1,719 karma · joined November 18, 2012
email-hash: 9ecf6778c92b4d597c80bfda61a2e80a664daa98800d95db36395067756d59ef
I live in NYC which has 29,000/sqkm in Manhattan and 11,300/sqkm overall. Public transportation is great here and you don't need a car.
but at 240/sqkm, that's really not much public trans per person!
Nuclear fission delayed 25 years.
WWII fought without atomic weapons.
No decisive end to the war instantly cementing the US as the undisputed global superpower and ushering in Pax Americana.
No mutually assured destruction fundamentally altering the calculus of major warfare.
Yet the discovery was inevitable, and they start appearing in the 1960s under a different world order. What happens next?
Customers are cheap and they're (partly) to blame. My theory is that Amazon conditioned people to view delivery as a free commodity and pizza places who had delivery baked into their model cemented it.
So if Doordash listed a delivery fee that covered their true cost of delivery, customers would balk. So they instead have to find creative ways to get enough. Maybe it's changed and Doordash cracked the secret, but when I'd looked into it years ago these companies barely got by — many of them actually losing money.
It's called the First-Sale Doctrine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine
So:
* fragment a—fragment b (em dash, no space) = traditional
* fragment a — fragment B (em dash with spaces) = modern
* fragment a -- fragment b (two hyphens) = acceptable sub when you can’t get a proper em to render
But en-dashes are for numeric ranges…
Chose worst-case images to make Messages look as bad as possible.
Same with the stacked, floating UI items.
And the "search bar" change causing us to re-learn habits? NOT TRUE. The old way works too; but now there's a discoverable alternative.
If we had tech support for a toaster, you might see:
if toaster toasts the bread:
if no: has turning it off and on again worked?
if yes: great! you found a solution
if no: hmm, try ...
if yes:
is the bread burnt after?
if no: sounds like your toaster is fine!
if yes: have you tried adjusting the darkness knob?
if no: ship it in for repair
if yes: try replacing the timer. does that help?
if no: ship it in for repair
if yes: yay you're toaster is fixedFirst it gave a "verbatim, literal English translation" and then asked me if I would like "a version that reads naturally in English (but still faithful to the tone and details), or do you want to keep this purely literal one?"
Honestly, the English translation was perfect. I know Spanish, I knew the topic of the article and had read about it in the NYTimes and other English sources, and I am a native English speaker. It's sad, but you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube. LLMs can translate well, and the article saying otherwise is just not being intellectually honest.
I think of an app like Photoshop, and it had one window for each image you had open, and then floating toolbars, another window for layers, etc. You could really organize your workspace and have a sense of "mise en place" in a way that doesn't really exist anymore.
Now every application is essentially a 16:9 rectangle squeezed into a tab. The web's enabled some amazing things, but not at zero cost…
Something's lost but something's gained, in living every day.
Ironically, this is the only line that I see that goes against the forum's expectations for decorum. What do you think you would otherwise be punished for saying? (And to be honest, I don't think the last line adds _anything_ to the discussion.)
There may, in fact, be dozens of us.
The other post about being able to do it on a substring match sounds way more ergonomic though, I’ll have to try that!
Whenever I sit down to code with a purpose, I'll make a branch for that purpose: git checkout -b wip/[desc]
When I make changes that I think will be a "keyframe" commit, I use: git add . git commit -m "wip: desc of chunk" (like maybe "wip: readme")
if I make refinements, I'll do: git add . git commit --amend
and when I make a nee "keyframe commit": git commit -m "wip: [desc 2]"
and still amend fixes.
Occasionally I'll make a change that I know fixes something earlier (i.e. an earlier "keyframe" commit) but I won't remember it. I'll commit and then do: git add . git commit -m "fixup: wip desc, enough to describe which keyframe commit should be amended"
at the end I'll do a git rebase -i main and see something like:
123 wip: add readme (it's already had a number of amends made to it) 456 wip: add Makefile (also has had amendments) 789 wip: add server (ditto) 876 fixup: readme stuff 098 fixup: more readme 543 fixup: makefile
and I'll use git rebase -i to change it to reword for the good commits, and put the fixups right under the ones they edit. then i'll have a nice history to fast forward into main.
However, I wonder why it hasn't been done by text-based platforms like Reddit and Hacker News?
Reddit has the drop down with "New" items (for the "curators" to watch) and "Best" (presumably for once the items have been elevated to the front page). HN has the the same: the "New" link versus the home page.
Twitter is slightly different, and maybe more of what I'm thinking of, but the content is very different: short form, and original content rather than links to finds with an accompanying discussion. Similar, but not the same.
I wonder if that tells me that it just only works with "doomscroll" content — the kind of content where it's plentiful, short, and very little commitment to read each piece (and therefore very little time lost for a "poor" suggestion)? Or if there's something fundamentally different I'm missing?
Thanks -- totally agree that curation is essential, and I suspect my original point may have come across as advocating against curation, which I wasn’t. My goal isn’t to randomize the homepage or flatten quality, but to involve a broader swath of users in the curation process. It’s currently dominated by the few who browse “new”, essentially a self-selected minority of curators.
Concretely, I was thikinking something like:
* Every new post is shown to a small % of users as part of their regular homepage (not in a “new” tab they’d have to seek out).
* Posts that get engagement from that slice are shown to more users, and so on — a gradual ramp-up based on actual interest rather than early-bird luck.
So it’s not removing filtering; it’s just moving from a binary gate (past the goalpost = homepage) to a more continuous, probabilistic exposure curve. Curation still happens, but more people get to participate in it, and the system becomes more robust to time-of-day luck or early vote pile-ons.
Anyway, I mostly wanted to clarify that I’m not against filtering -- just having a thought experiment about how we might make it more adaptive and inclusive.
Does that clarify my point? Any thoughts? I appreciate your engagement!
I'll definitely try out your product, but I have to say — an enter your email box is surprisingly high-friction and if you weren't a considerate person I'd met on Hacker News I'd probably close the tab when I saw that. I'll try it out and see if there's a particular reason why you need to capture an email address so early on, but I'd bet if you simplified it you'd get more traffic!
My goal isn’t to randomize the homepage or flatten quality, but to involve a broader swath of users in the curation process. It’s currently dominated by the few who browse “new”, essentially a self-selected minority of curators.
Concretely, I was imagining something like: * Every new post is shown to a small % of users as part of their regular homepage (not in a “new” tab they’d have to seek out). * Posts that get engagement from that slice are shown to more users, and so on — a gradual ramp-up based on actual interest rather than early-bird luck.
So it’s not removing filtering; it’s just moving from a binary gate (past the goalpost = homepage) to a more continuous, probabilistic exposure curve.
Curation still happens, but more people get to participate in it, and the system becomes more robust to time-of-day luck or early vote pile-ons.
Anyway, I mostly wanted to clarify that I’m not against filtering -- just having a thought experiment about how we might make it more adaptive and inclusive.
Does that clarify my point? Any thoughts? I appreciate your engagement!
FWIW, I wasn’t suggesting pure randomness though, it’s more like probabilistic randomness. Rather than a binary threshold a post must pass to make the homepage that divides the community into curators and consumers, this would show you posts with a degree of randomness with a probability proportional to the likes it’s garnered.
Btw, I’m not sure what you meant by randomness is an underdog? Are you implying it’s a nice goal but it rarely works out in practice, perhaps because people actually do fall into natural curator / consumer buckets?
ASCII wasn't "imperialism," it was pragmatism. Yes, it privileged English -- but that's because the engineers designing it _spoke_ English and the US was funding + exporting most of the early computer and networking gear. The US Military essentially gave the world TCP/IP (via DARPA) for free!
Maybe "cultural dominance", but "imperialism at its worst" is a ridiculous take.
I've wanted to try something like a Hacker News where your homepage shows a random smattering of posts where the probability you'll see any particular one depends on its number of likes.
In other words, rather than having a firehose of "new" posts from which a few are elevated to the home page (masses), give everyone a dynamic home page which is mostly items that have been liked by many, but includes a mix of some that haven't made that threshold yet. Maybe instead of pure likes it could be a ratio of likes to views.
But the point is some way to engage everyone in the selection of what makes the homepage. It could even be as simple as "keep HN as is, but include 5 posts randomly chosen from recent submissions and tag them as such."
Dang, has anything like this been considered?