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RangerScienceon The End of a Fair Price: Dynamic Pricing and the Normalization of Gouging

I wouldn’t expect it to; better information, without power to act on it, doesn’t do much.

That said, this’d be one of those things where you can say “this is my prediction”, and if it doesn’t come true, go looking for the forces and factors you missed from your initial prediction.

RangerScienceon Tell the speakers that you liked their talks

Pro tip: Every other slide (ish) is a joke referencing / setting up the next slide. Gives you a beat to change gears, keeps the audience really engaged, and lightens the mood. Also ensures you’re breaking things up into bite-sized pieces.

I gave a talk with a section on curried functions and interspersed the content slides with pictures of Tim Curry, for example.

RangerScienceon Psychoactive substances helped spur Andean civilization

Anecdotally / personally experienced; bad trips happen “when you get stuck”. The #1 thing to do in such a situation is to change the music. The #2 thing to do is, quite literally, go to the bathroom and take a shit.

It’s extremely analogous to anything that would make a normal day into a bad day.

RangerScienceon The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code

What comes to mind is how the cure for scurvy was simply… forgotten, causing it to come back.

RangerScienceon “Collaboration” is bullshit

> but don't look "reproducible" or "repeatable".

IMO, "ish". You can reliably and repeatedly produce good teams _if_ you reliably and repeatedly invest in your people.

IMO, what's really happening is that small, effective teams aren't _fungible_ - you can't just swap people around without breaking the magic in a team, and you can't just move a team around an organization without similarly breaking the magic (although the latter _is_ way more possible).

IMO, it's sort of an organizational version of "context switching". It takes time for a team to get up to gel and get up to speed. If you're swapping out team members, you break that cohesion. If you move around teams, you (somewhat) reset that "getting ramped up" process.

RangerScienceon DOGE Bro's Grant Review Process Was Literally Just Asking ChatGPT 'Is This DEI?'

I remember (the one time I snuck into NIPS) a buuunch of papers on "fairness", and it was basically: "We have decided that this input should not affect the outcome. Does it? If so, how?"

So that seems like a pretty good actual "what's DEI?" - Does race/gender/sexuality/etc affect some outcome? Should it? If it does affect it and shouldn't, what we can we do about it?

That said... yeah, not gonna get a room full of anyone to agree on that. Starting with that "should".

RangerScienceon Netflix to Acquire Warner Bros

Mostly agree, but I’d advocate for a carve-out for DropoutTV; maybe; exempt if (1) only hosting your own content and (2) that content can be licensed by other services?

RangerScienceon Wacky Fun Physics Ideas

I don’t know how much of this paper I can understand but

I find it pretty interesting that, AFAICT, the dominant engineering paradigm of an era is also the dominant “this is what reality is” metaphor: cathedrals and architecture and the spheres; steam and clockwork and mechanical; now - computation and information!

RangerScienceon Breakthrough in antimatter production

It’s more than twice(1) as easy to make a rocket-propelled bullet than a rocket-propelled vehicle!

1) It’d be exactly twice as easy but for Tsiolkovsky!

RangerScienceon My stages of learning to be a socially normal person

Consider that context heavily impacts how you show up, and in a therapy context, you’re likely to be a lot more relaxed.

So I’d bet it’s not that you’re masking that terror when you’re with your therapist, but that it isn’t present.

RangerScienceon My stages of learning to be a socially normal person

I think this means you didn’t read the piece, as it addresses this concern of yours in perhaps the simplest way possible: it’s about why each prior modality has issues.

RangerScienceon Work after work: Notes from an unemployed new grad watching the job market break

Yes, survivorship bias is probably happening here; but I’m not doing anything like “sorting by paid”. Each of these authors I discovered “organically”; generally through Reddit or Royal Road, any many I’ve been following (on Patreon!) since before they started making $$.

From what I can tell on RR+P; if you write a decent story regularly (or a tremendous story occasionally) you can make some money. If you then also strike a nerve with the audience, you can make a lot.

RangerScienceon Project Fucking Sucks

Maybe it’s a semantics thing (if we have different definitions for “gate keeping”)… but, I’ll fight you on that hill:

Gate keeping is one of the primary means by which a community defines itself; it both requires that the community have some idea of “us/not us”, either deliberately and explicitly, or incidentally; and it is a primary means of implementing that identity.

It can also be a means for induction; the “gate” is one of the best places to introduce someone to the cultural norms, etc, of the community they’re entering. Related, it can also be a way to catch people who’ll have a bad time in that community, even if they’d otherwise be welcomed.

It can be done well and it can be done poorly.

