doctorOb
doctorOb on Hacker News
I had a friend call me–practically in tears–because YouTube removed his highest viewed video game montage for violating their hate speech policy. Context: WWII tank game playing as the Germans, usually with some old german language folk song in the background. It's algorithmically removed and most likely algorithmically reviewed upon appeal, and there's basically no recourse for him. Meanwhile, similar videos by other creators have their content left up.
I have to remind him that, unfortunately, YouTube has no shortage of content and absolutely nothing to lose from false flagging a subset of it, compared to the pushback they get for letting something truly horrible slip through the cracks.
Hey, those are my weekend plans you're talking about!
I've had a few Big Macs lately, and from my perspective the meat is perhaps the least consequential part of that sandwich, both flavor and texture-wise. At one point I asked for 4x extra cheese (gross, I know) and after the first few bites, that too seemed to be pushed aside in the palate by the sauce. I can almost guarantee you I would not notice a difference if they swapped the beef for beyond meat.
A PagerDuty family account?
K-12 is a terrible system in the US which seems entirely reliant on the desperation of people who devoted 4-8 years of education to retain their jobs in a very limited market.
A teacher friend's district claimed to be investing in training their teachers, but all it boiled down to was a high level overview of google docs, with no guidance on adapting a curriculum.
> a "panel" of "experts" discuss how "issue x will destroy america."
My friend who worked in news regarded this as the first incarnation of "fake news".
Or, more charitably, the 90s?
From what I can tell, New England IPAs–especially the coveted ones such as Heady Topper–really only work when you can control for freshness.
As soon as the beer gets canned its got 2-4 weeks where you can drink it and say "wow, that's amazing". After that you'll have it and think "ok, a bit overhyped".
Distributing beer throws freshness out the window. A liquor store may put it in the back for a month before they throw it on the shelf and then your prospective customers won't get the best impression your beer can offer, as it's tarnished while waiting in that can. So now there's this surge of brewery controlled distribution where you make these pilgrimages to buy a bunch of beer that they'd canned only a few days prior, attracting people to enjoy it when it tastes its best and spread the word.
> The biggest thing to me was that I learned that motivation was something that could come after you force yourself to wake up early and just get started
I had a similar experience doing a podcast [1] with a group of 6 others, each putting out one episode per day. It felt like failing the group if anyone had to skip their day, as we came close to a year without a break. I'd spend hours researching and scripting my episodes while riding the bus, waiting for a friend at a bar, or just winding down before bed. It was peak creativity for me and I'm happy with how it all turned out.
But after a while we got burned out and decided to stop, with the idea that we'd keep making our own podcasts. But without that mutual duty to release daily, no one to date has actually put anything out. The deadline/responsibility was the only way to make it happen–at least for me.
[1] - https://www.podcastdotcom.net/early-bird-news/2018/8/5/8-5-1...
My favorite memory of FFmpeg involved wowing a friend with the "magic of computer hacking" by slicing a subsection of a youtube video, cutting the source audio, and replacing it with audio from a song he had discovered "fit perfectly". Never mind that the entire process took about 20 minutes of googling and trial/error with the Linux Subsystem for Windows. It was better than the native windows alternative :P
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tr8JVZdHfc
This is a bit like saying "why would someone take a ferrari to the corner store, a honda sedan works just fine". The implementation of the task at hand is without consequence, their boss just wants X to happen even if it gets done by hand. I love these opportunities because I can use a language that I'm not getting paid to write for the 99% of of my day job. Coincidentally this happens to be python for me but i'll defend parent's right to do it in brainfuck if it makes them smile :)
A number of years ago, I was conducting an interview for a front end developer position. I started with a mostly algorithmic question hoping to gauge the candidate's comfortability with javascript. It was something like “use a for loop and manipulate an array”. They froze up and asked: “can I use jQuery?”. At that point jQuery was at peak ubiquity. Here we had someone reaching for it when the DOM wasn’t even on the table.
I think we’re at that point with React today. It’s become the de-facto way to make a web page, oftentimes for the better. People use it on their complex sites so even for a simple landing page, it’s often the most comfortable tool to work with, despite the fact that it’s adding unnecessary complexity. Fortunately for the user, most of that complexity can be absorbed at build time using server side rendering (the client doesn’t even need to have react if the site is truly static).
It doesn’t matter that you have now moved your HTML into a transpiled javascript syntax that spits out a chain of javascript function calls which generates a javascript object that is then fed into a javascript library that builds an internalized DOM representation and, finally, translates _that_ into an HTML string (which, btw, is happening on a javascript powered server). The browser sees the same HTML + CSS that it might have seen if you had just served them a hand written HTML file over Apache.
For some devs, KISS might actually yield an incredibly complex blob of javascript ecosystem goodies, that is at the same time simpler to setup and get started with than remembering how to structure an HTML file ;)
I was especially irked by this the last time I went to a Lensecrafters. They said it's because Ray-Ban now makes the lenses themselves. So I was shopping at a store front for branded frames with in-house lenses, all owend, operated, and produced by the same parent company (Luxottica). Talk about vertical integration!
No refund on the flights so we ended up paying a ticket change fee and rescheduling for september! Some of the lodging was less flexible unfortunately :(
I just cancelled my trip _to_ Tokyo this morning at the last minute because I was worried about unwittingly bringing the virus back to the states and getting friends and family (children and immune deficient) sick.
I'm quite literally in the same position as you right now. As long as the CDC doesn't bump their warning up to a level 3, I'm going. The cost of the flight + no refund makes it difficult for some of my party to walk away from. I'm still fairly worried and my company is having me self quarantine for half a month when I get home.
A job in the hand is worth two in the bush. The friends I've had who drove for DoorDash and/or Lyft were in between proper jobs (e.g CVS and reception at a hospital or something), and that in between period was lasting longer than they had the savings for.
My friend has worked in a number of different pre-school facilities throughout Boston and most of them had a carved out screen based activity (usually tablets) for at least part of the day. I'm sure the science is still out but in practice it seems ubiquitous.
With both looking like they come with a built in VHS player.
I had this view for a while, until I thought about it from the perspective of my loved ones. They may very well prefer that I live past 65.
I'd say this is an open problem in the metasearch space right now. Airlines are increasingly splitting out what you do and don't get with your ticket into different fare classes, which they brand and line item themselves, making it difficult for a typical traveler to make heads or tails of whether they do or do not get a cabin bag or complimentary meal, etc.
The Bitcoin whitepaper came out just three months after this post, if I'm not mistaken.