MichaelCollins

Maybe they want SMS updates to their shipping, does that mean you should ask for confirmed phone numbers on signup? Of course not. Let them enter their email or phone number for shipping updates when they're confirming their purchase.

Ideally you shouldn't require users to make an account to make a purchase at all. There should be a "guest" path for purchases. Some sites still get this right. I can buy anything from plane tickets to pizzas without having an account on the company's website. Meanwhile half the "Show HN" non-commercial toy websites I come across seem to require a confirmed email for no good reason at all (probably because the webdev is hoping his little toy website somehow becomes a real business, and then he can spam my inbox with updates about this and turn me into a paying customer.)

Off the top of my head, here are some companies that don't require me to confirm my email address when making a purchase or an account: Southwest Airlines. Dominos Pizza, Hacker News, Reddit.

If those guys don't need a confirmed email address, probably your site doesn't either.

Absolutely. In the case of Facebook, it's easy to imagine them logging into websites as you to slurp up your contact list on that site. Don't worry, you agreed to it somewhere in the thousand pages of small print!

Or as the case of twitter demonstrates, you're also trusting all future owners of the Oauth provider, whoever they may be. If an erratic billionaire with a penchant for breaking the rules whenever it suits him buys your Oauth provider, who's to say what he'll do with his new access? He could treat your accounts as his personal toys. Better hope you don't earn his personal ire when he's on another wine and ambien bender.

> this is not really a big deal.

If it's not a big deal, then why do they offer this service "for free"?

It's all part of their commercial panopticon. You're missing the forest for the trees.

If the site doesn't need email for anything besides that, then it doesn't need email for that either. Let the user set an email for account recovery if they want, but don't require it. If users who choose not to give an email forget their password, they can simply create another account.

This is the way HN works. It's the way most websites used to work, until maybe 15 years ago, give or take. Today almost all sites ask for verified email addresses, but this used to not be the case.

Besides the commercial value of having user email addresses, I think it's mostly done for the webdev's ego:

> Users need to hear about my new update! (Because if I don't spam their inbox, nobody will notice or care about the thing I just did.)

If reducing friction is the priority, then maybe skip email completely. Let people sign up with any username and don't require an email at all, like HN allows. Most sites that require an email don't need an email, and only ask for it so they can spam users with nonsense like product updates.

No coincidence that so many journalists are twitter addicts.

I feel like you're understating it a bit; 20k years ago Manhattan was covered in over a thousand feet of ice. The Wisconsin Ice Sheet was huge and covered a substantial portion of the modern day United States: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisconsin_glaciation#/media/Fi...

> What can we do to remove the incentive that led to people having this kind of a discussion on a slack channel while one dude is at a doctors appointment?

Delete the internet, then return to newspapers published once a day. Short of that, it's hopeless. With continuous 24/7 publishing, journalists race to beat each other.

> Who say things like “American missiles fired by Ukraine?”

Russia-aligned internet commenters seem to say things like that a lot. I think it's part of their cope; Russia couldn't be struggling against Ukrainians... no... they're struggling against Ukrainians with American weapons! I guess this is gentler on their egos.

> a relatively cheap $1500 dollar system

Spending that much on tools doesn't seem like his style. He makes his own tools using scrap wood and salvaged washing machine motors.

> 2. Nuclear is not dispatchable.

This is not an intrinsic limitation. Naval nuclear reactors can power up to meet demand very rapidly. Civilian nuclear reactors aren't built like this for various reasons, including gas turbines just being cheaper for this purpose.

The birds probably help a lot too, particularly eating/spreading the salmon scraps the bears leave behind.

I love his videos about making his own bandsaws, belt sanders, etc. I've heard/read of people doing this sort of thing, but his videos documenting the process are really fascinating.

Also his website is well worth a peruse: https://woodgears.ca/

The US government isn't going to stop this shit anytime soon, since it was their idea in the first place.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_LifeLog

> LifeLog was a project of the Information Processing Techniques Office of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) of the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD). According to its bid solicitation pamphlet in 2003, it was to be "an ontology-based (sub)system that captures, stores, and makes accessible the flow of one person's experience in and interactions with the world in order to support a broad spectrum of associates/assistants and other system capabilities". The objective of the LifeLog concept was "to be able to trace the 'threads' of an individual's life in terms of events, states, and relationships", and it has the ability to "take in all of a subject's experience, from phone numbers dialed and e-mail messages viewed to every breath taken, step made and place gone".[1]

> The LifeLog program was canceled on February 3, 2004 (one day before the launching of Facebook),

If you live in any other country, you should lobby your government to ban Facebook, to ban all foreign social media entirely. But I fear the situation is hopeless for us Americans.

