HN user
Aussie based in the UK
Please define safe? The stabbings and acid attacks suggest otherwise
Please define functioning police force? The fact the police had to remember that turning up to burglaries is a good thing suggests otherwise
Please define takes care of sick people? The fact that ambulance response times were so slow they couldn't save cardiac arrests suggests otherwise
No offence but all those assertions sound like the UK 20+ years ago, not the one of today...
10 years ago the entry level SWE salary for FANG was about 160k USD.
Today, about 100K GBP or EUR are still "senior" SWE salaries at a lot of non-FANG tech companies around UK and Europe.
In that time, the currencies have also cratered against the USD.
The question is, which is it? Do engineers generate so much value that they should earn hundreds of thousands or are US engineers overpaid.
Given that most the FANGs generate over 1.5M per employee I'm inclined towards the former. Europe/UK is just poor. Our markets are smaller, our dreams are smaller and we settle for lower salaries while around us everything else gets more expensive, land healthcare education and energy.
Yes - writing PHP in 2024 is a crime that we should hold PH accountable for.
I got shutdown on twitter on this subject once - but I maintain can crime stats go down while crime goes up? As crime rates go up (and police get flooded) do people stop reporting all but the most serious of crimes?
I live on a street that sees almost daily crime (smash and grabs from car windows, bike theft, delivery theft). The police usually don't even bother coming to check things out because they're so routine and the police are so busy. So it does feel a bit useless reporting them to the police, and eventually you become a bit numb to it all as crime becomes normalized.
Can that then explain why crime perception can be high while crime reports come down?
off topic, but if I view using incognito then just click YES or REJECT ALL->confirm is that a way to escape this madness? Or should I just nope out of pages like this, seems like the content was pointless anyway
What does ignoring babies when they cry have to do with them growing up to be terrified adults?
I am personally atheist/apathetic. The closest thing you could get me to profess a religious fervour to is exercise (or martial arts) and mother nature. That said, I am a huge proponent of religion and can see how it is so important to people like my mother.
She doesn't preach or judge but I can see how faith anchors her. It gives her answers and an unyielding optimism in the face of difficulty, and I can tell you as someone who has clawed her way through a poverty most people in this world will only ever read about, she has known what difficulty can be. Faith keeps her positive and kind and generous. She finds it in herself to let go of anger and to forgive thanks to her belief in God.
So you're bang on the mark - my personal observations agree that religion helps us process emotions.
Seen through the lens of a social technology, we've replaced religion with consumerism and individualism, and social media has encouraged unchecked mammon. And so we're having to relearn everything old as new again.
Confession and grace are parts of the toolkit in therapy. Breathing techniques from yoga, wim hof and meditation are doing the rounds. The presence of song and chanting in many religions seems like a decent overlap...
Then at times of the highest reported rates of loneliness, especially amongst the young, what did religion give us - a local community.
Don't get me wrong, there was a lot of bad with religion but modern faith in places like the UK or the Nordics seems to be a net benefit IMO...
I'm sure there are people who straddle both
Twitter. Look for people that aren't trying to bamboozle you with wishywashy arguments or anyone who tries to make things sound too simple or are sales-y.
Best is to follow people who are speaking in precise technical details where you're not the audience. A bit like software engineers talking to each other: speaking in precise technical terms, assuming a reasonable amount of background knowledge. AKA professionals
Then do your own work to clue yourself up on the nomenclature and basics
Just the usual reminder that people should not be taking financial advice from random people on the internet.
There are lots of people on the internet putting out super valuable insight and/or trying to educate the unsophisticated masses. Putting out a blanket statement perpetuates this myth that finance is only for professionals, just like coding.
The culture of open source has led to high-trust collaboration in the software community. While anything involving money attracts grifters and scammers, that doesn't mean that there aren't honest and open people out there giving away gifts.
Much like you shouldn't just blindly execute random code on your machine from an untrusted individual on your computer, you shouldn't just blindly open a position on something without thinking hard about the decision for yourself.
emergent behaviour in complex systems is still reasonably simple, (eg OpenOffice won't print on a Tuesday [0] or moving my mouse makes Windows faster [1]) but maybe that makes it easier for us to appreciate how behaviour can emerge from distal properties interacting in a system.
