coastflow

Good candidates for relevant terms may include "stream of consciousness" as a narrative style [0], with a writing tone that is "highly informal" and "colloquial" with "vulgarity" (from the inclusion of "fuck" and other profane words) throughout [1].

The author additionally uses the writing technique of "enallage", defined as a "slight deliberate grammatical mistake that makes a sentence stand out," [2] from the article excerpt: "in other words, we need to use termios. the ugly side of termios."

In other words: the author writes in a highly informal, colloquial tone with a stream of consciousness narrative style. The article is notable for its vulgarity and usage of enallage to achieve its exceptionally high degree of informality. The author is reminiscent of James Joyce as an experienced C programmer.

[0] https://liberalarts.oregonstate.edu/wlf/what-stream-consciou...

[1] https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/29720/whats-the-...

[2] https://www.thoughtco.com/what-is-enallage-1690647

Thanks for the responsiveness, and linking to sources for your remaining facts that are the main arguments of your article.

The article (which as published today) has a factual error. The author wrote: “New York passed a law decriminalizing marijuana but never got around to issuing licenses or a legal framework to retailers.”

But New York State legalized cannabis in 2021, instead of just decriminalizing it. From The New York Times, published in March 2021 [0]: “After years of stalled attempts, New York State has legalized the use of recreational marijuana, enacting a robust program that will reinvest millions of dollars of tax revenues from cannabis in minority communities ravaged by the decades-long war on drugs.

“Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo signed the cannabis legislation on Wednesday, a day after the State Legislature passed the bill following hours of debate among lawmakers in Albany.”

This may seem like a minor nitpick, but the factual error invites scrutiny over the accuracy of the rest of the article. The author does link sources to the other claims in the article, but I’m now by default skeptical to believe the other assertions in the article until I can evaluate whether their linked sources are legitimate.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/09/nyregion/marijuana-seller...

Mexico is part of North America, and Mexico was included as part of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) when it was active (reference: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/n/nafta.asp).

>” Even Americans get kind of brainwashed that their local culture is inferior and everything is better in New York (and California) because that's where so much of our popular media originates and is set.”

For additional evidence, the setting of most of “Breaking Bad” (now continuing as “Better Call Saul”) in Albuquerque, New Mexico led to meaningful economic benefits for people living there, such as increased tourism (from https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/la-xpm-2013-a...).

Note that the article focuses on the ability to find work in the creative and media industry, versus the technology industry.

In addition, though it captures a feeling that many Canadians have, I wish it were backed by statistics and data to support the assertion in the headline.

I also thought that the following passage was not strongly supported:

>”WHEN I GOT BACK to Toronto, I understood in a new, tactile way that I might one day leave it. Toronto’s energy flows endlessly toward the impulse to win, to never stop working until you hit your head on the visible ceiling. Then you work some more. New York has that vibe too, maybe even more so, but I feel like everyone’s more self-aware about it. And, more importantly, there’s no ceiling. You can try to dominate the world and touch the clouds, as foolish as it would be.”

I believe the “impulse to win” is more of a function of who you associate with and your own attitudes, versus the city you happen to be located in.

There is a grain of truth (people who move to New York City are often self-selected to be ambitious), but it wasn’t convincing to assert that the people of Toronto are chasing promotions as part of a corporate ladder until they hit a ceiling.

Counter-examples are abound in Toronto. Some people start their own companies, others find enjoyment outside of work (e.g. family and friends), and others are comfortable with their position in life (e.g. small business owner of a bakery).

People in Toronto also come from vastly different cultural backgrounds as the city is one of the most culturally diverse (over half as part of an ethnic minority as of 2016) in the world [0], so it is a leap to assert that everyone shares similar beliefs about work just because they live in the city.

The author’s assertion is an example of the “false-consensus effect,” where people mistakenly believe that others in a particular context must share their beliefs [1]. This is why studies with statistical analyses are important.

>”But, in practice, that inevitability now felt freeing. I guess I got tired of repressing my sense of possibility.”

You don’t need to move to New York City to feel a sense of possibility and work toward your goals.

[0] (PDF): https://www.toronto.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/99b4-TOHea...

[1] https://www.nngroup.com/articles/false-consensus/

The iPad mini might be Apple's response to mostly fill the gap. The device can run phone apps without having the features of calling/texting.

The tablet also has more educational value as it supports handwriting and drawing, though it comes at the cost of not being pocket-size (adding inconvenience for users who just want to listen to music).

