pugets

When I turned on the music and chatter, the first audio that played was of a chimpanzee wildly shrieking for about 2 seconds. The song which played after was “Sonargaon” by Daniel Masson, which as far as I can tell does not include that audio. Maybe someone at the KSFO Tower was having a bad day. Very funny.

Missouri has a lot of those names, too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Missouri_places_named_...

What’s odd is when you read popular Reddit comments, you find the userbase believes that the site is full of pro-Trump bots and shills.

My politics are to the left of the American left, but I’d be crazy to believe that the mountains of the anti-Trump posts are organic & the spoonfuls of pro-Trump posts are paid, especially after an election where Trump won the popular vote.

My experience with my ADHD diagnosis and the 25 years of Adderall that followed have left me jaded at the state of psychiatry.

The focus of my attention does indeed change at a rate which is faster than average. If something can distract me from a task, then it usually does, at least for a few moments. But why is this classified as a deficiency and a disorder? In other words, why is directed attention considered the normal human experience?

To me, it seems obvious. My attention is considered deficient because we have constructed a society in which we expect children as young as 8 (that was the age I was diagnosed) to focus in a classroom on highly abstract topics (history, language, math, etc.) for hours at a time without issue. If a child can’t meet that expectation, then they will be medicated until they do.

But if we lived in a different society, especially one set in pre-modern times, then my kind of attention might not be considered a disorder. It could even be advantageous. How many early humans suffered a premature death because their hyper-focus on gathering berries left them oblivious to the rustling of leaves?

What I do is use RateYourMusic.com and find people who rate albums similar to the way I do. The site even lets you build music charts and filter albums by how highly they’re rated by the users you follow.

“We toss the coin, but it is the Lord who controls its decision.” - Proverbs 16:33 (TLB)

The second graph in that article ("The Partisan Gap on Economy Ratings") is alarming. In mid-2016, ~30% of Republicans said the economy was doing good. By mid-2017, that figure passed ~80%. By comparison, optimism among Democrats fell from ~70% to ~55% over that same time period.

I wonder if we'll make it to March 2025 before half of Republicans once again say that the economy is doing quite well.

> No, that's just something you read on a blog written by a guy who would go on to write that women shouldn't get wage equality because they would have to work more dangerous jobs and thus die more, because apparently saving the lives of man by making those jobs safer is impossible.

What am I missing here? Is it possible to make the workplace injury rate among linemen comparable to the rate among social workers?

Why restrict the definition to political censorship? Surely there are such things as academic censorship, religious censorship, etc.

I once moved towns and needed to cancel my LA Fitness gym membership. I found that they wanted me to go to their website, find the Cancellation Form, print it out, fill it out with my account details, and mail or fax it to their corporate office. I don’t believe there is any way of cancelling it online or over the phone.

So instead of doing that all of that, I called my credit card company and asked them to block all future charges from the company. It worked like a charm.

Why assume people will do what’s in their own long-term best interests, especially after being presented with a short-term thrill?

Pizza tastes better than granola. Grand Theft Auto is more fun than math homework. Having a Dodge Charger is cooler than having a Hyundai Elantra. Who cares about the costs? I can always fix my bad habits tomorrow.

What word would be better than “choose” in this context? For the majority of people who aren’t prisoners or toddlers, there is a good deal of personal choice that determines what foods we eat and how much.

Even if fate has it that I must end up at a Wendy’s drive thru tomorrow night, couldn’t it be true that I could choose to eat the 400 calorie meal instead of the 800 calorie meal, or order water instead of Sprite?

It does work. It couldn't not work. Each day of your life, you choose to do one of three things:

1. Consume more calories than your body will need to function

2. Consume as many calories as your body will need to function

3. Consume fewer calories than your body will need to function

When you consume more energy than you require, your body stores the remainder as fat. When you consume less energy than is required, your body converts your fat into usable energy.

Now obviously, this is an over-simplified explanation of nutrition. What you eat, when you eat it, how efficiently your body converts food to energy, and other factors will determine the little details. But the explanation I've provided is not nearly as over-simplified as "it just doesn't work."

To make a comparison, it would be like suggesting that the financial advice "earn more money than you spend" just doesn't work as a method of saving money, on the grounds that some % of Americans who try to save money end up in credit card debt.

That’s also how I lost most of my weight. Sure, you could spend 25-45 minutes on the treadmill… or you could just not eat 5 Oreo cookies, and you would achieve the same result (from a caloric perspective).

My best tip for not eating junk food: Don’t buy it. It’s so much easier to eat chicken and rice when you don’t have a bag of Doritos on standby.

If I did a push-up for every product that has “revolutionized” the fitness world in the last several decades, you would see my body and probably assume that I had used those products.

If you have a floor, a wall, and autonomy over what enters into your mouth, then you already have everything you need to gain muscle and lose fat.

Nobody needs a $1400 bike with a $40 monthly subscription to maintain a calorie deficit. It’s absurd. Peloton preys on their customers’ fear of sunk-cost by selling common exercise equipment at exorbitant prices. They want you to fear that if you don’t use the equipment, then you’re wasting your money.

Reading, writing, discovering, voting, and convincing myself that in just one more minute I will return to my day.

I proposed last year with a lab-made diamond. I did almost no research, went to one jeweler and only twice, shelled out less money than I was spending on rent, and I walked away with one of the prettiest rings she has ever seen. Her friends unanimously love it. They can’t believe I picked it out.

