Javascript has many faults, but go look into the history of how/why it was created and given that context, it's likely many would do far worse than he did.
> In more provincial regions and even just much of Europe lots of forms have to be filled out and printed.
This is changing quickly with the covid pandemic. One of its silver linings is that I can't remember the last time I had to wait in line for one hour only to be told off by some exhausted bureaucrat about my missing grand-parents' birth certificate or whatever the hell they come up with. Take that, bureaucracy!
This is probably the time to plug this wonderful extension [0] that directly warns you, whenever a link to a scholarly article is posted, that said article has had comments on its PubPeer entry.
For those who don't know, PubPeer was designed as a kind of forum where people can discuss articles after they're published (with or without a pseudonym). Of course, it almost instantly turned into a place for anonymous whistleblowing and call-outs for fraud, replication failure, etc. So while it's not an absolute rule, an article having one comment or two on PubPeer is usually a middling red flag for that article being generally dubious.
The reason I'm talking about all this is that the parent's link has twenty-five (25) comments on PubPeer. See for yourself, read the discussion and make of that what you will.
Leaving aside the usual quip about HN being an endless source of entertainment when it comes to attempting to comprehend basic concepts in biology that they weren't taught in high school, I'm wondering about something.
What's with the propensity for the typical HNer, and the tech demographic in general, to subscribe to the whole alpha/beta charade in the first place? Your average programmer isn't usually a bodybuilder or even what you may call a 'Chad'. Even on social media, blogs, and generally speaking the whole ecosystem of believing dumb evopsych crap, the most prominent speakers aren't exactly paragons of traditional masculinity themselves. And conversely, Joe Rogan himself (if you're willing to consider an MMA pro 'alpha') probably doesn't care at all about the Google memo.
So, like, if you're soft-spoken, introverted, maybe effete, maybe overweight, what's the point of doing all this? Why fantasize about an immutable, evolutionary-driven hierarchy of males if you're not even putting yourself at the top? Does that stem from self-loathing? Maybe a fetish of some kind? I'm curious to read different perspectives from HNers.
I’d argue that we have a lot of smart but hormonal and insecure teens on this site that are just trying to make sense of the world, especially what’s important to them.
I've always figured it was an ego-preservation mechanism. Subscribers to this belief don't see themselves as successful or attractive, but being successful or attractive is a major part of their sense of self-worth. The emotionally healthy response would be to address why they don't see themselves as attractive or successful, or maybe to question whether those make sense as part of their self worth.
Some people can't or won't do those options though, so their brains move to the next option to preserve their sense of self-worth: deflection. They believe they are unsuccessful or unattractive, but they can preserve some of their self-worth by believing that their perceived lack of success or attractiveness is due to factors outside their control. They were born into a hierarchy stacked against them, or they just weren't born with the right genes to concede. They're caught between a rock and a hard place; they either tell themselves that they're failures but it's okay because it's someone else's fault, or they tell themselves that they're failures and they only have themselves to blame. They literally can't see the third option, which is to tell themselves they aren't worthless.
People who would genuinely consider themselves alphas don't generally subscribe to these beliefs. There are some that claim it, but I'm frankly convinced that deep down theyre terrified they might be a beta, which is what causes the constant dick measuring in those communities as they fight to prove to themselves they really are alpha. Joe Rogan doesn't give a shit about the alpha/beta male thing because he's confident that his life has value. I'm a casual, occasional listener, and I wouldn't accuse him of being overly macho. He speaks confidently, but I don't think arrogantly. I don't think he's as clever as he's often given credit for, but that's not a mortal sin. Schwarzenegger is an even better example. Physically, the man is a paragon of traditional masculinity, but he bears no resemblance to the alpha male persona.
I genuinely have a lot of empathy for people that subscribe to the alpha male thing. I can't imagine the mental anguish of living an existence where you construct a mental hierarchy you are at the bottom of, because it's the best light you can think of yourself ever being in. It's easy to get lost in hating them because of how toxicly they expose their views, but underneath it all is just a person who's lashing out because they hurt.
Isn't the self help section one of the largest in the bookstore? I don't see any great mystery - cults of personality, money, power, genius - aspirational culture. As far as we know haven't those things always been part of human nature? You can put a negative spin on it and call it self-loathing or fetishism but for some people it's motivation.
