TRcontrarian

Joined 6 years ago

Karma
178
Submissions
25
Member since
Jul 16
Reading HN made me get more expensive ads on IG. feelsgoodman
View on Hacker News

Recent submissions

Comment · 5 years ago
Vernor Vinge is usually fantastic.
Comment · 5 years ago
The founding text is Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson (1992). It's short, funny, entertaining, and full of new ideas in a freewheeling early 90's spirit. The list in the comment you are replying to is not bad, since most interactions you will ever have with someone about a metaverse will hinge on shared descriptions you have with them of a metaverse, so whichever books you hear about the most are by definition the most useful ones to read.

Almost everyone has read or heard of Ready Player One (2011), which contains extensive descriptions of its own corporate dystopic metaverse, albeit one that I find insufferably cliche and unoriginal.

Metaverse descriptions are descended from the first cyberspace descriptions in Neuromancer (1984) which is a beautiful book worth a read.

Comment · 5 years ago
Comment · 5 years ago
Bee genetics are wild. When I was a beekeeper we learned that queens lay two types of eggs - normal fertilized eggs, which will hatch into females and grow into workers if fed pollen, and queens if fed royal jelly, and unfertilized eggs, which hatch into males (stingless bees called drones) who will fly off and mate with the queens of other hives in spring. [1] At the time I had never heard of unfertilized eggs hatching, and the implication was that by creating male clones of themselves (haploid offspring, [4] not exact clones), queen bees are directly mating with the queens of other hives.

This information applies to the Italian honeybee subspecies kept in captivity (Apis mellifera ligustica) - the OP's article is about the african lowland honeybee (Apis mellifera scutella). The different honeybee subspecies are interesting: italian bees are nonaggressive, russian bees are hardy, etc.[2]

There's nothing special about workers having offspring either. When a honeybee queen gets old or weak, brood pheremones stop being able to suppress worker reproduction (worker policing fails [3]), and there are workers running around laying eggs in brood cells. Because workers have never mated with a drone, all their eggs are unfertilized and therefore hatch into drones [5]. This south african subspecies with a self-cloning female worker is really something unusual and unexpected, since those females should only be able to lay haploid eggs.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drone_(bee)

[2] https://www.perfectbee.com/learn-about-bees/the-science-of-b...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_policing

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplodiploidy

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laying_worker_bee

Comment · 5 years ago
Comment · 5 years ago
Comment · 5 years ago
Is it better to live in a world where the future is unknown, and the best we can do is guess where value will be, or one where the future is known, and the prices of all investments are stable and already priced at their exact values? In which world is optimism and class mobility possible?
Comment · 5 years ago
I'm afraid it's only a matter of time before that becomes an astroturfing target as well. At least there's account history associated with it, so there is some effort associated with creating or purchasing accounts with believable histories. Long term I think facebook wins this space because they have the most in depth real digital identities tied to people.
Comment · 5 years ago
The funding model is extremely sus. I used to trust them but your criticisms are right on, and their 'the best x' lists have a curious tendency to prioritize brands that already have high ad spend, rather than surface little known indie choices.
Comment · 5 years ago
Comment · 5 years ago
Comment · 5 years ago
I feel the exact same way about sampling 'alien' ad culture. It's fun to switch on the local TV station in a new city and see what ads are being shown to people there. It's like a form of social calibration that shows what 'is available.' Same thing with reading the ads in the back of Popular Science or The Economist. I don't get that online unless I VPN+incognito, and I absolutely cannot get it on my phone, which is locked down much tighter.
Comment · 5 years ago
Putting hockey stick shaped lines on graphs with buzzwords on the x axis and dollars on the y axis does not a big idea make.

I am disappointed to see ideas that have failed to deliver for a decade like drone delivery (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/amazon-unveils-futuristic-plan-...) and 3D printing (https://www.economist.com/briefing/2011/02/10/the-printed-wo...) have a very long buzzword shelf-life, presumably because they are enduringly futuristic. First principles should tell us that most manufactured goods will never be 3D printed. There are entire fields of engineering dedicated to manufacturing processes, because the final material properties and cost of an item are affected by things like cooling rate, grain orientation, surface finish, tensile strength, and tolerances. 3D printing is another tool in the toolbox, not a replacement for the toolbox. I personally find them useful for ideation, but useless for creating finished products. It is worth considering that the entire market for 3D printers consists of rapid prototyping and Etsy knicknacks, and that it has been saturated.

Comment · 5 years ago
Someone might find it hilarious to put that sign in their front yard to mess with passers by
Comment · 5 years ago
Can confirm this is real. It happens with the tiger salamander subspecies we have here blocking developments.

Live from the official Hacker News API

A modern reader for Hacker News · SvelteKit + Skeleton