dlkf

Yeah, you have to be a real genius to make money buying the sp500.

This is a great comment. The language I use most is Python, and I am definitely biased toward its conventions. It's interesting to hear from the other side of the fence.

I want to suggest a slight reframing: instead of saying: "It is not all about cost-benefit," you could say "here is an addition to the 'benefits' column that hasn't been considered yet."

It's a totally reasonable argument; much better than "elegance." This was my main problem: that the critique of `unless` was much more plausible than the defence.

I never suggested we ”optimize the language around this feature.” I only suggested that it is a higher virtue than some user on HN’s subjective concept of ”elegance.”

What do you think is more important: the speed at which C programmers can navigate your code base, or one person’s subjective idea of ”elegance”?

There’s a cost-benefit analysis here that you are refusing to do: Of the two variants you’ve posted, the first will click immediately with a generalist dev who doesn’t know Ruby. The second will have them reasoning out loud, and then reaching for the docs to double check that their common-sense intuitions are correct.

This is not a contrived example. I regularly find myself having to read some code in a language in which I am not proficient. Stuff like ’unless’ is such a pointless obstacle in these scenarios.

So ”elegance” doesn’t come free. The cost is a loss of transferable knowledge from other languages. Your intuition is that this cost is low relative to the benefit of ”elegance,” I have the opposite intuition. Why stray from such universal conventions in favour of one person’s subjective aesthetic preference?

He has founded six companies. You don’t have to like him, but refusing to acknowledge basic facts just makes you look like an idiot.

> If you've designed your sampling properly

You are making a much stronger assumption than this. You are assuming access to demographic information of each subject, as well as population base rates for a sufficient set of attributes to correct for non-response bias. Maybe we have that, maybe we don’t. If we don’t, option A is a good tack.

Most entrepreneurs have a batting average that is closer to .000 than .500.

> One extremely frustrating aspect of plant meat is that they tried to aggressively push out traditional veggie burgers on restaurant menus. . . The thing is, vegetarian food is incredible without needing to taste like meat.

”Nobody goes there anymore, it’s too crowded.”

> I also still eat plenty of meat, just not every day

The reason you don’t see the value prop of beyond burgers is that you’re eating the real thing regularly. As a pescitarian who loves meat, I would bet the farm that if you went vegetarian, you would think Beyond is a godsend.

> IMO, I think the "meat in a vat" system where animal tissue is grown in some kind of factory setting is a much better approach.

Similar to how nuclear fusion is better than fission, and self-driving cars are preferable to human-controlled, etc etc.

The top hit on my list looked familiar. I looked at their recent comments and saw a discussion between that user and me. We were quoting eachother directly throughout.

I wonder if this explains our similarity. And if so, could we tweak the algo by e.g. Removing text that is prepended with ”>”

> Retaining information shouldnt have anything to do with how you ingest it.

It must. The ingestion method, and particularly how long the info sits in our consciousness, will govern the depth of indexing operations possible.

Something you’ve seen many times is typically easier to remember than something you’ve only seen once. This is obvious, but under your model it makes no sense.

That was just an example. In general, the Swedish drugstore will have 5-10 options, whereas the Canadian equivalent will have dozens.

THE Robert Kiyosaki???

In Sweden, deodorant sticks are smaller than what I’d get in Canada. There’s also an appalling lack of variety. In particular, you never see Old Spice. I think there is a lucrative business opportunity in bringing American deodorant maximalism to the nordics.

”Lung cancer is not specific to smoking at all”

> Our diagnosis is that individual developers do not pay for tools. Their manager might, but engineering managers only want to pay for discrete new capabilities, i.e. making their developers 18% faster when writing code did not resonate strongly enough.

What sounds more plausible you:

- engineering managers hate free money

- it’s obvious to everyone that this statistic is bullshit

> Question: Is weed bad for you?

> Answer: To explain, the term "weed" is used to describe a plant that is not wanted. It is used to describe plants that are considered to be a nuisance. The term "weed" is also used to describe plants that are considered to be harmful to humans.

What the fuck is the point of this tool?

> what they're doing is _at best_ tangentially related to improving UX . . . You can spin that as the company just improving the experience so that people want to keep using it, but fundamentally it is intentional psychological manipulation.

So we agree that ab testing is good for optimizing toward a numerical objective. You then seem to think that either:

A) There are simply no numerical objectives that correlate with good ux or

B) Every software company ever is optimizing toward perverse incentives by which they take more money from their users while making their products worse

It’s probably B that you believe, and this is such a myopic and paternalistic view. There are a couple cases where it’s a problem, eg cancellation flows. But this problem is orthogonal to AB testing (try cancelling your newspaper subscription in 1994). AB testing is mostly just trying to improve the rate at which people sign up or buy something, and in this case, your objection hinges on the hidden premise that people are idiots.

> Within a university, research with human subjects is required to pass an ethical review before it is allowed to proceed. Given the scale and impact of the research conducted by Facebook on its users, it is entirely reasonable to hold them to the same standard.

One man’s ponens is another’s tollens. See: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/29/my-irb-nightmare/

> I have not experienced a product become better for the user as a result of involuntary A/B testing in my entire adult life.

If you did, how would you know?

It’s a completely ubiquitous practice. So either it does generally help, or every software company ever doesn’t know what they are doing.

To me the latter view is the one that’s hard to take seriously.

Brain scans, small sample size, sensational claims; when will we learn?

Stewart’s Calculus has an enormous number of exercises.

> many are missing the article's thesis

Yourself included, apparently

This is grossly misleading. That is one kind of recommender system, but there are many others.

“Most people aren’t on twitter” is not a valid argument against twitter’s influence. Compare with “most people aren’t CEOs”, “most people aren’t politicians,” etc.

Some people have a lot more influence than others, and the influential people are disproportionately on twitter.

> This was a tradeoff to appeal to people whose vocabulary is narrow, not improve comprehension.

”Comprehension” is not some audience-independent property of a text. Comprehension is what happens when a text is well-calibrated for an audience. If your audience is unlikely to know the word ”obviate” (which seems true of many engineering settings, where the audience is international), you absolutely improve comprehension by replacing it with words the audience is more likely to know.

I agree with you that ”obviate” sounds better, and in a setting like a blog post, monograph, or even an hn comment, that’s probably what I’d use. But in e.g. a work email for colleagues in another country, you reduce the risk of miscommunication by following OP’s suggestion.

I don’t think you understand what Munch meant.

”The camera will never compete with the brush and palette until such time as photography can be taken to Heaven or Hell.” - Edvard Munch

Now do email, cars, etc etc

> The ideal everyperson computer is a laptop. That laptop has a full-sized keyboard and a beautiful 13-inch display. Maybe a 14-inch display with really small bezels. A smaller display is too small for most people’s taste (and possibly necessitates a slightly cramped keyboard); a larger display makes for too big and heavy a device for everyperson needs.

This may be true but I really wish it weren’t. 15”-16” is the sweet spot for me.

I’d like to hear an actual response from the people downvoting this comment. It’s an interesting perspective, and while I can imagine legit criticisims (SPOF, privacy concerns, coordination with vehicles outside the system, etc) actually articulating them would yield a more productive discussion than downvoting without comment.