andrew_eit

Is this data normalised to account for differences in traffic/popularity of the HN platform between 2008 - 2024?

Reason being: If the distributions of user types have changed over time (e.g. 2010 having a higher % of more entrepreneurial / founder type users vs employee-type fokls [like myself] looking for their next gig) then it could skew the results no?

Anecdotally the graph makes total sense. I'd just take the absolute ratio/differences with a pinch of salt.

I think the intuition here is: - Being surrounded by people one cannot connect with, increases the feeling that one is socially isolated and an 'outsider'. They are unable to engage with their organic natural (social) environment - Whilst being in 'a forest alone', offers the person a chance to engage with their natural environment and more easily connect with it, just by being there. You don't have to do anything but just exist in it. In a way you are accepted and do belong to that environment (genetically/instinctively). So it acts to counter feelings of 'not fitting in'.

Have you ever played the factory building game "Factorio"?

It's an amazing lesson in scale. In the early game, it's pretty easy to recover from supply chain issues and refactor your setup to adjust to your growth needs and expansion across the land. Once you reach mid to late game, and something goes wrong, your whole factory starts to grind to halt as you try to diagnose where in the whole system things have clogged up, you need to measure and monitor throughput to make sure you are producing the materials needed for consumption by other machines at a rate that is sustainable. Refactoring at this point really means shutting most of it down and building from the ground up again.

Kind of like humanity 100s & 1000s of years ago. Most of life was localized, food, raw materials. We were not over fishing the seas or pushing the soils to the limit. The scale of humanity now, is such that all the supply chains, food and resource requirements depend on such a plethora of things running as they have been, uninterrupted (gas, food, water supplies, raw materials, spare parts).

That is why this argument about "climate disasters in the past" really never made sense to me. This is an entirely different game.

And yes, "humanity" may survive. But just like the factory that stops working that needs to be largely deconstructed and re-built, a lot of people will be unnecessarily plunged into hardship, famine and probably death. Economies and societies will be affected in ways we really can't imagine.

The question then is, what will humanity and society look like after? And what will our successors and future generations think of their ancestors who had the time, knowledge and the technology to ease or circumvent their suffering.

This doesn't bother me at all, especially at an individual level.

I want to make clear - it's not the language issue per se. I think native English speakers are incredibly privileged to have their language as one of if not the international language, so I could never fault a person for not speaking a foreign language well (I'm sure I butcher the German language in ways that would make Goethe himself cry out in anguish).

It's the fact that this is an international company launching a product in a professional setting. Again, I don't quite know why this bothers me so much, but I feel its within the context of other cultural things I experience.

This is the comment I was waiting for :) It's strange isn't it, to suddenly be negatively receptive to something that you never noticed bothered you in the past.

"Dear Ms. Smith,

We would like to inform you..."

vs

" Dear Ms. Smith,

we would like to inform you..."

What you say is write and I am guilty of that too. I would feel very rude or out of place telling a colleague of mine to capitalize the first letter after Dear X. Even if I wanted to. So I just write my reply correctly and hope they notice :)

"You need scalable enterprise cloud solutions for digital business processes while maintaining complete data integrity?"

Nitpicking here, but my god, can German companies/universities/organizations please start paying for native English speakers to do their copy-writing and STOP translating directly from German?

It's "Do you need". Not "You need..."

This is the typical translation of the German marketing "Du brauchst <blah>?" or "Du bist ein <blah>? Dann...". I see pattern this all the time, such as "You are a student who wants to work on innovating projects? Then apply...".

This may sound like a rant, but I genuinely think these little details would go a long way to actually showing that the German economy does have some sort of international mindset. This persistence in sticking to these wrong ways just makes me think that 'OK this is another conservative old-school minded German company trying to play unicorn'. If there's no attention to detail or care for the little things on your front-page marketing website - your first contact with your customer - it just leaves me with a bad feeling about the parts I don't see.

I don't know why it frustrates me enough to write a comment in the middle of the day, I guess I really can't understand how global German corporations still, as a rule all make this same error, which I suspect is just the tip of the iceberg of a larger symptom of not wanting to think outside/beyond the DACH bubble. And I feel a sense of sadness that such a country with great prospects just drags its feet lazily into the the future.

