jkhaui

Good on you, but this doesn't prove anything imo. People are almost always positively biased toward attractive faces due to the halo effect. Biologically/psychologically this is a result of one's facial bone structure, skin, and bodyfat levels.

So being shabbily dressed and having stubble is mostly irrelevant here. Maybe you were just much better looking than the other (poor) bloke.

It's a fallacy to think that the only outcome of COVID is binary (i.e. death or perfect recovery).

Just browse r/covidpositive. There are so many "survivors" who say they still have so much internal organ pain 4 months after being diagnosed, and now they feel hopeless, have suicidal ideation, etc.

And from the sounds of it, a lot of these people are in their 20s-40s and could run a marathon pre-COVID.

Jesus. That's gruesome. And trust that the initial comments on HN are about how to most efficiently kill someone, rather than any visceral reaction.

C'mon, let's be real... most devs are working on features/products that will never see the light of day. Or they're restyling the company's "contact us" form for the thousandth time.

The market is not efficient. A software developer being paid $100k doesn't mean they're providing the world with $100k of value. it just means they convinced management/HR to pay them $100k for turning up 250/365 days.

I suggest checking out "bullshit jobs" by David Graeber :)

Amazing book. The funny thing is I never expected to see it applied to software engineering - but in this context it's very appropriate.

Yes. As a frontend developer, my default mode now is to almost always go straight to searching issues in the GitHub repo of an npm package I'm using.

I only end up on SO when googling very generic questions about React, TypeScript or JavaScript (and sometimes CSS). Also, the top Google results from SO are often from ~2017 or earlier which puts me off

I really enjoyed Bryan's book. I'd always thought uni was ridiculously overpriced, but hearing it straight from the mouth of a professor really hammered the point home for me. I believe we are on the verge of the education bubble bursting, just like the housing bubble a decade earlier

Yeah, totally agree. Ironically COVID has made me realise how much I want to work in an office now, as I'm going slightly insane from the lack of social contact. Moving forward, the best middle ground for most jobs would probably be half the traditional working week in an office, the other half from home. Or something like that.

"Online education used to be like online dating: only something losers would do. But now it seems to moving towards the default way of doing business."

As a self-taught developer and proud of it, I like this quote. A lot. It's easy to let yourself fall into a toxic mindset where you (and many employers) unjustifiably feel inferior because you didn't take the traditional 4-year college route.

But in less than a decade, hearing of couples who met on Tinder has gone from a novelty to the norm, reminding us of how quickly societal paradigm shifts can happen (for the better, imo).

Can you please explain what you mean by every component re-rendering? Maybe I'm just ignorant, but I don't think that's correct (unless you made a really bad app).

Other than that I agree with the gist of your post

What's bothered me most is how if you collapse Gmail's sidebar, the "no Hangouts contacts" section in the bottom half doesn't resize or adapt.

It probably doesn't hurt usability directly, but it seems very unprofessional

Wow, thanks for sharing this.

Also, to second your question: what the hell did happen to Windows search? I always just assumed I'd done something to break it (and honestly, could never be bothered trying to "fix" it... even after all these years), but apparently it's inherently broken.

I know very little about OS software. Could someone explain at a high-level how something as fundamental as file search can be rendered totally unusable? Doesn't windows have the best engineers in the world working on it?

From everything I've read about COVID-19 and flu-like infections, I'm also inclined to believe that warmer climates help slow COVID-19 outbreaks. It is (in my opinion) the most plausible explanation why certain regions are hit so much worse than others thus far. I also believe a paper I recently read supports this hypothesis.

I've seen the media publish articles with titles like "coronavirus myths busted: warm weather stops the virus". Ironically, these attempts to combat misinformation are dubious themselves, as the truth is probably somewhere in the middle; that is, warm climates may not outright stop COVID-19, but they may certainly hinder it. The fact is, while we can't make definitive statements at the moment due to limited data and understanding of the virus's pathology, we can make educated guesses through observation.

Another contentious point (particularly here in Australia) is the sentiment that children are mostly immune to the virus. The Aus government is pushing this line very strongly as an excuse to keep schools open (i.e. economical reasons).

So yeah, I don't know why I wrote this comment. Probably to stress the fine line that exists between having a mindset which is open to observational theories, while also being critical of "facts" which are pushed to drive political agendas amidst the coronavirus outbreak.

That capitalism, in its current state, is a broken system? As cliche as it sounds, there's no other way to describe it when you have frontline workers risking their life—and their family's lives—to make a man whose net worth is $100+ billion even richer. This is not a progressive society. No one wants to see it (besides the super wealthy). We've regressed back to the master and slave social classes we used to read about in history books.

So in other words: "who cares, the virus only kills old people who were probably useless to the economy anyway, so business as usual."