LLMs like ChatGPT will bring this to a whole new level. I'm not insinuating that ChatGPT is conscious but I think it definitely advances discussions on what you are calling a "spirit"
[0] https://beza1e1.tuxen.de/lore/print_on_tuesday.html [1] https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/11533/why...
I have done my fair share of drugs and as much fun as they were, the experience was nowhere near close to the peak moments of my life to date. YMMV
Proposing to my fiancee, attending my brother's wedding, holding my nephew for the first time, winning my first boxing match, winning life-altering over-leveraged bets on the stock market; these are all experiences that not even the greatest of great trips can hold a candle to, and none of them came with comedowns. I've come to realise that drugs are the fast-food of experiences. You get that great sugar salt and fat rush but it's not really healthy and doesn't taste as great food prepared with love sweat and thought (IMO).
PS if you really love drugs, for me the best of the best is your own adrenaline (again YMMV)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_school_(United_Kingdom)
Nine prestigious schools were investigated by Clarendon (including Merchant Taylors' School and St. Paul's School) and seven subsequently reformed by the Act: Eton, Shrewsbury, Harrow, Winchester, Rugby, Westminster, and Charterhouse.
Confusingly, "Public School" refers to the most elite (and very exclusive) schools in the UK
Slightly late to this thread - I heard a rumour that Citi were using Clojure, anyone able to confirm whether this is true for the SG dev team?
yes - I very often absentmindedly open Clash out of habit even if I wasn't intending to play it.
I very clearly and explicitly said "money they didn't have" in my first post and was talking about financial costs.
fair - I missed that context when reading the immediate response replying to.
Thanks for sharing your anecdata - the industry is definitely in need of regulation something I've long believed. The ubiquity and ease of access is probably the most dangerous bit. It's astounding that mobile games were able to copy/hire all the knowledge acquired in building slot machines to create an industry that doesn't even have to pay out..!
So I haven't played Clash of Clans but know Clash Royale exceptionally well (with a some dedicated training could probably shoot for global 10k league finish)
So speaking from experience: there's probably a finite sum you can spend on Clash Royale. I found the beginning highly addictive and I did spend hundreds when I probably shouldn't have, but the acceleration/frustration and advantage you can buy is very quickly eroded by skill. Once you have a maxed deck, it's pretty hard to buy victories and any new card might buy you some wins but will quickly get nerfed, and players better than you will still beat you (and matchmaking will converge you onto that 49% win rate).
I doubt I'm a typical player but at this stage I've probably extracted more value (by time) from clash than they've extracted from me - even if I spent 2k (a very very generous estimate), amortised over 5-6 years of play, that's not a lot of money (30 a month which is a AAA game every other month, less than a coffee a day) and has definitely given me more than that in enjoyment. And at this point my expenditure has completely plateaued.
Can I see people staying in that honeymoon phase moving from game to game? Yes maybe - I suppose by law of large numbers it's more likely than not Clash Royale peaked at like 100M players so 1k having issues is believable.
I'm all for regulation in this space (it's pretty crazy that it's not that regulated) but without data, my own personal experience feels like this is not nearly as dangerous as gambling or alcohol/drugs. The game milks you of money but doesn't create those boom-bust cycles that the traditional vices do
financially? ie they played an f2p got hooked and spent dumped their money into oblivion such that they couldn't financially recover?
Getting addicted to an F2P game and losing your time, while sad, is not within the scope of this discussion
sincere question - how big of a problem (in terms of #people suffering) is there of people spending beyond their means on online cosmetics?
I could see <18s getting into trouble but are there adults legit bankrupting themselves from paid-for cosmetics?
How common is the pattern for paid-for lootbox cosmetics (as compared to buy-it-now) cosmetics? Wouldn't say I'm particularly deep in either the RL/Fortnite ecosystem..!
I think those numbers are all relative?
If you're a bored prince with billions of liquid cash and even more billions of yielding assets, do you really care about 10-20k of weekly outlays?
Or reduce the scale, if you have 100k annual salary, do you miss that $3 a day you spend on coffee or $5 a week you spend on mobile gaming? ... or $15.99 a month you spend on Netflix?
Everyone has a thing and a threshold they are comfortable spending on. Some people want 4 wheels that will take them from A to B and other people are willing to spend $500 a month to get a Tesla.