>to make a screen display some text and pictures. But it's fancy text. It requires codes.

This rhetoric vastly understates why businesses hire developers: there is far more than displaying text and pictures. Consider Hacker News. The system involves user account creation, security, and the ability to reset passwords. There is a voting system and an input system to record comments.

You need to run backups and set up auto-moderation features. There is spam detection. There is the need for performance and fast loading speeds. The software needs to be maintained over time. The website must be responsive, and adapt to different display sizes (e.g. laptop display versus smartphone). The website should run across different browsers (Chrome, Firefox, and Safari) and on various devices. The website should follow accessibility standards.

There are strong reasons to believe that there are other causes than "mass psychosis" for competently-led organizations to want to hire web developers.

Food trucks can plausibly provide healthier options for food than in convenience stores, which often only sell junk food, according to a research paper that is a literature review [0]. This is especially true for low-income areas where there are fewer supermarkets (which sell fruits and vegetables) as due to the "risk of crime and theft, and [lack of] land for parking." However, the author writes that this hypothesis is not yet conclusive due to a lack of published studies.

Anecdotally, on university campuses, food trucks were the main option for food due to a lack of supermarkets and restaurants nearby. An app specialized for food trucks could also fix the problem where the availability and opening hours of food trucks are less known, especially for certain trucks that occasionally switch locations, are absent on certain days, or change their hours (making them hard to track via an entry on Google Maps).

In short, food trucks could plausibly be seen as a step up for finding fresh food instead of defaulting to a convenience store that may typically just serve junk food, in areas where there are no restaurants or supermarkets.

[0] Journal of Public Health Policy, 2021: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7874560/

There are additional steps. You need to take a spoon (extra tool), scoop out the loose leaf tea from the container, make sure not to spill it, and then pour it into the strainer.

After steeping, you need to dump the used leaves (assuming you aren't planning to re-steep) with more potential for spillage than when disposing a tea bag, then take the strainer to the sink, add a tiny drop of dish soap, rinse the strainer, and find a place to dry it (e.g. over an empty jar).

It's not difficult, and the extra steps are personally worth it as loose leaf tea generally tastes better. However, for people who aren't concerned about the taste difference, it's nice to have one less task (where spillage is a concern) to pay attention to.

Out of curiosity, I found a sample kindergarten curriculum for the province of Ontario in Canada. [0]

Children as young as four in the province are evaluated by educators on (pages 306–308): the development of the ability to interpret and respond to basic communication, demonstrate independence and "self-motivation" in learning, giving and accepting constructive criticism, developing problem solving skills ("e.g. trial and error, checking and guessing, cross-checking), personal hygiene, self-control of emotions, assertiveness when feeling safe or uncomfortable, and other skills. Indicators that educators look for include phrases from children such as "I'm really frustrated" (page 161) as a demonstration as an awareness and ability to label emotions; "I put my vehicle on the shelf so it would be safe" (page 167) as evidence of problem-solving ability; and persistence in difficult games (e.g. card games and outdoor children's games).

I was also curious whether education in kindergarten could actually have a causal effect on improving long-term outcomes. I couldn't find an immediate conclusion on whether or not interventions are effective, but in at least one paper, it's treated as established knowledge that interventions work. From a quick search, a longitudinal study published in a paper called "Task-Oriented Kindergarten Behavior Pays Off in Later Childhood" [1] with 2837 participants showed a correlation between self-regulation skills in kindergarten and long-term outcomes. The researchers wrote that "early screening by teachers [in kindergarten] introduces the possibility of preventing future learning and behavioral difficulties." They also asserted that "classroom engagement is malleable and amenable to interventions."

While causality was not clearly established in this paper alone, it looks like a reasonable prediction from the correlation that improving classroom engagement as early as in kindergarten could plausibly lead to better life outcomes in years later in life.

TL;DR: While kindergarten in Ontario in recent years may have different expectations than the commenter's time in kindergarten, it appears that educators do evaluate young children on general life skills (e.g. self-control and ability to be aware and label emotions) as a screening tool, and also potentially for interventions to improve engagement in the classroom (which could plausibly lead to better outcomes in years later in life).

[0] PDF, 2016: https://files.ontario.ca/books/edu_the_kindergarten_program_...

