bnralt

> Maybe people in America like a "service heavy" experience, and the only way to get it is tips?

Interestingly enough, I find the service worse in the U.S. Part of the reason is that the tip system leads to waiters wasting time talking about a table, and waiters who aren't your own feeling like they don't have to do anything for you. It usually takes me 5-10 times longer to pay the check in the U.S. than it does in some other countries.

I wish restaurants started offering self service sections where you could order by phone and pick up the food yourself. Having to use waiters gives me the same feeling as when I drive through New Jersey and I'm not allowed to pump my own gas.

That belief has reached prominent political leaders as well. I listened to a bit of the Ocasio-Cortez/Tim Walz Madden livestream on Twitch, and they were talking about how something needed to be done about the greedy developers who were driving the housing shortage.

> We're often so down on journalism on HN, and I believe a big part of that is we tend to read so much opinion and analysis and so little basic reporting.

I think a large part of it is that major news organizations too often don't do this kind of reporting, and often just seem to chase the same hot button topics as the rest of the crowd over and over again. And even then, few really dive into the details.

You're larger point is entirely correct, that there's a ton to be learned from old school journalism, and there are people out there doing it. But it's unsettling how much of it only gets covered by citizen journalists doing this in their free time, not by professionals who are supposed to be doing this for a living.

For example, the D.C. Attorney's Office had been simply dropping 2/3's of the criminal cases that came to them. No one noticed this until a anonymous internet account, DCCrimeFacts, went through the records and realized that this had been happening for years. Once that account wrote about it and it gained traction, major papers like the Washington Post started reporting on the story, it eventually ended up being an issue in Congressional hearings, and lead to changes in the way the U.S. Attorney's Office operates.

The account spent a lot of time digging through records and reporting on issues with the criminal justice system you wouldn't find elsewhere. But it was someone's side project, and there haven't been posts in a year.

Another example is the FAA scandal, when the best information has come from a single blog post by a law student who happened to go through the legal paperwork and was surprised that this hadn't been reported on.

The professional news media outlets do have some good reporters, and sometimes there are important deep dives there as well. But they feel few and far between, usually opting to chase infotainment (or sometimes the pet projects of a particular journalist).

It's amazing how many big stories we only get if some random citizen happens to spend their free time doing a personal journalism project, and if that project happens to get enough traction that people actually read it.

Right, Reddit banned any sub that disagreed with the progressive positions on Transgender issues, any mainstream subs would ban users for disagreeing with those positions, and heterodox subs were warned not to discuss them or else they could be banned. For instance, here's the Moderate Politics sub discussion on why they banned transgender topics[1]:

> The first of these banned topics: gender identity, the transgender experience, and the laws that may affect these topics.

> Please note that we do not make this decision lightly, nor was the Mod Team unanimous in this path forward. Over the past week, the Mod Team has tried on several occasions to receive clarification from the Admins on how to best facilitate civil discourse around these topics. There responses only left us more confused, but the takeaway was clear: any discussion critical of these topics may result in action against you by the Admins.

Also mod efforts to enforce an ideological view across the entire site. For instance, in the run up to the 2020 election, mods on the boardgame sub started going through the history of users and would ban anyone who voted for Trump.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/moderatepolitics/comments/mkxcc0/st...

The fundamental contradiction is here: "someone who is clearly not capable of making Right Choices" yet is "even a more genuine human being than your garden-variety obedient nine-to-fiver with a bullshit job and toxic family in 4 kinds of debt to cokehead bankerbros."

Many people can accept that someone is so incapable of making the right decisions that left on their own they might die. That since they're a danger to themselves and others, the state has to step in and take care of them.

The issue is that many of these people then turn around and argue that these people are capable of making their own decisions. Housing first in the U.S. gives these people apartment with no conditions attached. In a lot of cases, the people, since they are "clearly not capable of making Right Choices," make life hell for the other residents of the building, and usually aren't able to escape their problems.

There's a similar disconnect when people say "the shelters are extremely dangerous places, of course homeless people won't stay there" and then turn around and say "how could anyone think that putting a homeless person near them could increase their danger." Apparently, the homeless are the only ones who are allowed to consider the danger of being around homeless people.

Empathy is great. It would be nice if homeless advocates occasionally had empathy for other citizens as well.

