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wallflower

59,027 karma · joined January 15, 2008

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wallflower··on Ask HN: Wildly Unpopular Opinions
It wasn't really about UBI, as some of the participants were able to live because they were financed by their parents. For example, the billions and billions war on drugs/criminalization of drugs likely started out of a strong reaction to counter the threat of the counter-culture movement. And we all know what effect the war on drugs has had.

> "You want to know what this was really all about?" Ehrlichman asked, referring to the war on drugs.

> "The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news."

> "Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did," he concluded, according to Baum.

https://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-rich...

wallflower··on Ask HN: Wildly Unpopular Opinions
- There may not be a successful vaccine for COVID-19

- COVID-19 is just a dress rehearsal for something even more deadly.

- Since there is no apex predator for humans, viruses will likely rise to become the leading cause of death

- Modern society is, by definition, carbon positive

- The one time that society allowed young people to explore their interests, to not work (the 60s), the establishment was so scared at the revolution they never wanted that freedom to ever be available again

- Universal healthcare in the US would cause massive economic shock due to the unemployment

- Affordable college education would also cause massive economic shock with unemployment as this would mean removal of government backing for student loans

- Racism is a cultural disease sort of like cancer that has many forms, mild and severe. It is individual and cannot be cured.

- Those who lack money problems always have problems. Humans need drama in their lives to feel alive.

- The attention economy that Facebook started is destroying normal human behavior year by year

- To be a producer in the new visual economy (IG), it helps to be conventionally attractive. But that if not enough, you also have to demonstrate that you are not perfect, whether fake or human

- Political correctness and its evil twin Virtue Signaling are dividing all of us, perhaps on purpose

- Everything is faked or polished to be better than it really is at some level. Technology has been good enough to do it for a while to do it offline. Lookup Melodyne for singing. Now technology is getting to the point where it can do it live

- We may not make it past the Great Filter

- Smartphones are actually dumb phones because they make us dumb

- Time is everyone's most precious resource, yet we give it away sometimes like it were free "Do you have a minute?"

- Using headphones in an office to concentrate is training your brain to require headphones to concentrate

- Caffeine is the most successful drug

- Capitalism is the only economic model that works because it gives people something to aspire towards

- You cannot have capitalism without personal debt.

- Capitalism is unsustainable as you cannot expect to grow X percent a year and not eventually run out of Y.

- The Pareto Principle can be applied to anything. For example, how many people in a company actually do useful work (20% do 80%)

- Education is the most powerful force

- Sex doesn’t just sell. Sex is everything.

- Happiness is biologically meant to be fleeting. Otherwise we would eat once, have sex once... and then die.

- Companies spend large sums of money to create controlled, temperature controlled environments to make people focus on work called offices

- Some people think they are wealthy. They are not. You are only wealthy if you can maintain your preferred lifestyle without having to work.

- Monogamy is a cultural construct

- Without biological or technological adaptation to combat radiation in space, long-term space travel is impossible

wallflower··on Ask HN: Go vs. Ruby/Rails for first time indie dev?
If you choose Ruby, rspec and rspec-expectations (https://relishapp.com/rspec/rspec-expectations/docs) grant you very powerful abilities to write unit tests for your APIs out of the box. You can pretty much mock anything from method calls to network responses.

Also, when running an rspec test that touches/creates/modifies ActiveRecord database objects, the rspec scaffold will automatically create a new database transaction for running your test so that the test database you are using is not affected.

In general, don't worry if the Ruby that you write looks nothing like the concise and sometimes 'magic' Ruby that more experienced developers can produce. You'll get there when you get there. Try to learn as much about Enumerables as you can https://ruby-doc.org/core/Enumerable.html

Vue.js is a good choice. Not as popular as React... yet.

Rails, as other commenters have noted, has a learning curve. As long as you try to stick within the normal usages of Rails, you should be fine.

Whatever you do with Rails, stay far away from their template markup languages (haml). Write the front-end in Vue.js, consuming APIs, don't do any server-side rendering of anything. If you really want to do server-side front-end, ditch Ruby/Rails and just go full blown Node.js front and back end.

