Hacker News Reader

tsgagnonon Some employers have decided to build their own housing for workers

So a growing number of employers around the country have decided to build their own housing for workers, mostly for them to rent but sometimes to buy.

You can't image where the connection to company towns could come from in an article about people renting from their employers?

tsgagnonon Some employers have decided to build their own housing for workers

"Everything has risks, so reducing risks is meaningless" doesn't sound like particularly sound stance to take, especially on an issue like housing.

tsgagnonon UK Blocks Microsoft’s $69B Activision Deal

Cloud gaming is a growing market – they're preventing the deal on the hypothesis that it will give Microsoft a huge advantage in a growing market.

How does any large company build into a new/growing market without having a "huge advantage"? Do they have to wait until the market is matured from smaller companies before they can get into that market?

tsgagnonon Arrest made in SF killing of Bob Lee – alleged killer also worked in tech

I don’t understand why it can’t be both: SF is degenerating when it comes to random crime AND this murder wasn’t by some random thug.

Always important to reflect on whether stances like "SF is degenerating" are based on a rational analysis of what is actually happening, versus a more emotional response to stories that might be more like the topic of this post, just with less visibility into the exact circumstances of what happened.

Not saying that's likely happening here, but the clear response to the original news was that this was the perfect example of what SF is becoming. How often does that assumption happen?

tsgagnonon I fixed a parasitic drain on my car in 408 days

This must be the new astroturfing attack against concepts like public transportation. I've seen this phrase pop up too frequently at this point for it to be organic.

tsgagnonon Night of the living brain fog dead or how I hacked myself better via open source

I had to have my deviated septum surgically corrected back in my late teens before I was capable of breathing consistently through my nose. Even simple things like chewing with my mouth closed were difficult because I couldn't breath well enough with my nose only.

tsgagnonon So I only ate potatoes for 2 weeks

Famously, lots of people have successfully lived healthy lives with long periods where they ate mostly or exclusively potato, including multiple cases where people voluntarily ate only potatoes for a year. The safety of this diet is difficult to dispute, and I highly recommend potatoes much more than any other mono diet that can really mess you up due to nutrient imbalances

While this doesn't specifically say to only eat 500 calories, this is an explicit recommendation for eating only potatoes as a diet in an article proclaiming that eating 500 calories a day of only potatoes was an effective way to lose weight.

But at the end of day, I just don't see value in "I did some diet thing for 2 weeks!". Just like someone writing an article about trying out a new programming language for a couple weeks and labeling it amazing or terrible wouldn't be super interesting to me either.

tsgagnonon So I only ate potatoes for 2 weeks

I think his argument was that with potato-only he only wanted to eat 500 calories per day.

For two weeks. Which is effectively nothing when you are talking about long-term issues like nutrition, health, weight, etc.

tsgagnonon So I only ate potatoes for 2 weeks

My favorite part is where they eat 500 calories of food each day but still state "Neither of us were looking to lose weight".

Or the comment on "So the fact that we ate exclusively one type of food most likely contributed to weight loss, but it's unlikely to be the whole story."

tsgagnonon Giving kids no autonomy at all has become a parenting norm

To me, a "spank" is usually a mild to moderate slap on the rear, a part of the body particularly well cushioned that can handle it just fine without physical trauma, not to mention psychological trauma.

When I think of a child who has been "beaten", I imagine repeated bludgeoning across the body, often with a tool, and usually with visible bruising and possible laceration and bleeding.

"Spanking" can definitely include implements, though that's less common nowadays as people have started to view the act in a less positive light overall.

And the "without psychological trauma" is one aspect where it isn't really that clear if there is a level of spanking that avoids that whole issue.

tsgagnonon Giving kids no autonomy at all has become a parenting norm

Spanking a child and beating a child are two completely unrelated things.

Yes, striking your child to teach them a lesson is definitely completely unrelated to striking your child out of anger/frustration. Definitely no connections there at all.

tsgagnonon Groupon, which has lost 99.4% of its value since its IPO, names a new CEO

There are different versions.

Some like you said, are basically an reservation to for accomodations for a specific time period every year at a specific place.

But there are others that are basically "You have 4 nights a year at accommodation options X, Y, X". So you aren't guaranteed any specific locations or days ahead of time.

tsgagnonon Windows 11 KB5023778 update adds promotions to the Start menu

Don't forget Remote Desktop.

tsgagnonon SBF’s legal defense is being funded with Alameda money he gave his father

We are talking about being taught in an academic context, not a practical context. So, a better analogue might be that you wouldn't necessarily expect a martial arts historian to be better at the application of martial arts than the average person.

tsgagnonon Disney Eliminates Its Metaverse Division

I always preferred Active Worlds personally.

tsgagnonon Why are developers expected to estimate tasks at all?

Unfortunately this bit of illogic is so common that I know it’s a waste of time to argue, so I’ve learned how to figure out what they want the estimates to be, give them that, miss them (just like everybody else does), and then get to work on actually providing the feature.

It gets even worse when you are in a line of work where the estimates are part of some kind of sales pipeline. Then you aren't just estimating based on effort required, but also against a likely number that the customer will ever agree to.

tsgagnonon Google Search Is Dying (2022)

About a decade ago I used to pay $45+ a month for a very basic cable package that contained mostly public stations and a few of the standard stations that you get a hotels, etc. At the same time my parents paid around $100+ a month for their cable package with a better channel selection.

So, to me, even paying $60-$80 for various streaming services that are all on-demand (which wasn't the case for the cable I used to have) is still an amazing deal.

Oh, and I don't have to sit through ads every 5 minutes.

tsgagnonon SimCity launched a decade ago, and it was so disastrous it killed the series

OpenTTD sadly does not simulate passengers as unique agents. Transportation demand can be very unidirectional and not make logical sense.

Personally this isn't really a negative. I've found that I only care about "agents" when the scale of the game focuses on caring about individual units. Once you get beyond that, I don't think the simulation necessarily is more interesting just because it uses unique agents. And conversely, I've never thought while playing SC4 or similar game that "This game would be better if it simulated all citizens as unique units".

tsgagnonon Banning words won’t make the world more just

It feels a bit hypocritical to make this sort of proclamation on a social media site with extremely strict moderation.

Almost as though this isn't as simple a topic as "stick and stones" and that everyone has different tolerances for what they'll put up with depending on the setting and context.

tsgagnonon Before Genshin Impact: A Brief History of Chinese RPGs

I feel like this couldn't have been true by 1995.

The market of RPGs specifically made in the west by 1995 is relatively limited. So, you cross out the biggest entries in that space and you will run out of options pretty quickly.

But the argument falls a little too close to "If you exclude the western RPGs titles with a plot, there aren't many western RPGs with a plot".

tsgagnonon Stop Saying “Technical Debt”

That really only applies to "we have to launch it next week".

It can potentially apply to any project with a fixed budget, whether that's internal or external. And time is money, sometimes quite literally if you are working in the agency world. Customers will choose a project with a $50k budget versus a $80k budget even if smaller budget will be significantly worse, as long as it meets one of their basic needs (or even if it doesn't, if that's all the budget they have to work with).

tsgagnonon M1 MBP down to 3.5hr battery life when writing code

JetBrains Rider is a cross-platform .NET IDE based on the IntelliJ platform and ReSharper.

It's been years since I've used Resharper and maybe things have changed, but if you are looking to improve battery life, it's one of the last things I would start using.

tsgagnonon Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

It's explicitly asking for an open-ended list.

If your goal is to come with any reason to label a question a "list question", then I don't think it would be too hard to find a way to label any potential question as a "list question" and have it closed.

A different interpretation would be that the question is about whether there are maintainability issues with a certain implementation of CSS. Which the question being potentially answered with a "Yes/No" where an obviously better answer might provide an example or two of issues that could arise.

tsgagnonon Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

The question mentioned by the original OP was "My last question (just now) asked about potential maintainability issues involved with a certain approach to CSS layout." which doesn't appear to be very open-ended, at least from my interpretation.

I'll be honest, I mainly knew what the answer to your question would be, but I tried to put myself in the shoes of a newer user trying to understand what questions a person should ask on SO and was curious of maybe things were different.

And the answer appears to still be some form "you won't know until it's closed".

tsgagnonon Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

The primary purpose of S.O. is to produce a searchable corpus of answers with few duplicates and pretty high-quality answers.

The issue is that by discouraging participation in the community, you end up with a repository of old questions with decent answers (that may or may not be 'decent' anymore) and fewer newer questions with even worse answers.

My experience is that using SO is basically trying to find a middle ground between an answer that is too old to be relevant, but not so new that the effect of the stagnation of the community hasn't made the answer less than helpful.

tsgagnonon Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

My favorite is people downvoting and arguing about answers I posted over a decade ago

People bickering over answers on decade old questions sounds exactly like the sort of community SO is trying to foster.

tsgagnonon Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

Do you have a link to the rule about asking questions with only a "single correct answer"? Out of curiosity, I tried digging around and couldn't find references to that kind of rule.

tsgagnonon Amazon will require employees return to the office 3 days a week

I don't believe it's some simple reductionist "they're evil and want employee control" narrative.

Remove the "they're evil" part and I don't see what's reductionist about it being about "having more control over employees"?

That to me sounds like a very likely explanation.

tsgagnonon Tesla recalls 360k vehicles, says full self-driving beta may cause crashes

Obviously attention should be drawn to the fact that there is a critical safety update being pushed OTA, but "recall" is too overloaded a term if it means both "we're taking this back and destroying it because it's fundamentally flawed" vs. "a software update is being pushed to your vehicle (which may or may not be fundamentally flawed...)"

How many times in history has a vehicle recall meant the cars were returned and destroyed?

What makes this situation any more confusing than all the previous times vehicles were recalled?

tsgagnonon Tesla recalls 360k vehicles, says full self-driving beta may cause crashes

This is the correct answer. The question is, how do we get better at regulating reality faster?

I don't think "Use words that put a more positive spin for Tesla PR" is something regulators should be working faster on.