Edit: I also see this all the time in Email correspondence, you can immediately tell if a person is a native German speaker because they don't capitalize the first letter in an English email after "Dear X, we are writing <blah>" (which would be 100% correct in German, but somehow no one teaches this in English classes in Germany that in English it is capitalized). For a country that loves rules, this drives me mad.

Edit2: This is definitely a rant and it triggered me emotionally for some odd reason. I concede that my interpretation is quite exaggerated, so please do excuse me! I'll leave the comment however because I'm curious to know whether any others feel the same way.

Edit3: I will also say that translating between German and English is hard as there are some fundamental differences in their structure. There are very colloquial ways to say or not say certain things. That is why native speakers are essential for such things.

Edit4: Please take this comment with a pinch of salt. This is the rant of an fatigued expat who decided to blow some off steam about the oddities of their host country that drive them bananas. For posterity, I will say there at least 10 amazing wonderful things about German culture that I love, for each odd cultural thing. But you know, at some point when you see something for the umpteenth time, something snaps inside of you and it all comes out, especially on a mid-week day like a Wednesday.

I really wonder what percentage of difficulties that stem from math are due to its representation in the symbolic language used. By that I mean, so often, I am staring at a long, condensed equation. Factored to perfection by whomever was working on developing it. I stare at it for hours and just can't figure out what's going on.

Then after much tinkering with the parameters, exploring the limits, plotting graphs, slowly I look at it and recognize what is going on and realise "gosh that is actually really F**ing simple"

I wonder how much of "learning" math is really spent on decoding the representations we are provided, rather than understanding the concept they're meant to represent.

I bet the sophons are already on their way

In many ways I agree with you. I would like also to return to simpler times. Especially insta-texting (whatsapp) etc. SMS was fine for me to organise a meetup and then talk in person.

I guess my stance is more kind of to protect my mental sanity, to try and make this a "self-discipline" problem that I can control, and hence reduce my exposure/time online. That suits me but I do agree that to some degree there needs to be a wider societal change and I do agree that it can't all be placed on the individual to be super strong mentally when the internet is now literally a life necessity for operating in society in any dimension.

I see your point and think you have quite a valid argument there! Some of the things you said definitely echo with my experiences. For example, I do surf the net too much because I love new information. And perhaps without that access I'd be a lot happier focusing on actual physical things in front of me.

I guess it's not as simple as boiling it down to the individual's own self-control. To some degree maybe my stance is also biased in that I want to empower myself to be the one to reduce my time online.

I don't understand these negative comments about what "computers/internet" has done to me etc.

Yes, there are certainly aspects of computers, the internet and especially social networking and instant-texting that have a net negative impact on our lives.

But this argument strikes me as a "I'm such a victim" argument. Surely if you allow some device to have such a massive negative impact on your life then this would be the case even pre-90s before computers and the internet became mainstream?

- Maybe you might have spent too much time hanging out at your local bar? - Perhaps you'd have been addicted to television?

The one area, where I wholeheartedly agree and recognize the serious dangerous of the internet and computer devices is in children. The threat of cyber-bullying and indeed, rather more subtle, the attention-seeking culture of always producing content at a young age is IMO, very scary when thought of in the context that these will be future adults who didn't know better. We need to guard against these enabled social pressures like we protect kids from smoking, drugs, alcohol and even to a lesser extend (i.e. it's not illegal) addictions to things like TV, video games and other behaviors that they might fall prey to.

I guess, summed up what I am saying is: It appears that there the internet has developed a predatory nature on one's attention that extends to threaten one's social status and reputation.

Where I disagree is that - as adults - we know better and can combat this with self-discipline and by choosing our friends/social circles wisely (I don't engage with friends who constantly text or post online. I'm happy to meet but they know not to expect my participation there).

Where I agree is that, children are vulnerable to this and must be protected AND TAUGHT how to treat / interact with the internet.

Unfortunately, since this is relatively a new thing in society. We have not yet developed a solid culture around what is acceptable and what is not. Just like it is inconceivable now to smoke inside a closed room, or someone's house, I do hope that in the future it would be inconceivable to upload compromising information/pictures to random servers in foreign countries. But alas, we are not there yet.