thetechimist

I honestly wish HackerNews would just eliminate certain sources of links. Medium and YouTube would be a great start.

Or at least make it that if someone on HN doesn’t have a karma score of 100 or something, then they can’t submit links from those two sites and a handful of others. There has to be a cutoff that aligns with some measure of common sense. Or maybe the operators of HN are just thrilled to get as much UGC as possible, even if they are crappy links that detract from otherwise healthy use of the site.

I don’t click on any article posted at Medium no matter how “important” it might seem.

FWIW, the reference to BaseCamp being worth $100 billion is from a 2015 post by Friedman mocking the whole “valuation” concept by allowing a few people to invest a $1 in Basecamp at some micro percentage of shares.

It is here: https://m.signalvnoise.com/press-release-basecamp-valuation-...

Hopefully no one would actually scan that headline and believe it without reading it. That would be rather ignorant of money. Basecamp is a tiny company and only a few companies in the world are “worth” $100 billion.

The fun of Medium and YouTube. Links to Twitter and Reddit ought to be excluded too. If we wanted to follow the fluff on those services, we can sign up there and do so. HN ought to be reserved for independent blogs, tech announcements, company dev blogs, funding and innovation news from reliable sources, and random oddball stuff.

The first problem on LinkedIn is that many people have to be on it to earn a living or show their team spirit for work. If we could all find employment and network without LinkedIn better than with it, 90% of us would.

So when someone is hitting on someone using LinkedIn, that person is the societal equivalent of the jerk who hits on a waitress at her job. She has no choice but to be nice to you and tolerate your “smooth” lines because she’s a prisoner. She can’t leave easily and the jerk might be an important customer of the business. Even if the jerk is being coy about it (likely for the purposes of plausible deniability later), it’s incredibly awkward and disrespectful to the waitress.

This is no different than a female client flirting with a male financial advisor putting him in the awkward position as well.

Both are jerks. And while these are common stereotypical situations, there exist with the roles reversed too. Ask any male bartender. It’s awful and a real impediment to security in their relationship when every other night, some lady implies she’s available to him.

The second and bigger problem with LinkedIn are all the idiots who think it’s an extension of their social media. They pontificate on political events, give condescending lessons on life, share way too much about their personal life (nobody cares about your daily wins), and use #hashtags so #frequently that is #impossible to #read their #posts, not that they worth reading anyway.

It seems no matter what you do to purge yourself of these fools in your “professional network”, you’ve always got a few saps that end up liking their posts and so that Instagram-like garbage shows up anyway. You have to constantly tell LinkedIn you’re not interested, or just keep your network to a low high-quality number of people that are too busy working to play with their phones.

When I get a connection request, even if it looks like a promising industry connection, I check their activity history. If they’re on LinkedIn liking and posting things every week, then it’s a no go. You’d better be worth a cool $100 million for me to make an exception.

My feed is my feed. I follow companies to keep track of my industry. If you are cluttering that up with your sappy posts, even if I agree with you, you’re gone.

Unless you’re my boss, in which case, my hatred runs deep. I can’t even unfollow you because you are the kind of LinkedIn Loser who checks for mismatches on connections verses followers. So yes, much deep hatred.

As previously mentioned, the library. The argument that one has to wait sometimes is superfluous. Anyone saying such a thing isn’t a regular library user.

Whatever is popular for the moment is just that: popular for the moment. It will pass. Almost never does a book need to be read the year it comes out. I mean, after all, if you value books, you value in-depth reading that provides perspective. As an example, when “Thinking Fast and Slow” first came out, getting it at even larger central branches was tough. Fast forward a few years and now every library has a few copies just sitting there. If one worries that if they don’t get it while it’s hot that it might be gone forever, then trust me, it probably wasn’t worth your time. The quality good books (both fiction and non-fiction) stay in the library system decade after decade.

If you aren’t familiar with intra-library loans, learn how they work. Super easy and you can get the books that are older, but not as heavily stocked, quite easily.

