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Best Bi Geek Squid
Mar 25, 2016

mystes posted:

Every comment on this story about Latin is complete nonsense: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21578345

The first comment starts with "Latin is the most powerful natural language I know," and it only gets worse from there.

guy just openly admitting that he doesn't know Rust

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Best Bi Geek Squid
Mar 25, 2016

alexandriao posted:

also notice how nobody in that thread mentions spices or herbs lmao

e: I bet none of them know what cumin or cinnamon or asafoetida is

something something i showed your mom what cumin is iykwim

Best Bi Geek Squid
Mar 25, 2016

uncurable mlady posted:

don't practice sanitation on the same level (non homeless folks) That imo is true and we shouldn't ignore it. But why?

people without regular access to showers don't take a lot of showers. what could cause this? and how could it be fixed with an app?

Best Bi Geek Squid
Mar 25, 2016

Xik posted:

Porn site to pay $12.7m to women who didn't know videos would be posted (theguardian.com)
44 points by nwrk 1 hour ago | flag | hide | past | web | favorite | 15 comments


No particular comment to post, but just the fact that right now all comments expressing concern for the woman are grey (downvoted)...

quote:


dsfyu404ed 12 minutes ago [-]

Everyone(TM) watches porn, it's not a big deal. That response probably only works if you're profile is all about some super niche stuff that would disgust most people.
Being in porn is one of those things that is way less of a problem if you have the self confidence to just own it.

"Their money is green and I'm not gonna have a 20yo body forever" would probably shut up most people who ask (which going to be pretty rare in the first place).

reply


let's play "guess the gender of that hn poster"

Best Bi Geek Squid
Mar 25, 2016
Jeffrey Epstein and MIT: FAQs (mit.edu)

quote:

This is besides the point of the article, but the link is in HTTP (no TLS but available with a correct certificate), and the report site which has the information linked in the article is also in HTTP (but has a bad TLS certificate).


U.S. alcohol-related deaths have doubled, study says (npr.org)
85 points by pseudolus 9 hours ago | hide | past | web | favorite | 96 comments

quote:

rjkennedy98 7 hours ago [-]

> With the increases in alcohol use among women, there's been increases in harms for women including ER visits, hospitalization and deaths
Do people not care if men die? I do not understand why these snippets are almost always put in press releases, even when the actual numbers show that men are astonishingly more likely to die from the disease. I've seen articles about how women's rates are rising faster, when the increase in men's death over the same period is greater than the absolutely total number of women affected! Its almost as if we have to mention that women are affected or people will just ignore the problem all together. So sad.

quote:


ronnier 7 hours ago [-]

The state of men in the US is really deteriorating. Men are drugging, drinking, and smoking theirselves to death. And sometimes the death is very explicit, being by suicide which is climbing to rates higher than ever. Prisons are filled with men, universities are increasingly seeing fewer men than women. Men are increasingly sexless much longer than females. Seems we have a big problem on our hands.
reply

quote:

Shivetya 6 hours ago [-]

well to be honest, when the media which includes print, broadcast, news, and even movies, portray men in a bad light over and over and over it can have an effect.
many parts of the legal system and quasi legal system; think colleges; de facto treat men differently. this is especially true in cases of divorce, domestic violence, and campus issues.

this is not to say there are not many cases where the outcome is correct but there are too many instances where the deck is stacked against them before they even get to the table.

reply

Best Bi Geek Squid fucked around with this message at 02:54 on Jan 11, 2020

Best Bi Geek Squid
Mar 25, 2016
fuckputer

yosposter

fuckdditor

Best Bi Geek Squid
Mar 25, 2016
fuckopop

Best Bi Geek Squid
Mar 25, 2016
how could they violate the terms and conditions of use without the developer's consent? :reddit:

Best Bi Geek Squid
Mar 25, 2016

eschaton posted:

isn’t that basically today? it’s not like anyone programs in BLISS or PL/I or Pascal any more, the other C-equivalent systems languages have gone to eternal rest, it’s basically the only language in its niche now

you forgot about javascript

Best Bi Geek Squid
Mar 25, 2016
gonna write a song about writing my own personal custom program by smuggling it out of the office one code snippet at a time in my lunchbox. and it didn't cost me a dime

Best Bi Geek Squid
Mar 25, 2016

Maximo Roboto posted:

If you have a buddy who tosses around this kind of cash, your options are different from the options available to the overwhelming majority of us.

