I miss the days when we didn't need sites like this one, but I'm extremely glad it exists and thankful to you for helping me discover it.
6,770 karma · joined February 26, 2009
On the other hand, I've talked to a lot of other immigrants who lived in different states before this, and the general consensus (in that admittedly small sample) is that the US is definitely different from South America or Europe in that sense.
For context, I lived in Chile before I moved to the US, and Chile is the country in South America that tries the hardest to be like the US. Even in Chile, it's easier to have a richer social life than here, despite longer working hours and longer commutes, which both result in having much less free time. My own theory is because you get to socialize more at work and, if you have a kid that goes to kindergarten or school, with other parents. Here? "Not so much" would be an understatement.
In my case, it's to have a conversation. Before I moved to the United States, I could have all sorts of conversations with people at work, no matter how controversial or stupid or weird. But in the US, the culture is different. There are things that you can't discuss with your coworkers, for various reasons.
When the pandemic hit and I stopped going to the office, that made the problem even worse. Sure, I didn't have any real friends here, but at least there was more randomness and diversity in my social life. I love my family, but it's an extremely limited pool of people to talk to.
So I found myself participating more and more on Twitter, on Imgur, and on certain game forums. Which, in turn, had the same impact on me as Facebook used to before I closed my account.
My own, very personal conclusion, is that the society in the United States suffers from a "disease" of alienating people from each other and isolating them, making them turn to social networks to fill the void left by the absence of what used to be normal, every day way to socialize.
Then again, I'm just a sample of one, so my conclusion is almost certain to be wrong.
I find Windows 9x to be ugly now. Back then, I thought it was the best thing since sliced bread. Like I said, I didn't have a Mac, but I tried OS/2 Warp, and I hated it.
I think the Windows 9x nostalgia stems from the absolute usability fustercluck we have these days. Back then, the GUI was uniform -- you didn't have to guess which element did what for each app -- and it communicated clearly. You always knew if a toggle was on or off, if a button was pressed or not, etc. When a dialog popped up to open a file, a single Shift+Tab would take you to the file list, instead of silently and invisibly putting the focus on the list headers. You could move your mouse around without "helpful" hints popping up everywhere.
I would happily go back to these "obsolete" ideas of consistent and concise GUI design, but it won't happen. People have been harping on about this for years now, and things aren't improving. It's just not a priority, I guess.
Maybe I'm too cynical, but I think it's way more likely that the next few months will allow those politicians who relied on that bullshit in order to push their agenda, to instead push that agenda quietly and with little or no opposition.
For example, you don't see a lot of outrage on Twitter over Greg Abbott's persecution of trans children anymore, because Twitter is abuzz with what's going on in Ukraine. This is a thing that is just as "real" as Ukraine, but the collective attention gets focused on one thing at a time, which is why "bullshit in politics" is usually needed.
However, context matters. The statistics they quoted showed that the helmet use was at 91% in Seattle.
So if you have a law that is punishing up to 9% of the population and you note some pretty ugly biases in the sample of those who get fined, then it doesn't sound unreasonable to conclude that maybe we don't need to be doing that right now.
As it turns out, their data showed that the vast majority of people already used helmets. Those who don't are mostly those who can't afford it, and fining them won't make cycling safer for anyone.
The bias in the enforcement was substantial: black cyclists got 4 times as many tickets as white, and nearly half of the tickets were issued to homeless people.
A perfect example of how choosing the right question matters just as much as choosing the right answer.
"How many kids should we let die so that the rest can play with chemistry sets?" is the same kind of fallacious question as "Do you think all vaccinations should be voluntary or are you in favor of authoritarianism?"
In short, it's a false dichotomy presented as a question, with the purpose of distorting the narrative and forcibly ending discussion.
EDIT: Since it might not be clear, I want to clarify that I'm not saying the parent chose that question to shut down the discussion. I agree with the parent's assessment that insisting on asking the right questions wasn't "a winning move for politicians".
Ironically, it was one of the best jobs I ever had, but you can't actually pay for your newborn's healthcare with job satisfaction.
Pretty much that, except that I wouldn't use the word "stagnate". What I said was "lag behind the cost of living", which might not have been the most concise way of putting it, but I hoped it would get my point across.
Essentially, the conundrum I've faced too often is that if you're not climbing the ladder, the purchasing power of your salary will start falling, even if your salary rises, because the raises you get reflect the lack of regard the company has for people who aren't climbing the ladder.
Stagnation, for me, would be to stay at the more-or-less same purchasing power. And I would be fine with that.
Does having limited ambition make you a bad dev/engineer, if you keep learning new things and contributing quality code at your current level of responsibility?
