Alex3917

The idea that Knuth doesn't use email is basically just a practical joke that got out of hand. He actually received 31,997 and sent 19,910 emails between 1999 and 2019, and that's only including the emails from his work account at Stanford.

Sure, he uses email much less than you would expect from someone of has stature, but he still uses email about as much as the average person.

> "However, many magicians perform familiar tricks or variations of them without feeling the need to innovate."

Which makes these magicians craftspeople, rather than artists. Clearly some subset of magicians are actually artists, but the real takeaway is that neither the researcher nor the article author understand what makes something art.

I mean by this standard, you could write literally the exact same article about Subway Sandwich Artists.

Not online, sorry!

No idea. I’ve never worked at any of these companies, I just learned this in an academic conference presentation on ethnographic research into OnlyFans users. OnlyFans doesn’t have its on recommendation system, so users need to find their customers on instagram, Twitter, tumblr, etc.

> normal, non-sexual photos of trans people are "nsfw" now

FWIW, the algorithms that big tech companies use are often trained to recognize women’s underwear. So non-sexual photos of trans men wearing women’s underwear are often flagged, even when similar photos of women wearing boxers are not.

I’m not saying it’s right, just giving the actual reason this happens. (Albeit I don’t have Tumblr-specific knowledge.)

So one thing I try to be very good about is never doing more than one thing in a line, which means always using named conditions and named returns. So in other words, if statements and return statements should always contain a single variable that describes the condition or what's being returned, and should not contain function calls, boolean logic, etc. This typically involves giving things descriptive names and then not using them more than once, but it makes the code more readable.

So e.g. you have lines like:

  const isCar = (wheels === 4) && (steeringWheels === 1) && (canDrive === true);
  if (isCar) { ... }

and not lines like:

  if ((wheels === 4) && (steeringWheels === 1) && canDrive === true) { ... }

And similarly:

  const isCar = (wheels === 4) && (steeringWheels === 1) && (canDrive === true);
  return isCar;

Rather than:

  return (wheels === 4) && (steeringWheels === 1) && (canDrive === true);

I'd actually like linters for JS and Python to enforce named conditionals and named returns, but afaik no one has done this yet.

I often add an extra line or two of no-op code in order to improve readability. But in these examples, the code clearly wasn't written to communicate anything, but rather by mistake.

Don’t forget it can also play Myst.

> tl;dr for my post here, there was a segment of the slashdot population who really identified with the Columbine shooters

I mean the reason YC (and by extension, HN) became a thing was largely because of pg posting on Slashdot about similar themes.

I'm definitely not assuming that homeopathic medicine is incapable of harming people, but for the sake of this specific argument I think it's reasonable to assume that we could find something that isn't especially harmful to fill the role of giving people who don't read the labels something to take.

> Wishful thinking, but next up should be homeopathic snake-oil.

It sounds like it's serving a useful purpose.

> "I know so many people… hell, I've done this myself, I've bought [a homeopathic] product by mistake," Little said. In a trip to the drug store while sick or as a weary parent of a miserably ill child, it's easy to mistakenly pick up a homeopathic product in haste or the fog of infection.

If folks are going to irresponsibly take some random drug without having any idea what's in it, it sounds like funneling them toward something that won't harm them is a good thing. I mean would you really rather have them giving their kids something like tylenol without reading the dosage instructions?

> My home kitchen doesn't routinely serve strangers.

Most states have cottage food laws, with basic regulations for small-scale commercial production. E.g. you need to take a course on food safety, you need your water tested, and you can only sell up to $X per year, but you aren't subject to random inspections. There is no reason why the web shouldn't be regulated similarly, with different rules based on the size of the audience.

> For very small shops willing to incur legal risk or limit the application pool, you can do take home tests and/or lean on side projects, with an hour of explaining the nitty gritty details and choices. At scale it becomes untenable, because you open yourself up for discrimination lawsuits, and you can't convince a lot of people who already have jobs and families to do lengthier take home stuff.

At the end of the day, programming is just a writing job. So if you apply for non-technical writing jobs, e.g. to be a columnist at The New York Times or The New Yorker, do they not read any of your preexisting work on the grounds that it could open them up to discrimination lawsuits? Similarly, do folks who hire designers typically not look at their portfolios?

He wrote a famous book called Mountains Without Handrails:

https://www.amazon.com/Mountains-Without-Handrails-Reflectio...

It's been 20 years since I read it, but iirc he is musing about whether things like paving the trails around Niagara falls to make them handicap accessible diminishes our ability to be awed by the natural experience.

I may well be mischaracterizing it, so if you want to read it yourself the whole thing appears to be online here:

https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/sax/contents.ht...

> We are fortunate to have them and helping disabled people take advantage of the parks is an excellent idea.

Joseph Sax is rolling in his grave.

> Erowid is great, but the trip reports were universally fanciful

IIRC they have moderators vet them and only a relatively small percentage get published. The founders and staff actually take their mission statement seriously.

I look forward to them removing all this functionality in four or five years, and then reintroducing it as a stunning new innovation in another four or five years after that.

Also, the article A Rape in Cyberspace is about something that happened in LambdaMoo, and is one of the most famous articles ever written about the Internet:

https://www.villagevoice.com/a-rape-in-cyberspace/

It looks like it's been submitted to HN several times, but has never gotten many upvotes.

