Really love that you used Kunth's "Literate programming" to document the code. You don't see it often but I find it really nice when seeing it.
2,024 karma · joined February 11, 2014
A copyleft project with no CLA, levels the playing field so that everyone has the same rights. Eg.: Linux kernel
Google Glass and its users were mocked and it was a complete failure.
The iPad was mocked and ended up as an underperforming division, yet still the market leader because everyone else dropped the ball really badly.
AirPods were mocked but they are a wild success helped of course by the removal of the 3.5 jack.
It was a conscious decision by corporations to implement the dropping of constraints and search terms when too few results would have been returned. Today the search operators are a joke.
We do know that many people even in professional fields confuse correlation with causation. And even when that doesn't happen, when only doing measurments, correlation is often considered good enough without giving any thought to the underlying mechanism. This may be the root of Goodhart's law stating that when a measure becomes a target it stops being a good measure. The measure was only correlated with the behaviour the person doing the measuring thought was measuring.
Superstition is similar, but drops any shred of statistical rigour, relying on mere anecdotal evidence.
Do provide a concrete example so I can unpack it.
At the same time, malware still manages to sneak into the Apple app store.
The walled garden gives a false feeling of security while at the same time placing in bondage all those even vaguely connected to the platform.
Being part of a large but parasitized (ill) group is more fit in the evolutionary sense than being healthy but alone.
I do realize HN trends are unreliable. As a few others who replied, it felt peculiarly acute in this thread, but my impression was not based merely on this thread, but on several such 'huh' moments in the past two years. While HN always felt somewhat heterogeneous and still does, compared to 7-10 years ago, to me it feels that there is relatively more science contrarianism or even denialism with regards to climate, vaccination, etc., more subthreads derailing into religion because someone justified some strongly held position upthread using religion and more socially/culturally conservative attitudes. These are things which for lack of a better term I labeled a rightward trend in the USA sense of the word. In my unreliable memory, I remember HN being mainly economically right leaning and culturally left leaning which mirrors the corporate environment which found it much easier and cheaper to gain good will points that way. In retrospect, the pandemic feels kinda like an inflexion point (both HN wide and society wide).
I also have a limited POV into HN, for example I never really looked at the Launch HN threads (for the simple reason that most focus on the USA, at least in early stages, while I am in eastern EU) so I never really got those data points. With no real data and just remembered personal anecdotes is is hard for me to tell if this was merely an illusion or things haven't changed but I have become more aware of these aspects or whether the trend is real. Others in this subthread have proposed explanations for the trend and I think several theories can be found both society wide and HN wide. But while we do have some evidence the trend is real society wide, I thought it worth checking if the it is true HN wide before hypothesising explanations. Also, (compared to FB for example which we know captured a certain cohort and is aging along with it) with HN allowing easy account creation and throwaway accounts I think it is hard to accurately measure how well the HN sample reflects the population of society at large (we do at least know there is a heavy US-centric bias for obvious reasons).
I wish there was a reliable political alignment text classifier I could use to science this.
I am disappointed to see some have interpreted this inquiry on my part as me trying to police the thread.
Maybe not through crypto but otherwise perfectly achievable. No reason to achieve this within a file. If you really want to, some fancy solution involving blockchains and smart contracts is probably possible but there is no need.
Require by law all who desire copyright protection to register the work with a governmental agency and place a copy of the work in escrow at an archive as a condition. The archive knows when the copyright expires and starts serving the work to the public from that point forward. This is what to do if a state cares about public domain.
The status quo of corporations abandoning works to bit rot, actual rot, misplacement or fires for decades is strictly worse.
We do not need the monsters to make progress. Don't try to justify their inexcusable actions in some myopic utilitarian way.
It was easy when everything noteworthy was on Netflix. You payed for Netflix and got easy access directly on your TV to most trending content. This was more convenient than piracy.
Now the landscape is balkanaized and no one subscribes to all streaming platforms. You can never predict if something of interest will be present on the platform you subscribe to. Do you then subscribe to another service? Now you have to remember to unsubscribe. Do you rotate services and binge watch? Now you are not up to date and risk hearing/reading spoilers. This is less convenient than piracy.