[1] 2013: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23369956/

The longevity of his employment is likely a result of the company's willingness to promote him instead of hiring externally, despite his start at the entry level. This is not likely to happen anymore, at least nowadays.

From the article: "After getting his first position as a shipping assistant, Walter showed outstanding skills and willingness to learn, always doing more than expected. [...] Shortly after, he was promoted to a position in sales. Then, he became a successful Sales Manager."

I once spoke with a professional baker who started off as a machine operator for a bakery in his late teens, then earned promotion to become a production supervisor and then distribution manager. He then moved companies to become a plant manager, and later an operations director involved in baking formulation, until becoming an account manager (sales) for large baking firms.

The commonality between these stories is that loyalty and hard work at a job has historically enabled people to earn a good quality of life. Nowadays, it intuitively seems like internal promotions from the very entry level are harder to come by, as many firms prefer to hire people with degrees for management or hire externally.

Instead of promoting internally like in the past, I read and heard from managers they prefer to recruit externally for management positions. They perceive that internal candidates lack "leadership qualities" from past interactions with them, and/or perceive that they produce more value in their current positions. When asked how they account for these people changing jobs for promotions to lead elsewhere, the response was that they would say they understood the former employees' positions and would wish them well (without openly reconsidering whether they were under-weighing the value of internal promotion).

This video presents a version where the piece is sped up to 36 seconds in length: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5-Yo328Rp4

The standard way to solve this nowadays is to report error measurements, which introductory university physics textbooks teach.

>"(And yet once told of that scientist who added 1 metre to his measurement of a mountain, because he feared that the too round number resulting from the computation could have been confused with a rough measurement.)"

The best way to report the precision is with an error measurement (e.g. ±2 feet). This isn't an academic source, but a news article supports this:

From LiveScience [0]:

"Legend has it that when the team took the average of all of those measurements, they found the mountain was exactly 29,000 feet (8,839 m) tall, Molnar said.

"They didn't expect anybody to believe it, so the story is they added 2 feet [0.6 m], just to make it look more believable," Molnar said.

[...]

"Despite sophisticated gravimeters, complicated equations and fancy tools like global positioning systems, the elevation of Mount Everest is only precise to within a foot or two.

"All of our elevations have an error," Molnar said."

[0] https://www.livescience.com/50691-how-to-measure-mount-evere...

This wouldn't really be the same, but use a habit tracking app based on streaks (aka not breaking the chain) to make consistent progress on two learning projects on my own time (mathematics and programming).

The goal is small for each (just one module of a textbook per day for mathematics, and a third to half of a chapter of a programming book per day), but it's doable in spare time, and I keep reminding myself that I can only make progress on these projects if I at least hit that goal each day.

To build intuition on scaling, the 1997 "Powers of Ten" video is an excellent resource that is still shown in introductory university physics lectures: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0

Intuitively, it might be because the mouse predates the touchpad, and most mice only have vertical scroll wheels (so it conditions users to avoid discovering horizontal scrolling as an option, unless you click and drag a horizontal scroll bar).

Currently, it's also rare for webpages to feature horizontal scrolling, so by habit most users scroll vertically to access new information.

Discovery is also another reason mentioned by users elsewhere in these comments. Since horizontal scrolling is a rare behaviour, a clear signifier [0] is needed to quickly communicate that horizontal scrolling is a possibility, which is an extra problem that other potential methods don't have.

[0] https://sites.google.com/site/thedesignofeverydaythings/home...

For easier access for discussion, the full paragraph is: "Danny Sullivan, Google’s “public liaison for search,” told me that people using Google to find Reddit threads is actually evidence that search is working the way it should. Users on the whole have become passive, relying on Google to anticipate their desires. If they wanted, they could refine their queries, limiting results by, say, price point (“toaster $40 . . . $100”) or by listing certain terms to exclude (“ ‘toaster’ NOT ‘oven’ ”). As machine-learning algorithms have grown more pervasive, we’ve lost some of the fluency with search that older Internet adopters may have learned in a high-school Boolean tutorial. “There’s a shift now where, if you don’t find what you’re looking for, you blame the search engine,” Sullivan said. At the same time, he admitted that many users have a desire for “more noncommercial information, more community-based information.”"

Maybe it's just me, but I thought the middle section of the paragraph wasn't relevant to the first sentence. I speculate, with charitable interpretations, that the order of events was:

1) The reporter asked Sullivan whether the frequent use of "Reddit" in search terms indicated a problem.