We focus on digital goods because they have a perceived cost of zero to manufacture and are transient (one day the game will no longer work) but fail to spot that the value we heap on many material goods are social and most of us do not buy goods for life (hence why r/BuyItForLife is a subculture rather than conventional wisdom)
Quite the opposite - I'm not sure how many eminent mathematicians have the background to have gone far in politics.
The early pandemic outlined how many politicians lacked even the ability to reason about exponentials (let alone scientific thinking!) I am very glad that there is at least SOME representation of great thinkers amongst our leader-class
If anything you should feel shame for your lack of self awareness here
This is no place for these kinds of statements. Parent posed a question that can 100% be read charitably. In a system where all incentives promote individualism and self-interest, why should we care about others indeed.
To care about others is socialism. Or collectivism. Identity politics is probably part of the issue here, but I'm more interested in what other smarter people than me have to say, free from being shamed.
I think the whole point is that OP appealed, got hard rejection and can't escalate or even compromise.
Now their unrelated YouTube Music account is locked
I mean this is obviously reductionist but let's cherry pick some examples from the UK, bastion of the free.
It's run by an apparently corrupt government [0]
The NHS falls over every Winter, even without the help of a pandemic [1]
Backlogs on the NHS are now getting so severe that doctors are institutionally negligent - I know of two personal cancer cases missed for no good reason and GPs I know are confess to giving poor care due to being understaffed [2]
Knife crime is so much of a problem it gets its own page for statistics [3]. (Spoilers: there were over 3000+ knife related injuries in London in the last year)
And so, only when an MP gets stabbed to death is it newsworthy [4][5]
Police can barely keep street violence from breaking out, and for the rest of the country it's just bants [6]
They can't even keep their force from kidnapping innocent women off the streets at 9pm [7] and so now you their own advice is to not trust them [8]
For all the talk about democracy and freedom, it really seems like freedom is about the freedom for the strong to harm and extort others.
No thanks.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/nov/11/boris-johns...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/jun/27/an-nhs-winte...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/sep/27/nhs-backlog-...
[3] https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn04...
[4] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-58930593
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Jo_Cox
[6] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9800015/Thug-smashe...
You're right that WhatsApp really took their sweet time to copy WeChat. I wonder though whether there were mitigating factors. I know bringing WA onto the FB infra was a big job. Also had a friend that worked at WA and he was talking about India Payments over two years ago
My understanding is that WhatsApp is pretty big in India and my experience is that WeChat is pretty ubiquitous within SE Asia. The Singapore govt uses WhatsApp now for much of its govt comms and a lot of small business uses WhatsApp. Also recently in the news, you can book an Uber via WhatsApp . I'd be curious how WhatsApp does in Japan and South Korea.
Also my hunch is that Aus and NZ use WhatsApp heavily too
Heh on the continent they eat goose sometimes so I guess that might be the longer standing tradition? With no actual knowledge of these matters, game feels in season for late autumn / early winter...?
Some of my own personal observations:
- a turkey is a HUGE bird
- people only cook turkey once a year
- most guidelines for cooking turkey overcook the turkey
- most people are terrified of undercooking poultry
Trying something once a year isn't usually great for learning. It's a long feedback cycle and cooking for a special occasion disincentivises risk taking/experimentation. Same goes for risk of inflicting food poisoning for a large group. Cooking something so large is sufficiently different from roasting a chicken (for example) that people lack confidence/get it wrong.
This leads to the quaint cultural tradition of millions of people overcooking their turkey on thanksgiving in the US and on Christmas in the UK.
That said I always thought the US generally ate turkey more so their turkey game was better.
Fwiw my turkey has never been dry but I come from a family of cooks.
I will ebike for over an hour. I will not cycle for over an hour to get somewhere (as I will be completely soaked and fairly tired).
Here are some things I am counting down the days til I have the free time to go deep on:
Martial Arts Music Cooking
Here are some things I would love to learn more about
World History Science Gardening Sailing Camping + foraging
Here are some places I've yet to see:
Antarctica, Machu Picchu, Angkor Wat, Tibet, The Pyramids
Not to mention spending more quality time with my friends and family.
Enjoying more of my parents' finite years together
Spending time nurturing my children.
I am not my job. My job serves me - it brings me closer to my goals. When that is not true, it's time for a new job.