Hacker News: papeda

New comment by papeda in "Falling five storeys from a New York rooftop changed my life"

papeda — Sat, 24 Oct 2020 16:57:03 +0000

From the end of the article:

> To come so close to death does not provide a shortcut to wisdom or contentment. It doesn’t answer all your questions or eliminate your weaknesses. I’m fundamentally the same person I was before, but with one big difference. I’m viscerally aware how tenuous our existence is. How you can be walking on solid ground only to find it suddenly disappear from beneath you. The meaning comes in what I do from this point on. I have been given a second chance at life – and it’s up to me to make the most of it.

The article is clear that there was nothing intentional about this fall, but as a tangent, this excerpt does make me think about people who jump intentionally.

This line of thought is a bit ghoulish, but as far as I know about 90% of people who make an "unsuccessful" suicide attempt never commit suicide [1]. There are confounding variables galore here --- maybe it's the toughest cases who pick the most reliable methods; 10% is still way above the population risk for suicide --- but I've wondered if there's some way to give people that "oh, I'm going to die, and I don't actually want that" feeling that is apparently not uncommon [2] without actually hurting them.

[1] https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/means-matter/means-matter/survi...

[2] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/10/13/jumpers

New comment by papeda in "Adam Savage opens up about some realities of wearing hearing aids"

papeda — Fri, 16 Oct 2020 03:01:28 +0000

Tangential: as somebody with congenital hearing loss who's worn hearing aids since I was a little kid, the pivot to mostly digital communications has been a serious benefit for me -- even with modern hearing aids, there are many acoustically bad (for me) physical meeting rooms and speakers whom I just can't hear in person, but I can hear just as well as everybody else over Zoom/Meet/Facetime.

New comment by papeda in "On the Use of a Life"

papeda — Mon, 21 Sep 2020 02:05:51 +0000

Is it pithy? The summary given is "academia sucks, be an entrepreneur". IMO the actual point of the post is "I didn't pursue an academic career, here are the various things I did instead and why I think they are meaningful".

New comment by papeda in "Ask HN: Your Favourite HN Comment?"

papeda — Sun, 20 Sep 2020 12:52:27 +0000

I got a lot out of some posts made by a user named arkades about why the nature of medical reimbursement in the US contributes to physician burnout: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22057249

New comment by papeda in "Ruth Bader Ginsburg has died"

papeda — Sat, 19 Sep 2020 03:37:19 +0000

We can compare the stated philosophies of RBG against those of the two most recent nominees and the shortlisted candidates put forth in the past week and see that they're very different. It seems very plausible to guess that, given a large majority, these people will enact these philosophies. No?

New comment by papeda in "Ruth Bader Ginsburg has died"

papeda — Sat, 19 Sep 2020 01:08:43 +0000

Ah yes, wishing for a successor that does not undo your life's work is definitely what I would call "playing politics up until the end".

New comment by papeda in "Ruth Bader Ginsburg has died"

papeda — Sat, 19 Sep 2020 01:06:12 +0000

Paying people to vote is pretty out there. I think we should at least put election day on a weekend. Spread it over both days, even. This feels to me like a relatively easy small step that would really help make voting easier in a way that doesn't open itself up to voter fraud arguments (as far as I know).

New comment by papeda in "Ruth Bader Ginsburg has died"

papeda — Sat, 19 Sep 2020 00:39:17 +0000

Googling "ossification of American policy for a generation" returns one result, this thread.

New comment by papeda in "Why Is 1 World Trade Center Missing from Spider-Man?"

papeda — Thu, 17 Sep 2020 12:15:54 +0000

> You can't put in the sky an object visible from everywhere and then ask people to pay (or even just ask permission) to use pictures that include it.

This would be a great super-villain idea for a fun/dumb movie.

New comment by papeda in "A job at Yale in the 1960s set Susan Eggers on a path in computer science"

papeda — Wed, 16 Sep 2020 20:44:22 +0000

I'm confused, what part of her story involves "spoon feed[ing]"?