When people gather outside the Capitol, shouting that they have to stop the Congress from enacting the will of the people -- and construct gallows while they're at it -- that's not attempted insurrection, that's free speech. When they force their way into the Capitol, that's not attempted insurrection, that's trespassing. When they fail to obey the commands of the LEOs charged with protecting the Capitol and the people working inside, when they beat up some of those LEOs, that's not attempted insurrection, either.
To me, it sounds like the goalposts keep moving. At what point do you call it attempted insurrection?
I wonder what it would be like if kids started with BASIC. And not Visual Basic or any other modern, structured flavor. No, I mean the ancient stuff:
10 PRINT "All your base are belong to us!"
20 GOTO 10
Then go on to assembly language, again on some very limited and simple machine, along the lines of the good old ZX Spectrum 48 or Commodore 64.
Then move on to something like C or Pascal. Or even Python and JavaScript if you want. But the idea is that going through BASIC and assembly, they'll learn two important things: 1) how computers actually work (even though it's super-simplified, it should still be useful), and 2) why you need structured programming.
Or maybe I'm just being naive. I really would like to see if that works out, though.
Was there an established practice of peer-reviewed research back in 1847? My understanding is that the scientific community evolved that system because it helps reduce the potential for errors and makes it easier to trust the research.
> Most of us with a STEM education spent years learning about example after example of a great scientist or whistleblower that was scorned by the medical or scientific community, and it turned out that countless lives could have been saved if people had kept a more open mind.
"Open mind" and "communicating responsibly" are not mutually exclusive.
> I am greatly disappointed in anyone who claims to be educated but thinks that censorship is acceptable in a free society.
I am just as disappointed in anyone who thinks that requiring responsible communication is the same as censorship.
Sure, if we ignore the context of my statement and this whole discussion, which happens to be about COVID vaccines.
Also, please note that what I said -- and what you quoted -- is that if your claim is not supported by peer-reviewed scientific research, then you're offering your opinion. I didn't say that offering your opinion is the same as spreading misinformation.
It's only when you're presenting your opinion as a fact that you're engaging in misinformation, which is what I said in the next sentence that you didn't quote.
> GP is saying that the conversation is, and should be recognized as, more nuanced than that.
"Having a nuanced discussion" and "being responsible with how you say things" are not mutually exclusive propositions.
> If you're arguing we should only have evidence based discussion and that anecdotes and opinions don't matter, then you have new problems.
Anecdotes and opinions should be clearly presented as such, so that everyone who encounters them can decide how much they matter to them. That's what I'm arguing.
> I agree, but it seems GP was indicating this doctor was doing just that and was still silenced.
I see nothing there that indicates whether the doctor was doing that or not. Like I said, I don't know whether the doctor "insisted" in a way that made it clear it was his opinion, unsupported by current research.
If you're claiming something that hasn't been demonstrated through peer-reviewed scientific research, then you're offering your opinion. If you present that opinion as a fact, then that's misinformation. I don't know what form his "insistence" had, but I've seen plenty of similar cases so far, and all of them have been from people pushing their own narratives, instead of informing people responsibly.
If you're pushing a narrative that implies that you shouldn't get vaccinated, then yes, that's "anti-vax".
> It's the stifling of legitimate public debate, the stifling of legitimate voices who find themselves in the minority.
Being in a minority does not absolve one of responsibility. If you're publishing your opinion, or if you're discussing your research before it's been peer-reviewed, you have the responsibility to make that clear, and even to point out that it does not agree with the current scientific consensus (if any exists).
Farewell, Sir Clive, and thank you for some of my best memories.
It's a bit disheartening to watch gripes like this become more and more common on HN. It used to be a place where people were a lot more interested in sharing points of view and exchanging information, than criticizing anything that can be criticized.
I've come to dread cute management phrases like "everyone should pull on the rope". I agree with the sentiment, but software development is not as simple as pulling on a rope. There are lots of moving parts and lots of things to specialize in. And I say this as a generalist dev, not as an ops engineer.
I agree with TFA completely. I was interviewing for a job recently, and one of the questions I would ask when the interviewer signaled it was time for me to ask questions was "how do you handle QA?" On some occasions, this got me weird looks, because "QA" seems to be an antiquated concept.
In a similar vein, my stint at Amazon taught me that one of the questions to ask my interviewers is to tell me about their on-call rotation. Is there any? How often are you on call and for how long? Who gets paged first?
Yeah, we're all on the same side, but there needs to be some structure and order. Otherwise, you end up with something like this:
"Twenty-seven people were got out of bed in quick succession and they got another fifty-three out of bed, because if there is one thing a man wants to know when he's woken up in a panic at 4:00 A.M., it's that he's not alone."
-- from "Good Omens", by Sir Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
Thank you for clarifying.