mediumdeviation

> but 1% impact is pretty small

The best you can say here is that it’s within the margin of error, in which case the effect is so small it’s literally unmeasurable. In that case the null hypothesis still wins, and you should not switch.

> Is there any reason to assume that this problem is permanent and unfixable?

IE11 as tested in the article is not getting anything other than security patches. The users who use IE11 are probably also the users most affected by poor performance since they most likely have the oldest hardware.

Somewhat ironically you've accidentally included the `/publish-accepted` part of the URL in your submission, which means when I click through the link, the Chrome store is telling me that "I" have published the extension and will see it in the store in a few moments. You should try to get the URL fixed :)

There's a big difference between a video that streams in while the user watches it, and all the styles and scripts that are needed to render the page itself. If the former is too slow the user just keeps scrolling or the player switches to a lower quality stream. If the latter is too slow the user will just close the tab and move onto something else.

Now I wonder why nobody has advertised herbal tea as health potions to gamers...

The -san suffix is a honorific used in Japanese. Trying to use it for someone from China would be a really awkward faux pas.

> I would quite literally live in any Chinese city before chosing Singapore. At least China would be cheaper.

No you won't. However bad you imagine Singapore's police state to be, China's is several order of magnitudes worse. Singapore doesn't block most Western social network, media and file sharing sites. Singapore doesn't ban memes from social networks because they make their leader look bad. Singapore doesn't demand foreign internet companies to host content locally so that the government can crackdown on said content if it doesn't agree with them. Singapore doesn't kidnap dissidents from neighbouring countries, or put entire minority races into concentration camps.

And major Chinese cities aren't cheaper either. Surprise - if you want Western standard of living, then you have to pay Western prices.

Comparing man made emissions against natural is somewhat misleading. The damage caused by carbon emissions is related to its atmospheric concentration, which _is_ increasing at an alarming rate. It doesn't matter if man-made emissions is 3% or 300% of natural rate, as long as the net emission, as a percentage of the carbon already in the system, is large. Carbon naturally exists in a cycle, so natural emissions is always roughly in equivalent to absorption.

Could have made the Pencil triangular. The new shape fixes yet another annoying ergonomic issue with the original - that it's really hard to hold comfortably for extended period of time. There's a reason pencils are hexagon, and pens have rubber grips.

Regarding disposable plates and utensils, I actually don't see much of them unless you ask for takeout. I suspect in the area you're in the cost of dish washing is more expensive than the cost of plates and refuse collection. A tax on disposables would be great.

Singapore is actually getting better on reducing disposables, though slower than I would like. Cashiers don't double bag items anymore, and try to pack as much into one as possible. Paper takeout boxes and bags have replaced styrofoam and plastic in many places, and it's currently trendy to not offer plastic straws for drinks.

Another reason for disposable chopsticks, (though this applies more in China, Taiwan and Malaysia) is that the customers may not trust the hygiene of the place they're eating in. Disposable chopsticks are cut with the centers intact so it's impossible to put them back together and resell them.

I don't know what it was like before, but when I signed up for it after Netflix went international in 2016, and my first reaction is: this is it?

Using Netflix feels like giving up control, over both the viewing experience and the recommendation system. The recommendation system that Netflix poured millions into developing, with hyperoptimizations down to the thumbnails you see? I can't get it to stop recommending me shows I don't want to see. I can't pick the genres I want to show up on the homepage. The automated genre generation/clustering algorithm occasionally generates hilariously poor results. I can't leave my mouse over any thumbnail for a few seconds to read the synopsis because the trailer will automatically start playing.

Another example: No control over stream quality. I'm fine with waiting 30 seconds for the higher quality version to buffer, but Netflix forces me to watch the first 30 seconds in glorious 360p with sharp edges and features on actor's faces smudged out of existence. There's no way to change this setting, which exists on every video player I've seen since before YouTube existed.

How do you know that that's actually all data Google holds on you? Facebook has a shadow profile for every one of its users, one whose contents you cannot access. There's no technical reason Google can't build one, and they have been deceptive in how they collect your information in the past https://apnews.com/ef95c6a91eeb4d8e9dda9cad887bf211

Does https://www.goldstandard.org/ not do that already?

It means ground, as in the surface on which we live and build things on. 球 means ball or sphere. I wonder if that’s the reason why flat Earthers are rare in China and Japan - the very phrase ‘flat Earth’ is an oxymoron in these languages :)

Note that Facebook can still track you across any websites that embed Facebook content or use the Like button, and associate those information with your account. A good adblocker will remove them and make sites load faster.