Good luck, just get started!

wallflower··on Ask HN: Wildly Unpopular Opinions
In case you have not yet encountered John Taylor Gatto's 7 lessons:

http://www.swaraj.org/multiversity/gatto_7lesson.htm

Also, the "famous" TED talk on educational paradigms that you may have seen or at least heard referenced

https://www.ted.com/talks/sir_ken_robinson_changing_educatio...

wallflower··on The social obligation to be bad at things
I remember the Car Talk guys Click and Clack talking about their tongue-in-cheek (or maybe not) advice for being married. It was something like:

"The very first time that they ask you to do the laundry, say 'Yes, honey! I'd love to!'. Then, do it so horribly bad. Turn everything pink or whatever. Shrink, ruin some clothes. Then, they'll never ask you to do the laundry again."

wallflower··on Advice to new managers: don't joke about firing people
You are not truly a manager until you lay-off or fire someone “face to face“. I knew a manager who would not do the difficult task of laying off someone. I kind of lost respect for them.
wallflower··on Quotebacks – Quote the Web
Ted Nelson who coined the term _hypertext_ in _1963_ claimed in Werner Herzog’s documentary “Lo and Behold” that his original idea for “copy and paste” would always link back to the original. This article below based on the Herzog interview has more context but not the exact _quote_ (context pun intended) that I remember from the documentary.

Full interview of Ted Nelson from “Lo and Behold”: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Bqx6li5dbEY

> Nelson, who was featured in Werner Herzog’s latest film, Lo and Behold, believes that instead of the existing formats we use online, where text often mirrors the constraints of paper, we should have a system of two-way links that would allow readers to see the context of any quotation...

> There are a few offline examples, such as the Talmud and the Rosetta Stone, where text is read side-by-side. Nelson believes this is how online documents should be constructed.

> “As far as I’m concerned, this is the way literature should develop,” he says. “I don’t consider this technology, I think it’s literature. Being able to see visible connections between pages seems to me absolutely fundamental.”

> Nelsons says this setup would be the ideal format for reading annotations, additional details, correspondence, and disagreements: “It’s essentially a different genre of writing.”

> As Nelson sees it, our current use of online documents is very limiting. He’s particularly disturbed by how we use the words cut and paste. When the Macintosh was introduced in 1984, cut came to mean “hide this piece that I’ve just marked in an invisible place,” and paste became “plug whatever’s in this invisible place to where I’m pointing.”

> “To me that was an outrage because no one has yet got a decent re-arrangement system that allows you to see the all the parts of the arrangement as you’re writing,” Nelson says. “Those words meant something entirely different until 1984.

> Balzac, the French novelist, carried a razor blade around his neck for cutting up his manuscript. Tolstoy would cut up his manuscripts and leave all the pieces around the floor. This is true cut-and-paste, where you’re re-arranging on a large scale and able to see the relationships between parts.”

> Ironically, Nelson is friends with Larry Tesler—the man responsible for our modern use of cut and paste—but still calls their mislabeling “a crime against humanity.”

https://qz.com/778747/an-early-internet-pioneer-says-the-con...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Nelson

wallflower··on Ask HN: I'm an incoming freshman to college for a CS major, what should I know?
If your school offers an opportunity to study abroad, ideally in a country with a culture that you have personal interest in, please consider it strongly. I regret not doing this in college, as doing the equivalent nomad type experience is much more difficult after graduating.
wallflower··on What are the ways for mobile app virality?
tldr: critical mass with the right crowd, real word of mouth, luck, timing. Spread from elite/popular to mainstream.

"After I sent out that first email, I went rollerblading around a big office park where Tellme was based. I went up to a random guy and said, “Hey man, have you checked out hotornot.com yet?” He said, “No, what’s that?” I said, “Dude, just go check it out!” Then I went home and watched our logs for Tellme and saw a hit come in 10 minutes later, and then more hits kept coming from different people within Tellme.”

-James Hong, cofounder, HOTorNOT

From "Founders at Work"

> “We sent her all over the country,” Munoz told me this week. “Her pitch was pretty genius. She would go to chapters of her sorority, do her presentation, and have all the girls at the meetings install the app. Then she’d go to the corresponding brother fraternity—they’d open the app and see all these cute girls they knew.” Tinder had fewer than 5,000 users before Wolfe made her trip, Munoz says; when she returned, there were some 15,000. “At that point, I thought the avalanche had started,” Munoz says.

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-07-02/tinders-forg... (Paywall)

> Undeterred, Mr. Spiegel and Mr. Murphy shared an updated version for the iPhone with about 20 friends in September 2011. A few weeks in, they started seeing an influx of new users, paired with unusual spikes in activity, peaking between 8 a.m. and 3 p.m.

> It turned out the activity was centered around a high school in Orange County. Mr. Spiegel’s mother had told his cousin, who was a student at the school, about the app, which then spread throughout the school.

> Other high school students in Southern California picked it up, with the number of daily active users climbing from 3,000 to 30,000 in a month in early 2012.

