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distribot

201 karma · joined October 28, 2020

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distribot··on Ask HN: What caused the Olympics to become so terrible?
But if democracies put together modest bids that their citizens can accept and authoritarians promise to make it spectacular + offer larger bribes, who will win?
distribot··on Ask HN: What caused the Olympics to become so terrible?
I agree that you can learn more facts about place than you can by visiting for a few days, I think this is kind of misleading. I've mostly interacted with the world through the internet and have a decent sense for other cultures, world leaders, political systems, leading exports, types of food, etc but the <20 days I've spent abroad really feel like much richer experiences and were very eye opening. I think globalism and the internet make us think the world is a little smaller than it is.
distribot··on Ask HN: Does targeted advertising work at all?
That's fair but homepathic medicine is dwarfed by regular medicine in the industrialized world. There's no homepathic Pfizer or Bayer. I think if there was another practice that was way better than targeted advertising, targeted advertising might exist as a distant woo-woo second.
distribot··on Ask HN: Does targeted advertising work at all?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Targeted_advertising#:~:text=I...

Markets are imperfect and irrational, but you really don't think that there is a trillion dollar misunderstanding about the efficacy of the practice? Idk jack about advertising but it seems unlikely to me.

distribot··on Facebook loses users for the first time
You think TikTok is facsimile of Facebook?
distribot··on The New York Times buys Wordle
I think it's normal to acquihire for stuff like this. But I'm not confident. Maybe it's just a condition of sale that he spend a week talking to the NYT games team about the design and codebase.
distribot··on The New York Times buys Wordle
It would take months to make static copies of the website and mobile apps? There are youtube videos where a single guy does it in 40 minutes.

The AWS bill and ops are definitely relevant but didn't seem to be in the spirit of the original point about it taking X days to make. I didn't take "make" to include the effort of staffing up customer service people and whatnot. Maybe I should've but I dont think that's even what the person I responded to meant.

distribot··on The New York Times buys Wordle
Is the couple days work thing really relevant? You could have a solid Airbnb clone in a couple months (I'd imagine) and it's worth thousands of times Wordle. I think it has to be customer base, IP, and developer team that they're really paying for.
distribot··on How big was the Tonga eruption?
I know this is days late but I don't understand how you can say the voyage was a failure? They hobbled back home for sure, but they made it!
distribot··on Evolution of the elephant depiction throughout the middle ages
I wish there was context for the pictures. Where they came from, who drew them
distribot··on How big was the Tonga eruption?
Yes, they had incredible techniques. They could detect a remote island by the way the swell is disrupted. Also recently read about Magellan's voyage and it is remarkable that they made it.
distribot··on New York City to require employers to list minimum and maximum salaries
Can't the company be compelled to provide salary data for the role? I assume there is some kind of enforcement mechanism. So then it's a matter of explaining why your lowest paid senior engineer makes 150k, the median makes 200k and you've listed a floor of 10k? The judge/jury don't have to accept a smarmy response about how the hypothetical candidate might conceivably make 10k.

And on the subject of the window, most places have much narrower bands than that for a role. It might be that wide for all engineers, but not for senior engineers for example.

distribot··on Ask HN: Strategies to land fully remote $250k+ job
I can accept that prospect, but the thing I find the be really messed up is how you can be diluted beyond what you agreed to? It's not a percentage of ownership. They can just issue more shares. I don't get that.
distribot··on Ask HN: Strategies to land fully remote $250k+ job
Do you mean meaningful in the bull** jobs way or the moralistic way? I find the moralistic version confusing. I usually hear it applied to CEO pay, which last year was 350x the average worker. But what will ever feel like a fair or just differential? 7x? 3x? And what would be a fair metric? Are dentists less or more than social workers? What about dangerous jobs, are lumberjacks worth more than coal miners?
distribot··on Ask HN: What things has tech made worse in your life?
A person shouldn't be able to have signage above their business to indicate what it is, the phone number, etc? Not billboards, but literally a sign that says "Johnny's Bakery"
distribot··on Why U.S. Infrastructure Costs So Much
I think the mayor of NYC has a strong incentive to get credit for improving their subway system.
distribot··on Why U.S. Infrastructure Costs So Much
But the local governments executing these projects have very fixed budgets. They can't just fire up the money printer.
distribot··on Common Jobs in a Medieval City
Cool website. I miss this kind of internet.
distribot··on Samsung plans $17B chip plant in Taylor, Texas
That would be way more high tech jobs in Austin per capita.
distribot··on Boards are dangerous to founder/CEOs
Anyone know how Zuckerberg avoided the same thing happening to him?

Bezos was a 30 year old with a decade of experience in finance, I assume he was quite savvy. But Zuckerberg was a teen.

distribot··on YouTube is banning anti-vaccine activists and blocking all anti-vaccine content
The US government can't mandate that censorship tact, right? Sounds like a first amendment violation?
distribot··on TikTok has reached 1B MAUs
I don't understand the big risk. They build a profile about the kind of short form videos you interact with. It's pretty limited.
distribot··on Lab-grown meat may never be cost-competitive enough to displace traditional meat
Ruggedness and low maintenance is kind of debatable. A lot of that is just anti-biotic overuse. Which is a big issue.
distribot··on 40M People Rely on the Colorado River. It’s Drying Up Fast
It's crazy to me that in Norway they treat the oil reserves they found in the 60s as a good that is owned by the nation collectively, but we can't even treat water that way. Something that, if mismanaged badly enough, could kill us all in a week.
distribot··on The role of high-skilled foreign labor in startup performance
Not only is this in poor taste, they seem to be fundamentally different. People who apply for H1-B visa and immigrate do so voluntarily.
distribot··on Home Depot is introducing power tools that won’t work if they’re stolen
285 murders in the 15 biggest cities of the Bay Area.
distribot··on Why is China smashing its tech industry?
The printing press also allowed low-quality garbage to be spread with unprecedented effectiveness.

I'm not convinced that previous systems of more centralized distribution of information (television networks and woodblock printing) were better than the ones that succeeded it.

distribot··on Japan pitches 'Society 5.0' to keep its edge in tech and science
Are there any books kinda in this vein?
distribot··on Toyota is quietly pushing Congress to slow the shift to electric vehicles
This phenomenon is probably why systems that protect the status quo produce less innovation. Even though it might behoove them, and they have the resources to, the industry leaders are less inclined (because of inertia?) to resist ground breaking paradigms.

I guess it kind of makes sense for them. It's high risk/high reward and it will take a scrappy new company to try it.

distribot··on Ask HN: Did you quit smoking cannabis? If so, why?
10 year user. After a devastating diagnosis for a parent happened, it started to give me very intense anxiety when I used. It was almost immediately after the bad news and I haven't been able to go back to it even in small doses.
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