abdel_nasser

they will be skilled at something although im not sure it will be anything to do with socializing. and saying that outcasts will just be more likely to blossom because of it is just speculation.

at a certain point in history man began to eat plants and adopt a sedentary agricultural lifestyle. there were many people who were made sick by eating plants and very little meat or fat. very, very sick. there are still echos of it in the population today. was it a positive thing for all the skills of the past to be thrown away and a large chunk of people to be sacrificed because they werent compatible with the new way? sometimes a societal shift eliminates an entire class of people. youre wrong because you try to paint it like its zero sum for all classes of people. in reality, if it is zero sum its only because what we lose in sacrifice we gain in progress. can you believe this has been going on for ten thousand years and still it doesnt really have a name?

it must be said, even if its not what everyone wants to hear, that the fear-mongering corporate news media, who carpet the world in content that is deliberately designed to elicit a primordial brain-stem stress response, have probably contributed to this problem. whether they turn on the tv or they are sitting in the classroom, kids of all ages have it drilled into them that their country is evil and racist, that they are guilty almost implicitly for having white skin, doomed to a life of hardship if they have black skin, and also that the world is coming to rapid apocalypse which is completely the kids and the kids familys fault. i am not making a statement about whether any of that is true; what is undeniably true is that kids are being injected with this stuff 24/7 and its not good for them.

when i was a kid, we stood for the flag and sang the pledge of allegiance. there was a notion in the air of unity, order and strength. when i look back i recognize that this was very good for my mental health. you can have your opinion about the pledge but there is no denying that our children need an environment that is good for their mental health.

exactly. the equation has changed. people who dont fit in are now even more fucked. everyone is obligated to play this high stakes game that nobody asked for and that wasnt filtered through any kind of intelligent societal deliberation. nobody seems to be worried that kids make the rules in public schools, they bully each other viciously and kids who graduate from the system cant point to the country of portugal on a map. its full blown insanity.

this is political dogma. there is a strain of dogma asserting that behavior is 100% nurture. if they accept the idea that breeds of dog have certain traits then they would be forced to reconcile with the hypothetical concept that different races of humans have different inherent behaviors or ways of thinking. people complain about science being under threat but i never see people talk about this particular dogmatic landmine that threatens to destroy any scientist who dares to approach that region of genetics. the fact of the matter is that you can never create a complete and perfect atlas of the human brain or genetics without touching this topic -- as a person who suffers from diseases that are tangential to these areas i would very much appreciate less dogma and more progress...

wow that was really long but i read almost all of it. a lot of it is just going into details that are necessary to condemn him without committing libel, i feel like. the most impressive bit is that he became the CEO of a publicly traded company with totally fake CV and no education and was paid more than a million dollars. and now he works at a gun shop literally across the street from the old bike shop, peddling lies about being in the special forces.

it always astounds me how stupid people are. when i was 14 i had a buddy who was really into cycling and he told me that lance armstrong, a national hero at that point, was a liar and a doper. it seemed insane to me and i just brushed it off. and then a long time after that, it was in the headlines. in retrospect it was completely obvious. there are a lot of things like that. here is something that will seem insane to you but will be in the headlines in a decade or two: saturated animal fat doesnt cause heart disease. it will be fun to think back!

youve completely lost sight of the forest. there are little granules of subjectivity like the ones you nitpick about and there are huge boulders of subjective nonsense that leave you with a giant bump on your head -- the kind that are caused by dogma like race/gender politics, religion, war etc. the absence of these is what is desperately needed. to wave away the boulders because of the granules is idiotic. ive read books that looked at war objectively, excised moral dogma from religion and omitted race/gender crusading entirely and its very good.

i am really interested in history and i have spent a lot of time looking for a good book on a certain topic or time period and sometimes not finding anything. it turns out that its really hard to find books that are completely objective, well researched and also written well. there is a scarcity of these kinds of books especially for modern history. and so the idea struck me that maybe i ought to write a short history book. but then i thought that that sounds like a pipe dream. anyway, for anyone who likes that kind of thing i would recommend the binladen book that was published recently. havent read it yet but i cant wait to. it turns out the invasion wasnt so misguided after all.