It's Jevon's Paradox [1] applied to the browser, where increasing the efficiency in which the browser can be scripted paradoxically causes websites to become slower and harder to build. Not because JavaScript itself (or any of the libraries built on top it) got worse, but because by allowing developers the ability to script more and more complex applications, sites became slower, and developer tools became heavier to support these more complex demands.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

DNT headers are a thing. They were proposed by Mozilla originally, and its use was suppose to be opt in (and of course so is any compliance by the site in question).

Then IE10 turned it on by default, making it pretty much completely useless as a signal for site owners.

Our expectation of our algorithms are based on human performance. A human would never tag a black person as a gorilla, or vice versa, and if someone did it even once we could pretty safely conclude they're either extraordinarily incompetent, or racist, and in either case we wouldn't trust any tagging done by such a human.

And also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17858019

It was designed for Venmo to prove to new users that the app has a large network and was trustworthy

> Yeah, absolutely, so one of the biggest purposes of the social feed when Venmo first launched was around this concept of social proof. So if you think about a product like Venmo, it’s really only useful to you if people that you want to transact with are also using Venmo. So when Venmo launched, we had two feeds, we had the public feed and the friend feed. And immediately when a new user signed up for Venmo, you could see in the public feed that Venmo was something other people were using.

From a Venmo product lead - https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/14/16643192/venmo-stalking-...

But how would they measure bounce rate when analytics won't work when the user is disconnected? :)

Anyway since we're on HN you should know that Chrome has a "offline" button in its network tab in its developer tool, used for testing offline features, so you can take a single tab offline, instead of disconnecting everything.

I find the lack of granularity annoying. Your search history is generally less sensitive than your location, but both are bundled up in 'Web & App Activity'. There's no way to get Google to remember my search queries from my phone without it also creepily recalling every single location I brought my phone to. This feels almost like a dark pattern, like bundling a newsletter subscription when signing up to service.

Enums are not JavaScript, and I've never heard of an Enum stage X proposal.

> I suspect that humans will adapt to this new way of life we've brought upon ourselves.

You can't beat the laws of thermodynamics. When the wet bulb temperature reaches the human body's natural 37 degrees Celsius, it'll be impossible for the body to expel heat via sweating (evaporative cooling). At that point no amount of adaptation will help, and humans need technology to stay alive.

Webpack and Gulp were never meant to be simpler alternatives. Gulp used streams instead of serially processing files like Grunt, which made it faster, but obviously streams working in parallel are more complex than just processing the files one by one.

Webpack pulls dependencies into one file and deduplicates them. This is obviously even more complex since now you have dependency resolution logic as well as dealing with the various module systems JavaScript has invented.

Example: https://imgur.com/oR3Nk8q

This was generated by one line of code, simply applying the hoist-non-react-statics library as recommended by the official React docs https://reactjs.org/docs/higher-order-components.html#static...

JavaScript in many cases can be too dynamic to be properly typed. I'd rather have it than not - it has saved my ass a good number of times - but let's not pretend TS/Flow is totally wonderful.

Their actual efficacy is questionable at best though. After about 10 minutes of breathing, water vapor from your own breathing would have rendered it more or less permeable to anything infectious. Sneezing into a handkerchief would probably be more effective.

I have seen similar issues with overly aggressive parser in Messenger for Business, but with dates instead. It tried to turn the words in the following real conversations into dates for adding appointments

* "Christmas" in "Merry Christmas, and have a nice day"

* "at 100" in "It could be that you're not viewing the image at 100% zoom"

* Four digit module codes from my university that looks like four digit military time

and so on, ignoring context or even prefix/suffix text which makes it clear the text is not a date. It would be funny if these don't keep getting in the way when random words in conversation gets turned into links.

Consider the opposite - would Christians go out and start murdering people if they stopped believing in God? If tomorrow incontrovertible proof came out that the ten commandments and the Bible were in fact not the word of God, would my Christian friends suddenly start stealing from me or stick a knife in my back? As an atheist I find that absolutely appalling and I don't know how anyone can live like that.

Actually, I noticed YouTube's recommendations seems _heavily_ biased towards what you watched recently. This is likely due to how people watch videos - much like people binge watching TV serials, they are very much likely to continue watching videos from the same or similar channels.

In most cases this is harmless - play a song, and YouTube will automatically create a playlist of songs in the same genre. Watch a cooking video, and it'll give you a dozen other recipes by the same chef.

Unfortunately this doesn't work for political videos, as you've noticed. But there is absolutely no incentive for YouTube to insert videos from opposing viewpoints into the recommendations. YouTube is just giving people what they want.

It's amazing how the world's largest internet company cannot build a good blog. I don't know why Google is so insecure it thinks it needs to resort to the same tactics used by third-rate blogspam sites to keep users reading their blog posts.

This is what the site looks like with both sticky bars open on my 900px high screen. This is atrocious. https://i.imgur.com/o5hcENG.png