- fluoridationThat's not really "information" in the information-theoretic sense that the other person was using, when it can be rewritten in all manner of different ways while conveying the same overall mood. The densest way to communicate "Sam and Frodo walk across the plain towards Mt. Doom. They're both really tired" is exactly that. All the other words one would write around that core idea would not provide any more specificity to the sentiment, they'd just there to allow the reader to immerse themselves. Unless the information is simply the words themselves, in which case no text is any more entropic than any other.
- >What makes HN so great is that it's curated towards curiosity. Not simple quibs.
It wasn't just a quib. It contained some sarcasm, but it was also an honest question.
>If the only value your comment has is to yourself, you could write it without pressing the submit button.
I could also just have the thought and not write it down. Neither option would count as having expressed it. I need to have it intrude upon someone else's psyche.
- Does it come as misleading if you honestly believe what you're saying but are simply mistaken?
- I just don't understand how it could occur to no one in a group of three or four people for a whole hour. Like, even if the barrier had been fully built and worked perfectly even after considering the tide, they would have been making camp on fully soaked ground. Just what everyone wants first thing in the morning: to trudge through mud.
- I haven't had it happen while reading aloud (since I almost never read aloud), but I've definitely had it happen while reading something new that I hated. I'd end up having to read the same page (or more!) three or four times because I kept zoning out.
- My experience has been the exact opposite. Yes, there's literally a lot of information, but so much of it is irrelevant fluff that could be eliminated or trimmed without losing much. I've seen multiple paragraphs of Tolkien, for example, that narratively boil down to "they walk across the field". To be clear, I don't see that as a flaw. The fluff serves to set the mood. But that's different from saying that the text is especially information-dense.
- I do something similar, only keeping my lips shut and moving my tongue and throat as if I was speaking. I find it's an intermediate speed between conversation speed and purely reading with my eyes. I started doing it when I wasn't so good at English to give myself time to understand the text, as well as to practice the mechanics of English speech when I didn't have anyone, but I find keeping me at this pace gives me maximum comprehension. I have a friend who reads much faster than me and he quite often misses points in whatever he's reading. I think he got into that habit from literature, but it's disastrous when reading something more densely packed with information, like technical documentation.
- >you could stick the accelerator open and disable the breaks and steering
This is silly. Prohibiting modifying car firmware because it would enable some methods of sabotage is like prohibiting making sledgehammers because someone might use one to bludgeon someone, when murder is already a crime to begin with.
- I don't really understand your point in restating this. Someone who says "X should be true" isn't going to be convinced that X should be false by reminding them that X is in fact false.
>GPS et al would be non-functional if everybody could make a jammer.
Then it should be illegal to make a GPS jammer. Making it illegal to reprogram a GPS receiver in any way is unnecessarily broad.
- >Givers think that conversations unfold as a series of invitations; takers think conversations unfold as a series of declarations.
I don't really understand the thesis outlined in the article. "Givers" and "takers" are defined like this, but it actually sounds like the two types of conversationalists are "actives" and "passives", where actives seek to move the conversation forward and passives let others move it forward. A giver-and-taker conversation where both participants are alternatingly active can work. The giver asks a question and the taker answers it but then adds something of their own that doesn't let the conversation grind to a halt.
Example:
A: Hey, have you heard about X? (giver, active)
B: Oh, I hate X. I think Y. (taker, active)
A: Woah, hang on. I'm not so sure about Y. (taker, active)
B: Oh, yeah? Do you think Z? (giver, active)
In my experience, the absolute worst conversations I've had were those where I felt I was the only one putting in any effort, trying to come up with topic after topic only to have them peter out in under a minute, followed by silence.
I also don't know that people are necessarily fixed in their roles, be as giver, taker, passive, or active. In fact, if I'd have to guess, an engaging conversation has the participants constantly switch roles with the flow, depending on how much they have to say on a given topic.
So I think a corollary from all this is that a conversation breaks down when an active participant switches to passive expecting the other to become active, when in fact the other person just wants to be passive, or when two passive people try to have a conversation, in which case nothing happens at all.
- letsdecrypt.org doesn't load for me.
- The reason, I would guess, is that it takes at least a couple satellite passes to be able to get the 3D data, and then a processing step to actually obtain it, and they've not done that for sparsely populated areas.
- So running directions from B to A while never touching any shade, suggesting churches and rehab centers to ignore while the shadows stay perfectly still?
- >it's dehumanizing when you're hired to do something entirely different. Treating people as interchangeable units of labor is pretty much a textbook example of dehumanization in my opinion; we're not cogs who should be freely reassigned by authorities based on their whims, but individuals deserving of some semblance of autonomy and self-determination.