The HN bubble is real and it's easy to be derisive but the OP you replied to doesn't seem to be a troll. Sincere people are easy targets for the cynical but the flawed opinions of real people are more interesting than whatever sanitized death waits by appeasing something like n-gate.
>Among other things, because of a dead-simple user experience that lets even grandpa post content after a few clicks. Federation, if it adds any level of complexity past the grandpa UX, would defeat the goal.
You could have stopped there, that's pretty much the only reason. But that has little to do with federation though. And yeah the ugliness and bad UX problems of free software - software that's freely unusable - have been known for literal decades.
Hey, could you please not post flamewar comments to HN? You've got good points here, but unfortunately the nastiness of the last sentence overrides them.
Also, please don't create accounts to break HN's guidelines with. Doing that will eventually get your main account banned as well. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when posting here, we'd be grateful.
Even if you take the three biggest EU economies (Germany, France and Italy) you're still off by over $20k per capita vs the US (at over $60k).
And ironically out of these three Germany has the highest per capita and they're the only one to have merged with an Eastern block country.
Portugal has already fallen behind Slovenia.
The only EU countries to have anything approaching or surpassing US per capita numbers have tiny populations. In which case one might mention NY state has a per capita gdp of $85k with over 8M people.
What I mean is that most Europeans are fine, comparatively to Americans, and don't actually need to let tech giants intrude every aspect of their lives for the sake of growing their economy.
Seriously, do you think everyone would be up in arms if facebook microsoft and amazon pulled out? No, people would just shrug and move on to something else.
No this doesn't tell the full picture because the gap is the same for company like germany where the GDP per capita in 2008 was 45k and now is 48k. In 2008 the US was 46k and is now 63k.
The rate that these economies are diverging is the problem. Its to the point that the 50 million americans in horrid proverty are richer than the middle class in countries like spain, italy, greece.
GDP per capita isn't that insightful for this topic because it doesn't tell whether disposable income actually grew. It could also be the case that i.e. only the top 1% household income grew.
Median household income is a better metric to get a feeling for the live of the actual, average citizen. Median personal income in the EU grew 18.5% from 2008 to 2018 and 8.7% in the US. (It grew more in 2019 but I couldn't find the corresponding EU data for 2019).
The divergence from GDP per capita means most people didn't receive the growth in productivity.
Yeh in the EU in general it grew but that doesn't actually answer you first questions and it obfuscates the growing difference. This is because the EU as a whole because of the easter bloc country was growing from a much much smaller number.
But if you actually look at disposable income germany has nearly 10k less than the US. Thats not even to mention places like greece, Portugal, and spain.
German median personal income grew by 21% from 2008 to 2018, as per my original link.
My overall point was that GDP per capita growth does not relate to income of actual people, though.
The difference between both metrics means that mostly only inequality grew in the US from 2008 to 2018.
I think you looked at mean income in the wikipedia table, not median income. Median income is "only" 7k less in Germany than the US. The difference between mean and median essentially tells the same story: GDP growths only landed in the upper few percent housholds.
Look at China's example, their GDP per capita increased by 300% in the same time span. Suddenly they started being seen as a threat, companies banned, broken up, forced to be sold. This move is probably motivated partly by similar reasons and is indirectly supported by the fact that the US considered this a viable strategy.
The other reason this is being considered is the deep distrust of US tech companies. For the average literate European citizen, US tech companies probably look just as bad as Chinese companies look for the average literate US citizen. Again this is indirectly supported by US reacting in the exact same way towards the party they distrust.
This being said I don't think this will pass and it certainly won't be put to use any time soon. There are still to many strings attached from the US to European countries, economies, and people. The purpose of all that spying and infiltrating everyone is to keep both allies and enemies in check. But recent US moves and changing of times have created some very obvious cracks that won't get mended too easily.
I find it very amusing to see miffed people crawling out of the woodwork to reply to your jest about 4chan because it's a constant reminder that a huge chunk of HN is being very civil and charitable on one tab and reading a bunch of racial and homophobic slurs without batting an eye on the tab next to it. Gives a whole new meaning to civility and charitability, and indicates pretty well to whom it is directed.