:thunk:

Best Bi Geek Squid
Mar 25, 2016

fritz posted:

kragen 3 hours ago [-]

Mathematicians are perfectly capable of doing all those self-care things, as monks do in every monastery. (By contrast, non-mathematicians are unable to build anything larger than a small hut without help from mathematicians in the form of geometry.)
I don't know of a single mathematician who has ODed on amphetamines, although of course amphetamines have been popular with mathematicians since they were discovered; and I know of only one who voted for Trump (Dan Kleitman), although undoubtedly others exist. The doses of amphetamines conducive to doing mathematics are about two orders of magnitude lower than the lethal doses, so it seems unlikely that someone who takes them to improve concentration rather than for euphoria would OD accidentally, as heroin users frequently do.
Funding is only necessary to the extent that it helps keep the torch-wielding villagers away from the gate. To the extent that it subjects mathematical research to political tests, it is not only unnecessary, but counterproductive.
If my filter bubble includes Bruno, Socrates, Mozi, Gödel, Turing, and Archimedes, I think its radius is adequate.
I think the downvoting of my "tirade" to -2 has shown that non-mathematicians hate and fear mathematicians, think that all those killings of mathematicians I listed were reasonable and justified, and would like to silence any criticism of them.
reply

:psyduck:

this is why you never let the nerds interact with the customer

Best Bi Geek Squid
Mar 25, 2016
4. Bill Gates's eyes are portals to a dimension of pure force, giving him the ability to blast infected zones.

5. Bill Gates is so strong that he could probably beat up my dad. No way he'd get Corona virus

Best Bi Geek Squid
Mar 25, 2016

Antigravitas posted:

Firm wielding Theranos patents asks judge to block coronavirus test

Do you really want to set a precedent that (intellectual) property rights are suspended in times of crisis? 

I think that I do, op

Best Bi Geek Squid
Mar 25, 2016

lancemantis posted:

maybe they just have the 'POS-brain;

the real pandemic

Best Bi Geek Squid
Mar 25, 2016
i legitimately saw a mushroom agitprop film a little while back. it was this hour-or-so long movie about how mushrooms are literally magic and how this one dude (whose portfolio of patented fungi strains would certainly not make him a lot of money if consumption went up and psyclosybin was legalized) was so cool and had his life literally changed by mushrooms. The group showing the film had employees there handing out magazines stuffed with ads for dudes mushrooms and mushroom accessories

Best Bi Geek Squid
Mar 25, 2016

Oneiros posted:

seph-reed 5 hours ago [-]


So in order to really get a girls rocks off, you have to be able to hack her libido.


quote:

hack her libido

Best Bi Geek Squid
Mar 25, 2016

Suspicious Dish posted:

For women: perhaps a drug that makes them simultaneously aroused and hyper-critical?

the poster likes his dommy mommy

Best Bi Geek Squid
Mar 25, 2016

Mr.Radar posted:

sametmax 10 hours ago [-]

