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I tend to agree with you, many people are passionate about typefaces, and dictators are no exception. [Passion about typeface] seems to be a low-signal detector for dictators. I'm passionate about lasagna, and I'll bet Mussolini was too -- but that probably doesn't mean I'm a fascist.

But if you go around and tell everyone you meet that they're doing it wrong and that lasagna MUST be prepared exactly the way you do it, because it's the one and only right way, then you're a lasagna-nazi :)

When I read the headline i thought “well obviously they don’t mean Marco Rubio, there must be some famous publicist or something”. Cannot believe it actually was Marco Rubio, lol

The entire thing literally reads like an Onion piece. If I'd read this exact article in The Onion I would've considered it brilliant comedy.

It's becoming increasingly hard to distinguish an Onion article from actual media. Post-truth indeed.

Spending time on something like this suggests he doesn't actually have much to do besides throwing his power around.

People will often use their power to do seemingly meaningless things, when they don't know how to solve the actual problems on their plate.

Marco Rubio famously doesn't have the authority to do what is arguably his job.

> Trump envoy Witkoff reportedly advised Kremlin official on Ukraine peace deal

A more dignified Secretary of State would have resigned when this news surfaced.


> A more dignified Secretary of State would have resigned when this news surfaced.

I remain impressed at the number of longstanding Republican politicians that have been willing to sacrifice their dignity and likely their political career on the Trump altar. It is a one-way trip for their credibility, and when Trump is gone what are they going to do?

The only interesting right wing politician to me right now is MTG. And that's an odd position to find myself in. She is a clown, but suddenly she seems much more real for a moment. Like we might have caught a glimpse of the actual person. I am faintly curious how her political career shapes up over the next few years (assuming her resignation does happen and is not the actual end of her ambitions).


Well, you can come up with this position or view on a 5 minute toilet break after reading something that rallied you up. Once you have a voice you can trigger an avalanche with very little it seems.

Finally, some good news from this administration.

It's on brand for his party.

with current timeline expect the unexpected

What do you mean the TIRE company actually reviews restaurants?

At the very least, I appreciate that this test should help us determine the causal impact of social media. I don't know if rolling out to the whole country is justified just for the test data, but I feel it will give a pretty conclusive result one way or the other.

Teens will learn to bypass all this within the week. Then, whatever the new way of doing social media will be, it could easily reach consensus within the year.

Even if it achieves only a small reduction in usage (say 10%), i would expect that should have a measurable effect on happiness if the hypothesis of [social media causes unhappiness] is true. If no increase in happiness is observed, i think we could say that social media does not cause unhappiness.

Not so sure. The government has placed a A$50M incentive per violation discovered, I heard. That sounds like a powerful incentive on the companies to outsmart the kids.

If a kid uses a pseudonymous account and fraudulently bypasses an age verification system, I have a hard time believing that the company would be fined $50M.

I would guess that this massive fine is more for situations like if a company can be shown to have wilfully allowed a violation or else has been grossly negligent. (But I have not read the law!)


violation would be: not making a reasonable effort,

violation would not be: a kid bypassing their reasonable effort.


Anecdotally, people's fear of sharks still feels very overblown. I've gone surfing in SoCal a couple times a month for the last 5 years or so, I've never known anyone that's had a shark attack, and have only been told "there's a shark nearby" once. On the other hand, many friends have hit rocks, got caught in rip currents, and or had stingray stings. Even though the severity of these things is less than a shark attack, their prevalence means that there are many more deaths every year due to these relatively mundane things. But when I offer to teach somebody to surf, sharks are still one of the most common objections (it's probably second to "I can't swim").

None of this contradicts what the study is saying -- it's totally possible that the overall fear is decreasing. It's just _still irrationally high_, imo.


> But when I offer to teach somebody to surf, sharks are still one of the most common objections (it's probably second to "I can't swim").

It could also be just a good common excuse (and also a cover for the sometimes embarrassing "can't swim")


Huh, that’s a really good point. I wonder if that is what’s happening, will have to pay more attention next time. Thanks for suggesting it!

I'd say irrational risk-ranking is a near-universal human weakness.

Parents fear kidnappers more than car accidents. The elderly fear whatever the news is telling them to fear more than heart disease or falling.


Kids fear quicksand and the Bermuda triangle.

...or maybe they don't fear it enough, given https://nos.nl/artikel/2590957-vier-jongens-uit-cementslib-b....


There are way more things to worry about than sharks, placement, wave mass, reef suck, if you go down will you come up again, etc.

The Right, going well: https://youtu.be/cYb9HOuhBrc?t=299

The Right, a bit wrong: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjHaFOGBPzk

More on that location: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X03-6lTxFTg


I like to imagine that whenn is like iff -- ie, when would mean "when and only when", lol

This is fascinating! At the same time, this wikipedia article is of surprisingly low quality, with sentences like

> It is hard to determine how much spacing should be put in between words, but a good typographer is able to determine proper spacing.[3]

> Since the fifteenth century, the best work shows that text is to be read smoothly and efficiently.[4]

> Two other gentlemen have expressed different opinions on what the space between words should be.


I've adjusted or removed those sentences in the article.

thankyou!!

Exactly the same sentences grated here. It is the subjective passed off as the objective, passed on with a tone of false authority. A surprisingly large majority of public communications fall in to this category. Mastering this puffery, usually for the express purpose of swaying the wills of lesser minds or pressing buttons in funding and grant processes, grants you the reigns of bureaucracy and a career in corporate, public or international relations. A horrible way to waste a life.

> Two other gentlemen have expressed different opinions on what the space between words should be.

Yeah, that's just weird. Just two, both gentlemen? Is having an opinion about laying out text a chivalrous aristocratic old boy's club? Are there other alternative styles of laying out text that are more "ladylike"? Does this em-dash make me look fat?


I thought it was weirdly written, too. Why is the CSS property that controls it worth mentioning in the opening paragraph, and wtf is "standardized digital typography"?

I agree it's poorly written, but I'm _much_ more interested in whether it is correct, or incorrect. Do you believe it is incorrect?

75% margin means they have around $79.2bn of potential revenue sitting in inventory. Next quarter revenue is projected to be $65bn, so 110 days of stock.

I don't have an opinion on whether it's correct or not. I see AI writing, I stop reading. When compared to human-authored prose, AI writing is much more likely to be convincing-but-wrong. I don't need to be ingesting stuff engineered to be believable, with correctness only as a secondary concern.

If it's correct, it's usually because a better source has already written it correctly, or because it's trivial to somebody who knows what they're talking about.

AI writing is a sign that the author either doesn't know the material, doesn't want to write it, or both. Because distinguishing "too lazy to write it" and "too stupid to fact-check it properly" is very difficult on my end as a reader, it's better to be safe than sorry. There's no sense in exposing my malleable wetware to slop of unknown provenance.

There has been no shortage of human authors writing about this topic. I don't know who "Philip Pieogger" is, so I have no reason to prefer him as a co-author.


Apparently it doesn't matter to them

I don’t have hard data, but I think this optimal value is very closely approximated by coffee drinkers’ daily average. 400 ml is about 1.75 cups, and i think the normal distribution of coffee cups among drinkers is centered at ~2 cups. Makes me wonder if we’re all self medicating and accidentally finding the sweet spot.

Hmm to feel a bit elevated makes sense. I also have that with one glass of alcohol at certain times. Heart rate goes up, things get a bit more intense. It's a nice vibe if you're open to it. It's also a bit subtle.

For me what I've noticed: 2 cups hits the spot, but I always tend to drink more, around 4 cups. On the 3rd cup my mind gets jittery. It's not so much my body or anything and I don't experience the jitters strongly but at the same time I feel a stronger focus while noticing that stronger focus isn't getting anything extra done. Hence I call it mind jitters.

But I can imagine that at 2 cups people are genuinely just a bit elevated in certain ways.


OR it could be that we find the sweet spot because it's the spot we feel the best.

Well, that's the hardest data of all!

HN isn't a judge of software; it's a place to learn and be curious. So people are often interested in projects that do a novel thing in a normal way, or a normal thing in a novel way. Eg, stories fascinate us because something was built by a very lean team, or a group with no money, or somebody who is an industry outsider, or a parapalegic, etc. Overcoming these limitations is a sort of 'hacking'.

Is it strange that NFLX is down on this news? I would have thought this is a big win for them, as they are consolidating power?

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