Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | more thewebcount's commentslogin

That chart shows percentage of students getting at least 9 hours of sleep. Holy crap! In high school I used to go to bed around 11PM because my parents made me, and I would stare at the ceiling until I fell asleep at 2 or 3AM. Then my alarm would ring at 6:15 and I’d drag my ass into the shower and be a zombie through at least my first 3 classes. I’d get home at 2:30 and couldn’t keep from falling asleep since I was so exhausted.


i feel this so much. i didn't know shit about sleep back then, but in retrospective i had such poor sleeping habits and was barely getting 7 hours of sleep at much on most nights for such a long time, it feels terrible to know this now haha.


Reading through it, I was struck by the contrast of how broken the web page was with what the author was saying about UX. The author seems experienced in the field, but the site felt completely broken. I don’t know if it’s a device or browser issue, but reading on my iPad, if I tried to use my right thumb to scroll, the page acted as if I had reached the end of the article, even though it was clear there was more because the last visible line was only half-visible. (And this was after having to manually zoom in because all the text was shoved to one side and tiny.) Scrolling with my left thumb worked about 50% of the time. The rest of the time it worked as poorly as scrolling with my right thumb. I gave up after about 5 paragraphs.


that site is not really suitable for mass consumption, iirc it used to even have a caveat that said it really only existed to make certain leaf nodes sharable. it's basically a personal zettelkasten, but this update was also sent to his patreons as well, where the writing just ended up being whatever your email client made of it.


If you visit his top level website, you can see that it uses a columnar layout. I agree that it compromises the experience if a single article is linked like this, especially on smaller screens, but it isn't broken, this is how it is intended. It just doesn't cater to all formfactors.


Did we see the same website? The page I visited appeared to just be straight text. I’m on a iPhone with safari. It felt like a totally normal blog post by someone who doesn’t care for the current js heavy web.


Reader mode solved that.


It was the same thing in the 80s with camcorders. There was a stereotype of the crazy neighbor who followed his kids around with his camcorder recording every second of their lives. Then it was smart phones. Now it's this. People want to take photos and videos of stuff and it's more important to them than looking dorky for a few minutes. I don't like it very much, either, but I understand it, and it's pretty much human nature.


It's not just Linux users. I'm using Orion on macOS and I got stuck at the "Cloudflare needs to check the security of your connection…" prompt this morning. I didn't even get a Captcha. It just hung there. (And by the way, that prompt makes no sense.)


I've encountered that prompt inside a WebView in an Android app as well. Changing the user agent bypasses it for a certain amount of time.

I'm pretty sure that prompt will hang indefinitely for user agents it doesn't recognize (because bot detection is almost impossible these days).


I've not been to Tacoma, so just taking a guess - Gary, Indiana is a dying/dead industrial town in the Midwest. I believe it was known mainly for steel mills when it was at its peak. These days it's mainly the butt of jokes about the smell of the town. The smell is a very real thing. If you drive through it, there is a very odd industrial smell that permeates the entire town. I used to drive from Chicago to near Detroit on a regular basis, and I could always tell when I hit Gary because of the sudden change in smell. But as far as I know, not much of note has come out of Gary, Indiana in decades. Wikipedia describes it like this:[0]

Like other Rust Belt cities, Gary's once thriving steel industry has been significantly affected by the disappearance of local manufacturing jobs since the 1970s. As a result of this economic shift, the city's population has decreased drastically, having lost 61% of its population since 1960.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary,_Indiana


Tacoma smelled- paper pulp plants, and more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aroma_of_Tacoma

I see Gary also had paper plants, but I think it also had a ton of other industrial activity.


TL;DR - it helps to learn about patterns of thinking, particularly cognitive biases

Long version: Plenty of good advice here, but I wanted to add something that helped me in this regard. I grew up in a household where everything was criticized for any and all reasons, most of which could be boiled down to "I feel bad and in order to make myself feel better, I'm going to do something that makes you feel worse than me." Being born into that kind of atmosphere makes it very difficult to understand that a) it's not normal, and b) criticism (when used appropriately) isn't about making a person feel bad, it's about trying to improve something. It was just never used appropriately in my household growing up.