> Preserving their traditional alphabet and de-colonializing their culture is a good thing, no matter how I look at it
There are downsides to any situation. E.G:
- cost
- available resources for education and work
- adding one more obstacles for different cultures to be able to understand each other
I'm french, and in my country, language protection is a big thing.
It's also why we have such a terrible ability to speak english, which create way more problems than it solves.
Language preservation is overrated. Sure, it's nice. But compared to one day, having the entire earth speak the same language, be able to communicate and understand each other better? Small price to pay.
It get why they do it. Mongolia is a very peculiar culture, and I don't think it benefits much from mondialisation. Quite the contrary. And it's a way for their society to break from a painful part of their history.
But to me, it seems, at least on the long run, a step backward. Every time a language dies, like latin or summerian did, we gain uniformity. There are enough source of diversity in humanity to not need to add it to the very structure we use to exchange information.
Granted, the cyrillic alphabet is not very universal, but it is certainly more common than the traditional mongolia alphabet.
Now since I don't live there, I may be missing some crucial informations. Maybe the population still massively use the old alphabet unofficially and it makes sense. Maybe the use of the cyrillic alphabet brough problems I can't see.
So of course, I'm not the right peson to judge the situation.
But I wanted to bring a counter point to this the enthusiastic parent comment. We tend to react in a very emotional way when it's about culture, and I'm not sure it benefits our specie.
reply

I like how the guy just throws up his hands at the end and is like "yeah I actually have no loving idea what I'm talking about, I just wanted to feel my mouth move" after making readers wade through paragraphs of bullshit

Best Bi Geek Squid
Mar 25, 2016
Conversations with a six-year-old on functional programming


My six-year-old son walked up to me yesterday. “What are you reading?”

At the time, I was reading part of Janis Voigtländer’s habilitation thesis. Unsure where to even start, I decided to just answer straightforwardly: “I’m reading a very long story about free theorems.”

He persisted. “What are free theorems?”

Never one to shrink from a pedagogical challenge, I thought for a moment, then began: “Do you know what a function is?” He didn’t. “A function is like a machine where you put something in one end and something comes out the other end. For example, maybe you put a number in, and the number that is one bigger comes out. So if you put in three, four comes out, or if you put in six, seven comes out.” This clearly made sense to him, so I continued, “The type of a function machine tells you what kinds of things you put in and what kinds of things come out. So maybe you put a number in and get a number out. Or maybe you put in a list of numbers and get a number out.” He interrupted excitedly, “Or maybe you could put words in??” “Yes, exactly! Maybe you can put words in and get words out. Or maybe there is a function machine where you put other function machines in and get function machines out!” He gasped in astonishment at the idea of putting function machines into function machines.

“So,” I concluded, “a free theorem is when you can say something that is always true about a function machine if you only know its type, but you don’t know anything about what it does on the inside.” This seemed a bit beyond him (and to be fair, free theorems are only interesting when polymorphism is involved which I definitely didn’t want to go into). But the whole conversation had given me a different idea.

“Hey, I have a good idea for a game,” I said. “It’s called the function machine game. I will think of a function machine. You tell me things to put into the function machine, and I will tell you what comes out. Then you have to guess what the function machine does.” He immediately liked this game and it has been a huge hit; he wants to play it all the time. We played it while driving to a party yesterday, and we played it this morning while I was in the shower. So far, he has correctly guessed

[Math images omitted]

I tried  but that was a bit tough for him. I realized that in some cases he may understand intuitively what the function does but have trouble expressing it in words (this was also a problem with ), so we started using the obvious variant where once the guesser thinks they know what the function does, the players switch roles and the person who came up with function specifies some inputs in order to test whether the guesser is able to produce the correct outputs.

 was also surprisingly difficult for him to guess (though he did get it right eventually). I think he was just stuck on the idea of the function doing something arithmetical to the input, and was having trouble coming up with some sort of arithmetic procedure which would result in  no matter what you put in! It simply hadn’t occurred to him that the machine might not care about the input. (Interestingly, many students in my functional programming class this semester were also confused by constant functions when we were learning about the lambda calculus; they really wanted to substitute the input somewhere and were upset/confused by the fact that the bound variable did not occur in the body at all!)

After a few rounds of guessing my functions, he wanted to come up with his own functions for me to guess (as I knew he would). Sometimes his functions are great and sometimes they don’t make sense (usually because his idea of what the function does changes over time, which of course he, in all sincerity, denies), but it’s fun either way. And after he finally understood , he came up with his own function which was something like



inspired, I think, by his kindergarten class where they were learning about pairs of numbers that added up to .

