dropit_sphere

The reverse, however, could also be true---how did you get all those fireable white females in the first place?

No culture is static,

indeed, the dodo would agree

This is a great discovery! Have you tried tying developer pay directly to these metrics?

lower-priced housing often has unacceptable attributes simply by virtue being lower-priced, as crime rates and schools are worse.

https://twitter.com/extradeadjcb/status/1609972258725892097

I feel like the qualifications should just be "competent Civilization player" or something.

Actually I think...a lot...of jobs could be filled that way?

Second, nothing useful taught by religion actually requires religion itself.

This hinges very much on your definition of "useful;" if you don't believe in God or the resurrection of the dead, then talk concerning them is of course pointless. But if you do, they are very useful indeed.

caveat emptor...

I love Alastair MacLean's stuff! What was it called?

lol holy shit you guys are a rough crowd

it's "rational" if you don't factor in the complications

This is more a disagreement about fact than it is a threat.

"Take care of your body or else it will grow weak and sick" has a directive and a warning of consequences---is it a threat?

Really is insane. Started dating a girl with Type 1 and started researching it.

There's a group in Oakland called the Open Insulin Foundation doing some good work: https://openinsulin.org/

Somewhat mystifies me why a much-much cheaper alternative to the Big Three hasn't sprung up, but I'd bet a lot on the FDA.

There are some assumptions here:

- you made marines

- they are accessible to a-moving banelings without having to go around terrain and/or through tank fire, marauders, mines

It's quite possible to do low-apm styles in SC2, but you have to actually do them, rather than trying to be budget Maru.

This (or, the experience you're looking for) is available now, by using compositions more suited to it and adjusting your play, but it does require departing from the meta (which I agree is over-focused on micro).

It tends to mean more: splash damage, retreating, turtling, bigger units, expanding, scouting, moving along side lanes. All of these work to get you more for your clicks.

There is a very real sense in which you can shrink your pool of tactics to those with "good UI", allowing you to play more abstractly, similarly to how you'd want expressiveness in a programming language. If you treat your strategic plan as an engineering solution, and then try to reduce moving parts and possible failure points...turns out that is in fact possible.

Retreating, for instance, is a much simpler (in the Rich Hickey sense) endeavor than attacking. It's just less likely to go wrong---fewer things behind you, simple movement rather than dismantling a defense, etc. Doesn't mean you should never attack, just that you should appropriately cost complexity when weighing your strategic options.

Splash damage lets you work on an area level rather than a unit level---another source of abstraction.

Expanding tends to give huge benefits per click compared to other things, and lets you afford bigger units which require less micro.

This doesn't come for free, you do have to play more conservatively and think outside the box ("moving along side lanes" is how you get space for free, which we are quite profligate about sacrificing when we retreat), but it's very possible.

lolwhat, replicated w/Linux and Chrome just now.

I certainly sympathize, but I'm not sure what this has to do with land tax. If cities can't efficiently provide infra to certain building patterns, they should either reduce their guarantees ("You can build there, but you'll have to lay down wire yourself"), or prohibit building differently. Both seem compatible with an LVT.

Economically advantageous sprawl, though---or it would have to be, to meet the owner's goals of not being a financial burden.

I think the idea is that in that situation the owner sells, though.

They could recognize that joining NATO is a ultimately the choice of the states that choose join NATO, and respect that. It is that simple.

Empirically, it's not!

Eh...you won't find a nicer guy than Charles Murray, or less of a Stormfront nazi than Curtis Yarvin, but both are basically unmentionable. In both cases no one objects to their presentation, but to their (alleged) material.

I'm sorry, I just don't buy it.

"Engineer" sounds like kind of a moving target. The only "real" engineers design...engines. So it's worth asking what the actual value is of "engineering."

In my mind, there are two: making stuff, and tolerances.

Making stuff is magic. Most people reading this can sit down at a computer and formalize an idea such that the computer can do it. Most people can't do this. It is valuable for the same reason the ability to design a car or escalator or rocketship is valuable.

