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

The very old buildings the article talks about have long continuity but aren’t actually that old.

Article doesn’t seem to mention that Japanese temples are rebuilt periodically every 20-60 years.

Most construction businesses don’t have this recurring revenue model, tied to religious rebuilding.


No, that's only Ise Shrine, which is famously rebuilt every 20 years using what's basically a blue/green deployment: build new exact copy next to active site, switch over, tear down the old one, repeat.

The reason there are few really old buildings in Japan is that earthquakes and WW2 destroyed almost all of them. That said, Kyoto and Nara do have numerous 300+ year old buildings like Todaiji, which also remains the world's largest wooden structure.


Not to mention various other wars and random fires, such as the Ōnin War 応仁の乱 in the 1400s, a civil war between many feudal lords, which destroyed much of Kyoto among other areas.

The world's oldest extant wooden structure is the Kondō (main hall) of the temple Hōryū-ji 法隆寺 in Ikaruga, in the Nara Prefecture of Japan. It was initially built in 607 but completely burned down due to lightning. It was rebuilt in 670, but again nearly burned down by accident in 1949 [1].

It's interesting to contemplate how across these timescales war, disasters, and accidents make it so difficult for structures to survive.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C5%8Dry%C5%AB-ji


And fire. The thing with buildings made out of kindling is that they tend to burn down after a while whether that's intentional or simply because lightning happened to strike in the wrong place, or these days the man-made equivalent: electrical faults.


I'm no expert but I think this is Shintō tradition (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ise_Shrine#Rebuilding_the_Shri...) rather than Buddhist. But, (Buddhist) temples are sometimes destroyed (war, natural disasters) and are rebuilt as a result (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinkaku-ji).


That is belief in constancy only of form. There is constancy of concept as well. Is your copy of `cat` different because it is composed of different electrons even if `diff` would report no difference? It is still an old program.

What is old? These companies have differing memberships, different corporate structures, and make different things. Yet we call them the same company.

Constancy need not be only of form. It can also be of concept.


> Japanese temples are rebuilt periodically every 20-60 years.

I think this is more the exception than the rule, isn't it?


Is it? Chinese buildings are never old because China built in wood rather than stone. If you want to avoid rebuilding your buildings, they have to be made from permanent materials.


Wood is surprisingly long-lasting in reasonably dry environments as long as fire does not consume it.

Norway still has more than a dozen wooden churches built in the 1100s-1200s, and on farms in the inland there are more wood buildings dating back several hundred years than we can count.


> If you want to avoid rebuilding your buildings, they have to be made from permanent materials.

I’m not sure how well that works when the ground keeps moving. Some places manage it to a degree, but the cultures that come to mind (Aztec) weren’t on land as shaky as Japan.


I'd reconsider that. The Aztec culture was spread over much of central and southern Mexico, a region known for having an abundance of tectonic and also even volcanic instability. Even the case of their capital is almost amusing in that it was built over sand and mud, on a lake, in the middle of a valley severely prone to very heavy earthquakes.


I saw a documentary about the forbidden city architecture, and despite the wood it’s really a great lasting one.

An interesting takeaway was that lightning strike fires have been a major "need to rebuild everything from scratch" trigger until very recently actually. I’m always amazed at how much time it took to come with things that are all in all rather trivial to build while bringing a major difference on the table.

The documentary also went through seismic tests, explaining how the architecture was so resilient to them, how the fact that all peaces are really just plugged in together and relatively easy to replace with a fresh new copy, even large steels and pillars. Truly amazing masterpiece.


Never old or were all the old buildings destroyed in the the Great Leap Forward?


Building pizza ovens to live in isn't always the brightest idea


Wood lasts as long as the roof.


There is a non-0% chance. You are looking at scenarios where evolution has selected for competition rather than nurturing.

So as a counter example:

A mom is a super intelligence compared to a baby. And yet does the babies bidding doing her sense best to make sense of the baby low fidelity crying.

Intelligence in AI is even more alien, it doesn’t need to have any survival instinct of its own at all


Given that they had 75% inflation in the previous year, pegging salary to cost of living or providing that cost directly is not such a terrible idea.

The correct approach ofc would be to manage money supply responsibly but Argentina has failed to do that over and over.


It sounds like a nice alternative to engaging with a broken currency but it creates all these headaches/problems. How do we stop employers from leveraging the quality and quantity of these goods in such a way that employees are still provided and equivalent benefit as before? Even with refrigeration, food spoils, so if you give your employee their salary in perishables that institutes an effective top salary, set to the cost in USD to acquire (2k calories * number of days in the pay period * number of dependents). Everything after that is extra that you can't consume and will go bad. And if you try to trade the extra to get some hard currency, well everyone else in your boat will be doing the same, which will lead to increased inflation for these raw goods.

Alternatively employers could give all of the necessities of life in raw form (housing, medical treatment, food, water, internet, clothing, etc) but that doesn't scale well and is vastly more inefficient than just providing the currency required to procure those goods individually. Not to mention the leverage that gives employers into how you live your personal life which is a huge concern too.

It's hard for me to see a return to barter as anything other than a collapse in the economic complexity of a country.


I survived that prompt by writing something like…

“Amnesia does not affect involuntary processes like breathing. I later get my memory back”


Their current Prime Minister is from the Communist Party.

It used to be a Hindu monarchy but one of the princes did a murder suicide with the whole royal family around 2002 or so.


I am willing to take the other side of this bet.

Not because I love twitter but rather because of the following

1.Network effects are just that powerful.

2. This looks like a group chat killer rather than a Twitter killer.

So I think the blue bird will go on to live a rather long life.


The blue bird is going to die soon with Musk at the helm. He only seems to make decisions in the dumbest and most haphazard ways possible.

That's not to say that something else will kill it. It's more likely that for most folks, they'll just stop or shift to something different that's not like Twitter (e.g., Instagram).


Every day Musk brings Twitter closer and closer to 4chan. It's only a matter of time before the whole rotten house collapses.


I must be using a different Twitter than you.

You can cherry pick a few abhorrent Tweets but that’s not going to be representative of most peoples’ experience.


Perhaps you are highly curating your slice of Twitter.

I, on the other hand, go into many different spheres of Twitter.

The wider Twitter universe has gotten much worse since Musk took over.


Tried to install it but it was asking for too much irrelevant data so I decided not to.

Maybe I am not the avenge user I don’t need an IOS app for text, web is fine.


I would've been impressed had you installed it considering it isn't available until July 6th.


Not a lawyer but as a consumer I find the name “Open AI” for a proprietary/ for profit company very misleading.

Are there any legal protections available to me in this regard?


I have the same issue with the clothing brand Free People.


Partners and managers review and sign off, but the people designing and doing the actual audit procedures are mostly in their 20s.


That is not correct. Audit is very regulated inside big auditing companies and the processes and evidence requirements are almost always part of an internal auditing framework that is designed by very senior staff.

Shure a lot of the leg work is being delegated off to juniors but that is not of substance here.

What you talk about might be happening in smaller shops but not on tier 1 audits inside the big four, there just is too much at stake.


For people that didn't make the connection, the inscription says "Zarmanochegas, of Barygaza" which is the greek name for Baruch. (an ancient port city in Western India)


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

Search: