HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

CondensedBrain

136 karma · joined February 23, 2019

submissionscomments
CondensedBrain··on The internet is an SEO landfill
You can opt out of the redesign in settings. I don't know how long that will last. Sometimes it shows the new one, but it's rare.
CondensedBrain··on The internet is an SEO landfill
>> "Knowledge should be free at our point in time and supposed evolutional stage. But it's not."

We only evolved technologically. Our economic systems are still stuck in the 19th century. The planet's cultures are still recovering from a string of empires that valued domination and assimilation over cooperation.

For now, I have to charge for my skills to live. Some day I hope to be able to have hobbies and share their output without having to monetize them to fund the efforts.

CondensedBrain··on The internet is an SEO landfill
>> "I've also enjoyed the organic explosion of low carb cooking that has happened online. I have been witness to the community growing from its very beginnings less than a decade ago when it was just some people trying to make weight loss taste good"

This is way older than a decade. I knew people getting into it and sharing recipes on Usenet. The current boom is new, but online low carb communities are ancient in internet terms.

It wasn't very palatable back then, but people sure did try.

CondensedBrain··on The internet is an SEO landfill
Site searching Reddit can at least give some ideas for different words to try. Most of my problems finding things on Google stem from its declining ability to make a reasonable guess based on what I put in. It's not enough to have a word anymore. You have to know the right keyphrase or it shows a whole different world of results.

It used to show its best guess, then branch off from it with less specificity and more variety and, in general, a result reflecting what I meant within a few pages. Now Google is so desperate to get it right on result #1 that it never admits failure no matter how many pages you go.

CondensedBrain··on I’m not really a good web developer, I'm just good at Googling things
https://devdocs.io/ isn't exactly equivalent to manpages, but works well enough. You can even download documentation for offline use.
CondensedBrain··on Let's trim our hair in accordance with the socialist lifestyle
I didn't put them on a timeline.

The neonazi invasion happened around when both tended to show up in the same discussions. More people know about punks than skinheads, so I used one to give context to the other. The recent movie about the late '90s punk scene, Bomb City, even had a skinhead with an anti-Nazi jacket.

CondensedBrain··on Let's trim our hair in accordance with the socialist lifestyle
Skinheads were a punk-adjacent subculture that got overrun with neonazis. They never did shake the association.
CondensedBrain··on Give Firefox a chance
I'm going to pass on the browser part owned by the chairman and cofounder of Palantir. I don't trust it for that and other reasons. I don't have the skills or interest to audit and compile every release myself. I don't do it with the browser I do use, but the threat model is different for its maintainers.
CondensedBrain··on Bill Gates on making “one of the greatest mistakes of all time”
ARM and Intel/AMD represent two timelines that started to converge in the 2000s.
CondensedBrain··on Temperature changes around the world – 1901-2018
That probably factors in the infrastructure it takes to deliver the data.
CondensedBrain··on Show HN: Fist – Persistent Full Text Search and Indexing Server Written in C
You can frame a critique in a way that doesn't make the subject feel targeted.

Some tips:

* Rather than call their way atrocious, try something like "Use $(CC) instead of hard coding gcc to avoid a lot of headaches down the road."

* Instead of:

>> "This also raises in me the suspicion that it hasn't been tested with no compiler other than GCC at whatever version the developer had installed on his machine, which is bad."

Consider:

"Test on other machines to make sure you don't depend on quirks of your local gcc installation."

Don't tear down. Build up.

CondensedBrain··on Why Google+ Failed
On the plus side, Google at least tells you when it omits words and offers to put them back in now. Not that it does much good. Something about Google the search engine changed and now it's impossible to get good results for anything but the most obvious queries. I tried looking up why every commercial pot pie says to let it sit for 5 minutes.

I looked this up years ago and got blog posts explaining it. All I get now is page after page of recipes for homemade pot pies. You'd think after a while some logic would spin up to say "I bet this isn't what they're looking for! Let's try something else." It used to do that.

CondensedBrain··on Why Google+ Failed
There's a whole Wikipedia page for it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products

CondensedBrain··on Why Google+ Failed
GMail was different in a number of ways.

1. Exponentially more space in a market where single or double digit megabytes was the norm. GMail's original pitch was that you never had to delete an email, and that you could always find them with search.

2. It was one of the first web apps. It was dynamic in a way few sites were then. Asynchronous JavaScript (Ajax) and Web 2.0 were still new concepts.

CondensedBrain··on Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation
ActivityPub (AP) has the advantage of running on top of HTTP. You don't have to convince people to install a new browser. All the tools that communicate over AP run on familiar technologies. The hardest part is convincing people to make an account, so most growth is from people following friends--the key incentive--to Mastodon instances. It's not a big problem in practice. Monoculture concerns aside.

