aljgz

It's ironic/unfortunate they took the moderationazy path right when the site needed to find its new direction.

Some months ago I posted a question there after a long time, something that the LLMs could not give me a satisfactory response. It got deleted for being unsuitable for the site.

I'm not particularly a new user of SO. been using for 15 years and 5.5k reputation, which does not say much more that I know how to ask questions there, or I used to know.

Desperate, I take the question to a meeting with the language team. The guy gets excited: "this kind of question is why we keep holding these sessions"

SO became what it was by setting rules that worked extremely well. They even occasionally let some QnAs slip by, like the famous Jon Skeet Chuck Norris facts[1]. Now those same rules don't work well for a vibrant community, and at the same time they are being followed pedantically.

[1] https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9134/jon-skeet-fact...

More realistically, that impersonator has created lots of output, and the correct ones are selectively publicized (and few particularly interesting bad answers).

For people who don't understand second and higher consequences, it sounds like a good one

Emotional manipulation is the obvious answer.

Sunk cost "fallacy" helps the scammer a lot.

They start with a trivial amount and build from there. Each time, it's emotionally harder for the victim to accept the romance they built in their minds does not exist, AND the money they paid was not spent on a good cause.

It's much easier to deceive a person when their subconscious is collaborating with the scammer.

I hoped to see a systematic explanation of what the correlations show. As long as we don't have a viable explanation, there is something interesting there to discover. It can be that the statistical analysis is fundamentally flawed. Pointing out a flaw that tricked several serious researchers is progress. If it was because of some other factor (let's assume there are many more elderly people living around those neighborhoods, can't think of a better example now).

It has a low (few percent) CPU usage. Other tabs seem to be less than 1% most of the time.

The "delay to end all delays"

You'll feel right at home with something from Frame.work (writing this comment from my 13" FW).

If they ever sell their 12" version with AMD cpu, I might get one as well.

Encouraged my friend to buy one, his feedback: "best piece of tech in my past few years."

My first serious software was for a sizable goldsmith factory. They keep an incredibly low profile visible from outside, and they get really good at it. Once inside, the amount of gold that's moving around is jaw dropping. After a while, most of the time it feels like aluminum, or any other material. All you see is cuts to be made, welding to be done, carvings, sandblast, etc... It's work and responsibility and everyone is just trying to get it done and make it the problem of the next person.

I was shocked, in 2026, to know how hard it is to find a good tablet. iPad is out of question for me, gifted mine to my gf (the only apple device I ever bought).

Landed on a Lenovo Idea Tab pro, which has so much junk pre-installed that keep installing other malware on it.

We need rules that take companies responsible when they trick people into hands of scammers.

As long as I can't unlock its bootloader, it's not much better than that iPad.

> I'm Tired Boss

> I'm 30 this year, and computers don't have the same level of whimsy and excitement as they once had.

I'm 45 and computers are more exciting than ever. We choose what to get excited with, or oven nothing at all, which happens to most people at some point.

I've never been a die hard fan of Linux, but in the past decade and half found the trade-off for me to favor using Linux.

It's a device made by people like me (umm much better than me in some fields, but the mentality is similar), for people like me.

It does not disrespect me in design, functionality, in PR talk, and my relationship to the system is not adversarial.

For now, my incentives to use the system aligns with that of the system creators.

Did I write this?

I choose tools I use, configure them, report bugs, and occasionally contribute fixes. But when I can't, I work around them, yet never get used to the workaround.

"Habitual mitigation" does not happen in me, and it's partly intentional.

I have created bad software in the past, but when I saw how people work with it, I could not be proud. Learned to look at software like a user, and don't want to unlearn that.

I believe (or maybe I hope) software will be democratized and people will start to demand good software.

> The only say I have is in how I spend my money.

This. I get Frame.work and install Fedora. Use Firefox for everything possible. Once my current phone dies, I'll get a Fair phone, Motorola, or whatever gives me control.

Can't complain if I keep choosing hostile products for some convenience

!!SPOILER ALERT!! in Shutter Island:

When he realizes he's committed a terrible crime, the next day he goes back to believing he's a US marshal. His last words:

- this place makes me wonder...

+ Yeah, what's that, boss?

- Which would be worse, to live as a monster, or to die as a good man?

This is a sad reality of life, that leads many, to choose a fantasy over reality. How many of us consistently avoid this trap?

That one monarch is not a person or organization of people. It's an aggregation of all the loosely connected ones, competing on some things, coordinated on others, but you, the end user are never the beneficiary. That, my old school human friend, is the one commandment no one challenges. With all those players locked into a Nash equilibrium, no one can do anything about this, while all humans complain that things are not the way they should be.