Positive examples that come to mind:

- New Zealand has aggressive biological border control

- Costume parties that turn you away at the door if you’re not in costume

- Men’s and women’s circles - Everyone on the boat has to know how to sail

- Everyone on the ski trip has to WANT to be in winter weather

RangerScienceon Work after work: Notes from an unemployed new grad watching the job market break

looks at Patreon

Depends what you’re writing about. The chicken xianxia is something like $10k/mo, a Friren-inspired fic is a whopping 30k (and like 3mo old from a complete unknown), and Dungeon Crawler Carl has fully broken out into mainstream.

“Fun” things do seem to be making money, and if they hit a nerve they seem to be wildly successful.

RangerScienceon MAML – A new configuration language

Am I missing something or is this literally just Ruby? Like - it doesn’t list Ruby as a supported language, but, it also looks like fully executable Ruby code?

(To be fair, I’m in favor of that)

Edit: Oh, no commas.

RangerScienceon What is “good taste” in software engineering?

It works better if you “split the axis”; (imo) good code is easy to modify, bad code is hard to understand. Everything else is, as you say, trade offs, and so only evaluatable within a specific context.

RangerScienceon My Deus Ex lipsyncing fix mod

"At last, we at Unicorn Startup, Inc have built the Torment Nexus from the famous sci-fi story Don't Build The Torment Nexus"

RangerScienceon My Deus Ex lipsyncing fix mod

IMO - There's a few games that match it, but nothing "in the same category". Braid, Portal, Stanley Parable come to mind. (Also what I hear about Baldur's Gate 3, but I haven't played.)

But the depth of character, discussions on morality - I still reference the MJ12/Illuminati portrayal from Deus Ex as a discussion on leadership and morality - the depth of gameplay, the way it created a feel of a much bigger, open world.

RangerScienceon In Maine, prisoners are thriving in remote jobs

Do you know if anyone has ever sued to either not pay taxes while not allowed to vote, or to be allowed to vote? Ye olde "no taxation without representation"?

RangerScienceon This map is not upside down

Huh. I wonder if part of this is that, when you make a globe, you’ll pretty much always look “down” on it. And as another poster said, most of the land (and thus peoples and nations) are in the north. So it makes sense it’d end up on top?

RangerScienceon How to motivate yourself to do a thing you don't want to do

What’d you do after that?

RangerScienceon Do things that don't scale, and then don't scale

Eh. While that might be true in the course of say, governance - where IMO it’s important and worthwhile to use scientific methodology (statistics, etc) to establish “importance” -

…your family around the notional holiday dinner table? The personal is what’s important, kinda by definition. The point is the subjective and emotional.

RangerScienceon Do things that don't scale, and then don't scale

AFAIK, you cut off shitty relatives…

…and you usually find out they’re shitty because of how they handle (or don’t) “political” conversations.

Pro tip: You don’t get to decide for someone else what’s “just” politics. If someone else says it’s important, while you’re interacting with them, it’s important.

RangerScienceon How to rig elections [video]

Because notionally, the “game” isn’t supposed to be winners-take-all. And democrats believe in the game even when they’re not winning.

RangerScienceon We shouldn't have needed lockfiles

No, no, a thousand times no.

The package file (whatever your system) is communication to other humans about what you know about the versions you need.

The lockfile is the communication to other computers about the versions you are using.

What you shouldn't have needed is fully defined versions in your package files (but you do need it, in case some package or another doesn't do a good enough job following semver)

So, this:

  package1: latest

  # We're stuck on an old version b/c of X, Y, Z
  package2: ~1.2

(Related: npm/yarn should use a JSON variant (or YAML, regular or simplified) that allows for comments for precisely this reason)

RangerScienceon The untold impact of cancellation

Haha. No. I spent hours before hand talking with involved other people, and then I spent hours talking with these people, and then hours more processing the conversations (on my own and with advisors).

It’s just that in the end, it turned out that the things that decided it one way or the other had come up pretty early in the conversations with the accused.

RangerScienceon The untold impact of cancellation

I've seen four "in person", one very public (just purely IRL public).

I didn't see anyone (with one exception) pick sides immediately; although most people's "picked" side was "not involved". (The one exception was a community organizer who definitely has Been Through This Before).

For three of those, I did my own homework - a lot of asking around, and then a lot of conversations with both people. In the end, most of that didn't matter: the accused ended up damning themselves (or not!) pretty immediately when I talked to them about it.

RangerScienceon The untold impact of cancellation

> It's clear as mud.

NGL, love this phrase for this situation; I'm reading it as: "utterly opaque but also clearly what it is (mud)"

RangerScienceon The untold impact of cancellation

It's worth noting, when looking at these kinds of situations, that we do not have effective systems of addressing intimate / domestic crimes and accusations.

Near as I figure, it comes down to this: Our legal tradition was developed to mediate and resolve conflicts between groups; not within them, which is where this kind of thing happens.

RangerScienceon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (August 2025)

This looks interesting! Is there a way to reach out more directly? (It’s my understanding that regular submission systems as getting pummeled by bots..)