But you do realize that you're going to be treated that way regardless of whether it's overtly or not, right? That's why you're paid by the hour, not by how much your effort contributes to the bottom line (supposing for a moment that that could be accurately quantified). When you become an employee you do agree to become a cog in a machine. You're not some independent artist making your own way in the world, you're working on someone else's project and following someone else's success criteria, along with a bunch of other people. An employee gives up a small amount of autonomy and self-determination in exchange for stability. If that's not what you want perhaps you should become an entrepreneur.
I honestly don't understand how being asked to perform a wildly different task is much worse that the default state of affairs. If it were me I'd think "hell yeah! You're paying me the same money to go fetch coffee? The hell do I care?"
>I'm implicitly agreeing to literally any of those policies by agreeing to employment to any single one?
No. But it does make those policies not unreasonable. It can't be unreasonable when so many other places have said policies. That the place you're at isn't currently one of them doesn't mean it can't be one in the future, nor does it mean that it changing would be unreasonable. You especially can't put on the surprised Pikachu face when so many companies are doing it. "Wha... What do you mean in this software company they're requiring people to return to the office like they're doing at all the other software companies? This is totally unexpected!"
>In some societies (but not the United States), a company unilaterally trying to change the terms of employment in a way that the employee disagrees with is grounds for the employee to receive severance.
I live in one such country, and most people would still rather negotiate than just be fired with severance, or even just bear with it and start looking for a new job. All severance does is make it so small and medium-sized companies can't fire a lot of people at once. It's still a bigger blow to the employee, even with severance.
>I fundamentally disagree with the presumption that I need to be willing to present a company with an amount of money for them to force me to change my circumstances; if they're the ones who want to change things, the onus should be on them to convince me, or else they should be required to compensate me for their unwillingness to continue with the previous agreement. This isn't how things work with "at-will" employment though, and the number of software companies in the United States that offer anything other than at-will employment beyond finite length contracts are at most a rounding error above zero. This doesn't mean I have to think this is fair or reasonable; quite a lot of things in life are unfair or unreasonable without being within our individual abilities to influence, and it's not hypocritical to be willing to point those out even if I'm not willing to risk the livelihood of myself or my family to make a point about it that will in all likelihood change nothing.
To be honest, I'm not sure what your point is anymore. All I said was that if circumstances change and you and the other party can't come to an agreement, all that's left is to dissolve the business relationship. Everything else around that simple fact, such as the particular terms of the business relationship, seem to me largely inconsequential.
- >https://www.noaa.gov/digital-collections/collections/4774/it...
Like I said before, you can't do that over water. It constrains the shape of the triangle you can measure.
- I really think those are bad examples. I don't see how someone making what you consider to be an unreasonable request can make one feel dehumanized. Insulted or demeaned? Maybe, sure. But dehumanized? What does that say about your opinion of people who do do coffee runs or who like to work in offices? Nevertheless, I'll roll with it.
I would say it comes down to common practices. Commonly, engineers don't do coffee runs. Commonly, office jobs have always been done in an office, and this status quo has only changed fairly recently (let's say in the last 20 years). History could have played out such that it became common practice for coffee run duty to cycle over everyone in the office, regardless of role, in which case asking you to do it would have been perfectly reasonable, and someone would be right to ask what makes you so special than you can't do something everyone else does. Likewise for remote work. Some places allow it, some don't, and some may transition from one to the other. Since this is known to be the case (no one will believe you if you try to feign ignorance on this), it is reasonable to require to come to the office, no matter how many years you've been doing remote work.
>having expectations change without my consent (e.g. being told after multiple years working remotely that I need to start going into an office or "voluntarily" leave).
When expectations change unilaterally, that usually calls for a renegotiation. The correct response to "we want you to start coming to the office every day" is "okay, then I want $x more every year to cover my additional expenses". Now, it could be that either or neither party is willing to negotiate on such terms, or even that they do negotiate but no consensus is reached, in which case you just have to dissolve the business relationship. What else can you do?
- There's no need for a mob, government-backed or not. A vendor who scams his customer base is harvesting its good will, and eventually it will run out and he'll no longer able to do business.
- >Courts, law enforcement and contract law.
That's the wrong answer. The existence of tokens predates the existence of government. It's the next step after barter. The correct answer is reputation. A vendor who cheats his customers builds up a bad reputation, and the only way he can keep doing it is by changing customer bases, for example by moving to a different town. Think of the traveling snake oil salesman who moves on once people realize his remedies don't work.