kenning

the reaction of a pedo or worse lol

In 5 days:

"whoops nevermind"

i do appreciate the comments here from people who actually have firsthand experience with this. i think a lot of people on HN find this story interesting because it's so far from their experience, but feel like commenting anyway.

and it's valuable because the writers at the atlantic can't say "boy this sure is stupid, it's obviously X or Y." they have to write in this awkward tone as if they genuinely can't tell if these people are really possessed or not.

Nice read, thank you. Glad you got out of there

dota 2 is not as extreme about this as, say, starcraft. in starcraft, most "strategies" are heavily scripted build orders that almost never deviate from a handful of openings (similar to opening moves in chess) and a large amount of winning comes from the ability to quickly give orders to your troops ("micro"). This is an example of a strategy that is not viable without superhuman reactions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKVFZ28ybQs if you directly attack 20 siege tanks with 100 zerglings you will only kill about two siege tanks, but an AI can kill all the siege tanks with some zerglings left over.

There's some of this in dota, but there's a cap on the skill level for most playable characters that pros generally get "close enough" to, and beyond that the strategic depth comes from area control decisionmaking. Theres over 100 heroes and many of them have really weird abilities, like the possibility of creating a temporary wall (earthshaker) or the ability to teleport anywhere on the map every 20 seconds (furion). I could be wrong though, maybe the AI is winning games by playing heroes with long range and perfectly microing them to harass and prevent the other team from ever getting gold/xp.

My impression is that nicotine is "essentially" harmless but caffeine is actually harmless, maybe even good for you (kind of like a glass of red wine a week).

One thing that bugs me about ecigarettes is that the flavoring chemicals are totally untested. Vegetable glycerin is essentially harmless and is even used in asthma inhalers, and nicotine is way less harmful as well. However it's already been shown that certain flavoring agents like a particular butter flavoring are harmful (https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/11/e-cigaret...). I know a couple "juice" makers and they basically just throw in random flavoring chemicals that are meant to be ingested.

It's possible to get unflavored e-cigarette juice, and when I was using an e-cigarette (i switched to gum) i tried to get it as often as I could. But it's really uncommon, most shops don't even have one, and the one i went to was often sold out.

> Old version just worked and got out the way.

Just when I thought I had heard every opinion on npm, I find someone with the opinion "It always worked fine."

Very reminiscient of the intentional devaluation of Crystal Pepsi by Tab Clear (see the second paragraph here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_Clear#Post-discontinuation)

For me the classic example of this is photoshop. You cannot buy old photoshop licenses anymore because they realized that people are happy with them.

Or you could avoid adtech and misleading clickbait, which everyone hates

I agree with your first (non-quoted) paragraph. Please don't blame this on #metoo. it just happened, and I think the first point you made was just as legitimate before #metoo

As a stupid and impatient person, I didn't get to the end of the article the first time i looked at it. After I saw you wrote it I went back to check if you mentioned ublock by name.

You might want to have something below the header and above the lede that says "hey just before we go any further, the solution is to use ublock origin instead of adblock." And even better, a big image of adblock with another, bigger red "no" symbol over it (in addition to the one that's already in the logo i guess) and then a check mark next to ublock origin. Like I said, I'm stupid. It's an interesting article but i already knew adblock plus was sketchy so I didn't finish.

Every story about facebook now portrays them as satan.

I don't even like facebook but this is definitely a trend.

more like hackernews_user.md

This happens to your wife commonly?

I took modafinil for a while because a crypto SV nerd told me it was hip. We both ordered some and tried it. The stimulant effects basically stopped affecting me after a week, and i had the bizarre side effect of crying very regularly. My father, who has adhd, also tried modafinil and also found himself crying a lot at his work.

I gave my extra pills to another friend who was interested; both my friends stopped using them after a while, saying they made them feel different but not more focused or anything.

It was a mildly interesting waste of time and money for all four of us.

Friend works in data law and says that it's ambiguous. One of the problems is that people use personal information in their email. Also, you have no idea if it's actually personal information or just a nickname they've given themselves. For these reasons it looks unlikely that emails will be considered personally identifiable information.

Oh my god, can we have one article on this topic without this comment? The whole problem is that 99% of websites people visit come with trackers.

This is a great idea

What's more likely, that the EU wants good PR and hopes that nobody will notice they're not accomplishing anything, or that they're representing their constituents by making widely popular policies and putting the onus on violators to supply them with evidence of compliance?

> I don't want to be too cynical but it can function as a kind of elaborate PR and recruiting tool, as well as generally support the impression of the company being the Next Big Thing.

Whether or not this is intentional, it's working that way. I've heard more guests on techy podcasts that work for stripe than google, maybe just because they're so enthusiastic about the culture that they always seem to bring it up.

> and that code review is of no value.

I don't agree with this at all. Code review is obviously a huge benefit once you have enough money to pay more than one engineer per gigantic slice of the codebase.

