Tagged “hackernews”

I don't know what to make of this insanity

Some bits on retirement and people figuring out what they want to do.

I wish people would only use this for good. A stupid arms race that just makes it harder to automatically download utility bills.

interesting discussion on experiences and stats of apps

Good article, and some other good recs in the comments

Original title was "Why Captcha Pictures Are So Unbearably Depressing", which felt a bit complainy compared to the updated one. I agreed less with that take on the article, but a lot with the sentiment from the HN comments

A website with captchas is like a retail store with metal detectors; it's not somewhere I feel welcome.

So many good points. Tasks vs notes; not everything needs a checklist, some things are just notes. Thinking "I'll do that later" is a lot easier than "I will select a date/time in a calendar popup to schedule a reminder for this task". Todo apps are ineffective if having them is more work than the task you are trying to do!

A quote on HN about procrastination has also made be add Red Dwraf to booklist.

A bunch of good and/or relatable bits in comments section of this. Some sounds far too intense (the guy's ex-wife needing him to reply to messages within minutes!), some interesting ones on how people use their phones, and how beaviours and norms toward them have changed.

And from another interesting reply:

even if you ignore addiction , mobile phones have been integrated into society in so many infrastructure-like roles that they are hardly at all optional or 'ignorable' at this point.
When you live in a world that requires bills to be paid via mobile, rent to be paid via mobile, mass transit tickets bought via mobile, physical location reservation via mobile, as well as any customer service only available via mobile... who cares about personal addiction; normal life isn't feasible without a mobile phone at that point, and very few (if any at all) mobile phones are designed from the premise that they should respect your attention.

The mobile phones that are designed to preserve the users attention are widely incompatible with any functions that the user needs (billpay/specific group apps, whatever) to stay integrated with the systems being forced upon them, so those options are already non-starter.

That means this problem is worth discussing -- non-compulsive normal people as well as compulsive addicts are being affected by the lack of 'respect for attention' that mobile phones have, and this problem intersects with the 'required prevalence' of mobile phones across the world.

Summary of recent Sci-Hub legal challenges

I really wonder how this is going to play out. For those who don't follow the current situation with Sci-Hub, Alexandra (the creator and likely the sole operator) of Sci-Hub shut down the part of the website ("the magical proxy") that is responsible for fetching the papers that were not previously retrieved. This was done to comply with the request of the Indian court, as described in the article.
As a result, any papers published in 2021 (and some of the rarer, older ones, that nobody tried to access in the past) are not retrievable by Sci-Hub. The user only gets to see a white screen.

This is meant to be a temporary measure, but it's been going on since December of last year (due to various court hearing delays), and the desperation in online communities like the r/scihub subreddit has been palpable [1,2].

The word 'metaverse' is starting to get grossly overused and lose meaning.

Any mention of FB is inevitably pretty devisive on HN.

"Share a private virtual room with friends. Watch videos, play with 3D objects, or just hang out"

Works impressively well on pancake browsers as well. Found via HN.

I hate so many aspects of recent reddit, it somehow continues to get worse.

It’s shocking to me how people sell out like this. You have to know deep down that all these hostile short term juicers destroy the brand, each malfeasance creating more room for a competitor. I mean you guys replaced Digg, cmon.
The audacity to claim “it works”, in italics no less.

The real shame of the current tech companies is they have no principles, no long term vision. They all feel like they follow the same curve, a bunch of managers hitting KPIs during their 2-5 year stint before trading up, ending in some PE firm diving in at the end for the final squeeze.

They’re lemons being juiced dry, when they should be a garden of lemon trees.

“But we got 20% more juice than last year!!”

Yea, you did.

From hackernews.

GitLab security scanning has a similar issue of false positives (many Node security vulns in frontend-only code). But at least they can be marked as resolved!

Either infuriating or upsetting how long we have known about this and done nothing.

HN discussion, including some good comments like this:

The time for decisive action was at least a decade ago, but there's no harm in starting now — it just means that the transition to alternative energy sources must be more abrupt and more investment must be allocated to remedial technologies that can work towards undoing at least some portion of the damage we have done to our biosphere.

Let historians and the next generations worry about whose fault it was. It is more important to secure for the next generation a sustainable and habitable future, than it is to look back at past hubris and wonder where it went wrong.

A counter to the "but I always use cmd R" argument. Stripping away useful UI so things look clean is not a good design approach.

Though I don't think I ever worked as hard as the commentor, this bit felt pretty relatable:

One thing that always happened at the end of a semester is we'd have a few days after exams but before flights back home. On these days I'd typically try playing a video game (my hobby before college) and every time I would stop playing after just an hour with deep feeling of unease at the pit of my stomach. "Alarm bells" is exactly how I would describe it - a feeling at the core of my psyche that I have been wasting time and there must be something productive I should be doing or thinking about.

Years later, having tackled anxiety problems that had plagued me most of my life, I came to recognize that my relationship with hard work during my college years was not healthy and that this deep seated desire to do more work is not a positive thing, at least not for me.

Some complaints about the lack of obvious scrollable areas.

And HN discussion with some more.