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kadendogthing

17 karma · joined August 28, 2018

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kadendogthing··on I love you, Hacker News, but you’re toxic
He gave a few examples, but to be honest HN filters for quantity over quality with topic discussion.

It cargo cults academia but isn't actually very academic or novel.

Spread out your thoughts in a PG style manner and make sure it's emotionally sparse and you're good. You can literally say nearly anything here, even to the point of it being disingenuous or hateful and it will stand.

kadendogthing··on YouTube faces creator backlash
>Here's why YouTube can go fuck itself

I stopped reading. YouTube is a completely free platform. It will even pay you to host your content there if it's popular enough. You're free to go else where.

TiKTok does not pay you. Your subscribers are just a number, and you have no evidence that most of them are even real and you offer no evidence in your post that any of it matters.

kadendogthing··on B-threads: programming in a way that allows for easier changes
Anyone who's had to analyze complex systems at a high level will recognize that this is a pattern that often emerges in some form. The over all pattern happens in game engines, plugin systems, UI frameworks, in service buses, all over the place. It's just now at the code level. It's a good observation, though it seems the author has arrived at the correct conclusion/analysis and tried to shoe horn it in to fundamentally lacking systems (i.e., other languages/stacks that are inherently not functional, have side effects, and do not work off "events"/sync points).

My thoughts on this are: append only programming is less effectual than having an over all append only system, where many programs take input (including the original source "message"), then hand off the out put to the next program in line. Which programs get run depends entirely on that run context's configuration. When you have disparate programs working towards a final goal, and these programs are defined in a readable configuration it gives you quite a few benefits. Good clean logging structures, easy to reason about, easy to change (feature toggling, data migration points, etc), and easy to clean up when required.

I call it unix'ing your systems.

There's a lot of comments calling this silly but please attempt to give it a few read overs and apply it to systems you've worked with. Hopefully they've been large enough to draw similarities to what he's talking about in a very clean, academic manner.

kadendogthing··on The Roots of Boeing’s 737 Max Crisis: A Regulator Relaxes Its Oversight
>We’ve been undergoing a 70-year long period of deregulation, and it’s been overwhelmingly positive.

This is such a ridiculously untrue statement.

kadendogthing··on IRS sends warning letters to more than 10k cryptocurrency holders
>Here's one situation where it is very different.

It's not.

kadendogthing··on YouTube was launched as a dating site
> I kind of wonder what parallel universe you come from.

The one where I don't value bespoke development just because it's bespoke?

The universe where I have to actually quantify what's good and what isn't?

The worst kind of comments related to this discussion are always the ones that are insufferably offended that they can't out perform decades of experience and knowledge without doing anything.

>I've never yet see anyone argue that the reason tools took over the writing of HTML is because hand-written HTML wasn't good enough.

Check who you're listening to? It's a fairly common argument.

kadendogthing··on YouTube was launched as a dating site
Yes. I don't know why HN likes to pretend they're exceptions to patterns and processes that came about for a number of reasons.

In this specific case, the hand crafted HTML that I've come across in my lifetime is usually absolute garbage. I can normally see how the developer who wrote it thinks they're being clever or nifty, and dare I say it "clean", but it usually falls short and causes more harm than good.

So imagine we as an industry organically build tools to address this. 10 years later it's pretty good, but like 5 major websites still handcraft things because they have complicated user experiences with a broad user base.

We then get dork heads who see this, believe they're part of the exception, despite not having anything remotely close to the userbase or requirements of these websites, refuse to understand why certain things are the way they are, and think they're above these processes and frameworks despite not having invested any real time or effort into the skills necessary to justify not using these frameworks or fabricated HTML.

And the worst part is it's just HTML. And we still get it wrong.

TL;DR Programmers think they're better than they really are. Use the frameworks.

kadendogthing··on Declined Proposal: A built-in Go error check function, “try”
This reads like script kiddies who became professional programmers and just want things done how they've always been done.

Error handling in go is not concise, and calling it explicit is in insult to anyone with a modicum of abstract reasoning skills. Error handling in go is not explicit, it's verbose. Error handling in go is not concise, it's broad. Error handling in Go is not consistent, it's an exercise left up to diligent programmers.

As golang's code base grows, you're going to see this mistake play out over and over and over again.

Having a Result<T> construct would have been great for go.

kadendogthing··on Amazon workers launch protests on Prime Day
>the compensation should reflect the confluence of supply and demand in the market.

Yeah. There's no way way it's more complicated than this. If there are other effects not reflected on a simple X/Y axis then I don't wanna know about it!

kadendogthing··on Tulsa Teacher discovers calculus flaw
Here's an exercise for the reader:

* Why is this coming from "tulsatoday"

* Why is the article written in a particular manner?

* What biases and agenda is the publication attempting to platform here?

kadendogthing··on How much bandwidth does the spinal cord have?
Here is a rule:

>Please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.

Allow me to point out a few characteristics of this post:

* A submission to reddit

* No actual scientific or academic details supporting his statements. Just some known other quantitive data about the spinal cord. OP even characterizes most of his statements as "gross assumptions"

* This post to HN has been upvoted.

Here is a scientifically reasonable perspective on this subject:

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/7l56sb/how_much...

kadendogthing··on I Used Google Ads for Social Engineering
We don't have direct democracy. We don't usually rely on any form of democracy for a large set of actions we take as a society.

So I truly don't understand your confusion.

kadendogthing··on I Used Google Ads for Social Engineering
No. Not sure why you think you can so bluntly pretend I said things I didn't say.