I don’t know or care about the politics of the diamond trade. All I can confirm on is this: Lab-grown diamonds are the real deal. They will even fool a jeweler’s naked eye.

I don't think the aim is to teach that "millions of people are just morally deficient," as you put it. Rather, the aim should be to reinforce that everyone has the capacity to do good or bad, and the direction of your life is influenced partially (if not majorly) by the average value of your decisions.

In some aspects of our culture, shame still exists to great effect. For example, drunk driving is a behavior that never gets a pardon. Words never spoken: "We shouldn't judge Joe for his DUI, for if we were in his shoes, we may have done the same."

The drunk driver may deserve all sorts of considerations: They struggled with alcoholism, their judgment was impaired at the time, they needed to go to work in the morning, they couldn't afford an Uber, their designated driver didn't show, they didn't speak English well enough to coordinate another ride home. In function, no excuses are allowed. As a culture, we believe that no matter your situation, you must always make plans to avoid driving drunk.

What if this same type of intense shame existed towards other behaviors we wished to not see? To name one: What if we intensely shamed parents who let their young children become obese? Instead of blaming food deserts, lack of nutritional knowledge, lack of time to prepare meals, and so on, what if the blame went directly to the parents who are letting their elementary age children graze on a party sized bag of Doritos?

In college, I did my calculus homework on blank printer paper using Sharpie markers. I could only fit one integral per page, maybe two if I was lucky, so I’d turn in these 15-page stapled assignments. It was calculus all the same, and I got great grades. I think the purpose of this comment is to reinforce that the medium doesn’t matter — if you focus on the content itself, you’ll progress.

In my estimate, it’s because the crazy views get virtually no pushback from within liberal social circles.

I say this as a socialist who is critical of essentialism and other nonsense popularized by academia last decade. On liberal websites like Reddit, if you make a critique of the performative nature of land acknowledgements, you are sure to be called a conservative. The prevailing assumption is that anyone bothered enough by those cultural issues must not be a true liberal.

Yes, but HN “works” because it is a small-ish community with principled moderators and generally well-educated people. The community guidelines request that commenters assume the best intentions in others. I’ve been in enough heavily-censored forums, groups, and websites to say that too much moderation can be worse than too little.

Being liberal in the 90’s meant defending controversial or disruptive speech on the premises of the mantra, “I may not agree with what you say, but I’ll defend your right to say it.” This principle operated as a liberal self-preservation tactic. The Church had more influence in society than it does today, and if anyone was going to challenge the status quo, it had to be liberals. Hip hop music, feminist art, raunchy daytime television, and that nasty George Carlin all played a role in challenging the modesty that the Church wanted to preserve.

Decades passed. The church lost most of its mainstream power. Raytheon began marketing itself as a diverse workplace. Goldman Sachs marched in parades with rainbow flags. The question of gay marriage was settled. As society liberalized, liberals found themselves usurping the role of cultural hall monitor. It became disadvantageous for liberals to defend controversial speech, so new rationales had to be created to prevent the spread of anti-liberal ideas.

To my understanding, if one mother birthed 3 children at ages 15, 20, and 25, then her age of conception would be 20. So it could be the case that women did become mothers in their teens if they also continued bearing children into their late 20s.

When I journal (for my eyes only), I’m able to express my knowledge with personal experiences that are too boring, contextless, or controversial to post online. These thoughts still matter to me, so I keep them to myself.

Yesterday, I wrote about how if I hadn’t discovered weightlifting, I might not have gone to university. I reflected on myself at age 16 when I was mentally immature but interested in bodybuilding. Then I wrote about age 18, when the hard work started paying off, and my self-determination skyrocketed. Finally I wrote about age 20, when I made up my mind to study computer science, specifically because it was supposed to be challenging.

If I post these thoughts on social media, there’s a chance I’ll spark Socratic debates that I don’t particularly care about leading. When I do post the thoughts online, it’s usually because I hope my words land on the right person at the right time.

What a coincidence. I just had an idea like this two days ago because we recently adopted a puppy and we’re trying to establish routines. I think he is struggling with the day/night cycle since our blinds are usually pulled. I wanted to use a screen or a color-changing bulb, so he knows yellow o’clock means daytime and blue o’clock means night. Maybe I can use this. Thanks for open sourcing it.

Tangentially related, Character.ai[1] has been filtering bot responses that get flagged as NSFW. Caressing is allowed, but undressing is not. When NSFW content is detected, the AI characters usually respond by blushing “beet red” in embarrassment.

Not only has 4chan worked around the filter, but the progressively strict filtering is creating beet-loops in less risqué conversations.

[1] https://beta.character.ai/

This is the most useful thing I've seen on HN since... well, I don't know when. Thanks a lot OP. Keep working on it.

The lack of a `git undo` is the reason why I’m afraid to try git commands I haven’t yet needed. I can’t exactly “move fast and break things” if I’m always two errant commands away from receiving unwanted attention from my team.

In Seattle, a number of people make a habit of leaving their car doors unlocked, just so the windows don’t get smashed in case of a ransacking. It happened to a family member just last week.

I was hoping someone could help me understand. The objective of the Wikimedia Endowment[0] is to invest until the profits fully fund Wikipedia, expenses, as is the case with most endowments. According to Wikipedia’s financial statements[1], their spending balloons by tens of millions of dollars each year.

2015-2016: $66M

2019-2020: $112M

2021-2022: $146M

Assuming a modest return of 5%, isn’t it the case they would need billions in their endowment to fully fund Wikipedia?

0: https://wikimediaendowment.org/

1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fundraising_statis...