On tech books, get access to your nearest university, ideally a tech university library. Most will get you a card with certain conditions - and nearly all will let you visit and read forever with no questions if you’re professional about it. There are also private libraries (sadly rare) and some have good tech collections. Tech gets old and useless quick which is why most public libraries don’t stock stuff like O’Reilly. Which may be helpful to think about the value of spending one’s time reading something that will be DOA in 5 years or less. But if you are committed to a particular tech track or need for work, buy the book. That’s the cost of professional improvement. Don’t try to millennial your way around that. If you use ILL though, you can usually still borrow tech classics like K&R.

The modernist clamor for “the new” is dumbing down recent generations. Maybe what people really need to do is to read the existing books in the stacks so they can stop wasting time and money chasing the latest hip and trendy best seller that will supposedly cure all our ills.

Hard to see how apps like this exist. The author seems to enjoy writing about his app as much as creating technology that exists already, and has for decades.

For $7/mo, you can have MS Office. You get a real Word Processor for all possible writing that happens in the real world where proper want to collaborate on business documents, or use Focus Mode for distraction-free creative writing. IA makes a big deal about their grammar checking but so what? Other word processors have had it for years and MS’s is genuinely impressive when you learn how to set it for your needs. Plus for the same price, you get the workhorse beast Excel, a business email and calendaring client (Outlook), the #1 presentation tool (PowerPoint), and a highly functional note-taking tool (OneNote).

I’m not trying to push Microsoft’s product line. There are others like Corel, or Apple’s iWork suite.

I just don’t understand the plethora of “distraction-free” editors, or all the fuss about code editors. Just use VS Code, JetBrain, Atom, or what have you. But as we speak, people are sweating to create yet more code editors which will have twice the bugs and half the functionality of the existing ones.

The world of writing tools is even worse. Markdown is a bit of a joke in the real world. If I see one more article about how someone wrote a book or dissertation using markdown, python, pandoc, makefile, and git... sigh! The reason they write those blog posts is because no one would believe anyone would go through the hassle of avoiding Microsoft Word to that extreme. It’s one thing to be a bit “retro” and keep using WordStar or WordPerfect, but those are at least real word processors.

Whatever the intent of Goodreads initially, once Amazon bought it, it became a subtle funnel to drive sales of books, ideally through Amazon. While there are options there for libraries and many other booksellers, no one should believe for a minute that Bezos is interested in helping Goodreads be a contemplative site that fosters multiple readings of a small number of deeper reads.

The reviews can be helpful, but “tracking” ones books (or simple exercise, etc) is just a Silicon Valley middleman insertion into our otherwise simple lives so they can profit... somehow.

Many people at struggle to read books, probably because of smartphones and “internet reading”, but the reality is that this article is spot-on about our modern curse of information overload which gets combined with anxiety. We evolved the internet from our prior librarian mentality.

And while it’s perfectly fine to have libraries, book stores, catalogues of information, and encyclopedias, this article is correct that our personal lives could be improved by removing our click-happy ways from not only our web surfing habits, but from some of our book reading habits.

Personally, being an avid reader, I found it a relief to delete my Goodreads account some time ago. I also got rid of a number of books on hand, dwindling down to only 12, not counting some reference books.

I initially exported my “to read” Goodreads shelf into a spreadsheet, but eventually deleted it (and the 300+ books I had on the list). Not because it was unlikely I would ever read through them all, but because I also had come to some similar conclusions as the author of this article.

A forum is not anything like social media. People think that any internet site where UGC is posible is social media? Not.

HN, for instance, is not based on finding friends, creating glamorous profiles, posting daily and weekly updates about one’s life, or reading other’s posts. It has no images, hashtags, auto playing videos, or your cousin and high school sweetheart arguing in the comments of your post about your luncheon at the Hilton if you should be even at the Hilton because of your or their political views.

No, HN is just a topical forum. The only shadow of social media on it is when people post links to YouTube, which I don’t get or understand why it’s allowed. Why not post all the links to YouTube every day? If O wanted to watch videos about Perl, I’d go to YouTube.

It seems to me that the whole threat of being doxxed relies on two things: (1) that you’ve done something in one sphere of life that would be reprehensible (and maybe actionable) to another sphere of life, and (2) that the unholy Russian Twitter not mob can influence that other sphere of life.

It may not be possible to have different spheres of life cohabitate peacefully, especially if the doxxing involves shining light on old character flaws you’ve since remedied, but thanks to the digital world we live in, can be easily surfaced. I’d say “get off social media forever” to at least prevent your self 20 years in the future having this same worry about whatever it is you are innocently sharing this month, but that always seems to draw a gasp from people who apparently can’t imagine life without the internet.

