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RomanBob

-9 karma · joined June 17, 2019

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RomanBob··on Browse good first issues to start contributing to open source
>but don't start excluding one-off noob contributors. Open source is open for a reason.

The idea isn't that excluding noobs is good. But that noobs are coming in not because they want to contribute, but because they want to pad their resume. In doing so, they have diluted the pool in a way that they will not even be padding their resume.

RomanBob··on Imperial College London charge £28,000 for their online MSc degree on Coursera
University is just an overpriced IQ test anyway.

We want to delude ourselves that everybody has the capability to be a doctor, programmer, engineer, successful business owner etc. We ban employees from using IQ tests, when SAT scores correlate strongly with IQ. Then the best companies hire from the best universities where the best students with the highest SAT go i.e. they just hire the highest IQ people in each year slot.

To fund this delusion we would then have to make university available to everybody, as if a degree is in a vacuum a token of value and not the fact that a degree is relatively scarce. A degree when everybody has one isn't worth as much as when only 50% of people have one.

And of course the law of supply/demand makes degrees more expensive when everybody has one, but makes the degrees less useful economically when everybody has one. Double-dipped.

RomanBob··on Paean to Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri (2016)
creating mountain to get more precipitation sounds good until you realise that the optimum strategy is either forest spam or getting weather control and then borehole and condensor spam.
RomanBob··on Show HN: Dating Site Without Pictures
Dating sites are female-driven, and females select primarily on looks, as has been shown on plenty-of-fish and tinder data analysis.

So a dating sites without pictures would never work. I hope to be proven wrong, but I don't think so.

RomanBob··on Silicon Valley Seasteaders Go Looking for Low-Tax Sites on Land
The riches already gave back, because they got rich making things people want.

>We need more civic-minded leadership across the population, not less. The greed is just excessive.

This is the wishful thinking that statists will always use. the state will be fine if only people would be better. Well people are not better and never will be, so we need a system whereby we do not grant people, who will never be better, power over their fellow men.

RomanBob··on French executives convicted in the suicides of 35 of their workers
The workers chose to work there and chose to kill themselves.

Do we not expect people to have agency anymore?

RomanBob··on Boeing to Suspend 737 Max Production in January
Instead of being fired with $50 mil severance package?
RomanBob··on Boeing to Suspend 737 Max Production in January
>a race to the bottom by other states to claim the production facilities.

Instead of a race to the top where people can just say five infinity dollars?

RomanBob··on Boeing Weighs Cutting or Halting 737 Max Production
people still die more driving to the airport than in a plane crash.

The fact that people smoke, drive while texting, drive drunk, don't exercise and so on, show that they don't really care about not dying. They just like to complain when dying is caused by somebody else.

RomanBob··on Having Kids
>The 12 year old is sitting in my bedroom, reading.

I have some news for you chap.

RomanBob··on O(n^2), again, now in Windows Management Instrumentation
>and the exponential O(n^2)

You need to look up what exponential means.

RomanBob··on Google management shuffle points to retreat from Alphabet experiment
Are you referring to walking away from omelas?

I don't see why people think that story is in anyway interesting or tragic. It's non-sensical, when reality isn't so. It's only deep if you have never read an account of a war or read history or basically know anything about how anything works outside of your suburb.

RomanBob··on Sham news sites make big bucks from fake views
>asshole

I guess if you start a free play in town and try to sell bus tickets to bring people to town, and I drive my friend there and ask him for money, I am an asshole.

what a world

RomanBob··on The Great American Eye Exam Scam
Healthcare has always been used by their practitioners as a tool to extract money from customers.

Often they will say "it's for your own good".

In reality, it's just a cartel, extremely protected by government regulation.

For some reason, people think that the rules of economics don't apply when it comes to healthcare.

RomanBob··on Why are people getting worse at “The Price Is Right”?
This won't work for loss leader discount though.
RomanBob··on Why are people getting worse at “The Price Is Right”?
the 'real' price has and will always be the price you are paying.
RomanBob··on A Thermomechanical Material Point Method for Baking and Cooking [video]
those things are figured out centuries ago via iterated optimisation.
RomanBob··on This year’s Nobel prizes prompt soul-searching among economists
The way this story was structured makes me unsure if it really happened or not.
RomanBob··on Phoebus Cartel
This is the case.

People will buy el cheapo LED bulbs even now rather than well known brands. And those el cheapo bulbs have low quality electronics that fail quickly.

RomanBob··on An update on YC China
In the US, as I go through the airport, I am physically violated routinely for my 'security'.

All of the data I transmit are recorded, for the agencies to go through them, if not now, then later, when they figured out how.

People who don't obey the leftist narrative are cancelled, have their jobs terminated, and so on.

China has always been independent. They pride themselves on that. Taking away investment money isn't going to influence them.

If you want to influence somebody, first you understand them, then you build a friendship and rapport with them, and then you influence them. Turning off the phone does the opposite.

RomanBob··on One Google Staffer Fired, Two Others Put on Leave Amid Tensions
>I don't consider my colleagues my friends,

Do you allow colleagues to become friends?

RomanBob··on Some Blizzard employees are dreading BlizzCon
the parent asks for congress to intervene.

why is it immoral to play by the rules of a country in order to access that country's population? the country's people should decide for themselves how they should be governed. or do you think you know better?

RomanBob··on Zuckerberg doubles down on Facebook political ads policy after Twitter ban
It's not possible to be fixed because the majority of people are apolitical, highly illogical and vain.

Democracy as a system dispowers the individual (what is a single voice in a sea of milions). It is perfectly rational to not vote (your single vote would never matter, while the time it takes to go vote will).

Since most people want to spend their lives infinity-scrolling a facebook feed, and for some reason political power can be derived from these people, then facebook will have power by deciding what these people get to see, and if it's not facebook then it's twitter, or google, or the ISP, or the department of the internet, or the TV channels, so on and so forth.

only 0.1% of people care about free platform.

RomanBob··on Some Blizzard employees are dreading BlizzCon
It's a private company. How is it unacceptable for them to run the company whichever way they want?
RomanBob··on Some Blizzard employees are dreading BlizzCon
Virtue signalling only works because people fall for it. So it is really not surprising that it works on a lot of people.
RomanBob··on Some Blizzard employees are dreading BlizzCon
>so it might as well be those with the right values.

By 'right', you mean of course YOUR right.

You can't please everybody, so you should please ME.

RomanBob··on Cash/Consent: The war on sex work
This is an absolute butchering of free will.

A person being robbed at gun point is being coerced. He is having a choice forced upon him by another person. Society, being composed of individuals all of whom do not want to be coerced has an interest in preventing coercion.

This is not true of having to work. The biological necessity of your body requiring food is not forced onto you by anybody. So nobody can be held responsible for it.

A prostitute being given the option to sell her body for money actually makes her life better, because depriving her of having to choose does not improve her life, while depriving a man of having to choose between being shot and giving up his wallet improves his life greatly.

RomanBob··on Cash/Consent: The war on sex work
When you have minimum wage, the person being paid sub-minimum wage is no longer paid at all.

That is hardly an improvement.

RomanBob··on Dog-walking startup Wag raised $300M, then things got messy
Saudis do not want smart people being middle class in their country. That would ruin their theocratic state.
RomanBob··on Irish Teenager Wins Global Science Award for Removing Microplastics from Water
Because in reality the teenager's mental output isn't higher than a random adult engineer.

But people just think "amazing" when a teenager does something, because people now have very low expectation for teenagers.

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