https://yalebooks.co.uk/display.asp?K=9780300260632

im building a house and i got a bid from a foundation guy. he wanted 40k for a job that costs 10k in material. and i can easily do it myself. once i finish the house i will be able to offer a full breakdown of just how much you can save by doing it yourself.

this is clearly the result of societal programming. i propose that we eliminate all of these words from the dictionaries. we dont need any of these words anyway.

ever since the neolithic society has had a habit of trying really hard to gaslight people about utter nonsense. and all we got for it was bread and penicillin.

thats funny but i disagree and i dont think you have comprehended my comment. its the stuff directly after you die that counts because the window of post-death activity is probably not more than a day. you are man-handled in all kind of ways immediately after you die in a hospital. cremation takes a very long time at least in my part of the US. ideally i would have people on standby to inject me with powerful drugs and something to pump the blood to ensure any experience i do have is not unpleasant. then taken directly to a facility where my entire body would be instantly vaporized with explosives to make sure there is no suffering.

i feel like most people assume people are dead when we really dont know. there could be flashes of experience after death due to mechanical agitation/disturbance. or maybe something else. and maybe the part of the brain that is needed to produce "experience" is a tiny little section that goes un-noticed when they look for brain death. its not very important so i havent looked into it. but i am afraid that if i die and i appear to die before my brain is inactive then i will have a captive body experience -- unpleasant on its own and very unpleasant if i make it to the autopsy. i dont think they even check for brain death or electrical activity before they start cutting you open. i simply dont understand people who choose to freeze their heads -- its literally the worst idea. i would pay for the opposite service where they take posession of your body and make sure you dont have a captive-body experience and make sure that your brain is destroyed so it can never be resurrected and tortured.

i saw a youtube video where this young woman recounted a near death experience that she had. she was in her car and somehow the car became airborne and was headed straight towards a thick traffic sign pole or something like that. in any case, she saw the pole coming toward her and she knew without any doubt that she was going to die. and she said that she saw flashes of every time she was terrible to someone. and she hadnt realized how terrible she had been in all these instances. and she said she was angry at god in that moment for showing her these terrible things right before she was going to die. i think its fascinating because the body is watching the situation and when the situation is right, the body deploys the mechanism that it thinks is useful. you can look at a picture of a bear and you wont be affected but if your encounter a bear in real life, you wont just go into fight or flight; you will be having a frame of mind and motivations that are unique to that situation because your body is giving those to you. and here, when the body believes with enough certainty that it is going to die, it deploys these memories? maybe the body allows you to see what its been hiding from you for your own sake in a last ditch effort to produce some kind of advantage. the human mind is very mysterious. but my point is that there is some mechanism at the bottom of that. it could show you anything. it could make you experience anything. there is this mythology of having happy experiences on the way to death, walking into the light, etc. but we have no idea what these experiences are other than the fact that they exist. its possible that most people have a terrible, awful experience on the way to death. its something that i think is just underappreciated.

this is horse shit. the overall well-being of children has been declining for decades. now it has reached its precipice and snobby NYT says its because of the virus. its just a way to deflect from the truth which is that we have created a culture that enables kids to be shitty. the inmates have been running the asylum for a decade plus at our public schools. the environment that kids grow up in now is one where nobody is in control of what they experience. i remember when facebook first came out and i saw all my friends invest into it 100%. nobody ever asked, wait a second, isnt this unhealthy? isnt creating a points system for socializing a bit unfair to the less popular kids? isnt it sort of crazy to give facebook all of this information? i did my part and never made an account but nobody else did their part and nobody ever asked whether or not it was a good idea to make facebook a default entity in the lives of our children. something that everyone uses "because" and you cant choose to opt out without serious consequences for you social life which is a huge deal at that age. that was the contribution of the millennials to the the environment for our children. good job! children need an environment that is deliberately and thoughtfully controlled. not micro-managed, but controlled. soon the damage will be so great that even the dumbest people will realize this finally.