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/09/technology/snapchat-a-gro...

wallflower··on Growing Anomalies at the Large Hadron Collider Raise Hopes
Wow. I think it took me a month. If you don’t mind me asking, have there been any other books or book series that you have read at similar Cannonball Run speed?
wallflower··on Employers are rethinking open-plan office design
Thanks for the follow up. Yes, the size of the hearing protection makes sleeping on the side pretty much impossible. I guess that is an acceptable tradeoff, as long as I can get to sleep.
wallflower··on Employers are rethinking open-plan office design
Just a suggestion. Have you considered trying hearing protection to create a “low noise” bubble?

I have a pair of shotgun hearing protection ear muffs next to my bed. I only use them for emergencies when I really need to sleep and neighbors are partying very late. However, putting them on cuts any noise to a mumbling like in the distance.

Not the exact model or make but similar. Not electronic.

https://www.dickssportinggoods.com/p/walkers-game-ear-pro-fo...

wallflower··on Roll Your Own Frameworks
We once outsourced a native iOS app to a large consultancy. They were able to develop a working iOS app in a short amount of time. How did they do it? They threw at least twenty people (at the peak) on the project. And they used their own framework. It handled everything from network calls to CoreData to action sheet UI to the “kitchen sink”. Everything in that app extended a base class in their framework. They did give us a snapshot-in-time of their source behind their framework, and any iOS dev who had to fix bugs or add new features to the app they threw together eventually cursed the framework. Because sometimes adding a new UI animation or different navigation way required mucking through the framework code, sometimes frustratingly unsuccessfully. The app is no longer in use, having been rewritten.
wallflower··on Testosterone, a key hormone in the context of Covid-19 pandemic
Like anything with health, it is the system not the parts that matter.

> Q: What are the implications of women’s genetic superiority for the current coronavirus pandemic?

> A simplified way of thinking about that is this: A specific gene on the X chromosome, TLR-7, is often used to recognize single-stranded RNA viruses like the novel coronavirus. Having two versions gives them an advantage in recognizing the virus.

> Additionally, we think that COVID-19 uses its spike protein to enter cells in the body. They do that by unlocking the ACE2 protein on the surface of the cell. And, as it turns out, the ACE2 gene is on the X chromosome. Which means all of men’s cells are using that same [version of the] ACE2 gene. So if they unfortunately encounter a strain of COVID-19 that has a spike protein that can perfectly unlock their ACE2 and enter their cells, men are in big trouble quickly.

> On the other hand, in females’ cells, 50 percent are going to be using likely a slightly different version of the ACE2 than other cells. It’s much more difficult for a strain of corona to have a spike protein that could equally infect both populations of cells.

https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/the-reason-more-men-...

wallflower··on Ask HN: Any ideas for children education at home?
For your young inventors and scientists:

> Dyson engineers have designed these challenges specifically for children. Ideal for home or in the classroom, they encourage inquisitive young minds to get excited about engineering.

https://www.jamesdysonfoundation.com/content/dam/pdf/US%20ch...?

https://www.jamesdysonfoundation.com/resources/challenge-car...

wallflower··on Amateur programmer to paid professional in 60 days. What lang/stack?
Reach out to non-profit organizations that you could support. Ask if they have a website that they would like to build, however small. Offer to build it. Or build a website in 60 days that showcases your skills and has some dynamic elements and looks good on mobile.

Good luck, the point is to start building now - clients and projects.

wallflower··on State Machine in Real Life
While there are less of these now (possibly because of the feature described here), if you find a store with an automatic door that swings out, standing on the pad that is outside to block the door from moving is a good way to annoy your friends who are behind you and teach them about simple state machines.
wallflower··on The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic could have been prevented
> our general willingness to physically interact with each other

In the best outcome, there is a successful vaccine. Even Introverts Gone Wild. The Roaring Twenties all over again, as another commenter mentioned.

In the worst outcome, we learn to live with COVID-19 or its offshoots, forcing each person to take into a risk calculation and mitigation measures for meeting others, especially in crowds.

In all outcomes, humanity will survive. Even if the Contagion virus, which was modeled after the Nipah virus with 80%+ mortality rates in certain break outs, becomes a reality in the future, there will always be survivors.

wallflower··on The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic could have been prevented
Thanks for the clarification. I do not have an answer since I have not researched it or yet read the John Barry book about 1918. However, the epidemic will be forgotten, assuming a safe, effective vaccine is found. In a few years time after worldwide vaccine deployment and ongoing international joint efforts to proactively fight emerging and unknown viruses, there might be an annual flashback on International COVID-19 Remembrance Day. There will be moments of silence and then normalcy straight thereafter. Adults who grew up during the era as kids might talk about it as a way to bond during in-person or VR (not for safety, the Metaverse will not be denied) dates. And then the next threat will arise and the cycle will repeat.