But again this is HN attempting to discuss civics so I shouldn't be surprised.

kadendogthing··on I Used Google Ads for Social Engineering
>if we assume that most people people are too gullible and dumb to live in a society

Most people don't have the experience to properly discern information that they aren't intimately familiar with. They don't practice it. They don't have jobs requiring it.

You probably can't run a marathon if you've never trained before. Why are we assuming it's any different with information?

>there is no longer any reason to uphold the social contract.

Explain.

kadendogthing··on I Used Google Ads for Social Engineering
>NYtimes seems hellbent on convincing people that any information that is not vetted by other humans of authority (preferably themselves) is a danger to society that must be banned.

I mean it objectively is.

https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR2314.html

Stop assuming rational actors when the evidence is telling you there are none.

>Then again most of us know that the internet is a wild west and thats why we loved it.

You'd have to pretty obtuse to ignore the harm this "wild west" (nice romantic framing) has done to several western countries.

kadendogthing··on The Growing Risk of a 2020 Recession and Crisis
Have you considered the possibility that these are predicted but we don't elect people who will effectively listen to qualified individuals on these matters?

And that the system currently in place rewards those who use these crisis to their advantage?

kadendogthing··on Exploring alternative funding models for the web
>Netflix shows that there's an appetite towards paying for content

Content that was originally created with advertising money (The Office). Whether or not Netflix will last the next 5 years is debatable and unknown.

kadendogthing··on An ‘extraordinarily severe’ emergency: the radioactive leak at Harborview
I think I can't read.
kadendogthing··on An ‘extraordinarily severe’ emergency: the radioactive leak at Harborview
>Accidents like this don’t happen in the West/civilized world

Surely you must be joking? Am I not reading this correctly?

kadendogthing··on Civic honesty around the globe
> although the U.S.'s position is concerning

It's certainly not surprising.

>especially as a bastion of religious freedom

I would not use the word bastion here. Maybe technically it has religious freedom in code, but in practice it tends to be quite poor.

kadendogthing··on Airbnb likely removed 31,000 homes from Canada’s rental market, study finds
>Publish the actual paper or this is just vaporware nonsense.

Even without the data it's not non-sense. It's a pretty rational hypothesis. Being rational definitely doesn't make something right, but it's about as far away from non-sense as you can get.

kadendogthing··on Facebook reveals its cryptocurrency Libra
I largely agree with the OP. I think these technologies can only be viewed in an optimistic way through a techno-libertarian lens; a perspective I don't think has any practical grounding in reality at best and at worst actively ignores why current systems exist (throwing the baby out with the bath water so to speak). And with that lens, I think it's foolish it believe that an engineer will actually be able to steer this machine once it's out in the wild. Systems without power structures still have power structures, they just not may be immediately obvious.

But I do appreciate your constructive attitude towards his comments and I'll be checking your blog a good bit to inform myself as best as I can going forward :). I would ask that you have some kind of "apologetic"/philosophical tag on the type of posts that people like me can filter for so we can read up on that kind of perspective.

I think these systems deserve more social/civic conversation and less technical ones. The tech is cool, but these technologies have the potential to have severe civic ramifications. These technologies are largely out pacing our national and global conversations around how we should use them, their pro's and con's, and the systems they're designed to replace/circumvent... and it's not a good thing.

Thanks for the link!

kadendogthing··on 8chan served with search warrant [pdf]
>That is the beauty of free speech.

There is absolutely nothing beautiful about it and there is negative utility in allowing it to proliferate. It actively causes resource usage and damage that is unnecessary and totally avoidable.

kadendogthing··on The decline of the family has unleashed an epidemic of loneliness
No there isn't.
kadendogthing··on The decline of the family has unleashed an epidemic of loneliness
>The feelings of “you’re a white male and you work in tech and you are wealthy you are a SATAN” is just becoming too much :(.

Yeah this literally doesn't happen.

kadendogthing··on The decline of the family has unleashed an epidemic of loneliness
>I'm thinking specifically about the decline in church attendance.

This is an often repeated point but I don't see how it has any credence. Most people who attend churches may talk with each other for just a few hours -- and personally I've found most churches don't really foster a socially-healthy atmosphere. And that's fine, that's not the goals of churches, never has been and most likely never will be.

Churches if anything have never played a role in a healthy community -- and to this day if we map church attendance to social ills there's a pretty good correlation between the two: steady church attendance in areas tends to correlate with heavy drug problems, domestic abuse, and suicide.

However you want to dice that up, good or bad, it simply means one thing: church attendance and socially healthy communities probably aren't really related, and if they are, it probably doesn't have the effect you think it does given the available evidence.

kadendogthing··on High-flying ladybug swarm shows up on National Weather Service radar
On the other hand, it's NYC. There's standing water everywhere.
kadendogthing··on Los Angeles, the Automobile, and Mexican American Life
How is that racist?
kadendogthing··on Carnival Cruise Lines Hit with $20M Penalty for Environmental Crimes
This is one of those industries where we're just externalizing costs. Cruises as a whole definitely need to be more expensive to reflect the environment costs associated with not just the boats, but the wanton consumption that happens on these trips -- at sea and and at their destinations.
kadendogthing··on Economists Are Obsessed with Job Creation – How About Less Work? (2017)
How in the absolute fuck is this the top comment? There's so many platitudes stuffed side by side it just needs to be flagged.

That is to say: citation needed. For all of it.

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