Seems to me that everyone who has ever been doxxed is doing “something” that draws attention to them. That doesn’t make it right, but I haven’t heard of doxxing of any quiet Amish families, or guys building cabins in the woods minding their own business.

It’s usually some loudmouth on some open source software forum, or some politician’s operative, or someone being a potential whistleblower.

What you are asking is, in essence, how can I keep from getting punched in the mouth? It’s not too difficult, if you think about it. Someone randomly punching you in the mouth “for no reason” is about as statistically probable as being struck my lightning twice in the same week.

Some people attack punches more than others. I’m not saying it’s right, or even deserved. Just that there are life choices that can increase the odds.

Maybe what you’re really asking is how can I avoid the risks of some life choices I am making or want to make?

All the advice here will only partially mitigate the risk. The only real way to eliminate it would be to make different choices to stop unwanted attraction.

I somewhat laughed at all the “privacy” tips here. My friend, if you tick off the wrong person, they will find you or hire someone good to do it for them. And if doxxing is their chosen revenge, you can’t choose to then decide to be a quiet mild-mannered ordinary citizen when you already opened your mouth and drew attention to yourself.

I’m sure everyone who flips someone off across the street wishes the same when they see the scrawny guy reach into his jacket and pull out a gun.

Unrelated to this article about ‘dark’ restaurant bulk delivery, I often think that wouldn’t my neighborhoods be oh-so-much quieter and less smoggy if UPS, FedEx, and USPS only delivered there for residential deliveries X number of days per week?

If someone really needs it ASAP, too bad. Delivery schedules should be set in stone or else the party in question can go to a pickup center or an Amazon locker, etc.

What’s really funny to me is all these people desperately loving their Prime memberships and then just letting their boxes pile up on their porches or inside their houses unopened.

No amount of money for a Prime membership should require delivery vans to swarm a neighborhood every day of the week. You get your boxes on M/W/F or T/Th/Sa depending on the delivery company.

Cities like London are leading the way on reducing unnecessary traffic in their inner circles, but what about our quiet neighborhoods? We need a break. It’s turning into a commercial district in some neighborhoods because of the insanity of daily (sometimes multiple times per day) deliveries.

Same with the USPS. If it’s so desperate for cash, switch everyone to 3x per week for residential. I can’t think of a package or piece of mail I’ve ever received that couldn’t have waited until the next day. Quite honestly, it would be reclaimed time in my week not to have to “check” my residential mailbox 6x/week. Yes, I often forget or decide not to, but I’m lucky I don’t have mail thieves poking into boxes in my area. Not everyone has the luxury to ignore their residential mail.

I don’t know how these things wind up on Hacker News, but I oddly appreciate the break from things like “Use Vim to wash your clothes”.

1. There are websites to foster fears of warmongering (or to assure oneself that Red Dawn can never happen) such as Global Firepower. Here is the USA vs China. When I’m feeling unpatriotic, it can be fun to play with this website and imagine the torment we could cause our enemies, despite us not being able to regulate ride-sharing companies.

2. I’m not sure why military expenditures should matter so starkly. If I buy a 10 laser cannons for $1 million, and you spend $50 million on 5 million rifles, I might still beat you with my Stormtrooper weapon. Point is, it matters more on what you’re buying and building - and how you manage projects - than raw costs.

3. This article is not really new. The NY Times made a similar clickbait headline a few years back. The Brookings Institute rebutted it then.

4. The IQ arguments are specious. If IQ won wars, we wouldn’t have any. Also, I’ll take Patton, Lincoln, and Washington over their adversaries of the time, despite their adversaries being noted for their intellect. Lastly, what’s IQ got to do with anything in regards to China, a country that doesn’t reward innovative free enterprise. Their best and brightest aren’t at liberty to try their hand in the marketplace of ideas, but are forced to build what the Party says must be built. And those are just the ones that get found out. I imagine the truly bright minds of China stay in academia, escape, or humbly work the rice fields and keep their head down. I would. Why risk notoriety?

1. https://www.globalfirepower.com/countries-comparison-detail....

2. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2018/09/10/w...