klenwell

The other thing I recall tying those two periods together was enthusiasts saying, in the face of an obvious bubble, "Well, things are different this time."

My glib summation of those two events:

- Dotcom boom deregulated (in the social and technological sense as much as the legal) investing (e.g. the rise of day-trading).

- 2000s housing bubble (pre-GFC) deregulated home-buying (subprime adjustable-rate mortgages).

Perhaps our parting assessment of the ZIRP era will be it cut to the chase and deregulated gambling.

I've been saying this for years now, because I first noticed the differential in fertility rates as a child in the 90s.

You and The Onion both:

https://theonion.com/study-uneducated-outbreeding-intelligen...

I think my favorite Simpsons gag is the episode where Lisa enlists a scientist (voiced by Stephen Jay Gould) to run tests to debunk some angel bones that were found at a construction site.

In the middle of the episode, the scientist bicycles up to report, dramatically, that the tests "were inconclusive".

In the end, it's revealed that the bones were a fraud concocted by some mall developers to promote their new mall.

After this is revealed, Lisa asks the scientist about the tests. He shrugs:

"I'm not going to lie to you, Lisa. I never ran the tests."

It's funny on a few levels but what I find most amusing is that his incentive is left a mystery.

I think the killer app will be online meetings. Online socializing really.

I work fully remote and Zoom/Meet works fine for meetings. But I kinda dread things like team happy hour and find you have to keep them structured like a meeting to work with group video calls.

Visuals aren't even the key factor here. It's audio. I find the obstacle to casual socializing is not being able to directionally focus audio so overlapping conversations are possible.

Everyone agrees that FTX paid $100's of millions to celebrity endorsers and arena naming deals.

Don't forget the fortune cookies. I know that I and some others on HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33599123) never will.

I agree. It is an amazing, quasi-anachronistic novel. Speaking of Utopia, Melville offers his own vision of it in Chapter 94, A Squeeze of the Hand:

Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally; as much as to say,—Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humor or envy! Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness.

Would that I could keep squeezing that sperm for ever! For now, since by many prolonged, repeated experiences, I have perceived that in all cases man must eventually lower, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable felicity; not placing it anywhere in the intellect or the fancy; but in the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fireside, the country; now that I have perceived all this, I am ready to squeeze case eternally. In thoughts of the visions of the night, I saw long rows of angels in paradise, each with his hands in a jar of spermaceti.

It's an odd fish.

E.O. Wilson does a wonderful job in the opening of his book Consilience illustrating the philosophical tension between the Realists (Linnaeans) and Nominalists (Darwinists) that the New Yorker reviewer zeroes in on:

My intellectual world was framed by Linnaeus, the eighteenth-century Swedish naturalist who invented modern biological classification. The Linnaean system is deceptively easy. You start by separating specimens of plants and animals into species. Then you sort species resembling one another into groups, the genera. Examples of such groups are all the crows and all the oaks. Next you label each species with a two-part Latinized name, such as Corvus ossifragus for the fish crow, where Corvus stands for the genus--all the species of crows--and ossifragus for the fish crow in particular. Then on to higher classification, where similar genera are grouped into families, families into orders, and so on up to phyla and finally, at the very summit, the six kingdoms--plants, animals, fungi, protists, monerans, and archaea. It is like the army: men (plus women, nowadays) into squads, squads into platoons, platoons into companies, and in the final aggregate, the armed services headed by the joint chiefs of staff. It is, in other words, a conceptual world made for the mind of an eighteen-year-old.

I had reached the level of the Carolus Linnaeus of 1735 or, more accurately (since at that time I knew little of the Swedish master), the Roger Tory Peterson of 1934, when the great naturalist published the first edition of A Field Guide to the Birds. My Linnaean period was nonetheless a good start for a scientific career. The first step to wisdom, as the Chinese say, is getting things by their right names.

Then I discovered evolution. Suddenly--that is not too strong a word--I saw the world in a wholly new way. This epiphany I owed to my mentor Ralph Chermock, an intense, chain-smoking young assistant professor newly arrived in the provinces with a Ph.D. in entomology from Cornell University. After listening to me natter for a while about my lofty goal of classifying all the ants of Alabama, he handed me a copy of Ernst Mayr's 1942 Systematics and the Origin of Species. Read it, he said, if you want to become a real biologist.

I take it you didn't sniff any deeper. From the text:

Gunnar Broberg’s biography dutifully accompanies Linnaeus every step of the way, trekking through his life for four-hundred-plus pages. These are not, unfortunately, a pleasure to read... The main problem with “The Man Who Loved Nature,” though, is not all the things in it we don’t need to know but all the things we need to know that aren’t in it.

It's a book review.

Ask and ye shall receive:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5-over-1

See a lot of these in my area (Southern California). I'm ok with them. Probably need more.