Imagine if you had a human butler who was this particular with the way you asked things. Fired on the spot.

I don't use one of these. But I have heard that they're very convenient ways to set timers when you're working in the kitchen with both hands dirty, and because they support more concurrent timers than a microwave.

IMHO, Risk is one of the few board games worth playing specifically because it's so engaging. Most of my friends who are "into boardgames" tell me that Risk is a terrible game because it starts fights. But the games they want to play bore me to tears. (I can't even read the manual for Settlers of Catan without dying of boredom, but from what you say maybe I should give it another try.)

They could easily push custom firmware to "persons of interest" (ever criticize your government?) and nobody would ever know.

I think in the future, products like Alexa will be simple products purchased once for a profit (not loss leaders) that do all the processing locally, not service subscriptions. I mean, do you really need an internet connection and "cloud" services to implement an egg timer you can talk to? Maybe they'll have an internet connection to check weather.gov, but that's about all that's really needed.

> For me, the quality improvement from 480i/p to 1080p is huge and I wouldn't personally sacrifice that.

Heh, for me the quality of VHS (not bootleg) was good enough. The main reason I eventually switched to DVD is because DVDs don't need to be rewound, were cheaper, and seemed more durable.

Second or third generation bootleg VHS was often quite poor, as were worn out VHS from rental shops. Plus SD digital encodes from the 00s internet were very low quality compared to VHS, but I think that's the source of reference for many younger people who don't remember VHS well.

Right, they say iMessage is end-to-end encrypted, but this is only true if you and the people you talk to don't use iCloud backups. If you do, then iMessage's E2E encryption silently degrades to key escrow.

That's a choice they make, not some sort of immutable "reality".

When anybody hallucinates an insult where there was none, that is their own problem. You can't hold people accountable for offenses they never committed, for insults they never uttered, just because some crazy person hallucinates an offense.

F-15 isn't sleek, but it looks mean and hard. F-16 looks sleek.

> > Very few people who have gone to orbit (actual space) were anywhere near 'rich'.

> Blue Horizon[sic] ... Bezos

Blue Origin has never been to orbit. It's a glorified carnival ride and nobody who knows anything about space or rocketry could mistake it for anything else. Among rocket fans, these 21st century suborbital launches are a laughing stock. Even the 20th century suborbital Mercury-Redstone launches were arguably a pathetic response to Yuri Gagarin's pioneering orbital flight.

No household-name rich person has ever been to orbit.

The per-unit cost of the F-22 was substantially more than the F-35, yet the F-35 is everybody's favorite whipping boy while the F-22 gets nothing but praise from the same crowd. And I think there is a general awareness of F-22 production ending due to expense, so it's not as though the F-22 is wrongly perceived as being cheap.

I think the discrepancy in public perception comes down to physical appearances. The F-22 looks lean and mean, while the F-35 looks lumpy and frumpy. Physical appearance is the way most laymen judge jets. Ugly jets which are nevertheless popular have some other dramatic attribute which which offsets their appearance, like the A-10's autocannon.

Most humans are basically good. A significant minority aren't, maybe about 10%. Enough that you should never ignore the possibility the other person is a psycho, but few enough that you should never assume everybody else is a psycho.

Also, psychos tend to concentrate in certain places. If you're in a board room, or hanging out with a bunch of surgeons, perhaps it's rational to assume everybody else there is a psycho.

Sure there's an element of that, but for some people it seems much worse than others. Some people can still speak clearly with a mask on, but many people can't.

> a neurodivergent person just looks at all that as window dressing that isn't required.

This seems like a hypothesis that we could test. For instance, by rationally explaining the practical utility of eye contact, to detect earnestness or deception. Then ask them to attempt this, and see if they can bring themselves to even try. My guess is most neurodivergents who avoid eye contact will find that eye contact remains too uncomfortable to even attempt it. This would show that their eye contact avoidance is not merely a matter of them not seeing any utility in a pointless social game.

> I am starting to think there might actually be a strong correlation between how people look and act.

I think the way people act influences the way their appearance is perceived in very subtle ways. A sketchy liar could have exactly the same bone structure as an honest man, but the sketchy liar will be perceived as less honest due to almost imperceptible differences in body language, the way they hold their facial muscles, etc. The result of these subtle differences can be detected with a vague sensation of "this guy is sketchy, he's probably about to lie to me."

Also I think there is an element of truth to the old wive's tail of "your face is going to get stuck like that". People who frequently have malicious facial expressions in private will find themselves having malicious facial expressions when they don't mean to, when interacting with the people they intend to deceive. Maybe out of pure habit, or maybe because those muscles are just getting more exercise. Somebody who often has a lopsided smirk will develop muscles on one side of their face more than the other, and eventually they can't help but to smirk by default.