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Comment by hardwaregeek | Hacker News Reader

Never underestimate cultural momentum I guess. NBA players shot long 2 pointers for decades before people realized 3 > 2. Doctors refused to wash their hands before doing procedures. There’s so many things that seem obvious in retrospect but took a long time to become accepted

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Hey and you can use both lanes in a zip merge!

Isn't that the law anyway?

Morale: follow the rules.

>NBA players shot long 2 pointers for decades before people realized 3 > 2

And the game is worse for it :')

This is a fundamental problem in sports. Baseball is going the same way. Players are incentivized to win, and the league is incentivized to entertain. Turns out these incentives are not aligned.

> Players are incentivized to win, and the league is incentivized to entertain.

Players are incentivized to win due to specific decisions made by the league.

In Bananaball the league says, "practice your choreographed dance number before batting practice." And those same athletes are like, "Wait, which choreographed dance number? The seventh inning stretch, the grand finale, or the one we do in the infield when the guy on stilts is pitching?"

Edit: the grand finale dance number I saw is both teams dancing together. That should be noted.

Sure. There's a market for that. But the NBA sells a lot more tickets than the Harlem Globetrotters.

But that's a matter of scale. When I was a child, the Harlem Globetrotters were far more more famous than any 3-4 NBA teams combined. They were in multiple Scooby Doo movies/episodes. They failed tp scale the model, but wrestling didn't.

Would be very curious about, say, the worst MLB team's ticket sales vs. the Savannah Bananas.

And the ongoing gambling scandal gives credence to a third incentive I've long suspected. Only half joking

This isn't right - the league can change the rules. NFL has done a wonderful job over the years on this.

Baseball has done a terrible job, but at least seems to have turned the corner with the pitch clock. Maybe they'll move the mound back a couple feet, make the ball 5.5oz, reduce the field by a player and then we'll get more entertainment and the players can still try their hardest to win.

I wonder if anyone has made an engine for simulating MLB play with various rule changes.

Personally, I think it'd be interesting to see how the game plays if you could only have two outfielders (but you could shift however you choose.)

It's a good thought.

I'd guess MLB The Show video game wouldn't be a bad place to start. They should have a decent simulator built in.

Something Derek Thompson has written about https://archive.ph/uSgNd

Is it ? I, for one, enjoy watching the 3s raining down!

They did wash their hands. Turns out that soap and water wasn't quite enough. Lister used carbolic acid (for dressing and wound cleaning) and Semmelweis used chlorinated lime (for hand washing).

And Semmelweis is a perfect case against being an asshole who's right: He was more right than wrong (he didn't fully understand why what he was doing helped, but it did) but he was such a horrible personality and such an amazing gift for pissing people off it probably cost lives by delaying the uptake of his ideas.

But this is getting a bit off topic, I suppose.

Or you could say it the other way around: Even leading scientists are susceptible to letting emotions get the best of them and double-down defending their personal investments into things.

"A scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." - Max Planck.

That was later; earlier in history doctors (or "doctors" if you so insist) did not wash their hands.

I was mainly pushing back on the idea that something as seemingly obvious as hand washing was the thing that made surgery safe. It took quite a bit more than just simple hand washing.

Was soap often used prior to the mid 1800s?

People paid 100x more for their hosting when using aws cloud until they realized they never neded 99.97% uptime for their t-shirt business. Oh wait too soon. Save for post for the future.

kubernetes

People spent half their job figuring out self hosted infrastructure until they realized they rather just have some other company deploy their website when they make a commit.

People paid only 100x more than self hosting to use AWS until they realized that they could get a better deal by paying 200x for a service that is a wrapper over AWS but they never have to think about since it turns out that for most businesses that 100x is like 30 bucks a month.

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