lliamander

> I thought it wasn't a big issue until I saw how hard one side fought to keep the name "master".

They only fight that hard because they know the people fighting to remove "master" are (as a group) acting in bad faith.

On this and many other issues they tend to lie about history and language, extort those who don't comply with threats of sabotage towards their projects and/or careers, and will equivocate and dissemble whenever confronted.

It's perfectly fine want to use "main" rather than "master" (that is probably my preference). And it is perfectly fine to suggest other people do as well. But if you suggest it others and they tell "no" (politely or not), the right thing for you to do at that point is to mind your own business.

No matter how smart or skilled they are, people who spend an inordinate amount of time arguing politics (and dragging others into it) at work are by definition not "the best staff".

Having a narrow mission focus is the only way to retain your actual best staff.

The mission of reproducible builds is a social mission that will bring good to the world regardless of whether other social goods are achieved.

Trying to tie that mission to other social movements is a strategic error that will more than likely cause Nix to fail in its primary mission while doing virtually nothing meaningful for any of those other causes.

> but they said their system isn't wrong and the address coordinate mapping can't be changed anyway.

That is some breathtaking hubris.

That sounds like a pretty good life! But I think for someone 20 years your junior at the beginning of their career, they probably should be pushing themselves pretty hard.

But even for those of us who are more established, I think it can be a good thing to dial back our social lives from time to time and invest in building and maintaining our career capital. That is especially true if you find work boring. It is totally fine to be bored at work for a time, but long term that is a sign of stagnation. Stagnation, in turn, can leave you in a vulnerable place when market conditions turn for the worse.

Lots of good advice in this thread, but I'll add my two cents:

First, learn your job. It's a new job, so there should be plenty to learn. Learn the tech stack, the processes and procedures, study the people and the social dynamics. All of that will be helpful in you being the most productive you can.

Second, learn at your job. Once you've achieved a comfortable level of productivity at your job, it should be expected that you will (responsibly) take time to learn new things. Most of those should probably be fairly closely related to your current projects, but some things will be more exploratory. It is part of your job to learn what you need to do you job better.

Third, learn one thing at a time. Maybe you are really into learning a musical instrument, so you spend a few nights a week practicing chords or learning a new song. Maybe it is functional programming and you spend a your commutes listening to famous talks on FP. But don't think you can do it all at once. The people who seem to have it all still probably got there one bit at a time.

Fourth, learn what you want to learn. Overtime, if you manage your energy and time, you will find that there are things you do have enough passion and energy to work on and you will find time to fit it in.

And remember, it is good to try and push yourself while you are young, but remember that is a marathon, not a sprint.

Except that at the point where there is a police interrogation, there is (or should be) probable cause to believe that the person in question is not a law-abiding citizen.

While imperfect, adversarial systems are still our best means of establishing the truth. Whether it is Quality Assurance testing in the context of engineering, reproducibility in the context of scientific experiments, or trial courts in the context of law.

As an aside, why is this the thing you chose to focus on in responding to me? While I do think it is true and I am willing to defend it, it's not really the central issue.

What I understand as the central point of your original comment was that we cannot condemn all of the social sciences (or 90% of the work in them) on the basis of the Claudine Gay story. I refute that with this sentence:

>The longer such fraud goes uncorrected, the more rewarded a person is for their fraud, and indeed the more lengths other people go to cover up such fraud (as was argued by the OP) the more likely such fraud is normalized in a particular field. The Claudine Gay story suggests that, if anything, XKCD was wildly optimistic about the social sciences.

Put another way, in the spirit of Scott Alexander's recent essay "Against Learning From Dramatic Events", the Claudine Gay story represents a significant deviation from what would be predicted by a model that assumed the social sciences had a more robust level of intellectual integrity.

I do not assume a static number of researchers, nor do I see why you would infer that from what I said. Of course there are more researchers going into these fields. The more people enter into a field, the more likely the typical person entering that field is going to be a mediocre researcher, and the more likely that their work is going to be crap.

Sure, in the case of a very small and new field with promise of intellectually stimulating work and structural advantages for eliminating bullshit, adding more people and papers is likely going to be a net benefit. But realistically many established disciplines can only add people by lowering standards.

The fact that so many papers are published rather works against your argument. The more papers are published in a given field, the more likely they are to be bullshit.

Of course, that applies for STEM fields as well as the social sciences. However, if we do comparisons across fields, such as looking at how many citations a typical paper in some field will receive, we find that STEM tends to do a lot better than the social sciences[1].

>Pick a field and take it down if you can. But trying to build a case against all of social science using the example of someone notoriously elevated despite a lackluster career as a publishing academic doesn't get you anywhere!

The longer such fraud goes uncorrected, the more rewarded a person is for their fraud, and indeed the more lengths other people go to cover up such fraud (as was argued by the OP) the more likely such fraud is normalized in a particular field[2]. The Claudine Gay story suggests that, if anything, XKCD was wildly optimistic about the social sciences[3].

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5446096/ [2] https://danluu.com/wat/ [3] https://xkcd.com/451/

I think of it this way: CICO is an axiom we have to assume in order to figure out why a diet isn't working.

E.g. if your input is 1200 calories and you work out, but you aren't losing weight? Maybe your NEAT is way down (or you have a thyroid issue). You are super active but can't lose weight? Maybe you aren't tracking food calories accurately, or you need to eat more satiating foods.

CICO isn't a strategy, it's part of the landscape and your diet is a strategy to navigate that landscape.

