Jack_Hacker

In Principles, he describes some high-level decision making processes. Bridgewater is split into groups of about 300 people. Within those groups, smaller groups are formed to discuss particular strategies. Everybody has "baseball cards" of their coworkers with stats showing peer-rated talent in various sub-domains. When a decision is made, there are two rounds of voting: a raw vote, and a vote weighted by stats (e.g. somebody whose peers have rated them as knowledgeable about agricultural trades would have more votes in this phase). If the two rounds of voting don't align, they try to keep discussing the issue until they do align (though there are tie-breaker rules if deadlock is reached). I'm not saying this system is perfect, but it's interesting to me as a meta-strategy for evaluating potential strategies.

IANAL, but my understanding is that WotC is getting ready to revoke the old OGL on the basis that "perpetual" doesn't mean "irrevocable," and the main impetus for a new license is explicitly closing that loophole. The perpetual/irrevocable thing seems absurd to me as an outsider, but this article makes me worry that a court could disagree: https://gamerant.com/dungeons-dragons-wizards-of-the-coast-f...

According to several lawyers who have weighed in on the situation, if a document does not specifically say it is “irrevocable,” it can be revoked. While the old OGL uses the term “perpetual,” it does not use the word “irrevocable” in writing, and Dancey’s use of the word in interviews and emails may not be sufficient for the courts.

Storj Labs Inc. will also make available, monthly, a "warrant canary" in the form of a cryptographically signed message containing the following:

- a declaration that, up to that point, no warrants have been served, nor have any searches or seizures taken place

- a cut and paste headline from a major news source, establishing date

Special note should be taken if these messages ever cease being updated, or are removed from this page.

The current message is here:

...and then it goes blank.

If we take QM seriously, there's nothing stopping it from affecting macroscopic events from a human perspective. A cannonball whose trajectory was planned in accordance with Newtonian physics could suddenly and unexpectedly move three feet to the left, it's just ridiculously unlikely.[0] This isn't a piecewise function where Newtonian physics is true within some constraints of speed and scale, Newtonian physics is simply wrong and useful.

[0]: Under the Everett interpretation, which is no more or less scientific than the Copenhagen interpretation, this happens all the time and is witnessed by many humans.

The story is a long one, but for now let’s skip to the end: future-proof, established scientific facts can be identified via a solid (>95%) international scientific consensus, born of scientific labour, in a community that is large and diverse. In the entire history of science, no claim meeting these criteria has ever been overturned, despite enormous opportunity for that to happen (if it were ever going to happen).

Newtonian physics stood for hundreds of years, and we now understand it to be an approximation of quantum mechanics. It's still useful, but merely useful. Do not mistake "useful" for "true."

Ebooks with illustrations/graphs? Text books and graphic novels come to mind.

Parens aren't doing the same thing. Primitives are implicitly being wrapped in objects when you use methods, but they come out on the other end as primitives again. The new operator gives you an object wrapper that you can keep working with and modifying the values of, whereas the parens you're using just let the interpreter know that your period isn't a decimal point. You can also use a space for this.

  > typeof(new Number(0));
  'object'
  > typeof((0));
  'number'
  > 0 .toString();
  '0'

Not quite everything. JavaScript does have some primitives, though it also provides object wrappers for those primitives via the new operator.

  > let numberPrimitive = 0;
  undefined
  > let numberObject = new Number(0);
  undefined
  > typeof(numberPrimitive);
  'number'
  > typeof(numberObject);
  'object'
  > typeof(numberObject + numberObject);
  'number'
  > numberPrimitive;
  0
  > numberObject;
  [Number: 0]
  > numberPrimitive.one = 1;
  1
  > numberObject.one = 1;
  1
  > numberPrimitive.one;
  undefined
  > numberObject.one;
  1
  > numberPrimitive;
  0
  > numberObject;
  [Number: 0] { one: 1 }

Everybody can have an opinion about general topics tangentially related to a story; to have an opinion about a comment related to the specifics of a story, one typically has to read the story first.

One suggestion I've seen put forward would be to have story submissions include a quiz about the article which must be answered correctly before commenting/voting. This would obviously add friction to the process of engagement, and not everybody would like it, but I found the thought interesting.

Another approach would be to allow different categories of upvotes, like slashcode-based sites have. Then users can set "Informative" comments to get precedence over "Insightful" ones in their personal browsing, since "Informative" typically means that a comment is related to the story and "Insightful" merely means that upvoters agreed with whatever was being expressed.

I'm not arguing that either of these options is right for HN, just throwing out a couple of possibilities that seemed relevant.

they're likely just like you and me, learning on the fly and doing their best

Correct. In my experience of working at a cellphone repair shop, we looked up most Android repairs on iFixit and/or YouTube before quoting a price. If a tutorial suggested that there was a high likelihood of breaking a given part (usually the screen) during the replacement of an unrelated one, we would throw the cost of that part into the initial quote. Apple products are standard enough that the repairs which can be done were well known to everybody, and we didn't have to research those before giving a quote.