boffinism

I'm not super happy about using 'writing' to mean 'publishing articles online with the goal of maximizing your subscriber count'.

The Ocho.

For an article about book promotion and tone of voice, the tone of voice sure did put me off buying the book.

The subtext is: it wasn't a successful business, so the only option for survival was to try to find a buyer/investor to fund it on the promise of future success

Yup, if someone is saying your site is hard to read, listen. If someone facetiously dismisses a post because they claim that the parent website is intentionally designed to ruin, as in actively degrade, their eyesight, that's a different story.

No, but my original comment wasn't about accessibility (of which I'm a proponent, by the way), it was about whether the specific sentence "It almost seems like this was intentionally created to ruin eyesight" was unhelpful hyperbole.

Do you believe that things that you find fatiguing to read are also going to 'ruin' your eyesight if you try? Is there any evidence for this?

I wasn't aware that different bits of text in different shades of grey would 'ruin eyesight'. Can you provide a citation, or are you simply expressing "I don't like how this website looks" using hyperbole? Or are you using a hyperbolic way of expressing "I find it difficult to read this website"?

To save you a click, the 'it' in the title is 'metaprogramming'.

The thesis of the article is that, especially in Ruby world, we use the term 'magic' too much, when it's really a derogatory term that applies to cases where it's particularly hard to intuit _how_ a particular piece of code works.

As a subscriber you wouldn't see the ads, though.

The post doesn't miss that. The post is about that.

If I may: Facebook's user numbers have actually started falling [0], so your third sentence is incorrect. Your first two sentences make a decent point, though.

[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-60238565

Using the existence of shades of grey to deny the existence of black and white is equally childish in my opinion...

"just"

I wish they'd talked about running costs as well as the price of parts in the 'costs' section. It's the electricity bill that puts me off. Unless it can be... solar powered?

I think the critique and the passage go hand in hand: if Samsung repaired the break for free, they would be the ones bearing the risk of the new technology. Because they didn't, they're making the customer bear the risk.

That the phone might break is inherent in the fact that it's a new technology. The question is who pays for it when it does, the customer or the manufacturer.

Am I the only one who would have preferred this idea to be expressed as an idea rather than an anecdote that features the author changing the life of a grateful acolyte with their incredible wisdom?

(Context: Am dad. Love kids. Find parenting super tough. No regrets.)

How's this for a rule of thumb: if you can be happy without having kids, don't have kids. They're very hard work, expensive, and often bad for your mental health. But, if like a lot of people you know you will always be sad if you don't have kids, have as few as you need to scratch the itch.

Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/947/

> How do you nudge yourself in that direction on a perpetual basis, as opposed to visiting it by stunning your mind into submission and silence? > >Subscribe to Naval

Not sure if this was deliberate, but I'd love to know the conversion rate of this CTA.

Article as it originally appeared: https://archive.fo/6taZ8

Discussion of article's flaws here: https://twitter.com/jimwaterson/status/1491361991541538817

This feels like it could be resolved by technology.

I am happy to identify myself to government entity A to prove my age, but I don't want A to know what sites I visit.

I want to visit site B, but I don't want to identify myself.

Is there no API that will allow B to verify my age via A, without A finding out what site B is, and without B finding out anything more than my age bracket?

The problem with articles like this is that they take one good clear simple point, "the existence of experts using heuristics causes predictable over-updates towards those heuristics", and pad it out with so many examples and allegories that, understandably, what the reader wants to talk about is the validity and accuracy of the examples. These, of course, aren't the point of the piece, but the point of the piece is so slight that it hardly bears discussing. Of course everyone looks to the actual content.

I thought HN randomly pushed new submissions to the front page for random users, and measures how many votes they get before deciding whether to put them onto the home page for more people. There was a post about the mechanism recently. (It's why getting friends to upvote your new submissions doesn't front-page them, as those votes are ignored).

She made her comments in an article specifically about what it's like to be a Classics 'Don'.

Counterpoint: Classicists are not linguists and they're not supposed to be. There's no shame in a Classicist admitting they find Latin fluency hard, because it's a very secondary skill. There are some people who have that skill in abundance... so what?

That's like complaining that so-called 'No Code' web platforms are actually using code behind the scenes!

In the article she specifically talks about how blockchains are a godsend for data harvesters. I think it's disingenuous to pick out one of her criticisms, ignore the rest and say "that criticism by itself isn't as bad as the alternative".

I found great jobs by only working at seed and pre-seed startups (you have to be experienced/able enough to market yourself as a CTO). At this stage, there is no drudge, there's just adventures. Mostly failed adventures, but if you can get over that it's great!

The point is that one beer to many turns a would-be stalker weirdo into a stalker weirdo if they already have the kit to hand.