IIRC the PSAC II building, also in NYC, is designed so that someone can fly a plane into it without anyone inside really noticing.

To be fair, the reason this has so few views is because the original was deleted. There are earlier HN threads on this, e.g. here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14236711

Regardless, still a great post and highly worth watching.

> Her oncologist didn't like the idea because there is also lots of research that says it spurs growth in tumors.

To be fair, if that's the effect you're going for it doesn't seem like the best option. If you want something to promote oxidative stress, take something like pawpaw supplements or a drug like metformin.

Tumors need more energy than normal cells, and oxidative stress interferes with the ability of your mitochondria to produce energy. So yeah, it makes intuitive sense that antioxidants are not what you'd want for cancer. Although as you mentioned, these systems are pretty complicated and there are a lot of chemicals that can act as antioxidants in some circumstances and oxidative agents in others.

So basically this is another Joe Nacchio situation?

> unless you get a low-acetogenin variety, eating them more than once in a while has health impacts, possibly a Parkinson's-like syndrome.

Although acetogenins are very neurotoxic, they also have a fairly low bioavailability when the ripe fruits are eaten out of hand.[1] If you stick to eating only one or two fruits per day for the few weeks they're in season, you're unlikely to develop progressive supranuclear palsy.

It's really if you're doing things to increase the bioavailability, like brewing the leaves into tea, cooking the fruit with fats, infusing the fruit into alcohol, etc. that you're more likely to run into issues. In the 400+ years of people eating the fruit in the United States, there is exactly one death associated with pawpaws, and that happened to an orchardist who had been eating the fruit for 30 years straight. Had they been aware that their PSP symptoms were being caused by pawpaw consumption, they could have stopped eating the fruit after 15 years and likely would have been fine.

Keep in mind also that pawpaw consumption likely also reduces your risk of cancer, and since you're much more likely to get cancer than PSP, moderate pawpaw consumption is almost certainly a net positive for your health. There is also some new research that's come out within the last few weeks suggesting that metformin (also thought to be a mitochondrial complex I inhibitor) might reduce your risk of covid, so perhaps the fruit even has that going for it as well.

Regardless, given that you can talk with plenty of folks who have eating 2,500+ over their lifetimes who don't seem to be having any ill effects, the average person probably doesn't have a whole lot to worry about by eating a handful of pounds of fruit per year.

Also FWIW, here is a video I made last year showing my trees: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buJruAx0osg

And if you want more pawpaw content, Timothy Lane (Ockoo Farm) has the best YouTube channel on them right now: https://www.youtube.com/@abyssquick/videos

[1] Timothy Lane claims the bioavailability of the different acetogenins generally ranges from 1 - 5%, which seems about right although I have not fact checked this extensively myself.

> More importantly, however, this is an example of the "you're already doing it so it's not a big deal" fallacy

I'm not saying it's not a big deal, I'm saying it hasn't gotten much scrutiny, at least relative to comparable innovations in the past. E.g. when airports introduced body scanners, Jeffrey Rosen wrote an entire book about this called The Naked Crowd. Where's the equivalent scrutiny for iris scanners?

> Why would Worldcoin beta-test in Kenya vs SV if not in an attempt to fly under the radar of scrutiny

Iris scanning is already widely used in the U.S. and hasn't received much scrutiny. It's in the news all the time, e.g. with the owners of Madison Square Garden using it to keep their political enemies from going to concerts. You probably use it every time you get on an airplane already. Even LinkedIn uses CLEAR to power their verified profiles.

> let us get forward some legislation, adding criminal liability to the executives ignoring such things

IIRC there is government legislation that effectively mandates that tobacco companies add polonium to tobacco. Something to do with the fertilizer sticking to the trichromes on the leaves.

> Daniel Suarez had a very similar idea, although he referred to it as the bot problem

I also wrote about almost the exact same thing as what Worldcoin is doing back in 2006:

https://www.alexkrupp.com/fourwebs.html

As proof of the original publication date, not only is it in the Wayback Machine, but it's also cited in several academic papers and books. It's great that someone is actually doing it, but I'm also kind of ticked they didn't cite this essay as prior art in their patent application.

> anyone, human or otherwise - can use that wallet.

But there are only 8 billion people, which is literally an infinite improvement over the status quo.

Honestly I think aerobic training is more effective than isometric training at reducing blood pressure, I think most people (and studies) just don't do enough of it to see the effect. You really need to be doing a minimum of 90 minutes of zone 2 training 5 - 6 days per week, which isn't especially difficult but it's just more than most people are willing to do.

There's no doubt that doing squats or whatever will reduce your blood pressure more in the short term, but the effects generally only last for a few days. Whereas the effects of aerobic are larger and longer lasting, you just need to do it correctly and reasonably consistently.

Also, while Gymnopilus junonius probably does contain psilocin, I wouldn't really consider it to be a psilocybin mushroom. My understanding is that its effects as a nicotinic acetylcholine inhibitor are more prominent, at least from what I've heard. (As someone without a strong chemistry background, I'm less inclined to be an early adopter of something labeled "unknown neurotoxin.")