vkk8

Depends on why those unproductive hours are unproductive. My hypothesis is that human brain is just incapable of doing the sort of forced, focused work that modern work requires for more than a small number of hours. I.e. the hours worked are just not randomly productive or unproductive (like your casino analogue suggests), but you spend the productive hours and then you move into less productive mode, which could just as well be skipped completely.

A related question is does the working capacity "charge" over the course of one evening + sleeping or does it require more time? If the answer is "more time", as I suspect from the fact that most productive days of the week usually are after the weekend, a good strategy indeed would be to just do all the work we can do (which is maybe 10-20 hours) in two days and then recharge for five days.

The need for having Cloudflare is itself, to some extent, result of too much centralization. The massive DDoS attacks, which Cloudflare protects you from, require some amount of resources or at least risk taking, and are worth it only for big enough targets. No-one orchestrates a huge attack against a website with 1000 visitors per month; DDoSing an IRC network is pretty useless, because if one server is taken down, another can be used and the attacker doesn't really achieve much.

I guess they could tie it to Amazon Prime (like they did with Prime video) and just let Prime cutomers download any game on the platform without paying extra.

1) Such smart person might not even exist

2) If she exists, and is as smart as she should be, she will realize quite quickly that her power can be used for personal gain and she will become corrupted. Power corrupts, etc. and you can't really entertain any kind of organizational solution without considering game theory of the situation.

Apparently it's not. I live in Finland and I've never had my internet connection cut off in a supermarket (or any other large building). This has happened to me sometimes in Southern Europe, though. I don't know if they boost the reception somehow in large buildings here or if the building materials are just somehow different.

Can't say about your particular situation, but I think that, in general, our view of what is "normal weight" is very distorted due to the fact that most people around us are kinda fat. The same goes for exercising habits; people who don't move much often see twice a week jogging or something as a good amount of exercise. While it is certainly better than nothing and probably more than many people get, it's still much, much less than an average person exercised a hundred years ago by just living a normal life.

A person who doesn't provide any kind of stimulus to maintain their muscle mass can have low BMI too much body fat at the same time.

I'm also puzzled by the fact that EU is funding this. Usually states and state-like entities are exactly the ones who don't want people to use decentralized technologies, because they often make laws difficult or impossible to enforce.

In fact, wanting to circumvent laws is the only reason why people en mass would ever want to use decentralized technologies. I'm not necessarily always against this (there are some really stupid laws that should be broken), but I'm pretty annoyed by how people try to pretend that there is demand for these technologies for any other reason.

What if you plateau on squats?

Depends on how you do it, I guess. Squatting low weights or just body weight indeed doesn't involve stabilisers very much. But try squatting 2x your bodyweight on the bar and you find that it takes everything you've got to keep the body stable.

(Note: don't actually try to squat 2x your bodyweight unless you have some years of experience in squatting and know what you are doing)

Indeed. And I'd wager that what works on them is not even constant, but varies with time, experience, body composition, etc.

If you start from zero, doing anything a little bit improves your body, but it's also very easy to overdo it and break your body. If you then switch the activity, your body is already much stronger and better prepared for a new activity and is not as likely to break.

Maybe the lesson is that variation is the key? Do all sorts of physical activities and switch them occasionally?

Same. I went from yoga to Mark Rippetoe and, while I had difficulties for a long time due to trying to learn the lifts on my own, in the end the squats and deadlifts have benefited my body much more than yoga.

I've had similar thoughts on this.

In sports, most people accept that genetics plays a huge role (if you want to play in the NBA, having tall genes certainly helps a lot). Why wouldn't they also matter for intellectual pursuits? If the effect of genes is something we can easily see with our own eyes - arm length, bone width, etc. - we have no difficulty accepting it, but if we can't see it - certain type of brain structure, certain hormone profile that favours some activites over others, etc. - we want to believe that genes don't play a role.

Besides, the role of the genes can also be a second order effect. The book Sports Gene by David Eppstein tells a story of sled racing dogs that were bred for motivation to run (apparently it can be bred). Naturally dogs that like running also want to train more and become better at it. Could it be that the motivation to do things like mathematics or programming are also heavily influenced by genetics?

Combined with "A phone designed for the long run" that reads like a joke. 3 years is the "long run"? My Raspberry Pi's uptime is probably longer than that. For comparison, Ubuntu LTS releases have 5 year support.

I was wondering about this too. The article also says that the maggots can be killed by suffocating them in a paper bag. Wouldn't the gut also suffocate them?

I desperately need to know this, because if I ever travel to Sardinia I will definitely try this unless there's a chance of getting infested by flesh eating maggots.

Isn't it what it's supposed to be? I mean, their purpose is to persuade me do something that I otherwise wouldn't want to do (usually, to buy some product). How is this not hostile to begin with?

I see the same at my workplace. Hell, I think I'm slowly becoming one of those underpaid and underperforming people myself. The reason for this is that if there is no chance of a meaningful improvement in your salary or other benefits, why would you even try? Good old "they pretend to pay me and I pretend to work".

If there is no proper incentive system in place to encourage good performance, those who value money or career development just leave after a while and those who just want an easy life stay and underperform.

In more user-centric (as opposed to content-centric) forums this problem is solved by banning users who repeatedly make low quality posts. One crappy comment here and there is something anyone might make, but the same person posting pointless comments in every thread deserves a ban.

The author of the dickbutt (if he/she can be found) might easily sell the rights to their creation to a copyright troll for one million dollars after which my scenario could take place.

I'm not personally a software professional, but to me it seems that the problem is economical. Centralization and walled gardens happen because they are a way to couple the internet platforms to the economic system. I think that if done "nicely", much of the software and internet tech exist in market failure corner of the economy. It's not like there aren't many federalized/decentralized/community driven and open source projects in existence, it's just that no-one wants to fund and/or market them so that they often become non-viable in the long run.

Slashdot indeed exists, but its comment section is complete garbage and the news are less and less about science and technology and more and more about politics and nerd tabloid style journalism ("You wouldn't believe what Linus Torvalds said on the Kernel developer mailing list!").

Indeed. I find it extremely ironic how people here - of all places - are sympathetic to this sort of stuff.

Additional properties it should have:

* Basic HTML only, no Javascript

* No user interaction (comments, etc.)

* Gets updated occasionally but not all the time, perhaps a few times a year

Memes will be killed by some entrepreneuring copyright troll at some point.

In many jurisdictions, memes would either break the copyright laws or at least be in the grey zone. It's only a matter of time before someone exploits this. After one case, the platforms will ban them to avoid the risk of getting sued themselves. The same will probably happen for gaming videos.

The beauty of the old internet was that there was no need for filtering, because it was done by the users by choosing which platforms to participate. Instead of many fragmented, special interest platforms we now have a few generic mega-platforms like Facebook and Reddit, which naturally get filled with garbage. In the old web, a place for discussion would have been a small special interest discussion forum with perhaps around a hundred active participants and a few hundred less active ones. The outsiders (i.e. the people who would post garbage) did not participate in the discussion because there was some threshold of participation (finding the website, registering, etc.). Instead they would have their own forum somewhere else with similar dynamics.

I think it's very natural for people to divide into communities of tens or, at most, hundreds of people. The modern web platforms don't respect this at all.

I think that most of the filtering happened because different communities operated on different platforms rather than a single huge one like Reddit or Facebook.

A small, old time discussion forum for a specific interest in my (rather small) language had only perhaps a hundred active participants and another few hundred casual posters. In that sort of environment it is actually possible for the actives to get to know each other and have occasional live meetings, which builds a much better community. The threshold of participation is a lot higher since a new participant would first have to find the forum and then go through the registration process, both of which filter out people who were not actually that interested in the topic.

In Reddit or Facebook, any "community" (the word in quotations because I don't think they actually are very communal) for even a mildly popular topic gets filled with thousands and thousands of posts from thousands or millions of casual participants. The quality of the posts get very low, it becomes impossible for anyone to read all of them and personalities of the participants don't matter at all.

I actually found HN quite late (a few years ago) and was pleasantly surprised how well the spirit of the old Reddit and Slashdot lives on here.

Not all. While commercialization of the creator culture undoubtedly has some benefits, it also kills some of its original "soul".

Someone making funny videos on the internet on their free time without any kind of expectation to make money out of it unavoidably produces different results than the same person making semi-professional videos on Youtube and making living out of it. If the latter is an option, why the hell would the said person do the former? But since the latter option exists, it drives all of the creations to more professional, less quirky direction. It's the same effect that causes all the Hollywood films to have pretty much the same story arc and all the big budget games to feel like copies of each other.

> Some years ago there was an NPR story on women in academia and how one decided to get together 50 top female academics in their fields and update Wikipedia in their subject matter that they hold PHD's in and work at Universities teaching about. Waste of time, all deleted.

This sounds strange. Few years ago, when I was still in academia, I used to make small contributions to Wikipedia articles in my field (theoretical physics) and even smaller contributions to all sorts or articles (like fixing grammatical errors or adding "source needed" -tags). I checked my Wikipedia history now and none of my edits were ever reverted.

What I sometimes see on Wikipedia is details of some new and obscure, sometimes even controversial research in a general overview article. It's probably the researchers themselves advertising their own research and trying to make it look more important. Sometimes this is probably even done in good faith. I wonder if this is what happened to the women in your story

I'm surprised that this doesn't get brought up more often.

Somehow I have to upgrade all my hardware every few years, which of course increases the demand for chips, even though the software I use doesn't have much extra functionality over the software I used ten years ago. Nicer UI, yes, and I would argue that modern software is often more reliable than software ten years ago, but these things shouldn't require faster hardware.

This might be against the ethos here on HN, but I'm still of the opinion that 95% of the webpages would be much better if they were written in plain HTML.