wrhn

1659447091

Joined 4 years ago

Karma
6,693
Submissions
1,338
Member since
Aug 2
"But the rational and the irrational appear such in a different way to different persons, just as the good and the bad, the profitable and the unprofitable. [...] For to one man it is consistent with reason to hold a chamber pot for another, and to look to this only, that if he does not hold it, he will receive stripes, and he will not receive his food: but if he shall hold the pot, he will not suffer anything hard or disagreeable. But to another man not only does the holding of a chamber pot appear intolerable for himself, but intolerable also for him to allow another to do this office for him. If, then, you ask me whether you should hold the chamber pot or not, I shall say to you that the receiving of food is worth more than the not receiving of it, and the being scourged is a greater indignity than not being scourged; so that if you measure your interests by these things, go and hold the chamber pot. "But this," you say, "would not be worthy of me." Well, then, it is you who must introduce this consideration into the inquiry, not I; for it is you who know yourself, how much you are worth to yourself, and at what price you sell yourself; for men sell themselves at various prices." - Epictetus, Discourses, 1.2.2; (G. Long, Trans.)
View on Hacker News

Recent submissions

Comment · 13 hours ago
> According to my friendly neighborhood AI there is no commonly accepted term for this effect, but when you have a community of people

Social contagion [0] (not to be confused for memetics [1]) involves behaviour, emotions, or conditions spreading spontaneously through a group or network. [...] Throughout history all social contagions have had a single thing in common: the people who follow them genuinely believe their group is only doing positive effects, and cannot rationalize negative effects from within their group.

Tech executives are a group (and a network), its not some "regression to the mean" its common human social behaviour within group dynamics. It's not just those two there has been a progressive slide of executives joining the 'tech-bro' subgroup.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_contagion

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memetics

Comment · 4 days ago
> advantage for men, which gets smaller, but does not disappear, as distances increase.

The study below suggest otherwise (for running, which I learned about in a different HN post, I'll defer on the swimming bit that I have no idea of or thoughts about)

"[...] women become faster than men at the most extreme distances over 195 miles long."[0]

[0] https://runrepeat.com/state-of-ultra-running

Comment · 4 days ago
Started with @seancorfield, he was the one behind FW/1 and the way he thought about architecture and would write about just resonated. Then he started migrating over doing these CF/Clojure things like `cfmljure` and kept reading his writing (which I recommend) and that got me to finally look into Clojure -- which led to Rich Hickey talks, and everything he talked about was everything I was overly frustrated with in programming, the mutations, over-engineered/complected objects and data modeling.

I forget which talk it is, but there is one (or more) where he goes into how we modeling the world/data in OOP and his annoyance with confusing identity, value, and state; bundling them up into mutating objects instead of having a stable identifier(label) that has an immutable fact or facts(values) at a point in time(state). And how objects act on each other instead of function working on data. I felt like someone reached into my head and said everything I was thinking in a way I was never able to express or formulate and then instead of just bitching about it he created a solution. I was sold, hook line and sinker.

It all just clicked for me, even reading clojure code (writing at first was another story) came easier than trying to follow some javascript. Maybe it was because I already had years of programming experience, but I knew nothing of Functional Programming, was skeptical of this immutable data bit but really wanted it to be real, and had never seen a Lisp before or knew anything about it (I got hired programming out of high school) -- but it all just made sense and was basically a come-to-Jesus moment that I dove into and it drastically improved my understanding of systems, architecture, data, and the like.

Comment · 4 days ago
I caught a lot of jokes for sticking with CF over PHP into the 2010's (before moving over to clojure) -- I'm sure they all forgot by now, but I've been pretty satisfied with my past choices this last week. Before the move I mostly worked with Lucee and FW/1 [0]. I still think its a better alternative to PHP or Ruby(rails).

[0] https://github.com/framework-one/fw1

Comment · 11 days ago
> Do that many people just vote for one or two races?

Texas use to have straight ticket voting so people would just show up hit Democrat or Republican and be done, still had low turn out though.

My guess is that people that arent extremely motivated to get to the polls here don't bother now. Paxton is a highly polarizing guy, if it was still Cornyn I wouldnt even bother with checking results on election night like I will this time. From my own experience I prefer that people only vote the races they know and care about; I stoped straight ticket voting when I realized I didnt know anything about the judges (or that there were even judges on the ballot) that button put my vote on and that didnt sit right.

Comment · 11 days ago
Texas is interesting this cycle; Im curious after all is said-and-done if this helps or hurts. First time since 1994 a Democrat is a legit contender for governor. Data centers are gonna have a rough go of it if Hinojosa wins

Early voting already has long lines in a state that barely votes. Probably more Paxton/Talarico than the governor race though.

Live from the official Hacker News API

A modern reader for Hacker News · SvelteKit + Skeleton