I see this argument a lot, but it's contradictory. You're simultaneously arguing that people don't understand statistics because they're treating a 25% chance as no chance to win, but then you're doing the same by saying that the other predictions, in the 15% to 2% range[1] are "cope forecasts" that people who followed them "looked extremely foolish" (the only major 99% forecast was PEC, but Wang said that's because the model broke down and the actual forecast was around 5% [1]).

25%, 15%, 5%, even 2% chances happen with a decent amount of frequency. I don't understand how people can say that people don't understand probability because they think a 25% chance won't happen, but then turn around and treat a 15% chance the very same way.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/upshot/presidential... [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20171120175008/https://election....

Like the Rationalist's "Bayesian priors," the election models were a remnant of the "big data" hype from a decade and a half ago. This article is a decent overview for anyone who forgot about it[1]. Like with many hype cycles, there was something actually important underneath the surface (useful statistical modeling), but then people with a poor understanding of the limitations ran wild thinking it could do things far beyond its capabilities (in this case, the degree to which one could use statistics to predict the future).

Industry gave up on the more extreme claims fairly quickly because it wasn't able to produce. But it lingered on in other places where there was less direct feedback or it was telling people what they wanted it to hear.

To add to this, it became obvious that many of the leaders in this "field" were people who believed they had an expertise that was far beyond their actual capabilities. Nate Silver ended up accusing much of the polling industry of fraud recently, because he wasn't able to do basic statistical math[2].

[1] https://slate.com/technology/2017/10/what-happened-to-big-da... [2] https://x.com/JustinWolfers/status/1853302476406993315

There seems to be a coordinated effort to control the narrative. Grok3's release is pretty important, no matter what you think of it, and initially this story quickly fell off the front page, likely from malicious mass flagging.

One thing that's taken over Reddit and unfortunately has spread to the rest of the internet is people thinking of themselves as online activists, who are saving the world by controlling what people can talk about and steering the conversation in the direction they want it to go. It's becoming harder and harder to have a normal conversation without someone trying to derail it with their own personal crusade.

My "specific version" is the version used by government agencies, which specifically states that the government is giving people free permanent housing without requiring prerequisites.

HUD[1]:

"Housing First is an approach to quickly and successfully connect individuals and families experiencing homelessness to permanent housing without preconditions and barriers to entry, such as sobriety, treatment or service participation requirements."

California Department of Housing and Community Development[2]:

"Housing First is an approach to serving people experiencing homelessness that recognizes a homeless person must first be able to access a decent, safe place to live, that does not limit length of stay (permanent housing)...Under the Housing First approach, anyone experiencing homelessness should be connected to a permanent home as quickly as possible, and programs should remove barriers to accessing the housing, like requirements for sobriety or absence of criminal history."

[1] https://files.hudexchange.info/resources/documents/Housing-F... [2] https://www.hcd.ca.gov/grants-funding/active-funding/docs/ho...

> I’m not sure what the right answer is, but asking people who are used to rough and tumble life outside to then behave civilly indoors with zero tolerance seems…set for failure?

This is true, and that's why housing first is a terrible policy (I've seen it fail spectacularly first hand). Many of these people simply can't take care of themselves, and putting them in free apartments doesn't fix their situation, but it does make life miserable for long-term residents. All while being extremely expensive.

> Maybe they go maybe they don’t

Here they have frequent wellness checks. It doesn't solve anything. This shouldn't be a surprise - someone who's incapable of living civilly when given a free apartment likely isn't going to be a person who's going to put the time and effort into mental health classes.

> edit: I should mention that I've seen fairly convincing cross-sectional evidence that homelessness is more related to the housing market than mental illness: https://www.ucpress.edu/books/homelessness-is-a-housing-prob... , https://www.nahro.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/NAHRO-Summi...

The problem is that there are very different groups of people we're talking about, so much so that throwing them all under the "homeless" umbrella doesn't make sense. It's like saying car accidents are a traffic design problem, not an alcohol problem. Sure, both things can lead to traffic accidents, but they're pretty different problems.

People who temporarily need some assistance to get back on there feet are in a categorically different group than the people who are currently unable to function in society. These are fundamentally different problems.

I've seen how D.C. has tried housing first. It's given thousands of individuals free apartments, for life as far as I can tell, some in very expensive areas. It's been an enormous failure, since housing doesn't actually solve the very serious underlying problems that many of these people have. A lot of long-term residents to flee places that were once (comparatively) affordable because of rising crime and violence. The Washington Post has occasionally covered this [1][2].