Good example here: https://archive.org/details/thequestfortherest_flash

It works! It had been effectively defunct for years:

https://amanita-design.net/thequestfortherest/

I have a lot of sympathy for skeptics but this is the first thing that comes to mind the idea of Skepticism as a movement comes up:

A few years ago, he told me, he went to a skeptics’ conference in La Coruña, Spain. He was walking down some stairs one afternoon, not long after investigating the statue of a local saint, which was said to protect those who embrace it, when his left leg suddenly crumpled beneath him. “It wasn’t like I fell and broke my leg,” he said. “It was more like I broke my leg and fell.” The other skeptics gathered around as he writhed in agony. When he told them, between gasps, that he thought he had broken his leg, they were dubious. “You know, that might just be a sprain,” one of them suggested. Another told him to try wiggling his toes. It wasn’t until Nickell lifted his leg, revealing that it was bent at a grotesque angle to his foot, that they believed him.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/12/23/waiting-for-gh...

Christ. I realize you're probably being facetious. But de-extincting species to consign them to industrial food production (or some other industrial extraction process) seems like one of the more plausible business models. That's grim.

This is legendary Simpsons writer John Swartzwelder's technique, too:

Since writing is very hard and rewriting is comparatively easy and rather fun, I always write my scripts all the way through as fast as I can, the first day, if possible, putting in crap jokes and pattern dialogue—“Homer, I don’t want you to do that.” “Then I won’t do it.” Then the next day, when I get up, the script’s been written. It’s lousy, but it’s a script. The hard part is done. It’s like a crappy little elf has snuck into my office and badly done all my work for me, and then left with a tip of his crappy hat. All I have to do from that point on is fix it. So I’ve taken a very hard job, writing, and turned it into an easy one, rewriting, overnight. I advise all writers to do their scripts and other writing this way. And be sure to send me a small royalty every time you do it.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/j...

Experienced this myself trying to get it to write a poem with an unusual rhyme scheme. ChatGPT's response when I tried to explicitly spell it out (a few different ways):

Yes, you are correct. The statement I made is not accurate. The specified rhyme scheme was AABA BBAB AABA BBAB, which means that each stanza should have the rhyme scheme AABA BBAB, with the first and second lines rhyming with each other, and the third and fourth lines rhyming with each other.

That said, I wouldn't be surprised if the next version was able to grok this.

Glad you mentioned this. Not horror, comedy!

Listen, you! I was born here. I raised a cloud of children here. My ancestors came over here on the sandwich.

One of my favorite episodes.

Good example of that here:

https://www.cnn.com/2015/03/06/us/ferguson-missouri-racism-t...

So began an odyssey with Ferguson police, municipal court and city hall that left her with $1,200 in fines that to this day she still doesn’t fully understand. She paid the sum because endless court hearings about the car wore her down.

“I don’t have a lawyer. I’m not a lawyer. It’s me going up against the city of Ferguson when the attorneys won’t help,” Hoskin said this week.

From a NPR story:

Earlier this year, in the series Guilty and Charged, NPR's investigations unit found that the practices in Ferguson are common across the country. The series reported that nationwide, the costs of the justice system are billed increasingly to defendants and offenders, and that this creates harsher treatment of the poor. Because people with money can pay their hundreds or thousands of dollars in fines and fees right away, they are usually done with the court system.

https://www.npr.org/2014/08/25/343143937/in-ferguson-court-f...

It's one of things that boiled over with a lot of the civil rights protests.

Have you tried this game?

https://playheyrobot.com/rules

Did anyone else see the FTX fortune cookies?

https://mobile.twitter.com/klenwell/status/15921781646752522...

I detest the Meta metaverse as much as the next Hacker News user. But there is one use case where I could see it luring me in. Virtual meetings. Really virtual social events or happy hours. Professional ones mainly with my remote distributed team. This would be the killer app in my view.

The key to me it seems would be in the audio. Like if I turn to face someone, the audio adjusts so everything else in virtual room get quieter (but still audible). I can have a conversation with the person I'm facing. Multiple conversations can go on at once. Just like in a real room!

Anybody know if this is something that current state of the metaverse supports? Is this something being actively researched and developed?

I actually do this more effectively working from home with my wife. For people who like the aesthetics and atmosphere of an office for some reason, I think a coworking space would as productive or moreso than the company office. (Is this Body Doubling website coworking industry guerrilla marketing?)

I was dragged back into the office for a couple months in 2021. I was stupefied by how pointless it all was. From the time and resources wasted driving to and fro to the office every day to the meetings which were still largely done online (since we were a distributed team.)

I had to go 5 days a week. The company bled people. Most the people who were sticking around as I was leaving confided to me that they weren't happy about it. The company struggled to hire new workers. That's probably all abated to some extent since then. With a flexible hybrid schedule, I think they could have found a sweet spot.

On this topic, I find this article fascinating:

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-23758087

But life in New Jersey was not working out for Yarima. It wasn't the weather, food or modern technology but the absence of close human relations. The Yanomami day begins and ends in the shapono, open to relatives, friends, neighbours and enemies. But Yarima's day in the US began and ended in a closed box, cut off from society.