2) Sullivan asserted that Google is useful for searching for results restricted to a domain, then shifted to say that Google still gives relevant results if you use Boolean search terms.

3) Potentially after a follow-up question, Sullivan conceded that much of the results that Google returns is commercial instead of community-made.

From a writing perspective, I found it unclear whether the middle section that starts with "Users on the whole have become passive, relying on Google to anticipate their desires" was analysis by the author or part of Sullivan's response. I interpreted the sentences as part of Sullivan's response from the context, though it would have been clearer if the writing more explicitly indicated whether this was part of Sullivan's reported speech.

It was pleasantly surprising to see the article cite Hacker News as a source ("“Google is dead. Long live Google + ‘site:reddit.com’ ”—became the No. 10 most upvoted link ever on the tech-industry discussion board Hacker News."), which likely inspired the pitch to write the article.

The article still adds value as the reporter got a Google spokesperson to comment, and also brings the issue to a much wider audience outside of Hacker News.

This is interesting. From Wikipedia on "Just Mayo" [0]:

"On October 31, 2014, Unilever (parent company of competing brand Hellmann's/Best Foods) filed a lawsuit against Hampton Creek for false advertising, arguing that Just Mayo cannot be marketed as mayonnaise because it does not meet the definition of the product specified by the Food and Drug Administration.[citation needed] The FDA requires that "mayonnaise" contain 65% vegetable oil and at least one egg yolk-containing ingredient; Just Mayo contains ingredients such as pea protein, beta-carotene, and modified food starch, none of which are used in mayonnaise according to FDA standards.[19] Unilever also noted the use of egg-oriented imagery in its promotional materials, and stated that its false claims were "part of a larger campaign and pattern of unfair competition by Hampton Creek to falsely promote Just Mayo spread as tasting better than, and being superior to, Best Foods and Hellmann's mayonnaise." Hampton Creek CEO Josh Tetrick denied any wrongdoing, believing that Unilever's lawsuit was meant to solely hinder competition.[13][20]

"On December 18, 2014, Unilever dropped the lawsuit so Hampton Creek could work with "industry groups and appropriate regulatory authorities" on resolving its labelling, while also complimenting the company for its "commitment to innovation and its inspired corporate purpose."[21] In August 2015, the FDA sent Hampton Creek a formal warning that Just Mayo's labeling was misleading due to the product not meeting the standards for "mayonnaise", and because of wording on the packaging and promotional materials that contained an "implied health claim that these products can reduce the risk of heart disease due to the absence of cholesterol," which cannot be included as it contains too much fat to be promoted with such statements.[19]

"In December 2015, Hampton Creek announced that it had agreed to revise its packaging for Just Mayo in order to comply with the FDA's recommendations. The new label contains more prominent statements surrounding the nature of the product, and contains an explanation that the word "Just" in the product's name is defined as being "guided by reason, justice, and fairness."[22][23]"

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_Mayo

> Don’t slow the reader down. Avoid footnotes because they break the flow of thoughts and send your eyes darting back and forth while your hands are turning pages or clicking on links.

This sounds reasonable for technical writing, though it's interesting to read McCarthy's recommendation after considering David Foster Wallace's work, where there is a very frequent usage of footnotes.

In his non-fictional essays essays—often in the role of a reporter like in his well-known "Consider the Lobster" for Gourmet magazine [0]—Wallace uses extensive footnotes. This isn't technical writing, though the quality of Wallace's convinced me that footnotes can have a useful place in fictional writing.

> And don’t worry too much about readers who want to find a way to argue about every tangential point and list all possible qualifications for every statement. Just enjoy writing.

From Hacker News discussions (and also speaking to a colleague who competed at a high level on a debate team in high school), I learned the opposite lesson. If there is a weakness in an argument, it's likely it will be pointed out. I've found it important to consider weaknesses in logic and try to anticipate counter-arguments whenever possible, when writing for readers from more technical problems.

[0] [PDF] http://www.columbia.edu/~col8/lobsterarticle.pdf

This wouldn't be the case, as it is normal website behaviour. Users can't downvote posts (only comments) [0], and self posts on Hacker News are light grey by default [1].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17735526

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=468180

The original source, published by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) that includes an interview with a kidnapped worker (and a copy of a letter requesting contractors to continue work in Mosul), is at: https://www.icij.org/investigations/ericsson-list/iraq-isis-...