I'd say code review is also great if everyone is working on the same thing, such as a library. In that case I'd do code review if there were only two people working on the project. But when one guy is basically just doing react boilerplate and implementing designs, it's not worth the time to check every commit they make.

I work for a tiny 2-man project and we need to save all the time we can, so we don't code review. We actually have an unofficial policy: all code that is directly user-facing (web design for example) is handled by me and all backend stuff is handled by the other guy.

My previous company worked the same way though, and it was a real company with funding and customers. It was another tiny startup (essentially 4 person engineering team) and the work was cleanly divided: one person did the entire iphone/android app (react native), one person did the website, one person did the backend and one person did the analytics. For an established company this would be a nightmare -- we had tons of bugs in production, usually reported by our users. However, having a really clean separation of duties made it extremely efficient in terms of management, because everyone knew that if they wanted something done on the mobile app they just asked the guy who did the whole thing, he knew the codebase thoroughly and could fix or add the change almost immediately, then would work on the next task on his trello board (which almost nobody else even looked at). We essentially had no management (CEO was constantly gone looking for more funding) so this organizational structure was a huge boon, and allowed us to push out huge features in 1-2 weeks. I think that if we had a full time QA person this really could have worked well, and by "well" i mean "we could have done the job of a ~15 person engineering and QA team with only five people."

I know nothing about the housing market but to me it seems like this could be a pretty good move from zillow. They could theoretically use data on their millions of houses to find absurdly good deals and only snap those up.

Reminds me of the similar article posted recently, '“Is curing patients a sustainable business model?” Goldman Sachs analysts ask.' Or net neutrality. Regulatory capture is out of control in at least a dozen american industries i know of.

I've read a thread like this before, prepare for lots of people from countries that aren't the US explaining that their taxes are way simpler.

I think an interesting thing about turbotax and ifttt is that they both were confronted with the problem of a really hard UX and they both decided that the simplest solution was just to make everything a series of modals with the absolute minimum number of decision points. Kind of like the game Reigns.

> I don't understand why go through the hassle of actually deleting (particularly since it is so onerous). It changes nothing. There's probably still a shadow account of the data you gave them. Deleting the account doesn't put everything back in pandora's box.

I don't think most facebook users think this way. The big conflict in my experience with the FB scandal is that tech people understand that it's much easier to just keep data around than to track down and delete all of it, whereas users think about it differently.

I believe users conceptualize their access to facebook to be like their access to icloud or dropbox, where they have direct control over their data and when they delete it, it is deleted on the FB servers. (I suppose. Although icloud and dropbox probably keep some records of this data as well.) A coder would be able to intuit that it's much easier to simply flag "deleted" accounts as invisible to other users and keep the data around. Also, using the term "delete" ends up (intentionally or unintentionally) misleading people to think that way, and the 'onerous' nature of deleting leads to a cognitive dissonance where users think that because they worked so hard to 'delete' their account, it was more likely to be actually deleted.

This is part of a culture which is completely pervasive among tech companies of simply keeping all data around forever because until recently there has been zero reason not to, and you might need it later.

I think turbotax has a pretty phenomenal interface if you're in the bracket of people with really simple taxes. Two and three years ago, my taxes took me about an hour.

Depending on what you're looking for, you may also be interested in aping their freemium model, where the first time you use the service is free and sets you up quite well to reuse the service next year and pay $40 for one of their obnoxious services. As a customer it was quite frustrating but it succeeded in getting me to pay $40 the second year, and had I not gone far out of my way to remove the "plus" and "premium" features I would have ended up paying ~$100 the first year and $140 total the second.

The third year I switched to a competitor and got to use their service for free. In a way, using turbotax felt like a great UX mixed with a battle to read everything extremely carefully and retread my steps to avoid paying anything; to me, this is not all that morally reprehensible because it adversely affects people who don't value their money as much as their time. However it also seemed predatory in that a non-tech-savvy user such as my parents would likely be tricked into paying higher costs for essentially no added value.

I've been using mailchimp for the first time in the last couple weeks and found it to be a similar experience to squarespace: extremely friendly to non-coders, but kind of buggy and somewhat hard to use beyond their given templates. (Even the design looks very similar)

My specific problem: I fiddled with the "merge fields" (basically handlebars regex-replace tool) and somehow this broke my email template, but only after I had tested it once and it worked properly. When I copied the original (working) "campaign" and re-sent it, all the text of the email was gone. I copied it and fixed the merge fields, then all the images were gone. After reimporting the images it finally worked.

The really frightening part was that it worked the first time but somehow the act of copying the working email with weird merge fields broke a bunch of other things. So I suppose the copying was imperfect and created a problem with their regex-replace logic the second time. Very glad I tested it a second time before sending it out, overall it took me 6 tries to get it working properly.

I'm on the free tier, and customer support is a paid feature, so I had to figure this out myself.