7,700 karma · joined December 29, 2009
Email: matteo@purecreek.com
Will they never be true? No one knows, because predicting the future is not our best skill. They might well be someday. But the track record, for now, is dismal, which makes me thing they are more driven by ideology than by science.
How about the middle ground? We are part of nature and like any other animal we are trying to survive and make our life better. And it's not that other animals are perfectly respectful of nature either. Remove predators and herbivores will graze everything to the point of creating a wasteland and dying of starvation.
Nature, as a whole, is full of equilibrium, but single species try to maximize their survival in any way possible. We are not that different. We are only conscious of what we are doing.
It's not that nature is not tough on us. Everything out there is trying to kill us. Nature provides our sustaining, but it's also harsh, something we don't seem to appreciate from our lives in safer-than-normal cities, with always available food, heating, transportation, medicine.
I think the best perspective is aknowledging that we can have an adverse impact on the environment, and try to address it, istead of hating our own species as if it was a disease.
If your travel stays inside the ring (the highway circling the city), yes, travel time is not that long. Although 15 minutes is optimistic. While I have destinations I usually reach in 10-15 minutes, there are other places that take me 25-30 minutes. Which I don't find worth complaining about anyway, but not everything is 15 minutes away.
Living inside the ring is very expensive though, and many workplaces are outside of it. In that case, biking can take 45 minutes to an hour, or become impractical. I have friends living in neighborhoods from which biking is impractical (Bijlmer, Geuzenfeld).
You can always take public transport, of course, and mix it with biking. But biking through a city with 800.000 inhabitants in 15 minutes is not possible.
> "That's why we prefer to use power point presentations and (maybe even faked) screen shots to present software in early stages of development, instead of really running a live installation of the program."
When I was giving speaker training, I was always telling people to avoid live demos. There are many things that can go wrong and ruin your presentation with the main culprit being the WiFi connection at the venue (or lack thereof).
Invariably, people would not listen to the recommnedation, to only have their presentation fail miserably exactly for that reason. Even those with no live demos where not immune, since they hosted their presentation online.
What worked for me was starting dancing tango, where I built a newer, better and larger network than the one I previously had. I guess this can apply to any social activity where you can interact with people, be it social dancing or coocking classes.
> Establishing — for the first time ever — a guaranteed minimum earnings standard
> So as you can see, we are not arguing for the status quo.
Well, ok. The real question though is why.
Only companies with massive investments can afford to burn cash to keep the price to the final user as low as Uber's.
Such regulation would reduce the number of competitors appearing on the market.
Does somebody have an explanation for such cut-throat industry? Software development generally offers good jobs, so why isn’t that true for game development?
The possible explanation is the race to the bottom to offer games for cheap or free, as the article mentions. But then, why does that happen in games? There is plenty of software orders of magnitude simpler than games that gets sold for much higher prices.
What am I missing?
The teacher recommended at the beginning of the exam to save often, especially before running our programs, because if they got stuck, we would have to reboot, losing everything.
Of course, there was still a guy that typed for a whole hour without saving. Upon running his program, it obviously crashed and he lost all his work.
I got the habit of saving constantly pressing ctrl-s ever since. I do it even in apps that don't save anything, getting annoying sounds from my computer.
I have the second problem as well, but I don't know if it's really a problem. I remember learning many patterns in English before fully understanding their meaning, and the same applies to Russian.
That's probably a "feature" of learning a language. The more you will see the word in conctext, the more you will refine your understanding.
The only advice that I find a bit rushed is to read books with the audio after you learn the top 1.000 words and half of your grammar book. That's still too hard for me.
But I can listen to this Russian-only podcast and undertand almost everything: https://russianpodcast.eu
The learning through an SRS happens only for the 1.000 most common words of a language and its grammar.
After that, learning is intermixed with speaking, reading, writing and listening to learn vocabulary through comprehensible input.
Still, I have to say that learning the top words and grammar, I got to an impressive level, giving the effort. I can listen to some podcasts, read what people write on Facebook and some articles, and speak with friends in noisy contexts.
I use Anki to study Russian, with great results, following Gabriel Werner's Fluent Forever.
In the book, he teaches how to learn the words and the grammar of a language using Anki. One of the fundamental ideas is to both create recognition and production cards.
The recognition cards are the ones with a word in your target language, of which you have to remember the meaning. This is what most people use SRSs for.
The production cards instead show you an image, or a sentence with blanks, and you have to come up with the correct word by yourself.
Before reading the book, I have never seen anyone using the latter, but it makes sense. You have to train your brain not only to recognize the information, but also to take it out when needed, and those are two separate paths.
[Update: fixed the book's author name]
I have been using it to test the new features in Xcode 11/ iOS 13, and it has spared me many headaches.
In the discussion with Jack Dorsey on the Joe Rogan podcast, Tim Pool had a good point: some of the rules are intrinsically biased on one side of the political spectrum.
