Humans evolved to crave schadenfreude because curiosity and desire for justice are both helpful to reproductive success in group settings (e.g. tribes).
Media 'hacks' this evolved instinct for schadenfreude by manufacturing bad people so readers satiate their craving for 'justice' by gorging on the missteps of others.
This is harmless entertainment in works of fiction, but destructive and counter-productive in reality.
This means research projects will be optimised for political boasting.
Sounds terrible, but is it? It incentivises high-impact research (otherwise politicians can't boast about it), and less research into trivialities that common sense says aren't worth the public funding.
"less research intro trivialities that common sense says aren't worth the public funding"
In your eyes, science and research is a linear process, governed by some "common sense", in which important and high impact discoveries are found as an immediate and direct consequences of the previous important and high impact discovery?
I'm trying not to get angry at a stupid HN comment, but surely we can think through what we write sometimes.
Some just couldn't grasp the why, others understood perfectly well why their major donors wanted to squash studies on environmental stressors that might impact fisheries.
Being curious definitely leads to discoveries. But important discoveries can also be made by saying "Topic X, if better understood, might lead to a cure for cancer - let's look into (and fund) that".
We could think of this problem as a slider from 0-100 where we allocate from 'none' up to 'all' our research budget to curiosity-driven research.
Political appointees having a say will likely move the slider toward the 0 (not necessarily to zero). I'm just not sure it's a bad thing.
Shrimp running treadmills, specifically, wasn't idle curiosity driven blue sky research though - it was tied to creating real metrics for measuring impact of change in marine environments on the health of the food we eat.
It's a good example of "political types" making a song and dance based on "common sense" to save trivial amounts of money while making the health of marine systems opaque for the benefit of political donors.
That's a bad thing for people at large, and a good thing for polluting mega corps that want to privatise benefits and socialise costs.
I see your point, that donors could influence political appointees to nix certain research topics for their own benefit.
How often does that actually happen, and wouldn't other institutions pick up the slack in most cases? (i.e. high value research doesn't cease to be high value just because one type of grant or institution refuses to fund it; it would therefore be attractive to other institutions/researchers)
Some benefits of having political appointees in the loop are that the pubic perceives (not necessarily 'gets') greater value from public research funding, and the people responsible for the funding (political appointees) are closer to the actual spending and are more involved in the allocative process, which should mean fewer expensive, hard-to-justify topics.
Consider one basic question: how much high-impact research do you think this would incentivize into global warming? Or is the looming global ecological catastrophe not high-impact enough?
It incentivizes work that sounds impressive to laymen. Actual work tends to be technical and might not sound super exciting.
If 20 years ago, a politician had to get up and explain that we were spending millions of dollars training computers to recognize a strawberry, likely the entire field of machine learning would not exist today.
> think of this as the just-say-no engineer, as opposed to the just-say-yes engineer. The just-say-yes engineer is obsessed with moving fast, approves code changes by default, values MTTR over MTBF, and tends to ship a lot of code. The just-say-no engineer is obsessed with quality, is happy to move slowly, and blocks code changes by default.
Love the concept of the 'just-say-yes' engineer vs 'just-say-no' engineer (and corresponding prioritisation of MTTR over MTBF).
I'm definitely a 'just-say-yes' with the caveat that bad architectural choices can be super painful to fix later, and features become a lot harder to fix when they have users as opposed to before launch (so I'm a little bit 'just-say-no', or at least 'just-think-for-a-bit-first').
I also think the balance between 'just-say-yes' and 'just-say-no' really depends a lot on the project. If it's finance or healthcare, perhaps 'no' by default is best. But if it's a silly startup idea, YOLO.
A "just say yes" attitude leads to certain disaster then because the time to fix the product never comes. Demanding the time to clean up is equivalent to saying no. Whoever is in charge of development needs to have the power to do that and actually use it (if they don't ever use it, they effectively don't have it).
> A "just say yes" attitude leads to certain disaster
Disaster's a possibility. But if an idea has a 1% chance of success, "just say no" usually assures failure, whereas "just say yes" is a shot at that 1% chance.
If there us a 99% chance if faulure, the rational response is no unless the rewards are absolutely, insanely huge (at least about 200x the cost of every resource used) and the org can take the failure.
For any non-snooker players: the theoretical maximum break you can usually get is 147, by sinking all 15 red balls each followed by a black (the highest scoring coloured ball) for 15 x 1 + 15 x 7 = 120. Then sinking each of the coloured balls for 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 + 7 = 27. This makes the maximum break 147.