"the ruling class has major incentives to help them forget"

> Until then, get ready, my friends. What is about to be unleashed on American society will be the greatest campaign ever created to get you to feel normal again. It will come from brands, it will come from government, it will even come from each other, and it will come from the left and from the right. We will do anything, spend anything, believe anything, just so we can take away how horribly uncomfortable all of this feels. There will be an all-out blitz to make you believe you never saw what you saw.

https://www.wbur.org/cognoscenti/2020/04/14/gaslighting-coro...

wallflower··on The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic could have been prevented
We are all living through this in real-time. A few of us even know people who have died from COVID-19 [1]. For the first time in a long time, on a large scale, many people are experiencing the effects of normalcy bias, even if they don't it is called that particular term. [2] Good or bad, we are all seeing the results of having a global supply chain. For the first time in a long time, most of us know people who are unemployed for reasons that are beyond their control. We are seeing acutely the benefits of a social safety net. [3] For the first time in a very long time, with few exceptions, people are not experiencing FOMO as it relates to the innocent but probing "what are you doing this weekend?" or "what did you do this weekend?", as people simply cannot "go out on a Friday" like they did just a couple months ago. The whole casual Tinder hookup culture is undergoing a sea change in the temporary era of social distancing, as kissing is a known probable vector for virus transmission. Let alone, having a date in a restaurant is a vaguer memory every passing day.

The Internet, broadly speaking, is fueling a return to creativity not seen widely since the days of MySpace. Creativity almost always thrives under constraint. For example, Russian isolation art [4].

Finally, for those who are saying we'll forget about this in two years... (normalcy bias) what if there is ultimately no successful vaccine and just a set of treatments that are fairly to moderately successful once you are infected?

[1] > The CDC's Pandemic Flu Storybook provides readers with a look at the impact pandemic flu events have had on both survivors and the families and friends of non-survivors. These stories are not folklore, but personal recollections.

https://www.cdc.gov/publications/panflu/stories/survived.htm...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalcy_bias

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/06/business/europe-coronavir...

[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/25/world/europe/russia-Faceb...

wallflower··on The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic could have been prevented
Even if it could have been prevented, there is significant probability that another novel virus could arise from bat or other reservoirs in the future. Similar to how H1N1 better prepared certain countries who experienced it, this could be the wake-up call that was needed to help future generations survive a much worse virus by getting them more used to a life where being in a crowd is not normal. There are very few people alive who lived through the previous 1918 pandemic. This is our 1918 or, at least, a strong warning.
wallflower··on Face-touching may reflect unconscious hand-smelling [pdf]
EDIT: Yes. Personally, I would not risk it if it lowers my chance of getting infected. The choice is up to you.

> These pathogens can be picked up by our hands and get into the body through mucous membranes on the face — eyes, nose, and mouth — that act as pathways to the throat and lungs.

https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/09/how-touching-your-face-c...

wallflower··on Millions of credit-card customers can’t pay their bills
If you use Amex, there is a one-time offer until 5/1 to get one year of digital access for $112 (after $75 statement credit).

http://wsj.com/amex

wallflower··on Millions of credit-card customers can’t pay their bills
This isn’t answering your question. However, a friend who worked at a large credit card issuer said their break-even interest rate to support operations was 9.9%. Everything after that was profit.
wallflower··on Background Matting: The World is Your Green Screen
The Zoom guesswork-based imitation is pretty good, and it seems to be optimized for a single person's movement. It gets confused when there are more actors like a child or dog entering from stage left.
wallflower··on Ask HN: Tricks to improve posture?
Excellent, thanks for following up!
wallflower··on Why are Soviet math textbooks so hardcore in comparison to US textbooks? (2017)
Look into Art of Problem Solving (AOPS).

https://artofproblemsolving.com/

wallflower··on How does the coronavirus kill?
One very important thing to note is that the Oxygen - Hemoglobin dissociation curve has a sigmoidal shape. It is not linear. After a certain point, around 90 %, there is a very sharp drop-off.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen–hemoglobin_dissociati...

wallflower··on Mystery of two-million-year-old stone balls solved
> but I had no idea about humans 200,000 years ago using tools.

You might be interested in Sapiens.

https://www.amazon.com/Sapiens-Humankind-Yuval-Noah-Harari/d...

wallflower··on Ask HN: Tricks to improve posture?
Be careful, you may want to invest in a more expensive burst-resistant exercise ball that will not pop like a balloon.

https://fitter1.com/products/classic-exercise-ball-chair

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