I tried to set up an online account with Vanguard recently. At the end of the signup flow, I got an error saying I had to phone it. It was a weekend so I tried a couple days later during business hours just to be sure and because I loathe dealing with human beings for stuff that should be able to be handled by a website. Same result.

So I phoned in, spent a half-hour with a human being. He was audibly cursing as he tried to get me set up. At one point, after I had given him my name and other PII, he addressed by a different first name then quickly corrected himself.

At the end, he said, "Ok, now you'll get an email to finish setting up your account." Email arrived and it was addressed to someone with a different name. I recognized the first name as the same name the agent had mistakenly used with me.

Suffice to say, I did not finish setting up my account and decided to stick with Fidelity.

They find, time and time again, in all sorts of fields, that extremely parsimonious models like equal-weighted linear regression of one or two predictors outperform expert judgment.

I came across this in Thinking Fast and Slow. Kahneman was a big fan of Meehl and restates the point:

The important conclusion from this research is that an algorithm that is constructed on the back of an envelope is often good enough to compete with an optimally weighted formula, and certainly good enough to outdo expert judgment.

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/9574537-the-important-concl...

I too agree with the premise of this article. On this topic of expert judgment vs data, however, I found the counterpoint in this HN comment thought-provoking enough to bookmark and refer back to now and again:

I started at MS during Vista and I've been involved (sometimes tangentially) with Windows ever since. This is all my opinion, but It's been very interesting seeing the decision making process change over time.

If I had to summarize the change, I'd say that it's evolved from an expertise-based system to a data based system. The reason why eight people were present at every planning meeting is because their expert opinion was the primary tool used in decision making. In addition to poor decisions, this had two very negative outcomes:

1) reputation was fiercely fought for. Individuals feared that if they were ever incorrect, the damage to their reputation would limit their ability to impact future decisions and eventually lead to career death. Whether this actually happened or not is irrelevant; the fear itself caused overt caution and consensus seeking.

2) In the absence of data, an eloquent negotiator is often able to obtain their desired outcome, no matter how sub-optimal that outcome might be.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15174737#15176957

Even more provocative, it ends up being a (qualified, as I read it) defense of telemetry.

Excellent advice. This is like the golden rule of dealing with people. Well, the other golden rule. The professional one, I guess you could call it. Be explicit, polite but firm.

It works well for both managing people or doing customer support. It doesn't work for everyone. But as you note, it works in the vast majority of cases.

If you've read the Ask a Manager column, you'll recognize it as a core principle there. And if you've ever watched The Dog Whisperer, you quickly discover it works for dogs, too. (You just have to learn a few tricks for communicating with them.)

This American Life also did a pretty interesting story on his origins:

Reporter Jon Ronson travels to Jones' hometown in Texas, to investigate the story Jones tells about himself, and how he became who he is.

https://www.thisamericanlife.org/670/beware-the-jabberwock/a...

I feel like this thread's title is editorialized (and click-bait). It got me. To be fair, maybe it hit a character limit.

The actual title:

Children and adults should avoid consuming animal products to reduce risk for chronic disease: NO

You mean switching to a diet of twinkies won't reduce my risk of chronic disease?

Reminds me of this story from This American Life that they replayed recently about a retired physicist diagnosed with Alzheimer's who loses the ability to read a clock:

https://www.thisamericanlife.org/583/itll-make-sense-when-yo...

What is interesting is he is able to analyze why he has difficulty reading a clock. (As he explains, it's a surprisingly difficult problem.)

Fascinating and a bit heartbreaking. I'm happy to hear you're coping and recovering. Best of luck!

I used to bring this question with me to interviews in my back pocket, so to speak:

Two people, Alice and Bob, are each flipping a coin repeatedly. Alice will stop when she flips two heads in a row (HH). Bob will stop when he flips a head followed immediately by a tail (HT).

Who will flip the coin more times on average: Alice, Bob, or is there no difference?

I had come across it on Metafilter a few years ago:

https://www.metafilter.com/147228/You-blew-it-and-you-blew-i...

I figured if I ever got a whiteboard or coding problem where I was completely lost, I might try saying something like, "I have no idea how to solve this. But here's a fun problem I came across recently that we could work on together."

There were a couple times where I got a question I couldn't solve. But I never had the courage to pull out my backup problem.

I use the API to send myself a daily email with a combination of random and anniversary bookmarks:

https://github.com/klenwell/pinprick

I find it a good way to keep in touch with past bookmarks and do some light maintenance.

My "speedrun":

  var simulateClick = function (elem) {
   // Create our event (with options)
   var evt = new MouseEvent('click', {
    bubbles: true,
    cancelable: true,
    view: window
   });

   // If cancelled, don't dispatch our event
   var canceled = !elem.dispatchEvent(evt);
  };

  var run = () => {    
    var el = document.querySelector('input[type=checkbox]:not(:checked)')
    simulateClick(el)
  }
                     
  setInterval(run, 100)