Definitely one of my better parenting days

Best Bi Geek Squid
Mar 25, 2016

quote:

JamesG124 11 hours ago [-]


Anyone rememer how that New Yorker piece describes HN as a place full of performative erudition?

reply



vharuck 8 hours ago [-]


I'd much rather "performative erudition" than "performative idiocy" (a.k.a. trolling), because the latter makes visiting idiots feel they're in good company[0].

[0] Paraphrased (surprisingly to me) from a Hacker News user: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1012082

reply


themodelplumber 5 hours ago [-]


Funny in its way. I was thinking about this a while back. IMO HN as a community is mostly introverted (subjective/qualitative) and structure-biased, so open-ended discussions on "erudite" topics which may not be direct specialties of commenters will encourage a sort of performing or even bluffing effect, out of community-identity stress.

At that time I think I concluded that the least-pressured conversations, and likely most positive and upbeat, would be those on topics like retro computing. Such a topic is close to the HN tech-user specialty, close to the heart because of its strong integration with personal past experiences, and mostly made up of "known" or "closed-ended" topics. So, far from a performance or bluff, you get some pretty passionate tales from direct experience, and erudition be damned.

Not sure if that's a rule, but so far it matches my personal perceptions of what makes a really good discussion here, vs. one that's...less like that.

reply


jpxw 10 hours ago [-]


I’ll take “performative” erudition over a lack of any erudition at all.

reply


voldacar 2 hours ago [-]


Lol the New Yorker is the epitome of "performative erudition".

reply


downerending 2 hours ago [-]


Wow--that's quite a bit of (presumably unintentional) irony, coming from them.

reply


bJGVygG7MQVF8c 10 hours ago [-]


Ha! That rings true ^_^

Although it has to be said: Takes one to know one, New Yorker. Contemptuousness toward amateurs might be justified though.

reply


TimSchumann 11 hours ago [-]


I’d have a witty retort to this, but I can’t find the relevant XKCD.

reply



Best Bi Geek Squid
Mar 25, 2016
that last one could be a deece thread title

Best Bi Geek Squid
Mar 25, 2016

Zamujasa posted:

this is the kind of thinking that's going to drive an ai to murder us all

it'd really just be the kind thing to do

Best Bi Geek Squid
Mar 25, 2016

NihilCredo posted:

danicgross 3 hours ago [–]

The cross-pollination effect of Couchsurfing is so powerful. I often wonder — how could you create a digital equivalent of this?
We let strangers into our homes, but not into our superuser shell. Why?

holy poo poo

Best Bi Geek Squid
Mar 25, 2016
Triplebyte is a YC company and HN is a YC site, so economic interests are aligned with nuking highly critical comments

reply


dang 2 days ago [–]


That's a natural assumption, but if you think a step further it's not hard to see why it's false: you shouldn't optimize for local optima, especially if doing that would ruin your global optimum. When you have a goose that lays golden eggs, don't risk the goose for an egg.

YC's economic interest in HN is having it be a happy, thriving community. That dominates all other considerations put together. A fast way to ruin that would be to destroy the community's good faith by suppressing negative posts about YC or YC startups. In addition to being wrong (we wouldn't want to belong to such a community ourselves), it would be dumb. If anyone wants more explanation there are posts about HN vis-à-vis YC's business interests going back years: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... See also https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que..., which describes the simple way we try to optimize this (simple in principle, though not in execution). And see https://blog.ycombinator.com/two-hn-announcements/ from 2015 about HN's editorial independence.

(Edit—because I've been wanting to write about this for some time and this may as well be the place:)

The above is the answer I always give to questions of how HN serves YC's business, because it's true and it's solid economics. It's the right answer to give to anyone who's looking at the question through a cynical economic lens (as we all have been trained to do) since the answer is, basically, "we can be even more cynically self-interested by not doing that".

