reactchain

This is really cool. I can see it being extremely useful for reviewing. The numerical citation style of CS papers has always been a pain point for me.

The argument here is that "smart people are worse looking" is actually a case of _of the people you encounter_ smart people are worse looking, but that overall there is no correlation. This makes sense, but I think it's more complex. If you took the entire population, I think you could still conclude the "smart people are worse looking" if you define smart to include non-innate, learned behaviour, for the simple reason that good looking people have an easier time in life (getting jobs and so forth) and are therefore less compelled to spend time and effort becoming "smart". So there's a self-balancing aspect that produces these correlations in the general population as well.

This is a great essay, better than some of Paul's other recent writing which has felt less inspiring than his old stuff. This feels in depth and written from the heart.

True, but I think it points to an inherent weakness in the business model. The reason it's so hard to build these businesses without relying on Google (and playing cat and mouse with their ranking algorithms) is because customers fundamentally don't care whether they get their content from you or someone else.

There is a recurring lesson with these type of threads: don't build a business that is dependent on an unstable, black-box algorithm of a mega-corp. If your business is so fragile that an algorithm update by Google causes you to have no customers, then you should have built a business with a bigger moat, brand recognition, etc. It sounds like this business was more of an SEO hack.

I find the more important question to be "how do you remember what you read?". I think (at least in my case) remembering more of what I've read would be a better investment in time than reading more, or better directing my reading. I would love to hear tips people have.

Check that you're getting enough uninterrupted sleep. I think it's a hugely underestimated way to gain mental clarity.

Yeah, this has been going on for a long time. The methods evolve, but the bullshit stays the same [1]. Good rules of thumb:

1. If it praises a product, the article was paid for

2. If it has a link that looks even slightly out of place, that link was paid for

3. With few exceptions, most of the revenue for the publication comes from selling features and backlinks (much more than subscriptions and ads).

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

Has anyone noticed a shortage of Pi Zeros recently? It seems everywhere has run out of stock.

The US has a very coveted position in the West, but the reach of this is getting smaller every year. Having root access to FAANG for instance is pretty useless in China, Apple is the only one of those five with any presence to speak of. And anything supply chain related China would be in the more powerful position.

What are the chances major projects we use today aren't backdoored similarly? It's so easy to do and so hard to detect.

This is fantastic. Way better than the Algolia search which seems to be the most "official" one. I love that you cached the article content too.

Isn't this type of thing usually a civil case - how is it that he can get jail time? Also what ever happened to Kalanick in all of this?

The next logical step of course is to start bumping up "disadvantaged" listings in search rankings.

I'd love to read more about the economics of captchas - what is the "labor" of classifying images worth? What is the marginal cost per captcha of human solver farms, etc. Can anyone point me to some resources?

How can one test GPT-3?

> As for the blackmail and war starting you probably couldn't do much with public tweets

Depends how tense the situation already was. A well-timed tweet could be enough to tip things over the edge if both sides were already on the edge, and I don't think we're too far away from that.

That is just embarrassingly petty - I've just lost a little more respect for the guy.

I think the goal of running native speed compiled-ish code on the browser in a sandboxed way would be great if it worked. CSS and HTML for "apps" has always seemed like a hack to me. The problem is every single attempt to do this in the past has resulted in a bloated mess. Maybe this time will be different...

Flutter for web feels like going back to the .net "webforms" days, where you could supposedly build a web app the same way as a desktop one and the whole client-server thing was abstracted away. Except it sucked, I still have nightmares about viewstate. Seeing Flutter apps that render everything to canvas feels similar.

Developing once for iOS and Android seems obvious and doable, but extending that to the web is a different game.

Douyin is likely better designed for censorship, data collection and so on, particularly in the context of Chinese language - I'd say the parent comment is right, the goal here is to replace TikTok with Douyin.

> The company has said that TikTok has not shared data with the Chinese government nor would it, a position that would be difficult — if not impossible — to maintain under the new law.

Are we expected to believe that it was pulled because they were uncomfortable sharing data with the CCP? There is approximately zero chance of this. So why did they do it?

The documentation could use some work - I have scoured the website and FAQ but still don't understand how this works. Does it compile into javascript, or it is a Python interpreter for the browser? What subset of python does it support? What about libraries?

I recently encountered Pyodide[1], which compiles to wasm. This seems more interesting/useful, because one can imagine running scientific computations (for which Python is a good choice) in the browser without much of a performance hit.

[1]: https://github.com/iodide-project/pyodide

> The editor is ... mine

One of the things I like most about vim is that you can use it on just about any remote machine, and even if you don't have your own vimrc the default editor is still really powerful.

100% concur with this. I learnt Vim many years ago and I genuinely don't know what I'd do without it. It's always just there when I ssh into a new server. And the JetBrains suite has an awesome vim mode meaning I can use most (but not all) vim shortcuts with an actual IDE. I don't think vim itself works well as an IDE substitute, and wouldn't use it for hardcore web dev for example - but for quickly editing random files there's nothing that comes close.

The "openness" of the west is being blatantly exploited, and yet for some reason people are still hesitant to call it out for what it is. Almost every significant US internet company is totally blocked in China. Until the US completely blocks WeChat, TikTok, Zoom and so on, China will continue to have a major geopolitical advantage.

I want a tool like this for any website, that intelligently extracts just the useful part as plain text. Reader view and so forth just don't work that well. Are there any tools around like this?