HN user

rdiddly

7,877 karma

decaying organic matter that thinks it's a special unique snowflake

Posts2
Comments2,719
View on HN

I suspect I'm similar to many users, in that I came to Stack Overflow near the peak, and used it as basically a specialized search engine, without ever asking or answering a question. (I assume this is possible only if you use a widespread stack.) When something better came along, I just moved on. I hadn't directly experienced a sense of community, so I experienced (for example) bureaucratically-closed questions more as a hassle (search again) than as a betrayal.

So probably the thing you need to start practicing and learning is how to deal with anxiety. Conveniently those sessions can fit right into the time slots you're currently spending procrastinating because of selfsame anxiety. See how long you can sit with it and reassure yourself, before reaching for the phone. Once that's been tamed a bit, I think the ability to enjoy doing something poorly will start to appear naturally as a by-product. Or, you can force the issue a bit by adopting a "punk" ethos: "I suck at this, but fuck you, I'm doing it anyway." And there's your example of doing things in a slacky YOLO way too: listen to early punk rock. They did a pretty good job of channeling their anxiety outward into creativity and energy. And there's a "punk" version of almost anything you can think of. Keep it simple, be a beginner, maybe even mock the experts - some of them need it. Good luck.

The only thing worse than a long-winded explanation that finally gets around to the topic you're interested in (in his case an explanation of SOLID) is a long-winded explanation that never gets around to it (in my case a refutation of SOLID).

Tempted to hate this guy but he's probably like, 19? Just starting to learn how humans work but still not aware he is one. Ahh the world, full of humans (always with the pronoun "they" and not "we"), full of ego and totally resistant to being wrong, rejecting my noble and completely egoless resistance to being wrong. As well as my compulsive need to best them in an argument, er I mean nobly rescue them from their ignorance! But sadly they will all have to live their lives first-hand without my help, developing reasons for thinking about certain things in certain ways, as if completely unaware that I was finally born and came to save them from all that!

I'm not caring so much about the Cedrus genus, as the dilution of the word through unimaginative overuse and over-application. But to the extent that it still means anything at all, I would say it means an aromatic evergreen, since those are the two traits that seem to unite all the various trees colloquially referred to as cedars.

"Its retirement signals an end to an era of American culture—and ambition."

What'd, fuckin' Putin ghost-write this?

The nostalgia is fine, but calling it "...perhaps the pinnacle of American engineering excellence," well, to paraphrase The Dude: "For you, maybe."[0] My engineering excellence kicks fucking ass, and I still have those values, and I'm an American.

Maybe those who aspire to engineering excellence should've gone to actual engineering school instead of majoring in literature.

[0] Perhaps you thought I was going to choose "That's just, like, your opinion man."

Glad I'm able to amaze you.

I can't speak for other cheapskates, but I personally think it's more that YouTube is still so utterly inessential that if ads ever start managing to get past my ad blockers, I'll simply not watch.

This article is just a rehash or summary. Check out one of the sources it links to (since the other is broken) for details on the technique: https://mymodernmet.com/kitayama-cedar-daisugi/

The strength & flexibility I would guess are attributable to the lack of knots and the straightness of the grain.

One thing both writers keep doing that's annoying is calling it a cedar. The tree is cryptomeria japonica, known as sugi, which in English is sometimes known by various misnomers such as "Japanese cedar" and "Japanese redwood," both of which should be taken as more poetic than scientific.

How many words before you realized it was a piece of shit though? For me it was "Because I am a Sci-Fi nerd." Yet I kept reading, because I am a fucking fool, and now I'm pissed that I spent time on it.

I honestly could not follow any discernible point or thrust to this incoherent, disorganized, self-indulgent piece-of-shit post. He didn't even successfully establish or explain the titular Onlyfans analogy. I know more about his fucking taste for sci fi than I do about the ostensible subject matter. I know more about his physical composition (answer: he is made of metal. He was forged in the fires of science. O glorious creation, emerging complete and perfect from the furnace!) than I do about the subject matter.

Anyone care to explain to me why any of them even considered it? What's the specific upside from the perspective of an index provider? Seems to me like all it does when you bend the rules is erode trust, so whatever the upside is, it must be pretty significant since it comes at such a high cost to the credibility and trust placed in the applicable index and the market itself.

The key there is "whole market." This is still a tiny sliver of the whole market and most people's exposure to it is minimal. Still a wealth extraction move ultimately, but like many other such moves, the few pull just a little from each of the many. Nobody individually goes broke, but the whole class gets slightly poorer. It takes a village to raise a billionaire!

All true, but how do you distinguish human-written from AI-written or a hybrid? They all have an author's name attached. You would have to limit your reading to people you know personally. (Which isn't a terrible idea actually.) Otherwise it's a judgment call, which inevitably comes down to a question of writing quality. "This has to be AI because it's so terrible." But humans are perfectly capable of writing terribly (that is in fact where the LLM learned it) and LLMs can even write well occasionally, including with human intervention. So I decided that if I'm using quality as a proxy to guess at authorship, why not just forget authorship and make quality primary. Basically since authorship is unknowable I'm declaring it irrelevant. It's not ideal but these are the times we're living in.

"Violence" is a word normally used when the victim is sentient, but I'll go along with it:

Violence against inanimate objects is morally neutral. Violence against instruments of violence is self-defense. Violence against oppression is how the USA was founded.

A corporation has unfair political advantages including a deep purse, an unlimited lifespan, and more recently all the rights of personhood. The only advantage the people have is their numbers, and yeah numbers of votes would be great, I agree, but when votes are ignored, or never solicited in the first place, it often comes down to numbers of pitchforks, as it were.

You're being more literal than I was. My point was that "a debt" is a broader concept than the GP comment acknowledges. A debt is incurred any time you propose or agree to buy something. And legal tender is the way you settle it.