However, I also always feel a little bad after giving that answer because it's not the deeper truth. The deeper truth is that we just feel this way. HN and YC grew up together. In a way they are siblings, and one doesn't exploit one's sibling. Or, to switch metaphors: because HN and YC grew together, the connections between them are complex and organic, like the connections between brain hemispheres. If you get in there and start snipping and moving things around, you're likely to end up with a self-lobotomy.

If you want a hard-nosed business reason for how HN makes money for YC, one is: it leads to people starting startups that wouldn't otherwise exist, and it leads to YC funding startups that it wouldn't otherwise get to fund. That's how HN adds to YC's core business (edit: but see [1] below). I use that reasoning to explain to people why we don't need to sell ads on HN or do other things to monetize it or drive growth. Again, though, it doesn't capture how I (and I think most at YC) really think and feel about HN. The deeper truth is the two have always been together and we can't imagine them otherwise.

In other words, the value of HN to YC is intangible. That affects how we operate HN. If the value were tangible, then snipping things and moving them around and generally being bustling and managerial would probably be the way to go, or at least the most likely thing that people inside a business would do. But since it's intangible, all that kind of thing gets supplanted by a general feeling of "this is good, don't gently caress it up". Since the main indicator of whether we're loving it up or not is the community, the way HN can most add value to YC is by keeping the community happy. Happiness means two things here: interest (because HN is supposed to be interesting) and trust (because a community can't exist without trust).

This is not a mystical paradise that will last forever—it's a historical accident that an internet forum ended up in a sweet spot vis-à-vis the company that owns it, where the business is better off optimizing for the forum being good and happy than by banner ads or growth hacking. But we all know that it's an honor to get to be stewards of a community in that way, and while nothing lasts forever, we want to keep it going as long as possible, and maybe longer than anyone would have thought possible.

[1] edit: for some reason I forgot to mention the three formal things that HN also gives to YC: job ads for YC startups, Launch HN posts for YC startups, and displaying YC founder usernames in orange to other YC founders. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23293437 for more.

Best Bi Geek Squid
Mar 25, 2016

uncurable mlady posted:

i can't tell if this is stupid or genius.

ill give you a hint

it's not the second one

Best Bi Geek Squid
Mar 25, 2016

quote:

How the ‘Magic: The Gathering’ Color Wheel Explains Humanity

Move over, Myers-Briggs

[a million words and pictures about magic the gathering colors having something very important to say about human personalities and how this breakthrough transformed the author's life]


holy poo poo what's wrong with people

Best Bi Geek Squid
Mar 25, 2016
im in the criminal phase :getin:

Best Bi Geek Squid
Mar 25, 2016

fritz posted:

lazyjones 1 day ago [–]

The bullying/mobbing aspect of Cancel Culture should explicitly be made illegal. I don't understand how people don't recognize it as what it is: idealogical "cleansing" in the same way the Nazis, Mao, Stalinists did it. Simple employer protection as suggested doesn't go far enough, the intent to harm one's career on ideological grounds must be punished.
reply

lol he didn't even qualify it my saying "it's kinda like" or something. just straight up saying that the libs are doing what Nazis et all did. does this guy think that stalin just called people out on twitter and called it a day?

e: in Soviet Russia, culture cancels you!

Best Bi Geek Squid
Mar 25, 2016
fdschoeneman 2 hours ago [–]


According to the Ars piece, the outsourced fact checkers claimed an opinion piece was false because all of the facts in it were cherry picked:

"The researchers found that the post by the CO2 Coalition was based on cherry-picked information to mislead readers into thinking climate science models are wrong about global warming."