I watched a neighborhood meeting recently about the issue. The city does wellness checks on the people in the program - but they can just completely ignore them, and nothing happens. Long term residents have been forced out after people in the program have attacked them or threatened to kill them and the city doesn't do anything, and doesn't even remove them from the program. A councilmember was taking part in the meeting, and had nothing to say other than he was looking into ways that the city could provide more help to people in the program.

The linked article is bordering on misinformation by not mentioning Finland's compulsory commitment, and also ignoring the failures of housing first in the U.S. like D.C.'s that haven't included that aspect. That's why a lot of these programs end up failing - people try to pick and choose the elements that they want, and ignore necessary elements that they find inconvenient. In the end, that doesn't help anyone.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/dc-politics/dc-housed-t...

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2023/08/08/dc-paid-h...

I've seen this argument brought up a lot, but I've never seen someone attempt to answer the counterfactual. If LIDAR was added to Tesla's now, how much would FSD improve? I've seen people here who have used it say that with the current software FSD is already pretty good, but my guess is that even with LIDAR they'd still be far from L4. So what kind of difference would we expect to see if, say, tomorrow Tesla announced that they're going to start using LIDAR?

> I imagine A blog should do something like press releases and describe and progress made on the actual website or plans for-

A lot of older websites actually used to do this with a “what’s new” section or page. With blogging, “what’s new” became the entire site, with almost the entirety of the content (everything that wasn't new) now hidden.

Ironically, after mentioning that discussion dies off incredibly quickly when HN stories fall of the front page, this discussion was moved off the front page to a day old discussion. My guess is that almost no one will see it now.

> We started by putting advertisements on existing content, then moved to social networking and social media, which was essentially an engine for crowdsourcing the production of greater amounts of content against which to show advertisements.

I see a lot of people talk nostalgically about blogs, but they were an early example of the internet changing from ever green content to churning out articles on content farms. If people remember the early internet, it was more like browsing a library. You weren’t expecting most sites to get updated on a daily - or often even a monthly - basis. Articles were almost always organized by content, not by how recent they were.

Blogging’s hyper-focus on what’s new really changed a lot of that, and many sites got noticeably worse as they switched from focusing on growing a library of evergreen content to focusing on churning out new hits. Online discussions went through a similar process when they changed from forums to Reddit/HN style upvoting. I still have discussions on old forums that are over a decade old. After a few hours on Reddit or HN, the posts drop off the page and all discussion dies.

KA-52 helicopters were considered to be a one of the big obstacles that Ukraine faced during their 2023 counteroffensive. "Military briefing: Russian ‘Alligators’ menace Ukraine’s counteroffensive"[1]:

> Justin Bronk, senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a London-based think-tank, said Russian helicopters fitted with anti-tank guided missiles “were always going to be a much greater threat to Ukrainian forces during a counteroffensive than during periods when Ukraine was defending against Russian attacks”.

> “They can hover, spot for targets and fire anti-tank guided missiles from beyond the range of shoulder-fired Manpads or anti-aircraft fire,” Bronk said.

[1] https://www.ft.com/content/d8fe8941-3703-433d-ac7a-dab9ba500...

It's set up like this - busy avenue with lanes (left to right) 1, 2, and 3 enter into roundabout with circles (inner to outer) A, B, and C. The problem is that half way around the circle, where the avenue continues, A, B, and C then have lines indicating that you can either continue on the circle or move in a perpendicular direction to the circle and exit back such like this A -> 1, B -> 2, and C -> 3. And that's what everyone does. The problem is If someone from C is going around the circle, they're going to t-bone anyone going A -> 1 or B -> 2, and there's no moment to prepare because A or B is going to be suddenly cutting in front of them.

Or to visualize it another way - if you can image those intersections where there are two right turn only lanes, and one lane to the left of them that's right turn or go straight. Now imagine if all three lanes were right turn or go straight, and everyone made right turns - but if someone in the far right lane is going straight, they're plowing into the cars turning in the other two lanes.

After years they eventually fixed it and made the two outer circle lanes right turn only, which is what they should have done at the beginning. But even there they screwed up, because there's a street that enters the circle right after the right turn only signs, so if someone is entering from that direction and isn't familiar with the circle it's possible for them to ram into the other cars.

> Just because you drove wrong does not make the roundabout bad.

You seem to have misread my post. Everyone drove wrong. I seemed to be the only one to notice it, and started avoiding that roundabout, because driving with the correct right of way rules during busy times would lead you to t-boning another car. Other people I talked to said "no, that's just how you're supposed to drive on that roundabout" (it wasn't, and the signage was eventually updated many years later).

If _everyone_ is driving through it incorrectly doesn't make it a bad roundabout, than I suppose no roundabout can be bad. If it's always the fault of the drivers and never the design, you can't really say 4 way stops are any worse in this regard either.

I don't think most of the ones here could be easily reversed, for what it's worth. The streets were designed with them in mind, so they're usually at the exact spot where 3-5 different roads intersect.

The number of bad roundabouts is pretty common here, though. But it wouldn't entirely surprise me (based on other things I've seen) if there was a level of local incompetence that went beyond the norm. You're right that they can be improved, but (I mentioned this in another reply), sometimes that takes years or decades for whatever reason (and even then, they don't fix all of the issues).

> The worst roundabout beats the best 4-way stop any day of the week. Sometimes there really are easy answers.

Maybe you haven't seen the worst ones, then. For instance, one by my house had traffic lines which gave people the wrong impression about the right of way within the roundabout, leading to every vehicle treating driving like that. I actually drove like that as well for a long time - when you're spending every day driving the exact same way that the hundreds of other cars surrounding you are driving, and the lines on the road suggest that it's correct way to drive, it's easy to mistakenly think this is what you're supposed to be doing.

Then it hit me one day - this isn't how right of way works in a roundabout at all. I talked to others in the area, who were surprised when I brought it up. That's what the lines implied, that's what everyone _did_, but that's not how it was supposed to be used. Everyone was driving through this incorrectly. And it was a major roundabout, that had some of the heaviest traffic in the city.

Maybe it didn't matter because everyone was driving incorrectly, which worked most (but not all) of the time? But when it wouldn't, the accident would be a T-bone, so we can't say that roundabouts eliminate those.

Years later someone in the city seemed to realize it, and changed the design of the roundabout. It's better now, but there are still a few areas they overlooked that have the potential to cause accidents.

Online I see this mentality that roundabouts are great no matter what and it seems really strange to me. It really depends on the design of the roundabout and the traffic conditions. Where I grew up there are a lot of roundabouts, but many of them are so dangerously designed I started actively avoiding them. It’s not that you can’t poorly design a four way stop, but it seems to be much less common, for whatever reason.

I see people complain about roundabouts with traffics lights and how it negates some of the reasons for the roundabout. The thing is, these aren’t just put in for fun, usually they’re in areas with extremely heavy traffic where merging can get extremely difficult which leads to long backups (or in cities, accidents that can shut down traffic).

Roundabouts can be great when used well, but they’re hardly the silver bullet that online discourse often portrays them as.

Maybe this is better:

Cruise line A and cruise line B drop their passengers off at a remote island for 5 days, and then come to pick them up and take them home. After cruise line B drops theirs off, the cruise ships breaks down, and the passengers can't be picked up after 5 days, so they're stuck on the island with no immediate way to get off. Cruise line A says "OK, the next cruise ship we send will be at half capacity, so we can get the passengers from cruise line B off the island and get them home."

Is cruise line A rescuing the passengers from cruise line B? I'd say yes.

> it fed a crime wave, something a number of US cities are suing Kia over

A large part of the crime wave stems from the policies these cities implemented. Many times from the same leaders who are suing Kia now.

For instance, a friend got their car stolen in D.C. After they caught the guy, they let him go with no consequences, because they said he was under 25 and it was the first time they caught him. D.C. recently put a convicted murderer on the sentencing commission who believes that this kind of "it's not really their fault if they're under 25" thinking should be extended to murders as well.

Local politicians even told us there wasn't a crime wave, and that it was just a fake narrative. Then when that stopped working, they started pointing fingers at everyone else they could.

But why did they decide that? It seems to be a pretty clear example of the perfect being the enemy of the good.

1. Better bacteria is found in the wild, it might be able to significantly reduce cavities. People could be randomly passing it to others through kissing, and no one is concerned about it since it doesn't seem to be harmful.

2. It’s not given to people for replacement therapy because (as the article states) people decided that a replacement therapy “needs to meet a number of criteria."