Change happens gradually, and then suddenly.

In similar situations how hard is it to initiate a class-action?

Guess: same icon used in very small size for lists/menus and much larger when you select the item. Also, if the same one is used for all resolutions, the actual size can vary widely between monitor sizes, DPIs, resolutions, scales. Good to have one that looks decent to people who see it large and/or care about quality

Living in Vancouver, I traveled to Toronto to watch the Eclipse in 2024. We faced a nasty cloud, and had to drive hundreds of kilometers (hundreds of miles) to get a reasonably good view. On the drive back I decided that I'll travel for the one that's happening today, and here I am, in Sierra, with some cool people.

Solar eclipses happen rarely enough, and frequently enough, to act as milestones in my life: I can review what happened since the previous one, and make a plan for the next one.

They are some of the most magnificent natural phenomena, much more interesting than what's expected.

The only other one that I got to see in perfect conditions was in my home town, Isfahan in 1999. I hope this one is perfectly clear again, and I have some resolutions for the next one.

Just a guess: Ratio of positive results out of previously unknown cases gives a good estimate of the total expected unknown cases. Precision depends on selection bias, and statistics has tools to estimate and/or improve it.

I've been telling people this car analogy:

Imagine your car would only let you drive on road approved by the manufacturer, obviously, for your safety. But then they would approve roads only if 30% of anything you paid for in that road would go to the car company.

Sounds stupid? Well phone manufacturer taking 30% of everything is exactly that to me.

Years ago, we were revamping a mission-critical project with more than a 1000 database tables to a backend of .net and EF. Our rewrite was much cleaner, but still had 450 tables. We started noticing that our backend took 2 minutes after starting up to serve the first request, fast after that.

It turned out EF had a stage named "view generation" which verified that data would round-trip, meaning if it goes into the DB and comes back, would stay the same. Run time was exponential on the number of tables and complexity of models.

People used tricks to work around it, which was basically caching the "generated view" in a file, which could speed up the production startup, not as easy in DEV environment, our programmers still needed to wait 2 minutes after each compile.

I started looking into it, and it turned out that Microsoft had open sourced EF a short time ago (long after we had started the project).

While profiling, view generation took much longer, 450s, as it was a CPU-heavy process. There was a function excluded from release builds by a `[Conditional('DEBUG')]` attribute, and when I removed the call to it, the time went down to 64 seconds, 63 of which was in a very simple function. A LINQ statement in there could be re-written to make it 120ms.

I ended up contributing it to EF core, being acknowledged in their blog post, and we ended up using our own release build of EF libraries until the fix made it to the public release.

Had they not open sourced EF, it could turn into an existential threat to the project.

I just watched this incredibly anomaleous work.

I asked AI about some side information about it, but I'm sure some HN folks have much more interesting things to share

Interesting... Can you elaborate? I did not get the reference.

How's that different from friends at your sports club? How does the risk of your workplace friends not taking your side balance against the benefit of the possibility that they will support you?

Should I give up years of joy and sense of community and belonging for the fear that someday my workplace friends will betray me? And then years more of suffering in my next workplace?

A strategy that minimizes risk rarely maximizes reward.

This is a recipe for a sad life. It's avoiding friendship for the fear of betrayal. You get a lot of benefits by being good friends with colleagues. There are, however important things to be aware of:

1- "Though shall not" limit their social life to their colleagues (or any single group that can disappear with a divorce, change of jobs, or hobby, maybe because of an incident).

2- "Though shall not" blindly help people with the hope of being helped in return. Help with generosity, but know the limits: don't sacrifice yourself, and certainly, don't count on people returning the favor as your main plan. It's incredible how much happier we can be just by helping people, if we fire and forget, rather than cling onto.

3- Do not define yourself with your job, your success in there, or with your colleagues' approvals. This is extremely hard, yet extremely important. Diversify what defines you. Be able to mentally afford being bad at some of them. Don't let any of them define who you are. This lets you act with true confidence (not insecurity disguised as overconfidence), which is extremely pleasant for yourself and others.

This is exactly what I needed, ending my work week for the company, and transitioning to working on my own project over the weekend. Good to know I'm not alone, still dreaming of making things that serve people the way they (the people, not the things) want.

I hope I can get this out soon

Thanks, as a software engineer, always a problem solver, who just follows an dreams of solutions to social problems (I've once led a software project for one of these, but not more), breaking down the mega category of abusers into subcategories with mechanics of their actions changes my mindset from useless anger into a problem solving one.