An good example is the rule against misgendering. Twitter forbids referring to a person using a different gender than the one that person choses. E.g., you have to refer to a male-to-female transgender as a "she".
But to conservatives, referring to someone using a gender other than their biological one is the definition of misgendering.
This is a purely ideological take, and Twitter chose the definition of one side over the other. Then they can apply it "impartially to all users", but its the rule itself that is not impartial.
As the article mentions, these people did not just disappear or change their mind. They just moved to more obscure places, where they can continue and be evem more motivated, because now they have been censored.
And you might still consider this to be a satisfiable definition for "it worked". Out of sight, out of mind.
Except that, these people are now relegated to an echo chamber far from public discourse where they will only reinforce their views without challenge. An echo chamber that is now suddenly more appealing, because it's forbidden.
Recently, in an episode of the Joe Rogan Podcast with Tim Pool, Jack Dorsey and Vijaya Gadde, Jack admitted that a woman that was part of the Westboro Baptist Church changed her mind only becasue she was allowed to be on Twitter and be exposed to other points of view.
So, from the point of society, I don't think it ever works to pushi extremists to the underground. Sure, Reddit does not have any obligation to give them a place to gather. But still, maybe it should anyway?
EDIT: Reading other comments here, I also got reminded of the fact that, before Hitler got to power, Germany had hate speech laws that explecitly forbid nazi propaganda. Many were sent to jail for that, which only contributed to their determination and their spreading.
So, if you are concerned that being allowed in the public allows them to spread their views, do not be so sure that pushing them away is going to stop them. You might just do them a favor.
My experience is that, in many, if not all fields, people are experts at their particular skill only.
Writers are good only at writing, developers are good only at developing, and so on. Making connections and finding work is a different set of skills that many don't have.
Do they need to pay someone to do it? Well, in theory, they don't need to.
But that means learning a skill they probably don't like. Many developers are introverts who don't want to spend time talking to people. My guess is that writers too prefer to work on their own.
Apologies for the mistake.
This was actually one of my major annoyances, since I use this feature often. I'm glad they added it, chances are others use it too.
I live in NL and (I checked with my accountant), I can deduct the cost of coffee I get at the cafe where I work, provided that I drink it while working.
As if there is a "western" diet.
Even just remaining in Europe, the typical diet in Italy has nothing to do with the typical diet in Germany.
And while southern countries and northern countries tend to have more similar diets, even between them they have big differences.
Same goes for "eastern diets". China and India, to pick just two, have completely different diets.
Criticize overcompsuntion of low quality food all you want when it occurs, but I think that broad-stroke generalizations like "western diet bad" are not useful.
- [1] https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/huffington-post-shut...
We tend to think that these companies know us very well, but (anecdotally) that's not my experience on Facebook.
There is a page where you can see a list of things Facebook thinks you like. In my case, it's full of things I don't care about and I would never buy. They are there because, according to that page, I clicked on some ad at some point.
Which I don't remember, so it might well be five years ago. So I get targeted by ads I am not interested in at all. A random ad has more chances to capture my attention than something targeted on a non-interest.
I have been running my online business for 5 years now. I learn (and keep learning) all I need to know from the same, high quality source.
I get targeted all the time by adds on landing pages, email funnels, Facebook ads, etc. Some of these are legit, but thanks to my experience I can see that most of them are of poor quality.
They will never sell me anything, while they might sell something to someone that hates his job and is looking for another way to make money.
It also has the advantage that, if later this solution needs to grow past a simple command line tool, I can just grab the Swift code from the script, put it in an Xcode project, and make a Mac app out of it.
Is it?
I was never abused, but my parents were definitely not pleased by bad school reports. It's not hard to imagine that people who look for excuses to abuse their children, do so after getting a school report.
Why is it so astonishing?
While he is not the type to install new apps, all my friends are, and never ask me for any advice.
Anecdotal, but I think HN users do not have all the power you think they have.
What these shops are doing is create scarcity based on real demand. While it is somehow artificially created, the customers are real. The exclusivity of the experience then creates more demand.
What the article describes is different. They would be the same only if these restaurants would be paying friends to keep the restaurant busy, to later sell it at a higher price.
Well, one such source of email addresses was me.
When I joined it more than 10 years ago, I was not as privacy aware as I am today. So, upon joining, I uploaded my address book to connect to people who already had a LinkedIn account.
I shortly after realized that they abused it. They sent an invite email to every person that was not on their platform.
I only got to know about it becasue one of my university professors sent me an email saying that she was not interested in joining yet another network. I had to apologize, because I did not expect that to happen.
To this day, LinkedIn still uses that information to suggest new connections to me and to prompt me to invite people that are still not on their platform.
In retrospect, it was a stupid move to upload my address book, but I'm sure I am not the only one that made that mistake, and probably many people still do nowadays.