> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
While I find the article and some of the comments interesting, I don't think it's a good fit for HN. Articles should provoke curious conversation; this one, judging from the number of dead posts, is provoking too much tribalism.
There are plenty of curious comments in this thread. Those take time to show up, because they require reflection, not just reflexivity, and that function is just a lot slower. Repeating something from a hot, bubbling cache—pre-boiling rage!—is super fast. That is why comments show up so quickly to muck up fresh threads with angry reflexes.
Of course, those comments trigger angry reflexes in others, so we're in a flamewar before curious conversation has had a chance to put its boots on. Blaming "HN" for this is a red herring—the overwhelming majority of HN readers and commenters are doing nothing of the sort, and some of them have interesting things to say about barber shops.
I don't think you see the whole of the harm done here. Yes, the extreme opinions come from one side, but to deal with it, the non-extremists have to take opinion-suppressing measures. Just the process of recognising and flagging posts that are bad for us is polarising.
There's a balance to be struck: I don't like the idea that the extremists determine what interesting content is permissible to discuss on HN. But while bringing attention to and discussing this article is good for consciousness-raising, I think this polarising process is damaging HN.
i know right? they somehow converged, but if you look at history of marxist movement, e.g. Russian Bolsheviks, they all started as upper class "liberals" sympathizing with the suffering of the underprivileged masses. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Checking pockets isn’t enough. Pitchers have been hiding the substances on their hats or gloves or other sneaky places for years. It’s not like they just bring a jar of spider tack out there with them
It is better than nothing. But you've also got people going on and off the field frequently and a strong incentive to cheat. If your five second check is circumvented it's no longer that much better than nothing.
learning how to fall is huge. of course falling down onto asphalt/concrete always carries some risk but once you get comfortable falling safely, it's pretty unlikely you'll do any serious damage to yourself if you're not straying too far outside your limits as you learn.
"the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated there were roughly 22,000 deaths in the prior season and 34,000 two seasons ago." -- emphasis added
Estimation usually involves gathering data and applying some statistics to the data. The question was about the details of that process. "They estimated" isn't telling us anything new.
> People occasionally conflate these shell-company reverse mergers with the current boom in special purpose acquisition companies, but they are really very different. A SPAC goes public and raises money specifically for the purpose of taking a private company public; it sells shares to the public and then has a public vote with a lot of disclosure to complete its merger. A reverse merger generally involves a public shell of a more or less defunct operating company (or at least one that pretended to have operations); the shell will be fairly closely held by a few insiders, and there will be no real money inside it. It is not a high-profile way to go public and raise money, the way a SPAC is; it’s a low-profile way to sneak into the public markets.