New comment by papeda in "Phosphine detected in the atmosphere of Venus – an indicator of possible life?"

papeda — Mon, 14 Sep 2020 22:25:13 +0000

These low-CO2 countries are effectively exporting CO2 production (e.g. manufacturing) to China, no?

New comment by papeda in "Brutality of Life Reading List"

papeda — Sun, 13 Sep 2020 20:10:06 +0000

I wish this comment had a NSFL tag at the beginning. I did not want to read that, and it comes out of nowhere relative to its parent comment.

More generally, I think there's a difference between "meditation on brutality" and "misery porn", and that the latter sometimes gets dressed up as the former.

New comment by papeda in "Hong Kong: books by pro-democracy activists disappear from library shelves"

papeda — Sun, 05 Jul 2020 22:32:24 +0000

I'm not one of "the people who disapprove of this but who endorse the top down language policing as endorsed by Twitter ", but as far as I can tell, few of those people advocate banning books. I think "banning books" is a specific thing that is pretty well drilled into Western minds as something that evil totalitarian dystopian forces do, maybe because of Fahrenheit 451, 1984, and so on. Twitter, on the other hand, doesn't have any obvious cultural precedents for most people, so different policies for it don't set off the same cultural alarm bells.

New comment by papeda in "A practical case on why we need the humanities"

papeda — Sat, 04 Jul 2020 00:48:39 +0000

It's a little strange to me to use history as the representative for the humanities, because history seems like the most "scientific" one -- there's some truth of what happened, and historians are trying to navigate toward it, figure out how to talk about it, identifies whys and hows.

On the other hand, there seem to be broad swathes of humanities academia that strongly reject the notion of some kind of "truth", e.g. new criticism. I find this strain of humanities work a lot harder to appreciate.

New comment by papeda in "Google-backed groups criticize Apple's new warnings on user tracking"

papeda — Fri, 03 Jul 2020 16:35:48 +0000

The web of corporate intrigue that powers watchdog groups is remarkable. The people who caught the professors are from the Campaign For Accountability, a "watchdog group" [1]. They pursue this role for a variety of issues. Their work on Google comes from a wider initiative they call the Google Transparency Project. One of the funders of said project is Oracle [2], which has...its own motives for bringing Google down a peg [3].

[1] https://campaignforaccountability.org/

[2] https://fortune.com/2016/08/19/google-transparency-project-2...

[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_v._Oracle_America

New comment by papeda in "Google-backed groups criticize Apple's new warnings on user tracking"

papeda — Fri, 03 Jul 2020 16:17:56 +0000

There seem to be two conflicting lines of thought about the future of advertising.

1) Companies are learning that non-online advertising is not very worthwhile and so are reducing the resources allocated to, say, network TV ads. This has already happened to a large extent to print and radio advertising. This suggests that the future of online advertising is bright.

2) Companies are learning that online advertising is not very worthwhile. They are learning that clicks are a bad metric, that online ads target people poorly, and that customers dislike online ads. This suggests that the future of online advertising is dim.

I'm curious as to what people make of these two positions. Are companies just going to spend less on ads in general?

New comment by papeda in "A Roundtable on Covid-19 and the Attention Economy"

papeda — Fri, 03 Jul 2020 12:55:00 +0000

Where does this 8s number come from? This article claims there's no clear evidence for it: https://www.bbc.com/news/health-38896790

New comment by papeda in "A researcher on how to live a happy life"

papeda — Thu, 02 Jul 2020 18:13:48 +0000

> supposedly our circumstances only account for 10% of our happiness with 50% being genetics and 40% behavior

Do you have a reference for these figures? 50% genetics seems high.

New comment by papeda in "Watching the Skies in Japan: Mishima Yukio and Other UFO Enthusiasts"

papeda — Thu, 02 Jul 2020 12:50:42 +0000

If this story interests you, here is an engrossing article that ties together modern sumo, Mishima's attempted coup, and a surprising bit of investigative journalism: https://grantland.com/features/sumo-wrestling-tokyo-japan-ha...

New comment by papeda in "Why do so few people major in computer science? (2017)"

papeda — Mon, 29 Jun 2020 12:09:34 +0000

The featured article has these "numbers showing opposite".