This is not a logical argument. Facts are correct or incorrect, whether they're cherrypicked or not.

reply

Best Bi Geek Squid
Mar 25, 2016
trivially insightful thought: my experience teaches me that I don't fit in at a lot of organizations

minor insightful thought: although I reflexively blame other people for this, it is possible that my own attitudes and reactions play a role in my inability to fit in

galaxy-brain insightful thought: I will get a PhD so that I can keep acting in the same problematic ways, not grow as a person, and won't get in trouble

Best Bi Geek Squid
Mar 25, 2016

fritz posted:

colinmhayes 2 hours ago [–]

People who donate to domestic charities when AMF and the malaria consortium are saving lives for $5 a net are immoral or naive.
reply

please let there be a version of this post except they say that it is immoral to donate to anything other than the EFF and FSF :pray:

Best Bi Geek Squid
Mar 25, 2016

quote:


dmode 3 hours ago [–]

I dislike Uber and Lyft's practices as much as the next guy. But I also believe AB5 is a terrible bill and will be voting in November to exempt Uber and Lyft from AB5. AB5 was written to impose a 20th century employment model to a 21st century situation.

exactly backwards - the entire classical distinction between independent contractor and employee is based on a near-medieval employment model (the law of master and servant) that we have tried with increasing difficulty to graft onto 21st century realities. it is uber and lyft that want to continue to apply this hoary old model to the 21st century. AB5 actually uses a much more modern test that is based in part on the actual economic realities prevailing between employers and their subordinates, be they classically "employees" or not.

Best Bi Geek Squid
Mar 25, 2016
gently caress uber and lyft

one good thing is that the court of appeals set a very accelerated briefing schedule while the stay is active. Plus there was this interesting bit:

quote:

On or before September 4, 2020, each defendant shall submit a sworn statement from its chief executive officer confirming that it has developed implementation plans under which, if this court affirms the preliminary injunction and Proposition 22 on the November 2020 ballot fails to pass, the company will be prepared to comply with the preliminary injunction within no more than 30 days after issuance of the remittitur in the appeal. 5. Should Lyft or Uber fail to comply with these procedures, the People may apply to this court to vacate this stay.

Best Bi Geek Squid
Mar 25, 2016
"it's just a prank, bro!" I yell as a federal judge sentences me to ten years

Best Bi Geek Squid
Mar 25, 2016
I think that poster literally might not understand that spotify can play music that is not on your local machine

gonna be a real shock when someone tells him about netflix

Best Bi Geek Squid
Mar 25, 2016
PaulHoule 1 hour ago [–]


I have gotten into the hobby/habit of printing at least one "thing" a day with artistic intent. That could be:

* an anime character printed with a thermal receipt printer * a 4x6 card with an information graphic I rendered with CSS Grid * a shutterfly envelope to family in New England, etc.

most of the time I am starting with an image somebody else made, but there is a lot of judgement involved with fitting the image to paper and process -- it is a bridge between the world of digital images that I work and play in and the real world.

I go through printers the way rock stars go through guitars and what to do with the e-Waste is already part of the product.

I am amazed the the HP Officejet 6600 which just failed on me -- despite the expensive ink, the quality of the work it could do is astonishing.

It stopped picking up paper because something (like a little plastic gear) broke in the drive chain for the pick roller. To be fair all the rollers looked pretty worn -- the printer had been heavily used by a college professor. It's possible we could have fixed it but considering the cost of the next ink refill, I chose to get another printer.

If I were going to salvage the old printer I think I would go for the stepper motors, which would be great for robotics and other mechatronic projects.

---

I badly want to hack an inkjet printer to print white ink onto transparencies and then put it into a second printer to take a PNG with alpha like

https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/File:793Nihilego.png

and make a sticker that could go in a window. Commercial kits to do this cost about as much as a good DSLR lens and they are a business expense to people who are making large quantities of swag.

It's a good market case for the "open source 2d printer" however. It's one thing to get white ink compatible with the printer, it's another thing to get the transfer function between "75% transparent" and a certain amount of ink into the printer's brain

Best Bi Geek Squid
Mar 25, 2016
I can't get a gf but it's because of my personality not because you can't get away with saying the n-word in public 🤷‍♂️

Best Bi Geek Squid
Mar 25, 2016
tfw one of america's main cities is not actually in america

also, I wonder why that poster singles out the chicago and says it isnt part of western culture?

:thunk:

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Best Bi Geek Squid
Mar 25, 2016
mods plz rename me to "the ultimate hedonist" and give me a hedonism bot av, tyia

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