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pmjones

Re:Tell HN: Tradition Isn't Useless – It's Chesterton's Fence on Wednesday September 10, 2025 @03:46PM (#45202669)
I always wondered -- was this an actual experiment, or is it a just-so story?

EDIT: looks made-up, at least according to this: https://factschology.com/factschology-articles-podcast/monke...

Re:Tell HN: Tradition Isn't Useless – It's Chesterton's Fence on Wednesday September 10, 2025 @03:45PM (#45202650)
"Tradition" is smarter than you are. You might be able to ignore it for a while, maybe years, but the Gods of the Copybook Headings will eventually return.
Re:What Should the Department of Education Do? on Friday September 05, 2025 @08:54PM (#45145526)
Dissolve.
Re:MVC Isn't MVC – Collin Donnell on Saturday July 12, 2025 @11:51PM (#44547337)
Re:Yall are awesome. Thank you on Wednesday August 28, 2024 @11:02PM (#41386842)
Good luck, and good hunting!
Re:How to Be a Good Programmer on Sunday September 24, 2023 @12:29PM (#37634537)
Prior art: "How to Be a Programmer" by Robert Read

https://braydie.gitbook.io/how-to-be-a-programmer/en

"World to end tomorrow; women, minorities hardest hit."
Re:Open Peer Review Considered Harmful? on Thursday February 23, 2023 @08:44AM (#34910463)
> society recognises that there should be a way to assess the correctness of scientific claims

That assessment must include "replication" not merely "review."

Re:The News Is Bad for You. Stop Reading It on Tuesday January 24, 2023 @11:57AM (#34506322)
I don't recall who said it, but paraphrased: "To see how useless the news is, read last week's paper."

Further, if you must consume news: avoid watching it in favor of listening to it; avoid listening to it in favor of reading it; avoid reading from institutions in favor of reading from actual individuals.

Re:Bus factor of top GitHub projects on Wednesday January 11, 2023 @02:11PM (#34343038)
Great conclusion point: "Metabase supports public transportation."
I first read the title as "naive" technologists.
Re:The Alan Watts Delusion on Sunday January 08, 2023 @01:05PM (#34301412)
I picked up some Alan Watts in one of the ways the article describes: as samples spliced into music. I found it fascinating, and listened to some of his lectures, and while it was fascinating with some occasional revelations, in the end he seemed like just another hippie.
I know you hate you got caught out; I'll let it go this time. You can have the last word here if you like.
It is a damn shame that some people confuse "socialism" with "voluntary cooperation and exchange for mutual benefit."
Re: on Wednesday December 28, 2022 @06:46PM (#34167593)
If use must use an alternative, "pederast" works well.
As with many things, female averages are higher. But females scores also tend to cluster toward the middle. Male averages are lower, but have more scores at both the low end and high end. Thus, the best male performances are higher than the best female performances (and the worst male performances are lower than the worst female performances).

See also: men and women are innately different.

Re:Ask HN: A Book or Course to Learn Code Quality/Structure? on Thursday December 15, 2022 @09:05AM (#33999631)
It's PHP, but my book [Modernizing Legacy Applications in PHP](https://leanpub.com/mlaphp) may help -- deals with code improvement, especially the organization of that code. The examples are taken from a real codebase, though the names have been changed to protect the guilty. The book is still free, so nothing lost if it's not what you're looking for.

Good luck!

Re:The “Died Suddenly” Explosion on Monday November 28, 2022 @02:49PM (#33778591)
I do not see the author blaming "vaccines" (plural, of all types).

I do see the author blaming the mRNA "vaccine" (singular, deployed under EUA for SARS-CoV-2) combined with subsequent exposure to the virus. Quoting the article:

"""If you wish to blame the vaccines, then you’re left with the struggle of explaining why there are so many cases in late 2022, beginning in July, even though hardly any vaccines are administered in July, August and September. It doesn’t look like there’s a clear correlation between doses administered and sudden deaths.

As I have argued before, I believe that whatever is going wrong with the population, is a product of an interaction between the vaccine and subsequent exposures to SARS-COV-2. A simple delayed effect from the vaccine is insufficient to explain the peak in late 2021 followed by a decline in cases of people “dying suddenly”."""

Re:We’re Witnessing the End of Social Media on Thursday November 10, 2022 @02:25PM (#33551719)
Thank God.
Re:The Mistake Smart People Make on Tuesday November 08, 2022 @04:42PM (#33524695)
There's only one?
I wrote Modernizing Legacy Applications in PHP for exactly this situation.

https://leanpub.com/mlaphp

And it's (still) free!

TIL: Monkeys are racist, somehow.
Re:Refactoring Large Codebases on Wednesday August 17, 2022 @11:28PM (#32504935)
"I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Codebases on fire, edited in production. I watched websites uploaded from development through an FTP gate. All those files will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die()."

More seriously, the volume of development happening without version control is astounding. FTP-ing an entire codebase to a production directory, with the files named ".bak.1", ".bak.2", etc. is still a common thing.

(For what it's worth I wrote a book on Modernizing Legacy Applications in PHP https://leanpub.com/mlaphp so this subject is close to my heart.)

The above-average joe wants to see (among other things) successful replication, which is in short supply. Cf. https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg25433810-400-the-repl...
Re:Why isn't there a replication crisis in math? on Wednesday February 02, 2022 @10:49PM (#30188363)
"All science is either physics, or stamp collecting." (Ernest Rutherford)
Re:Do climate models predict extreme weather? on Saturday January 08, 2022 @10:09PM (#29859581)
> Do you have any evidence for this?

It's the very definition of how computer models work. The modeler writes the program, determines all the inputs, determines how the logic of the program will respond to the inputs, etc. The modeler is in complete control of the model, tells it how to behave, and thus the model says only what the modeler tells it to.

> Are you implying that climate change isn't happening?

Non sequitur.

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