3. Except meeting that criteria makes people think the replacement isn’t safe and shouldn’t be tried.

The article is saying “of course we needed to add X characteristics to the bacteria, they were necessary in order for it to be a good replacement” and then goes on to say “of course people shouldn’t be using the bacteria with X characteristics, X characteristics might be dangerous.”

The safety concerns sound circular in an almost Kafkaesque manner. From what I can tell, a strain of the bacteria was found in the wild that created less acid and seemed to lead to less carries. So people thought it needed to be safer, so they instead created a genetically modified version of the bacteria. But now it couldn’t even be tested in the wild because the “safer” version had so many unknowns that even letting people experiment with it would be dangerous, since it could potentially escape into the general population and hurt people (possibly escape through activities like kissing, the article states). But the earlier strain has been out there spreading in the population for decades/centuries already.

Why not just let people experiment on their own with the original low acid bacteria if they want? It’s already there in the wild. You’re already “painting your teeth” with different bacteria when you kiss people, so why not at least let some people pick which naturally occurring bacteria they can expose themselves to instead of letting it happen by random chance?

A lot of the hype about Lumina seemed to be goofy, but the hand wringing over “painting your mouth with bacteria!” is just as bad if not worse.

True, but there's a difference between being open to revisionism and actively trying to spin things in a revisionistic manner because novelty brings more clout.

Depends on the historian. The overly theatrical way some historians react to the term "dark age" is a bit revisionistic (and perpetual revisionism seems extremely popular among academic historians).

And many get similarly spun up about the term "feudalism" as well.

> Like, the part about making your co-workers feel like they're bottlenecking you; can't imagine working in an environment where everyone tries that number on everyone else. It's extremely adversarial. Is that really standard management advice? Maybe on Wall Street?

I think you're misunderstanding that part. The goal isn't to accuse the coworker. The goal is to explain to the coworker that what they need to do for the project is important to the point where any delays is going to cause a delay for the entire project. This isn't intended to be a negative statement; many projects do rely heavily on certain members getting things in by a particular timeline, and if that isn't communicated and followed up on, projects will fail. The dudebro speech in the document lacks tact, but the underlying principal is sound. The excerpt:

> DO NOT just go to them and say “I need creative, let me know when it’s done” and “I need a thumbnail, let me know when it’s done”. This is what most people do and it’s one of the reasons why we fail so much. I want you to look them in the eyes and tell them they are the bottleneck and take it a step further and explain why they are the bottleneck so you both are on the same page. “Tyler, you are my bottleneck. I have 45 days to make this video happen and I can not begin to work on it until I know what the contents of the video is. I need you to confirm you understand this is important and we need to set a date on when the creative will be done.” Now this person who also has tons of shit going on is aware of how important this discussion is and you guys can prio it accordingly. Now let’s say Tyler and you agree it will be done in 5 days. YOU DON’T GET TO SET A REMINDER FOR 5 DAYS AND NOT TALK TO HIM FOR 5 DAYS! Every single day you must check in on Tyler and make sure he is still on track to hit the target date. I want less excuses in this company. Take ownership and don’t give your project a chance to fail. Dumping your bottleneck on someone and then just walking away until it’s done is lazy and it gives room for error and I want you to have a mindset that God himself couldn’t stop you from making this video on time. Check. In. Daily. Leave. No. Room. For. Error.

> If anything we need to go slower and gentler (environmentally, socially, economically), not "faster"

Do you think we should move slower when it comes to saving the planet? From what I can tell your main issue is with the goal, not with efficiency itself.

That's the same impression I got. It's odd seeing the discussion veer off into morality, because most of it seems to be standard and non-problematic advice (IE, understanding what your product is and don't get distracted by focusing on what it's not).

And though the advice isn't particularly novel, it was worth reading since a surprisingly large amount of people don't do these simple things.

One of the reasons why this happens is because repeat violent offenders get away with a surprising amount. For instance, the lead criminal in this case had been charged with attempted murder in a separate case just a couple years before starting the crypto thefts, but the charges were eventually dropped. The crypto thefts seem extremely violent as well[2]:

> An elderly North Carolina couple was held hostage in their home by armed men who threatened to "cut off (the) husband’s toes and genitalia, to shoot him, and to rape his wife," before they were robbed of more than $156,000 in cryptocurrency, federal prosecutors said.

[1] https://www.palmbeachpost.com/story/news/crime/2018/08/22/up... [2] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/crime-courts/elderly-nc-couple-...