Tolerances is all about providing certain guarantees about the stuff you make. I think most developers could hit those guarantees...if they were ever verbalized. What, you want me to decrease memory usage by 50%? Actually, I probably can do it. At the very least, I can point you some academic papers as to why it's impossible.

But nobody has ever asked me to do that, ever (except in interview questions). I suspect my experience is common among developers.

So, from a "making-stuff" perspective, yeah, we're engineers. From a "tolerances" perspective, most of us aren't, but wouldn't have much trouble becoming them. It's just that no one actually wants that.

A world governed by patch notes. Hoo boy.

Out of curiosity, do you believe the NYTimes should have the right to censor its own comments section?

No, no I don't, not as a "comments section," anyway.

To an extent, NYT is riding on users' past experiences with uncensored comment sections in other contexts. It's the violation of expectations (both of commenters and readers) that grinds.

Were NYT to put up a disclaimer to the effect that "This is our damn site and we'll delete whatever we want," I think they'd actually get some respect for it. The ire comes because they want it both ways---they want the engagement metrics, without the freedom that engagement requires.

What's needed is a rule of law, such that users can predict beforehand what the outcome of an action will be.

Hmm, I will have to keep this in mind.

It's exactly the kind of thing that should be on HN.

It's not that Tucker's an oracle. It's that sometime in the last 30 years the tenets of the journalistic priesthood have changed. In the past the (aspirational) goal was to provide the public with the facts; now it's to provide the (interpreted) Truth.

Biased media is nothing new. It just used to be biased in different, opposing directions. What's new is that journalists finally found something they could all agree on: pro-journalism!

It feels insanely presumptuous to hear this stuff.

Democracy? Since when are we a democracy? Oh, because it's a popular term used in media and vernacular? So are Fruit Loops, who cares?

Let me try an alternate framing: democracy is a brand, a feel-good term for political rhetoric. This is what democracy looks like: https://media2.s-nbcnews.com/j/msnbc/Components/ArtAndPhoto-...

What is actually (though unpopularly) valuable in our society is not democracy, but the Bill of Rights, high trust, and rule of law. Democracy gets the applause, but they do the heavy lifting.

By all means, cover elections, blow the whistle on crap. But if you're scratching your head wondering why the media's popularity is at an all-time low, maybe it's because there's this onanistic self-regard that places the media above the citizen.

Tucker Carlson just broke the record for most-watched month of any cable news show ever. If that offends you as a journalist, it's probably time for some introspection.

No one cares if you enjoy programming or computers as long as you act relatively 'normal'. It's not that nerds care about intelligence more than popularity (trust me most aren't) it's just that the nerds have already lost the popularity race by being socially awkward individuals that can't hold a conversation about any topics other than very specific subjects to save their life.

This passage makes me think you missed the points of the essay.

PG isn't saying "people hate people who enjoy computers and want to shove them into lockers." Rather, he's saying that status competition in middle/high school is a brutal Darwinian struggle, and those who have anything stopping them from optimizing solely for status, will lose the race.

Your comment about awkwardness/inability to hold a conversation doesn't strike true either. Rather, I felt like no one else could hold a conversation. Time has born this out; many of my nerd friends have gone on to people/verbal professions, and I'm one of the more gregarious developers you'll meet. I played a lot of sports and so had substantial intercourse with my school's popular crowd---I would not list "conversation" as one of their strengths.

Now, one caveat here: The idea that "nerds are just awkward weirdos" isn't entirely without base. I think there are two types of people who get labeled as "weird" --- actually-messed-up people, and also people who are interested in something out-of-context. The trouble with school is that, because your actions don't affect the world, it's impossible to distinguish between the two---like how you couldn't tell Einstein from the Time Cube guy (https://timecube.2enp.com/) if you couldn't do experiments.

I successfully turned my mom from someone who often needed computer help, into someone who was pretty self-sufficient, when I told her that "The solution to any technology problem will only have two ingredients: Google and pain. If you have access to the first, you can solve anything provided you're willing to endure enough of the second."

It's a work in progress. :)