i have been an electric vehicle enthusiast and evangelist for more than a decade, well before anyone knew tesla or elon. i know everything about electric cars. i can state with total confidence that the hottest ambient temperature that a tesla might encounter would have precisely zero chance of causing the battery to overheat, let alone overheat to the point of creating thermal runaway.

yeah, exposing a child to nothing more than a corn field is abusive because when they become adults they have no tools to succeed or any context with which to understand and navigate the world. and also it creates a cultural barrier that really makes it hard for them to get along on the coast. you create this stunted human, yeah i think it meets the criteria for abuse if only just and if only in the most modern interpretation of the word abuse. i certainly would never do it to any kid that i had to raise. maybe youre from the midwest and if i have offended you then i apologize but no problem has ever gone away because people ignored it. it must be confronted like all the other societal problems that hurt people needlessly.

there should be an application layer protocol and corresponding browser that only transmits things that do not require a large corporation for the creation and maintenance of the software that is used to display those things. why would i describe it that way instead of some other way? because that is really the core of the issue. we can focus on making the web simpler for the sake of user experience but what really matters is whether a new web would have many smaller organizations maintaining browsers or just one huge company maintaining the browser that 99% of people use. in the former case, browsers are subject to a market and would therefore be faster, safer, better maintained and conform to the preferences of the user, ie open source and no spyware. in the latter case the browser is only good if you are lucky, the well-being of a single company has a disproportionate impact on the ability of people to browse the web and their browser will probably spy on you.

javascript was created because we didnt know how the web would be used. now that the web is part of everyones lives and we know basically how we use it and what role it plays, what reason is there for this giant lumbering mess that is javascript that needs an army of people to interpret and is the source of countless security problems?

i moved to the midwest from the san fran bay area. i could not have imagined it. people from the coast think they know but they dont know. coastal people have absolutely no idea about the midwest. like this guy says, if you tell a coastie some midwestern city or state they just stare blankly. two minutes later they will refer to your city/state again but mix it up with some other cliche midwestern city/state.

the experience of living in this place and sharing a house with natives has been mind bending. i have been to a dozen countries and these people are less like me than any other people i have met. it really makes you see how there are so many things that we take for granted that are really totally invaluable triumphs of cultural curation and accumulation. there are sensibilities that simply dont exist here and you didnt even realize that these things were sensibilities at all or that a person could not have them. there are so many gears and cogs that are essential to a good quality of life and a civilized standard of living that are invisible and whos names arent in the lexicon. to see a place like this is to see those pieces finally, through their absence. i really believe that raising a child in the midwest is form of child abuse.

many of these places are in need of nothing besides more intelligent people. they just suffer from poor planning, a lack of intellectual rigor within public institutions... if a bunch of coastal people would just come back then these midwestern cities would be the best cities in the country without a doubt. but its still a great choice if you just want an affordable place to escape to that has a functional economy/society.

what do you mean by this? child soldiers for VCs? you mean HN/YC kind of defends ruthless VC people because they are naive?

when country A inserts itself into the affairs of country B, especially internal structures like the academic establishment, that is a material threat to country B no matter how you slice it. if enough influence is gained on the part of country A then it becomes an existential threat and so keeping these kinds of things to a minimum is an objectively high priority for any country that wants to preserve itself. There are no two countries that can trust each other completely because the global geo-political landscape is always changing and changing in unpredictable ways. what is absurd is your juvenile understanding of international affairs, history and game theory.

wait, does mariadb randomly lose data? if youre writing a message service, is it bad practice to store each message individually, one row per message? or clump them together?

with respect, this is horse shit. its not an innovation or discovery in cell chemistry. its yet another electrolyte additive that even in the estimation of these lofty articles only stands to slow dendrite growth -- something that does not on the face of it stand to increase energy density. its not something that will move the needle in any way, not now and most likely not ever.

by the way, i was looking at HNs html and everything seems to be made out of tables. tables absolutely everywhere. can anyone tell me why that is?

whatsapp was run out of a single cabinet.

