DoofusOfDeath

HN users downvote all but the highest-quality puns.

I'd compile some examples for you, but I'm not sure how you'd interpret it :)

Awesome multilayered use of "visceral".

Very cool! Any idea what the impact of network latencies and jitter is on the overall experience?

This is a bit of a tangent, but:

Before the pandemic, my wife and I worked from home while our kids went off to school. That made it really easy to have "special" time without concern for the kids hearing us or walking in on us.

With schools doing remote learning, that's no longer possible. Which means we're at the mercy of whenever the kids are soundly asleep at night. Which means we're more tired during those encounters, and it messes up our sleep schedules.

It's one reason I'm really, really looking forward to school returning to normal next fall (fingers crossed).

About 6 months ago my job required that I finally get my hands dirty writing x86 assembly. It's my first real foray into assembly coding.

There are a few aspects of it that I'm really enjoying:

- I can now actually understand the disassembled code that I see during debugging. This includes recognizing some of the assembly patterns that appear because of ABI requirements and/or common programming idioms.

- I'm becoming comfortable with a programming idiom that I've never really used in the past: registers, flags, various kinds of memory addressing.

- It helps my understanding of compilers' lower levels / backends, and the related problems: register allocation, instruction selection, etc.

- It provides a clear path for my first attempt at writing JIT code (using Xbyak[0]).

So as Richard Feynman might have said, it's great fun!

[0] https://github.com/herumi/xbyak

> I'm trying to do this in as harmonious way as I possibly can, but I'm a bit worried that getting really contentious about it might have negative repercussions.

You mentioned "contentious". Are you concerned that the conversation can't remain friendly, professional, and cordial for some reason?

I'm no expert, but I have a little experience with sound mitigation.

IME, the effort needed to reduce unwanted noise depends a lot on the frequency range.

Very roughly speaking, dampening high-frequency sounds can be done with relatively thin and light sound-absorbing materials. Lower-frequency noise, including vibrations that shake the building's superstructure, require more extensive modifications.

It would be awesome if an actual acoustic engineer or architect could weigh in on this.

I wonder if this is an opportunity for business insurance.

I.e., being shunned by Facebook or Google is a high-consequence, low-probability, hard-to-predict event.

You may as well treat it like building a factory in an earthquake zone.

> At what point do we label massive shared delusions mental illness and treat them as such?

I'm having trouble imagining how that's compatible with a democratic form of government.

A policy like that would, I think, provide a very clear roadmap for would-be dictators.

IIUC, the article seems to define the term "light phase" to mean what a layman light me would call "brightness". But it seems crazy to me that they'd overload the term "phase", when it has a very obvious alternative definition in the field of optics.

Can someone clarify if that's what the article is actually saying?

That advice was valid 99.9999% of the time prior to this outcome.

Now it's valid 99.99985% of the time.

> A great way to justify not doing anything.

People are good at rationalizing. I'm sure my earlier comment, and many others, would be sufficient justification for someone inclined to do nothing.

> Being angry at some injustice doesn't automatically make you unhappy too

I guess I was assuming that anger and happiness are somewhat mutually exclusive.

I apologize if I'm misunderstanding your comment. But just to help others avoid confusion, ADHD isn't the same as being extra energetic.

It may be a little nastier than that.

In some cases, they're selective about which groups will and will not be sheltered from offense. And they may refuse to admit that, let alone engage in a public, civil debate about their choices.

Apple is under heightened antitrust scrutiny IIUC, so it's plausible that past and current discussions were/are actually helpful.

And fwiw, you're welcome to just ignore any threads or stories that you feel are getting repetitive. Many of us have a personal list of such topics, but our lists may not match.

Agreed. I've found that there's a meta-skill in life: accepting that one can't right every injustice, and to not let that fact prevent you from being happy.

C++ has been my main programming language for the last 20+ years. (Dang this makes me feel old.)

For my paid work (at multiple jobs), I've never been allowed to use C++ newer than C++11. At first it was due to incomplete compiler support, and later on it was because various customers were using older versions of RHEL whose standard version of GCC was something like 4.8.

Anyone else experiencing this?

I don't know if this affects your argument, but are you sure you can trust the AQI meter's readings for anomalous levels?

We recently had a discussion on this topic: [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25138485

Does a wood-stove catalytic converter help with PM2.5? That seemed to be the main focus of the article.

HR represents the company's interests, not the employees'.

I've heard it said that in the U.S., the only reliable way for a non-union worker to get real protection from abuse is to personally hire a labor attorney.

Thanks for the link - I found the interview interesting.

In it, Pink describes two competing mindsets for approaching social issues. One prioritizes analysis and understanding as first steps; the other prioritizes activism unrestrained by fact-checking.

I'd be interested to hear his accusers' response to that interview. Experience tells me to withhold judgment until I've heard from all sides, and that interview was only with him.

That's an interesting idea. I don't know much about game theory, but I'm curious if it has useful application to this problem.

I'm religiously agnostic, and I'm in the habit of trying to understand these conflicts from both an atheistic and Christian perspective. Based on that, your recognition that this issue somewhat breaks down along worldview lines makes sense to me.

[Disclaimer: The following is a description of my current thoughts on the topic. I could very well be wrong, but I thought sharing them might make for an interesting discussion.]

That said, I have an anti-PC view on this topic that AFAICT is somewhat a-religious. My perception (i.e., I very well may be wrong) has been that the pro-PC arguments I've heard contain some logical inconsistencies that I've been unable to resolve. And that some organizations with pro-PC policies use ad baculum or ad hominem attacks to avoid serious debate about their position's weaknesses. I think it's obnoxious to force others to obey their moralizing while refusing to submit their views to serious debate.

I'm confused as well. I think a letter like this would be improved by adding some supporting references or examples.

I'm not sure, but that's an excellent counterpoint if so.

I shouldn't have presumed to speak for the parts of CT near NYC.

I grew up in southeastern CT and visit there occasionally. It's hard to describe how dead it is for commercial software development, even compared to Boston.

Even if one was inclined to open a good software shop in CT, you'd have neither low property prices nor an existing pool of highly skilled labor.

Designs for residential houses and appliances that ensure waste heat goes outdoors in the summer, and stays indoors in the winter. (And vice versa: refrigerators and freezers that take advantage of cold outdoor air in the winter, rather than using electricity to run compressors.)

I was about to have a knee-jerk reaction to this, but I just realized I may misunderstand what the rules actually allow.

My worst-case scenario, perhaps totally unrealistic, is that this allows a drone with a camera to hover over my property, peeping in through the windows.

Are there any current / upcoming rules that prevent that?

I really like the idea of somehow discouraging ghosting. It happened to me at a time when I was desperate for a job change. A recruiter for RedHat strung me along for weeks before going silent. It really screwed up my job-search schedule, as RedHat was (at the time) my first choice.

But I'm not sure where the best place is to apply pressure:

(a) privately shame recruiters to the employers they represent, or

(b) publicly shame recruiters so that employers and candidates can avoid that recruiter, or

(c) publicly shame the employers who hire such recruiters.

Also, the anonymous nature seems like a double-edged sword. One could imagine hoax / malicious reports being submitted by competitors and/or rejected candidates. I imagine that once that loophole starts getting exploited, employers will rightfully ignore all the reports.