spoilers, but Isaac Asimov's The Feeling of Power (1958) is relevant to this concept of warfare.

If only wars would end when all the soldiers on one side were dead.

If the people fought before they'll keep fighting, even after their robots are gone.


They will certainly make human soldiers unviable. (I draw mostly dystopian conclusions from that prediction.)

Or it will just lead to lopsided massacres like the maxim gun did.

There was never any other option, given the direction of progress and basic human nature.

I know I know, but this and that and not me nor you, yet here we are and this is just beginning.


On the plus side there is now quite a lot of drone on drone combat saving people's lives

They are being operated by humans

But imagine the efficiencies to be gained if you swapped out the direct human operator with an automated operator. Then, you can have teams of automated operators being operated by a single human!

... Enterprise Edition

... LTSC

Really? I use Github Copilot. It is great actually, and I actually prefer it to Claude (loosely held opinion tho).

They do own some vertically integrated products like PeopleSoft that use these lower level foundational pieces. But I agree, I don't know why anyone in their right mind would use Oracle outside of golf and sailing bribes.


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

Search: