cuddlybacon

> We think “left-wing” and “right-wing” aren’t very useful ways of seeing the world, and that they make a lot of people falsely believe that they disagree with each other. We’re not driven by ideology, we just aim to do what works.

I don't think that great way of describing political positions, but they are at least _a_ way of describing political positions. If they are going to reject the terms, I'd prefer they at least answer the question in a better way instead of rejecting it.

But...

I do not think left and right trick people into falsely believing that they disagree with each other. Instead I see them as an acknowledgement that political positions tend to cluster. Add in an election system that tends towards two party rule, and left and right wing sorta makes sense.

Everyone is driven by ideology. I think those that say they are above ideology don't really get why different ideologies are different. People's political positions are an expression of their core values. There have been a few books I've read that make the case for this. I think The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt does it best.

One thing he discusses in that book is an ideology can represent a mix of values or be an expression of a single value. One bit of research he showed had people doing a test where they were told to answer as a person from a different ideology. He found those who belonged to single-value ideologies did worse. In particular it could be seen that these participants assumed people of other ideologies believed in the same one value but where just worse at achieving it. I bring this up, because I think it is going on here. For left and right to falsely believe they disagree with each other, they would have to be trying to achieve the same goal. The same values.

I think the Party says this because they want this to be inclusive of people from other ideologies, and I think they earnestly want to achieve that. But I think that thinking about it this way will prevent them from being successful. With this mindset, I think they are most likely to end up with whichever ideology is biggest becoming absolutely dominate. Similar to what happened with Occupy Wall Street. I think they'd get better success on this goal if they learned why different ideologies are different, what the different values they are aiming for are, why the core Pirate Party positions align with those different sets of values, and for other issues try to pick positions that best serve multiple sets of values.

It's hard to gain too much insight from Wikipedia, but it looks like it fills a niche that was empty.

The Pirate Party of Canada used to be quite active on r/CanadaPolitics. Once they fleshed out their platform they ended up overlapping heavily with the NDP and Greens (particularly the Greens).

I think many Pirate Parties have fallen into similar traps when they fleshed out their platform.

Tipping is governed by two separate races to the bottom:

* Buying social prestige amongst your group by showing generosity.

* Buying better service by showing generosity.

Both these result in motivation in favor of tipping more and against tipping less. Both of these require your tips to be above average, and not everyone can be above average.

What makes it somewhat tricky is that tipping to show generosity is a type of virtue signalling. And virtue signalling generally doesn't work if you admit you are doing it for self serving reasons. Since the best liars believe their own lies, our brain is resistant to acknowledging that these are the true reasons behind tipping. It prefers to pick justifications that align with the virtue being signalled.

I thought so too, but looking at the definition on wiktionary:

1. Any apparently useless activity which, by allowing you to overcome intermediate difficulties, allows you to solve a larger problem. I was doing a bit of yak shaving this morning, and it looks like it might have paid off.

2. A less useful activity done consciously or subconsciously to procrastinate about a larger but more useful task.

I had thought that only definition 1 counted as Yak Shaving but apparently definition 2 is also in common usage.

I would personally find the concept more useful if it only meant definition 1. But that might just be me.

I remember seeing this commercial as a kid. :)

By the time I started driving, the law required pay-before at all gas stations. So I don't really get what the problem is. How does having the card make things different for Jerry? If he didn't have it, wouldn't he just give the clerk 37 cents and be just as well off?

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Hi op,

Based on some other comments I think the elitist remark is uncalled for in this situation. Looking again, you were neutral on it. I just assumed it was meant negatively.

> This article explains how students do not follow the same organization paradigm based on folders and local file management. This could be, in part, attributed to the new ways young students learn, which is on online first operating systems or tablets, where by default, the local system is hidden and also where everything is done through applications.

For me it was because I realized that the time I spent doing this had exactly zero benefit. At least to me.

This quote comes off as somewhat elitist. If someone hasn't developed the same workflow as you, that doesn't mean they are less informed or skilled.

It's the smart microwave!

Remote IDEs aren't necessarily about subscription based SaaS. For me any editor that can't be run by ssh into a workstation within the build-farm is a non-starter.

Since everyone is mentioning Technology Connections (he deserves it, great channel), I want to bring up this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UiS27feX8o0

To me, this really shows the sad direction smart appliances have gone in. I would love to see that smart appliances would have continued to evolve in this direction. I don't like the current state of smart appliances, but going back to the absolute basic seems like an over-reaction to me.

NativLang did a video on the Altaic theory. I think 'defunct' is more appropriate than 'not widely accepted'. The accepted explanation for the shared features is a language area. Languages can take features from other nearby languages without needing them to share a common ancestor.

[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0zkHH6ZOEk

I've had an idea for a while to make a dashboard style notebook. Basically something that can query a few internal systems (bug tracker, code reviews, etc) and produce of dashboard that basically shows what need my attention.

The Github and REST notebooks in the article imply something like this is possible.

> Safer roads means more people will bike, which means biking will stop being seen as an elitist thing.

I don't think it is just safety. Most people understand an e-bike is going to be more dangerous, but they are popular anyways.

The other factor is distance. e-bikes increase the distance that can be covered by a significant amount, which changes a lot of commutes from "too far" to acceptable. The only people who can afford to be within a bike commute are at least above-average income-wise.

Even satire news sites have caught onto this: https://www.thebeaverton.com/2020/09/i-bike-everywhere-brags...

I originally searched for "exploration vs exploitation" but that lead to the "multi-armed bandit problem" on wikipedia, so I went with that on my post above.

I do that "exploration vs exploitation" is a better name for it though.

I first encountered it via this book:

https://www.amazon.com/Algorithms-to-Live-By-audiobook/dp/B0...

The wikipedia article also briefly mentions that it is observed in animals.

Could it be that your over 30?

There is a problem known as the multi-armed bandit problem[0]. The problem deals with situations where you have to chose between different options you could take, but you don't start off with full knowledge of the options. You can spend time learning the options (exploring) or you can spend time using the best option you already know of (exploit). Importantly, you can't do both at the same time.

In general, good strategies start with a phase of exploring followed by exploiting.

Humans follow this pattern as well. For us, it seems we spend our late childhood, thru our teens, and into our early 20's in a heavily explore-biased state then switch to exploit biased for our 30's and later.

So the thing that happened to "exploring the internet" is you got older. Exploring for the sake of exploring is no longer as innately desirable to you know as it was when you were younger. You can still do it now. In many ways there are new tools that make it easier (see other posts) but it will likely feel more like work in a way which wasn't true when you were younger.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-armed_bandit

I think Perl 6 killed Perl 5.

Perl spent almost 20 years with a new version looming over its head. It was known from the start that Perl 6 would be incompatible. This meant it always seemed to be a bad time to get into Perl. You were committing to having to do a partial re-write whenever Perl 6 happened to come.

As more time passed and the differences between 5 and 6 became bigger, companies that had been holding out for Perl 6 started to ask "If I'm going to have to do a re-write, why not re-write in something else?". Which is what we ended up doing.

I think there are various other warts in Perl compared to other languages in its niche, but I don't think they killed the language.

I have two LG 4K monitors with a 2016 model (which I really want to upgrade). It's mostly fine. Waking from sleep it does go thru an annoying sequence where it wakes up one monitor at a time. When I gave feedback to Apple, they suggested plugging in the dedicated power supply as well. Maybe that would help some of the issues you see.

Sticking to tech, I differ from the HN consensus on:

* Small UI changes (eg moving a button) don’t make me have to relearn the UI from scratch.

* If an app developer has a way were I can get my work done faster, I want to know about it. Getting shit done is more sacred to me than the workflow I built myself.

* Related: devs do achieve the above.

* Most documentation doesn’t explain anything that can’t be learned from a code completion engine. When I do have questions, Stack Overflow is more likely to have a concise explanation that the official docs.

* Native apps are something only us devs give a shit about.

* Functional programming isn’t catching on for two reasons: the on boarding experience is missing things (mostly the big picture aspects of structuring an app) and b) Haskell is the post child of functional Languages.

Me, within reason.

A major version change (eg UI rewrite or API breakage is an exception).

I don’t get the constant breakage the rest of HN seems to get, so there is no reason to pay the cost of manual updates.

I agree.

As someone whose day job doesn’t involve writing UI code, web UI still ends up being the easier of the two to implement.

I miss my Pearl, but not the other BlackBerry devices I had.

I like how you could type on it without looking. It's been a decade and I still have typo issues with touchscreen phones. A post this long would likely have 4 noticeable typos if done on my phone.

Yeah. It is general internet culture at this point.

Ah. That's why it didn't seem to do anything. What this does should really be in the title.

> > There's something amazing/odd/horrifying about a world where it is generally no longer cheaper to do anything yourself.

> How? It’s pretty much the point and purpose of civilisation, to say nothing of industrialisation.

Civilization isn't necessary for this to be true. It is even true in small scale societies. You can observe this whenever they get cutoff from each other: they end up technologically regressing. It is more expensive to do everything themselves, so they end up losing access to technologies.

The world where this was last true was when the common ancestor of us and neanderthals were still around.

> How does that provide value to the "community"?

Well, you are part of the community. If you get value from playing piano or chess then you've provided value to the community.

I think there are two reasons to have chosen community here. Firstly you could chose to do thinks for the benefit of someone else, if that's what you want. Secondly it gets you to think about the externalities that exist.

I guess the person you are replying to thought it was obvious that a person is a member of the groups that they are a member of.

> But we don't have the same cultural concern against underthinking. I have never heard someone telling their employee or friend "you're underthinking this". Surely overthinking is bad, but when underthinking can be severely dangerous, it's easy to see why some people overthink.

We do this all the time. We just don't use the word "underthink". "You didn't think this through." "It sounds like you haven't gotten to the details yet." "Are you sure that's how it works?" "You need to start thinking things through." "You have a brain. Use it." "Pull your head out your ass." I think all of those phrases are suggesting the same thing underthink would.

This is what I do as well. For me, a lot is 7.

I do re-open closed tabs from the recently closed tabs list from every once in a while. Maybe 5 or so times a week.

Going into history is pretty rare, but sometimes happens. I probably do not need to do that even once a season/quarter.

I use fish. My biggest pro-tip is don't chsh to set your shell to fish. Instead configure your terminal program to launch fish.

* do you have any trouble running shell scripts?

Nope. fish will run bash for most shebangs.

* What about bash one liners?

You will have to translate these.