But no matter what your particular strategy, it is always going to involve eating less hyper-pallitable foods and getting more activity. That may not be all, but you cannot go from obesity to a healthy weight without those things.

Machete Order: https://www.slashfilm.com/1264147/what-is-star-wars-machete-...

> In my own case, I didn't see my own grandmother for two years during COVID other than via Zoom/FaceTime. She has a history of bad lung infections, so none of us wanted to get her sick.

Absolutely! I was already under personal quarantine of sorts before the pandemic even started, because I had immune compromised people under my care. I would bever expect society to turn itself upside down to accommodate my particular situation.

> Section 230 was explicitly about allowing service providers to act in an editorial capacity

Absolutely. Sites with user-generated content would be practically unusable without such protections.

However, the first two sub-sections list why the protections are being granted in the first place. When a social media platform's moderation actions are sufficiently opposed to those purposes, then I would argue they are no longer "good faith" moderation decisions per section 230 and thus fall outside of its protection.

I'm not saying they are. I am just saying that imminent domain is what we have now, and that land-value tax is something that might be better.

I'd rather the government not force people out of homes they paid for, but I don't think that's an option right now.

While I share your reservations, I do prefer this to imminent domain (a practice I am not a fan of). I think it's more likely for the seller to get the best value for their property, and incentivizes the seller to make good use of the property.

Again, that interpretation only makes sense if you are treating Thomas as a sci-fi novel for adults about sentient trains and the capitalist system, rather than as a fairy tale for children. Of course you will invariably butcher what the story was actually trying to convey.

The lessons of the episode are simple:

- you will not get what you want if you are selfish, mean, and unreasonable (Henry's paint is eventually spoiled anyway)

- if you disobey your parents, there will be consequences (like timeout). Note that Sir Topham hat (as a parental figure) while firm, was very patient with Henry.

You could also explain The Wizard of Oz as "young girl travels to a foreign land and kills the first person she meets. She then teams up with three strangers to kill again"

The purpose of Thomas the Tank Engine is not to speculate on the ramifications of living in a world with sentient trains like some weird sci-fi novel. You are welcome to write that if you want, but fat chance producing something kids will enjoy.

Thomas the Tank Engine exists to delight children with the mystique of steam engines, and to provide the back drop for simple lessons on pro-social behavior that children can understand.

Density also comes with it's own problems - crime, pollution, disease, and a loss in personal freedom necessary to keep those other problems at bay. None of that is ideal for family formation.

And increasing density only works up to a point. Once you can no longer increase density, the prices start climbing back up.

I think rezoning for more mixed use neighborhoods is a good idea, and some high-density living is good (not everyone has kids, or wants to have them) but I am skeptical of increasing density in general.

There is value in mixed use neighborhoods - low density doesn't automatically mean suburban sprawl.

Most of human history has been spent in much lower density living situations than we have now, and I'm pretty confident there is a negative correlation between housing density and fertility.

> The thing about women entering the workforce making it impossible to have a single earner home is nonsense. The problem is housing.

I think you may be right about the overall problem, but I'm not sure I agree that density is the solution.

People starting families don't just want a house, what they want is enough space. Mothers want a yard they can send the kids out into when they need a moments peace, closets to store everyone's junk, and bathrooms big enough to walk into while pregnant.

I think disaggregating populations into more medium and small cities would help keep costs down and give people more space.

> You could say the same about the taxes used to pay for public schools.

Absolutely, because it is true. Especially considering how much we overpay for public schools (costs having been rising faster than inflation for decades with no improvement in student outcomes).

Do you think my preference for my wife to be a homemaker is wrong or irrelevant? It's not just an arbitrary preference: in general it is better for the children. It is also what most mothers (at least mothers of young children) would prefer, including my wife.

Don't get me wrong: for some children, childcare is a better alternative than what awaits them at home, but I think for most it produces worse outcomes.

And this kind of thing will force some women into the workforce, because there's no free lunch and some women will have to work to offset the cost to pay for these programs.

> you're also telling him "you can't exist here".

No, we are saying his behavior is unacceptable, and that if he wishes to participate in this community he will need to conform to those standards.

It is not a mercy to allow bad behavior in order to be more "welcoming".

What if this were an in-person community, and the above commenter had a problem with personal space and non-consenual touching? Not only are you driving everyone else away, but you are also risking legal consequences (or worse).

The way to help such people is have firm boundaries and clear rules. If the above commenter had any question about what constituted an acceptable comment, he could refer to the HN guidelines which the subject of this very thread.

Yup, the incentive should always be to direct people toward high-value conversations.

That's interesting: I don't think I've ever been unsure of why people downvoted anything I've said.

I don't think we should make it any more complicated. You might benefit (on the margin) from some feedback, but that makes the conversation more noisy for everyone.

I can say that personally, if I downvote something without also replying to it, it's either because I don't have time to write a helpful response, or because I know my own contribution would make things worse.

You just asked one.

Sure, and scientists need a place to have such conversations.

But publication is not a closed system. The "published, peer-reviewed paper" is frequently an artifact used to decide practical policy matters in many institutions both public and private. To the extent that Science (as an institution in its own right) wants to influence policy, that influence needs to be grounded in reproducible results.

Also, I would not be surprised if stronger emphasis on reproducibility improved the quality of conversation among scientists.

Sounds like a problem worth solving.

I agree that most labs are probably not out to defraud people. But without replication I don't think it's reasonable to have much confidence in what is published.