i remember jack on the JRE podcast having a debate with a right-wing journalist. he was put into the position of trying to deny that twitters moderation favors far-left narratives. its emblematic of the role of CEO because i have always imagined that the true challenge of being the CEO of a top company is to be stuck between honesty and the company. jack wanted to say that yes of course the moderation skews left because to do otherwise would threaten the solvency of the company. but to say it out loud would make it all redundant. a thousand people think that if only they ran twitter they would put an end to X. no you wouldnt. and i would guess that jack has gone through more than most of us could imagine.

and i think its a much more dignified job to work at in n out than mcdonalds. their employees are always fresh and eager. it kind of reminds me of costco employees who always seem to be well put together.

how disgusting. it makes me think that vertical integration is great for countries where the losing party of a lawsuit doesnt face any form of disincentive like paying the legal expenses of the winning party. if you are a company that tries to sell a product like this ice-cream mod then you will be sued but its better to have your own burger joint and fill it with your own inventions. they say that the company was brought to brink of insolvency so i think they probably would have been better being a vertically integrated burger joint.

thats so cool to read about the innovations of their machine. text message alerts, ingredient monitoring in the hopper -- there is so much meat on the bone in so many markets.

i sometimes think of what a better mcdonalds would look like. i imagine it would have equipment like this ice-cream machine that is highly automated and designed for very low maintenance. so one area of arbitrage is reducing staff count and burden with the machinery. then another aspect is getting rid of indoor seating. even before the pandemic i always noticed that the drive-through always seemed to get more traffic than the inside. i think you could just get rid of the inside and do a scaled-up version of the parking-lot delivery that mcdonalds has started doing recently. a medium sized parking lot with a large amount of numbered spaces, and some of the area could be used as a buffer for people to wait for open spaces. and a walk-up window for people who dont have a smart phone or are on foot. and this plays into the largest source of employee friction in my opinion. imagine you work at mcdonalds, you are face to face with random strangers all day. not only is it embarrassing to show your face and be recognized as a person who works at mcdonalds, its stressful dealing with people who are rude and sometimes crazy. i think if you could cut out this aspect of working at mcdonalds that it would be a much more attractive job and you would have much higher employee quality and retention which matter a lot. and one way you might do this is to have a very simple robot deliver the food. the active parking spots could all be on the outer edge of the parking lot and wrapping around the edge could be a track with protrusions between each parking space. it would be covered for rain and snow and surrounded by standard railings so that nobody would wander into the track, no cars could intrude into the track and nobody could interfere with the robot easily since it would be quite heavy. the robot would be a large box about the height of a car door window with a large battery and four large wheels and a camera and a radio. the robot would travel between the building and cars, having multiple food orders put on top of its head and then positioned directly in front of the driver window. it would be simple to drive, impossible to drive into a place it wasnt supposed to be, and driven on shifts, perhaps as a break from the more laborious jobs or by other people remotely. and the nice thing is that if the backup robots all failed or there is some problem, the workers could just use the track to deliver orders by hand like dairy queen. a high tech fast food company with delicious food, an app that works, fast and efficient user experience and a massive improvement in employee satisfaction.

if we had just passwords then there would be far fewer people losing their life savings than with the current system.

my bank insisted that i add a phone number to my account when i called them today. i declined and when pressed briefly explained sim swapping and declined again. a glaring and obvious flaw in the integrity of using a phone number for id verification was not even in the lexicon of this establishment that safeguards nothing less than all of my literal fucking money. they then went on to find that i actually did have a phone number on record and that it is authorized for identity verification and also that i have never even heard of this phone number! im still dealing with it.

its amazing to think that not just this but the entire mountain of bullshit could be avoided with simple passwords. it should be an option offered by every service for a user to deactivate all authorization methods besides one very strong password and perhaps a backup password. we should at least have the option.

exactly. there are no large masses in space let alone ones we can anchor things to. the country of canada tried to build a robot arm for space and they ran into this exact problem. seriously, if they would just consult smart people like us then maybe they could have saved themselves the trouble of launching silly robotic arms into literal orbit.

no, i think "welding is hard in space" is much more insightful. it is much better to make a broad and sweeping statement and then discard a bunch of important possibilities.