I sure hope you don't have any elderly family members. Plenty of people in their 40s have died too

For a forum of ostensibly intelligent people, it's amusing to see the rise in anti-china sentiment brought about by the coronavirus.

Sure, China has a poor human rights record in many regards. But objectively, their handling of the coronavirus has been phenomenal, especially when one considers its hugely dense population.

And regarding the fake video supposedly showing a live person being body bagged: even Facebook "verified" the video as fake, and you know that.

China's done many things poorly in recent history, but containment of the coronavirus isn't one of them. Resorting to unsubstantiated xenophobia in times like this really says more about you as a person than anything else.

"Fact-Check Scarcity Principle: This article is called 100 Little Ideas but there are fewer than 100 ideas. 99% of readers won’t notice because they’re not checking, and most of those who notice won’t say anything. Don’t believe everything you read."

I was thinking to myself "this is an amazing list" until I came across that cheeky snippet. Now I'm confused; is the point to make readers critically evaluate each of the listed theories?

Except it seems the consensus is that it really does suck - both from the perspective of HackerNews and the people forced to use it

Completely agree. The author glosses over the fact that half of coding is just pattern recognition derived from seeing something written a certain way many, many, many times over.

It's not far-fetched to consider that exposing kids to an hour of code daily could make transitioning to a programming career much more feasible in their later life (whereas without this exposure, programming might seem like untouchable black magic). Heck, I think the reason my own transition to being a dev was relatively smooth is because I was obsessed making HTML websites as a kid. Despite not touching it for ~15 years, even that exposure proved invaluable in picking up the skills relatively fast

As someone who is heavily interested in the EdTech space (I've had the unfortunate luck of being a student for far too long and experienced how woefully inadequate the education system is), I was thinking pretty much the same sentiments.

Initially, I agreed with most of the failures Audrey listed. Though I started wondering if such a lengthy list could be sustained, and lo and behold, about halfway through the article I sensed a large drop in quality, with the author seeming more focused on rhetoric and being "right about others being wrong" instead of providing an objective and insightful perspective.

Some examples: #52. Virtual Reality - I think her gripe is with VR being hyped too early, but from her writing, it sounds like she thinks the entire field is already dead and buried for education. Which would be ridiculous. The friction with VR right now is the technology; it is too physically limiting for the benefits > the cost of change. For anyone with an open mind who has tried VR, however, I think it's obvious that it will be the future in some shape or form. Whether it's this decade, or the next, or in 2040 who knows but dismissing an entire field like this really reduced the author's credibility in my eyes.

#49. Yik Yak - Never used it myself, but from what I've heard it was anything BUT an ed-tech app..?! It's listed as a defunct social media and chat app... Guess the author was clutching at straws here.

#48, #38, #6, etc. - Author seems to have a completely unjustified pessimism toward any sort of coding that isn't related to the traditional CS pathway. I can only speak for myself, but as someone who made poor decisions out of high school and is now a (pretty decent) self-taught developer, I find the author's conclusions totally wrong. Learning to code was the single good adult decision I've made - I've found a lasting passion, and I can make positive contributions to society. Without it, I'd still be sitting around depressed all day.

#25. Thiel Foundation - FWIW, I'm not a fan of Thiel at all but I do agree that we are in a college bubble. Audrey's snarky comment "Here’s one look at what some of the past Thiel Fellowship recipients are up to. Yawn" seems totally unjustified here. I haven't been through the list, but IIRC Vitalik Buterin (creator of Ethereum) was a recipient of the Thiel Foundation. Regardless what you think of crypto, Ethereum has had an enormous impact on the blockchain landscape. Whether or not Eth itself is successful, it's unjustified to write it off as "meh" if only for the downstream effect it has on other areas of innovation. I think money is a terrible indicator of "success", but if we're going down that route, Eth currently has a market cap of $14.5 mil+, which would make Thiel's investment a good one (though I don't believe he had a stake).

#13. Blockchain Anything - It's sad to see the author's piece decline from what were some really valuable insights earlier in the article down to this Buzzfeed-esque drivel again dismissing an entire field. I'm not saying blockchain will or won't be successful. However, for any new & poorly understood technology, it's easy to just google "reasons why technology X sucks", link to the first 5 articles, and win over readers who don't know better.

Again - it's a shame the author appeared desparate for filler material as the list grew longer. It's particularly a disservice to herself because she made some great points at times. Adopting a more balanced tone would have been desirable. This way it'd be clearer to see that EdTech really does have huge potential for an industry that desparately needs a total remake; it's just been executed very poorly for the most part. P.S. Lol at the author downplaying the impact of YouTube on EdTech. I'm not a huge fan but half the material for my course these days are links to YouTube videos. There is a slow but clear shift to tertiary education that is 100% online.