So many (way too many) years later, I started getting into the skeptical movement. What initially attracted me was that it was about tearing apart stupid ideas (so pretty similar to what I grew up in). Someone would claim to have a photograph of Sasquatch or a UFO, and people would show how the photo wasn't what it claimed. But it was a lot deeper than that. There were doctors debunking bogus medical cures, and people pointing out that businesses were scams, etc.

That was all well and good, but as I read more and more about how to get better at spotting these sorts of things I read a lot about cognitive biases and logical fallacies. Something soaked in because I found as I understood my own thinking better, I had a better understanding of what could and likely couldn't be other people's motivations for saying the things they said. Whereas before I might think, "Oh that person's just saying x because they dislike me," or "because they're jealous that I have y," or whatever, these days I'm better at saying, "Well, they might just be saying that because they don't like me, or it could be they don't have the same experience as me, and don't understand my motivation for why I think like this. I can try explaining my motivation and see if they understand or not. And maybe they'll understand or maybe they'll explain something to me to help me understand their point of view." (It's more complicated than that, but it's hard to explain in a comment.) Anyway, a lot of the pain of getting criticized evaporated when I could reason better about other people's motivations.


I have no preference either way to keep or get rid of AM radio, but I have to wonder, do people under 30 even know what AM radio is or how to tune into it? Just like with manual transmissions and cursive writing, it's probably something they've never had any need to do. Does it help in an emergency if you not only don't know how to do it, but also don't know to do it. I was born in the 70s and listened to plenty of AM radio, but for the last 30+ years AM radio has basically meant "low quality far right talk and religious programming maybe with some country music on the side." I haven't even thought of turning on AM radio in literally decades.


I often see signs instructing to tune to whatever AM for weather info, so I don't think it's that far fetched. Kids learning to read ask questions about stuff they see.

And FWIW, I was in line for a drive thru PCR covid test in late 2020 at a fair ground and they were broadcasting the instructions on an AM station, informing us by sign to tune in.


In my state (Washington) we have signs over most of the coastal highways and mountain passes saying "tune to XXXX AM when lights are flashing". So I am certain under 30's in Washington State know this.


Where I live, the women's sports is on the AM radio when men's is on the FM band owned by the same station. There's also a BBC World Service mirror on AM. There's also a lot of non-English AM radio in the city I grew up in. I am under 30 and have used AM for these purposes quite often. Like a stone with lots of life underneath - just because something looks unused on the surface doesn't mean there isn't a bustling community.


I turned on AM during a cross country road trip. It was fun exploring for an hour before switching back to bluetooth.


I remember being at a small company in the late 90s. We hired a new engineer and he used AIM. The boss was furious that the new guy was spending his time on the clock chatting with friends (and possibly leaking company secrets to people at other companies!). They forbid him to use it, so he would log into it every morning and set his status to some childish message about how his employer wouldn’t allow him to use it during business hours.

I remember thinking it was odd that the engineer would think it was OK to be chatting with friends while he was supposed to be working, but I also thought it was odd that the boss was so pissed off about it. It’s not like we didn’t (physically, IRL) chat among ourselves about non-work stuff, too. As long as we were getting our work done, who cares? Now everyone has chat and social media on every device, include their own that they bring with them anywhere, including work.

I also remember that when I was a kid, I was never supposed to interrupt my father at work by calling him, unless it was an absolute real emergency, like the house burning down. Times have changed!


So what's the end goal with all the personal info they seem to collect? Does it lead to other types of scams higher up in the organization? I can see how some of it is useful to the people running the virtuals so they can keep up with the conversation more easily, and I get the point about making the virtuals seem more realistic for the area they're targeting, but it seems like they collect a whole lot more than that. I've gotta believe there's something bigger at play here. And usually when there's one type of organized crime going on at an organization, there's more, right?


> I have observed that many of my peers want to be “managed.” What they like about the arrangement is the feeling of isolated from responsibility and liability. Do as told. It’s sort of an “anti self reliance” thing. An attempt to be, as an adult, in a relationship that looks more like a subservient child-parent relationship.

What a bizarre take. I like programming, I don't like dealing with all the people stuff. I've run my own business and it involved focusing on all the things I find uninteresting and focusing very little on the things I find very interesting. So for me it's just a matter of not liking that position. This belief that everyone who isn't in management is some sort of troglodyte who can't pick their own nose is very childish.


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: