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snarkerson

68 karma · joined January 16, 2022

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snarkerson··on The Decades-Long Travesty That Made Millions of Americans Mistrust Their Schools
The tug of war between phonics and sight reading continues.

You need both skills.

snarkerson··on How to Roman Republic 101, Part IIIa: Starting Down the Path of Honors
This is the tyranny of documentation. We really have little insight into the plebian life. Most direct information comes from funerary inscriptions and graffiti.
snarkerson··on Ex-S.F. fire commissioner with fractured skull after metal pipe attack
Remember the good old days of Dirty Harry movies where a 44 solved these kinds of problems?
snarkerson··on Block: Inflated user metrics and “frictionless” fraud facilitation
Are there more artists name checking Cash App that they missed?
snarkerson··on Abuse prevention is tradecraft
I thought content moderation was censorship.

Now post that XKCD comic.

snarkerson··on Harrison Bergeron (1961)
The enforced equality of outcome is extended into the extreme.

So is it of value when not in the extreme?

snarkerson··on Amazon built a new unit to fix its engineering culture
Maybe the adversarial evaluation process has a poisonous effect?
snarkerson··on Gen Z never learned to read cursive
But writing is learning. Brains use sensory feedback to remember and recall. Cursive is just a method of faster writing. The physical act of forming the letters leads to better recall of what is being written. Reorganizing and rewriting does even better.

Learning to write is as important as learning to read and learning to do math. There are good ways and bad ways to learn.

It's too bad this skill is being neglected and people turn to measurably worse methods of learning.

snarkerson··on The End of Manual Transmission
I bought a manual in 2016. It took the dealer a while to dig one up for me.

My next car will be electric. I will miss that shifter.

snarkerson··on Unpaid social media moderators perform labor worth at least $3.4M/year on Reddit
Porn is built in. Getting rid of it would Tumblrcide. Let's see how that IPO goes.

As a rule, all moderators suck. This has been true since before http.

snarkerson··on A belief in meritocracy is not only false: it’s bad for you (2020)
Princeton be the change you seek.
snarkerson··on U.S. takes unprecedented steps to replenish Colorado River's Lake Powell
That is in terms of electrical power generation by hydroelectric dams.
snarkerson··on Ask HN: How to Make Passive Income?
money doesn't grow on trees but you can grow trees and sell them.
snarkerson··on Unpaywall: An open database of 31,903,705 free scholarly articles
Would not be surprised if the Crossref DB was their starting point.
snarkerson··on Elo scoring two years of Magic: The Gathering games
Jeff Lynne is getting into some esoteric things to make music for.
snarkerson··on Inside the longest Atlassian outage
> Most of them said they won’t leave the Atlassian stack, as long as they don’t lose data. This is because moving is complex and they don’t see a move would mitigate a risk of a cloud provider going down. However, all customers said they will invest in having a backup plan in case a SaaS they rely on goes down.

The real key lesson here. Your business is important to you. Not so much to the service provider.

snarkerson··on How We Built r/Place (2017)
Some images were not permitted. Like the American flag linked above. They rebuilt it but the original was wiped out by an admin user.
snarkerson··on Exit interviews are a trap
My exit interview early in my career lead directly to a job later in my career. It was a clean breakup and the HR person and I had nice chat about all sorts of work and non work things.

Years later they were a consultant helping fill positions at a small company. They happily moved my CV to the top because they remembered me and the fun exit interview. Probably added more to the offer too as it was generous.

snarkerson··on How to get lost in your neighborhood
Sing with me: these are the people of your neighborhood.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2bbnlZwlGQ

snarkerson··on Why the 2020 census has 9 fake people in a single house
Would like to talk about an extended warranty for your car? Or end of life care for your 78yo family member? Or super awesome student loans for your 16yo family members?

That is just low hanging fruit.

Imagine cross referencing other data sources to get more complete images of everyone in 52m responder households.

snarkerson··on Venting doesn’t work
Bad science reporting and Slate go hand in hand.

Clickbait is what they do.

snarkerson··on Venting doesn’t work
Tamping down emotions and keeping them wrapped up has always worked well.
snarkerson··on www.userfriendly.org seems to be gone, RIP Erwin, Dust Puppy and Co :(
I bought on of his books but it’s not the complete series.
snarkerson··on Ask HN: How can we fix Wikipedia?
That's almost just like doing something to fix things.
snarkerson··on Cloudflare to acquire Area 1 Security for $162M
Just imagine how much Area 51 Security would cost to buy.

/some jokes have to be made just to get them out of the way

snarkerson··on Imagine if a lemon law penalized schools for rotten educations
Imagine holding parents accountable for the development of their offspring?
snarkerson··on Confessions of a Bitcoin Widow
It's a bookvertisement.
snarkerson··on Starship is threatening NASA’s moon contractors
Paying DoD prices for a civilian program never made sense.

Add in constant program stretching due to a limited budget, I don't doubt NASA will look bad by comparison.

snarkerson··on I Finally Installed an Ad Blocker
How anyone used the internet without and adblocker AND script blocker is beyond me.

This is my hardware and I am going to control it.

snarkerson··on A 1970s boardgame takes about 1,500 hours to complete
I was wondering why I was reading a vaguely paraphrased Kotaku article.

Blogspam is a pernicious cancer.

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