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voussoir.net/writing/cyborgs_on_hn/cyborgs_on_hn.md
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Cyborgs on HN
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=============
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This page collects comments which make unnecessary or tenuous analogies to computers, programming, dollar-sign $variables, sed's/replace/syntax/g, mathematics, and cryptography in discussions that aren't about those things.
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> Real wages haven't increased since 1970.
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> We only feel richer because:
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> \* Most households have two wage earners now.
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> \* We use lines of credit to borrow for discretionary purchases, we lease cars, pay by subscription for things more.
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> \* We have more gadgets. (Note that this has been proven to make people any happier.)
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> > \> Note that this has been proven to make people any happier.
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> > s/Note/Not/? Or are you missing a "not" somewhere else?
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> In my former life as a consultant I came to very much dislike personas as implemented by ux designers.
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> Personas are a magnet for prejudice: they are based on the idea that clusters of people all behave the same (old people, young people, professionals, stay-at-home mothers, what have you).
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> > Yes, the very idea that customers can be bucketed is flawed. We are all unique people.
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> > > I think GP is fine with bucketing, but they're saying that f(age, gender, interests, ...) is not a good hashing function.
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> Is it possible that people simply continue to think about what they were trying to learn, consciously or not, when given no tasks? Why is the control comparing people who tried to learn information and then took a break to people who tried to learn even more information? Would a more insightful control be to look at how people who took a break compared to people who continued studying the material during the break time?
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> > I agree with you entirely. I want to make a few points though. First is that even when I am actively listening to someone speaking, my brain will make associations with the new information (coming from my auditory sensory registers), so I context-switch involuntarily every second. Think of process preemption.
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> > Roughly like this:
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> > t0: hear the word "dog";
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> > my auditory registers record it
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> > t1: my brain processes the word "dog";
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> > I imagine what "dog" looks like
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> > hear the word "cat" concurrently, goes into registers
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> > t2: my brain processes the word "cat"
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> > I imagine what "cat" looks like
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> > hear the word "lamb" concurrently, goes into registers
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> I've timed it in actual play: it's quicker to google for a monster stat block (one from the SRD, obviously) than it is to look it up in the Monster Manual sitting right next to the laptop.
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> > Sure, but from experience in play, sticky notes in the Monster Manual are much faster for switching back and forth than browser tabs are.
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> > > That's a cache, though, when the use case at hand is random access.
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> Brain is very active when you sleep, a lot is happening. Imagine sleep is just a mutex on big set of data on which computation needs to be made, compression, data reorganization, index optimizing. Data that you received that day is segregated , decisions are made which data to keep and which to delete. After that lock is freed and you wake up. If you don't sleep your system will run slower and slower over time and will timeout more and more queries until it will start to return corrupted data. You need to sleep to keep the system healthy.
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> tl;dr: It's not because the cardboard boxes are significantly better than cribs and other sleeping methods, it's the fact that the box comes with almost everything a new parent needs to look after kids, which means they don't have to shell out $foo-money to be able to take care of the children properly, and aren't left worried that they left something out.
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> English pronunciation <-> writing is so far from a mapping, it causes a lot of resource waste.
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> Even if there are dialects that pronounce the same word differently, you could still find a lot of common ground.
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> > Finding that common ground would mean switching from our current system of somewhat-arbitrary spelling to a different but very similar system of mostly-arbitrary spelling. It imposes the same memorization burden on everyone and the benefit is slightly more predictable pronunciation within each of a set of officially-blessed dialects. That ground gets lost over time regardless; there is a reason predictable pronunciation is a feature of spelling systems that either (1) are new, or (2) have just undergone reform.
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> > If your biggest problem lies in a circumstance you rarely encounter, arguably fixing it is not a priority.
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> > \> for example I always mess up the words study and student, it's infuriating
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> > This is a funny example to use, since it fully conforms to the rules I described above -- study uses the STRUT vowel, and student uses the GOOSE vowel. It would be a better example for the complaint that we have more sounds than symbols.
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> > > Good points, but I disagree. Decoding and encoding becomes a lot harder, if vowels change depending on consonants coming after them, or something else even further down the line. (I'm not a linguist.)
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> > > It's like a config file specification that supports gotos.
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> Because there's a bit of a feedback loop with success. If others see you as being successful or impressive (on whatever axis they care about), this attracts them to you, and having a more admirers increases your social power and influence, which gives you more opportunities and better chances of success in your future efforts.
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> This also explains [redacted]'s formula for career success, which is basically:
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> 10 Make something awesome
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> 20 Tell people about it
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> 30 GOTO 10
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> English suffers from the same problem as UNIX: they're both good enough.
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> Or you know, just look away from the monitor, in the physical space of your office/whatever instead of a flat surface, which would have similar benefits.
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> > So many office spaces are rectilinear and planar. I find the fractal real world to be so much more restful to look at. It refreshes my mind in a way unlike any manufactured surface.
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> There are few things in life more important than choosing one's peer group well. The Internet gives you many more options than we had available prior to the existence of it. Choose wisely and re-evaluate that choice periodically to see whether your peer group continues to represent your goals and values.
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> Why? Your peer group literally gets arbitrary code execution on your brain. (It's a flaw in MonkeyBrainOS 1.01 which we haven't patched yet.)
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> It's common amoung US companies as well. How many tech companies aren't available in !USA? How much "streaming TV shows" aren't available in !USA?
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> Walking Through a Doorway Makes You Forget (2011) (scientificamerican.com)
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> > Not entirely unlike running a garbage collection cycle (or freeing a pool) after each HTTP request...
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> Great read. Somewhat of an off-topic question, but here goes:
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> \> Watkins wanted her pen name to be spelled in lowercase to shift the attention from her identity to her ideas.
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> I’m sure what I’m about to say has been discussed before — but wouldn’t this accomplish the opposite effect? I feel her “unconventional” name makes me focus more on it, not less (especially when her name is used at the beginning of a sentence, where we are trained to expect a capital letter no matter what). Do other people with lowercase names have similar justifications?
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> > To me it's a small pattern breaking annoyance, like a linter warning I can't turn off that triggers every time I see it.
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> Mobile app stores handle a lot of hassle like distribution and billing. I would avoid complex backend at all cost if you don't want to be on 24/7 devops duty. Maybe periodically updated CVS at basic webhosting would be enough.
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> > s/CVS/CSV/
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> Slight note about Dan Wang picking 2005: That was the peak of CS degrees awarded because it's 4/5 years after the height of the dot-com bubble. So the upward bump in the mid-2000's is somewhat explainable as an anomaly.
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> > Re: the choice of 2005 as origin, if you rebase on 2009, then CS degree growth looks on par with other STEM fields.
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