pattrn

How does survivorship bias relate to this post?

> Looking back, I cannot believe how much I’ve been able to ship over the past 6 years by just following this one rule.

This seems to be his only conclusion about the effect of working a little bit every day. And I don't think survivorship bias applies here. If you work a little bit on a product every day and don't ship a lot over six years, then you're probably in the minority.

Good point. I just checked the paper, and it's true that the vaccinated population had proportionally more 60+ year olds (by about 3x).

As I read through this more, It's a bit surprising that out of 805,124 people (includes uninfected) under the age of 45, there were only 5 deaths. Haven't looked into the data for a long time.

The author links the following paper as a source for his comments: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3868853. Unless I'm reading it incorrectly, the mortality rate of the infected, unvaccinated population is 0.5% (131 / 26,632), and the mortality rate in the infected, vaccinated population is 2.5% (33 / 1,410). Does this mean that the vaccine decreases your chance of contracting the virus, but increases your chance of dying if you do contract it?

(Note: I understand that the overall death rate from the paper is 0.002% for vaccinated population and 0.012% for unvaccinated population.)

Posts like this make me scratch my head. He describes his parents as first generation immigrants who moved to the United States and built up enough wealth in one generation to put their kids through college. Then he denigrates capitalism and describes his situation as "privilege." By all appearances, his parents, who started from nothing, seem to be quite well off -- perhaps even better off than him -- despite his "privilege." I fail to see the material impact of what he calls "privilege," and I don't understand why he dislikes the economic system that catapulted his parents into success. His own life story reads like a counter-argument to his own post.

I think it's technically defined as private ownership of the means of production, but don't quote me on that. My last economics class happened many years ago.

No worries! I agree in part with your original statement, which is why I was asking for more detail. As a society I think we have too much confidence in our predictions about macro events, especially ones involving human behavior. Even the simple examples I gave likely involved many unsuccessful predictions before landing on the ones that were reproducible, so in a way we were likely poor at predicting even those events (20/20 hindsight). It's certainly an interesting topic.

In a way, we do fail pretty often at predicting, but if the gold standard is every other organism's creative predictive ability (as opposed to common instinctual behavior), we're actually quite good :).

> We didn't survive as a species thanks to life guiding philosophy or in general thanks to a conscious thinking process in which we tried to predict the future.

Not sure I understand you correctly here. Choosing to build shelters from the inevitable elements, storing food for the winter months, building traps to capture animals that may walk by at some point, etc... seem like crucial, conscious, predictive behaviors that increased odds of survival. Are you talking about this type of predictive decision making, or something else?

It's important to consider that converting between the long-term store of value and the short-term medium of exchange is a taxable event, so if your asset gains value at exactly the same rate as inflation, you still end up losing money.

This is the one thing that bothers me about TypeScript as well. I've ended up using frameworks like `zod` to do runtime type checking of endpoints. It has gone a long way towards decreasing edge case failures -- I just wish they had something like this built into the language.

I used the qualifier "assuming Conley told the truth" to establish an axiom, since the author did that implicitly. Everything else was pure deductive reasoning.

That aside, I personally believe that the entire media and all public figures will lie on behalf of what they believe to be "the greater good." Their goal is not "truth." For that reason, I don't believe this interview communicated any meaningful information; I also don't believe the follow-up last week communicated any meaningful information. I don't assume Conley told the truth. My comment intended only to point out a flaw in the deductive reasoning of the article.

(Regarding your assumption about me, this is the exact problem with trying to develop opinions by reading between the lines. It's easy to develop strong, unfounded opinions without any evidence.)

Interesting read, but I'm not sure the analysis of the following exchange is correct.

> Q: But was it ever below 90, here or at the White House?

> CONLEY: No, it was below 94 percent. It wasn't down in the low 80s or anything.

When Conley answer's "No," that implies it was not below 90 "here" or at the White House. And "it was below 94 percent" implies it was somewhere in the range of 90 to 94. Assuming Conley told the truth, the only way you can interpret the oxygen levels as being below 90 is if you ignore the presence of the word "no."

I've noticed when speaking with physicians that they tend to give very precise answers (unless they believe the precise answer will lead to worse health outcomes for a patient). This exchange sounded pretty typical to me. Doesn't seem like Conley intended anything nefarious.

As a competitor to Scrivener, I'd love to know why you think that.

(I just deleted a paragraph of text so that I don't influence your response with my own opinions.)

One could also assume that there's a 1% chance that a mask is harmful (let's say due to oxygen deprivation). If that person believes that they are harmful, then why would take the 1% risk?

(For the record, this is not my opinion. Just pointing out that this reasoning isn't very convincing.)

That type of response may result more from lack of education than from political ideology. Where I live, there are a fair amount of educated liberals and conservatives. I run into liberals and conservatives alike who give a similar response to what you listed; I also run into liberals and conservatives alike who have wonderful conversations about politics without getting riled up. From my observations, there doesn't seem to be a correlation with political ideology.

I'm curious to know how frequently you have encountered one of your liberal friends debating with an educated conservative. Likewise, I'm curious to know how frequently you've encountered one of your conservative friends debating with an educated liberal. Over the past couple of years, I've run into a number of people who simply couldn't believe that an educated liberal/conservative existed, primarily because they grew up in an area where there weren't many people with differing political views. It's a dangerous trap to fall into, because it allows you to categorize the other political party based on only the rhetoric of elected officials and on the interpretation from media. I have yet to meet a conservative or progressive who matches the caricature of either portrayed by politicians or entertainers.

Was in the same boat (regarding the Javascript ecosystem) until I discovered NextJS. It's pretty opinionated, but lets me get fully functional React sites up and running in with sensible defaults in minutes. Not exactly as clean as PHP, but for quick projects, it's removes a substantial amount of overhead.

Hi pearce! Thanks for the great feedback. The editor does allow exporting to both Markdown and Word, and I'm slightly embarrassed that we forgot to mention it on the front page. I'll fix that. (The last section near the bottom does mention that we do daily backups -- perhaps I should move that up. We also keep hourly revisions of each novel.)

Your suggestions for the copy and additional CTAs sound like a perfect A/B test to run, which I'll get on ASAP. Still trying to figure out all of this marketing stuff, and all suggestions are _very_ welcome.

It's still a young product, so we have a long way to go, and we're still learning. Thank you for taking the time to look at it! Can't wait to hear what you think of the actual product.

Hey all! I've been working on this for the past 6 months, after many years of being a wantrepreneur. This is the first time I've launched a product and taken payments. Would love to hear any feedback or questions on any aspect of the site, product, etc.

Can't read it because of the paywall. Either way, I'm one of those Americans that wants to be free to do whatever I want that doesn't directly harm other people, including being stupid. Most likely I won't intentionally choose that, and hopefully I haven't accidentally chosen that, but I vehemently oppose being forced one way or the other by the government.

Solo founder here as well (launching my first product in a week, so keep in mind that I don't have much experience). My process looked something like this:

- Analyze market (Can this make enough money?)

- Chat with target market (Will anyone use this?)

- Build MVP as fast as possible (I didn't look for any feedback during this process.)

- Run first beta (Lasted two weeks, constant contact with customers, mixed with some bug fixing and developing some smaller features. Called all beta users with a short survey.)

- Build larger feature requests

- Run second beta (This one lasted one week, and I signed up 10x the users than the first beta. Similar interaction with customers. Goal was to discover usability issues and any obvious gaps. Called all beta users with another short survey.)

- Build larger feature requests

- Prepare for launch (Built: payment processing, beta user benefits, etc...)

- Respond to your post on Hacker News

- Launch!

This seemed to have worked well, as many of the beta users still use the product almost daily. I'd say overall, roughly half of the time was spent doing product management (user feedback, planning features, etc...) and marketing (landing pages, ads, help content, guides, etc...), and half of the time was spent doing development. I didn't put much thought into this initially, but it feels right in retrospect.

I don't use social media, so I didn't even think of that as an avenue for product feedback. This is probably a personal failing. My approach relied on building a landing page, driving traffic via ads, and then chatting directly with any users who joined our Slack. Not sure if this would work for everyone, but it worked well for me.

Unfortunately, I can't really think of a system for striking a balance between these two activities. For me, it mostly came down to starting the day by asking myself, "What is my biggest risk, and how do I reduce it?" The answer to that question increased the chance that I would move the needle during that day.

Sorry if that wasn't very helpful. I'm new to this, so it's hard to differentiate between activities that harmed productivity from activities that helped it. Either way, good luck with the grind!

It's a unfortunate that he doesn't include the equivalent class-based implementations of his logging quiz. Event lifecycles notoriously obscure order of execution, so I'm not sure the alternative is any clearer -- especially not with contrived examples. In my experience with both hooks and classes:

- Hooks require substantially less boilerplate than classes.

- Rendering optimization problems with hooks tend to take more time to identify and to fix.

There are other pros/cons, but these are the ones that affect my work most frequently.

That's primarily why I listed all of the typical state taxes. When you combine property tax, state income tax, and sales tax, it can come pretty close to the federal income tax.

Point taken, though. I probably should have qualified income tax by calling it "state income tax." Quite a few people who read this board live in countries other than the USA. Thanks for pointing it out.

I completely agree with you that the culture isn't for everyone. Many towns lack basic government services like trash pickup and public utilities, likely due to the reduced taxes (I haven't done a comparison, so this is just a guess). I was mostly addressing the original poster. If he/she lives five miles from the border, I suspect that the culture doesn't differ much.

I live a mile north of New Hampshire's southern border. We have no income tax, no sales tax, the median property tax is within $800 per year of the neighboring states, and the median income is only $3,000 per year less than Massachusetts (pretty sure after accounting for taxes, New Hampshire is higher). As far as death rates go, the life expectancy is 79.5 years, which is pretty close to the 80.5 in Massachusetts and 79.7 in Vermont. Contrary to popular belief, we've been practicing social distancing for many years, simply due to the our low population density (/kidding). It's a pretty great place to live.

Life's good here, especially if you're a software developer. Come join the dark side! We have cookies.

Don't really have the time to do a complete write-up, but for what it's worth I've completely moved my company from GitHub to GitLab within the past year. We found the group and project hierarchy to work very well for organizing our clients and their projects, and we've made extensive use of your CI/CD.

The only real complaint I have is about the Auto DevOps feature you released. We're currently using this for a number of smaller projects, and we've found the documentation around customizing deployments severely lacking. We ended up just reading through the Auto DevOps repository since it was clearer and more complete than any online documentation, which eventually allowed us to work through all of the issues we were having.

Other than that, it has been a wonderful experience. Thanks for a great product!

In that case, the odds of a Yian being a terrorist would increase, thereby increasing the odds of a Yian getting searched. If we assume that the odds of being a terrorist varies based on demographics, then this would catch more terrorists than random searches.

It reminds me of the N-armed bandit problem: use random searches some small percentage of the time, and use a distribution based on prior samples to identify subsequent searches. (It's not exactly the same, but the same technique applies.)

Not sure if you're referencing the constitution's original intent for state legislatures to elect senators. If you are, here's a good reference for anyone interested in the topic:

https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/briefing...

This mirrors my sentiment prior to moving to Boston. It turned out to be the opposite. It took more time to get to most places in the city than it took to get to equivalent places when I lived in New Hampshire. You name it: grocery stores, restaurants, pubs, cafes, shopping, parks, markets, etc. My wife and I moved back to NH after a year due to our quality of life dropping so drastically. Two of my childhood friends recently moved back from San Diego and Los Angeles for exactly the same reason.

Now I can get to all of the aforementioned places via car in under 5 minutes. There's Uber and Lyft for when I want to go to a bar. DoorDash serves more than 50 local restaurants. Traffic adds at most 5 minutes to any drive, and only during a small window around 5pm.

The city offers convenience in theory, but from my admittedly anecdotal experience it doesn't hold up in practice. And I'm not sure that matters. At the end of the day, it's just a preference.

That's incredibly embarrassing. Thank you for pointing it out! I wrote this post while going through a bad head cold, so I'm afraid I missed quite a few typos and errors of that sort. Hopefully that's the last one.

This is my first blog post relating to software design. It talks about how naming and design go hand in hand, and about how readability takes priority over design. I'm aware that there are some pretty strong opinions out there, so fire away. What do you think?

Programmatic banning of sources takes power away from editors to determine legitimacy. It censors the conversation that would have otherwise taken place. Wikipedia cannot claim impartiality once it picks and chooses sources at an organizational level. Due to having little interest in keeping up to date with Wikipedia's ban list, I certainly will no longer see it as impartial from this point onward.

I'm not concerned about the downvotes when I don't see a clear reason for them. As far as I can tell, I raised a legitimate point. I'm assuming that it's legitimate because none of the downvoters commented to explain why they disagreed with my point.

(I shouldn't have to say this, since it neither aids nor harms my arguments, but I don't read Breitbart.)