AP doesn't have to run on HTTP, but any alternative has the same problem as anything else that needs its own client. Even browser support for FTP is on the way out, and it used to be standard.

CondensedBrain··on Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation
ActivityPub shows a lot of promise.
CondensedBrain··on Dialog – A domain-specific language for creating works of interactive fiction
Spammers call this article spinning or content spinning.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_spinning

CondensedBrain··on A janitor at Frito-Lay invented Flamin’ Hot Cheetos (2017)
>> "It was historically used to either refer to a person of unknown gender, or to optionally refer to a person of a known gender. so your options for singular pronouns might be either he or they, or she or they."

That's the thing though. Enbies don't generally know their gender. If you would use they without anger for an unknown person of unknown gender, it makes no sense to be mad about using it for a known person of unknown gender. You still don't know their gender. Neither of you do. He/him, she/her, man and woman, and sir and ma'am can cause tremendous dysphoria. That's often part of how they know they're not binary.

edit: reduced to key point

CondensedBrain··on A janitor at Frito-Lay invented Flamin’ Hot Cheetos (2017)
It's mainly used by nonbinary (enby) people of Latin descent in the US who feel like both Latino and Latina are a poor fit.

These threads always have the same look as the ones where people complained about singular they. Latinx doesn't have centuries of use the way singular they does, but it doesn't really matter. It costs you nothing to respect another person's self-identification.

Whether people should use it as a group term beyond enby Latin American descendants is another matter.

CondensedBrain··on Ask HN: Due to global warming, where would you move to or avoid?
Climate refugees are going to be the big issue, not where to choose to move if you have that freedom. Any question of where to go has to somehow answer "What happens when everyone else who can tries to go there?"
CondensedBrain··on Two potentially life-friendly planets found orbiting a nearby star
12 light years is a long way for a signal to go without attenuating into noise.
CondensedBrain··on i386 architecture will be dropped starting with Ubuntu 19.10
For some reason I thought this happened a long time ago.
CondensedBrain··on Anxiety: An Interactive Story
Something to keep in mind is Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria.

https://www.webmd.com/add-adhd/rejection-sensitive-dysphoria

It passes if allowed to, but having someone complain about overreaction or try to push through it does not help. Sometimes an ADHD brain, especially an anxious one, can seem to react in an irrational way.

And it's true! But there's nothing they can do about it at that moment. They can learn how to smooth the curve or avoid getting into it in the first place, but not mid-panic.

CondensedBrain··on Table Salt Compound Spotted on Europa
There are different kinds of water.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_water

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritiated_water

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiheavy_water

Finding any of them on another planet or moon would be interesting.

CondensedBrain··on The Wrong Right Way
If they did, I can't find any information on it. Where did you hear about this?
CondensedBrain··on The rise and fall of the company behind ‘Reader Rabbit’ and other games (2018)
Every Minecraft guide is trapped in a YouTube video made by someone who sounds like a teenager or younger, so the answer is probably yes.
CondensedBrain··on The rise and fall of the company behind ‘Reader Rabbit’ and other games (2018)
It took me a lifetime to realize Reader Rabbit is a play on Peter Rabbit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Rabbit

CondensedBrain··on The Wrong Right Way
>> "Ultimately, we couldn’t find a way to make the business viable. We explored a number of different options—voluntary subscriptions from users, premium features, increased fees—but the resources required to support a high number of lower-volume creators always outpaced our revenue."

I wonder if Patreon ran into a similar problem trying to stay afloat without handing more control over to VCs.

CondensedBrain··on I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup (2014)
If voter turnout is to be taken as a measure, red/blue tribes aren't representative of society. Voters (at least in the US) are a highly-motivated minority with firm opinions. Turnout peaks in Presidential elections, but still barely breaks 50%. Most people don't even pay attention until the debates start.

Consistent Voter Tribe people don't believe me when I tell them the most popular prime time cable news program barely has enough viewers to fill a few large stadiums. What you see on /r/all reflects the interests of people who watch TV shows with tens of millions of viewers, not the minority of people extremely tuned in to politics.

This is why I stopped watching cable news and following most political media. I realized they gave me a twisted view of how popular my opinions are.

CondensedBrain··on I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup (2014)
It depends on the subreddits you subscribe to. Communities with a single place to interact will vary depending on time of day and topic. One day you get upvotes, the next you get downvotes for the same kind of thing.

Hacker News is Hacker News. Reddit is the communities you subscribe to. A negative view of Reddit as a whole makes no sense. The defaults and other big subreddits only reflect society at large, so any problem you have with Reddit is really with society.

/r/slatestarcodex, /r/pics, and /r/DaystromInstitute have nothing in common other than the platform.

Page 1 of 2Next →