But Ronnie's opponent fouled at the start, which meant Ronnie was given the ability to nominate any coloured ball as though it were a red ball. He nominated the green as the free ball and sunk it as if it were a red (scoring 1 point), then potted the black (7 points). So he had an extra 8 points right at the start.
Then he managed to sink a red (1 point) followed by the black (7 points) a total of 13 times, and a red followed by the pink (6 points) twice.
As an Indy hacker I want to see GitHub succeed, but I ditched actions years ago - (shocking) false economy. Spend entire nights pushing to actions over and over only for complaints about weird/niche dependency issues and other oddities - the cycle time's just too slow and the DX is no fun (my pain doesn't even factor in outages; just the feature itself as it's intended to be experienced). I want to spend time talking to users and building features, not debugging weird syntax or dependency issues on a remote machine non-interactively.
So why are Actions so unreliable anyway? Occam's Razor would probably suggest the domain is inherently complex/difficult; but other providers show that reliability is possible. What would Occam's Razor suggest next? Poor management..?
I have Gitlab with a runner on a notebook I have running as a server. Pretty solid and if you need to bail on Gitlab SaaS you can BYOI and selfhost. Plus the CI is many streets ahead of GitHub in terms of pretty much everything.
> How do you ensure you didn’t forget to run the tests?
Reasonable concern. In ~10 years of indy development, I haven't forgotten to run tests before pushing to main, ever. So setting up and maintaining complicated machinery to solve a problem that could (but never has) happened doesn't justify taking focus off other more important things, namely building.
The benefit probably increases with team size (I'm a team of 1, so I appreciate the luxury of being able to dodge CI/CD entirely).
I think it comes down to risk tolerance. For an established company that wants to avoid upsetting users at all costs, CI/CD makes sense. But for a nimble 'move fast and break things' startup, it can steal dev time for very little upside.
Say a disaster happens and someone pushes to main without running tests, 9 times out of 10 it will be of ~zero consequence (either the code works first time, it was a cosmetic change that hardly affected users etc).
I know there are horror stories and CI/CD would have prevented some of those, but IME they're just not that common nor severe for small operations, and even when they happen, only a small subset are irreversible/unfixable.
That's not the purpose of a remote CI/CD. Your pipeline can be as strict or as loose as you wish. It's there to show you a log of the execution as it happened in a neutral environment (remote server).
Basically, what you are suggesting is that everyone advertises their tests/builds run on slack? Also when two devs merge their changes, who compile/tests the master branch?
I see the benefit (it avoids the “works on my machine” problem), but my rails app isn’t too fancy and works on heroku ~100% of the time when it works on the dev machine. Making an intermediate build redundant (technically not entirely but it’s just not worth the effort).
For small teams it could be as simple as everyone agreeing to ensure tests pass on main before pushing to prod.
So long as something can be bought for x and sold for y (where y>x) there'll be an economic incentive to do so.
So instead of scalpers trying to simply get to the front of the queue, they'll be automating plays on spotify (hogging bandwidth, something spotify is already stingy with), and 'sharing' tracks with others, meaning it incentivises spam and fake activity.
Probably not a big issue to be fair, and if it only works legitimately 10% of the time it's still a win.
But if there's one company that can take a decent idea and execute poorly, it's Spotify.
Curious why they're broken, as the wayback machine seems to be able to run javascript. Do the visualisations rely on a server (or some other assets not included in wayback machine's crawl)?
Wonder how much the removal of trees and bitumening/concreting of surface areas contributes to radiative heating from the sun which then increases the temp of surrounding air, especially on still days.
The Houston metroplex might be one of the best domestic examples of the urban heat island effect. They've got their own entire website about it. If you overlay the daily temperature curve of 77002 with any zip outside the beltway, the difference is incredible. The increased HVAC demand further compounds everything. Downtown Houston is truly hell during the hottest summer months. It can be 4am and your ac condenser will still be throwing the high pressure cutout switch.
The sattelite feed I use has an infrared channel, and Houston's ring and web road structure stands out from geocyncronous orbit, whereas Mexico city is invisible, hot but not like the heat island effect of what must be one of the greatest amounts of concrete on the planet.
Humans evolved to crave schadenfreude because curiosity and desire for justice are both helpful to reproductive success in group settings (e.g. tribes).
Media 'hacks' this evolved instinct for schadenfreude by manufacturing bad people so readers satiate their craving for 'justice' by gorging on the missteps of others.
This is harmless entertainment in works of fiction, but destructive and counter-productive in reality.
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