This sort of thing has not been at all uncommon for Google over the past few years. I’m looking forward to the day when they no longer have this level of power to make or break tiny companies. With any luck, they will either stumble with LLMs and become irrelevant or emerge as only one of several companies and be forced out of their monopoly.
I think this is a more compelling idea than people in the comments are giving it credit for
> The problem is that you can easily come up with 100 different hypotheses for what’s going on. Ok, so you run 100 different studies to test each one. But studies take a long time to run — let’s say 6 months per study. Congratulations, you’ve just locked yourself into 50 years
This is a major problem with science whenever you have less of a theoretical foundation. Compared to physics or chemistry, we know very little about nutrition or sports science. Because of this, the search space is very large. One could argue that given the number of surprising results (and difficulty reproducing those results), medicine and psychology also fall into this category.
> A riff trial takes advantage of the power of parallel search. Some riffs will work better than others (or at least differently), and parallel search helps you find these differences faster, especially if the differences are big.
What if we did more to encourage people to track and report their personal experiments? If even 10% of everyone on a diet (any diet) just tracked what they ate, what exercise they did, and how much weight they lost, and reported it to a centralized database, scientists could then look for patterns in that data and do formal studies based on suspected patterns.
We could do similar things with longevity/happiness. Look at the "Harvard Study of Adult Development" but imagine it was spread out over 10s of thousands of diverse people instead of just 300 upper-class American men? The data quality wouldn't matter much if all you are doing is searching for patterns to do follow-up studies.
The main issue with this riff trial is that it doesn't test the most likely reason the potato diet works: that it's a very restrictive diet. Testing several different hypotheses barely helps at all if you don't test the overwhelmingly most likely one.
Would suggest checking out pyquery. It uses JQuery-like syntax. It's been around a long time and in my opinion, it's way easier to use https://pypi.org/project/pyquery/.
I'm currently reading Digital Minimalism from Cal Newton and have started preparing for a 30-day digital declutter. So I was really excited to read this title and immediately disappointed after clicking - the Cat phone has a web browser. If you have access to the entirety of the internet in your pocket, it is hard to limit yourself and no little trick or hack is going to actually help - in my experience.
I'll go ahead and take advantage of this post to ask, what do other digital minimalists on HN use for their phone? I'm looking for something with messages, maps, a camera, and WhatsApp with no access to a browser or an app store. The most difficult item on that list is definitely WhatsApp. Unfortunately, if you travel a lot (which I do) it's not really optional. Outside of North America, EVERYTHING happens on WhatsApp. I've started looking into custom Android ROMS but that feels like an extreme step for what must be a common problem?
I never switched to smartphones to not have internet in my pocket, and so I sticked to Sony Ericsson phones. Currently I use a 2010 Sony Ericsson Elm (J10i) which gives me SMS, phone, camera, and a few utilities : calendar, alarms, calculator, flashlight. Dimensions are 110.00 x 45.00 x 14.00 mm, I recharge once every ten days or so
I could be wrong, but I imagine the number of people who need internet access for Maps and WhatsApp but NOT a web-browser would be pretty small.
That said, I could possibly recommend the Nokia 2720 flip, which I've been using it as a secondary phone for work, primarily just for calls and messages. It runs KaiOS and has WhatsApp and Maps installed, although it does also have an internet browser. That said, it's quite clunky to use with the numberpad, and you might be able to hack it to disable or remove it. There's a dedicated KaiOS hacking community which might be able to get you there[0]. Looking briefly, I think there's a hack that allows you to set a proxy for the web browser, so maybe you could set that to something useless?
I commend your efforts, and am curious to read that book you mentioned!
This is actually really helpful. I'd be concerned that deleting the browser would result in other apps breaking but that's probably a risk worth taking.
It’s a full phone, with a web browser, and you can do all the normal phone stuff with it but it’s size dissuades you from doing so. It’s functional to text or Spotify but annoying to spend a lot of time on the web with it. So in a pinch you can but you won’t want to.
I think KaiOS is probably the closest thing that you can find. It will also have a browser, but trust me when I say that on most phones it's so slow and unusable that you won't be tempted to use it often.
I had a similar issue for myself, only my strongly desired application was Spotify (instead of WhatsApp). Ultimately I weaned myself off Spotify through a phone with KaiOS and ultimately I took the plunge on buying the Light Phone II.
It's a real bummer that there are so many limited solutions for things like this. FWIW, the contracted software company that worked on the Light Phone OS put together a blog post detailing how they used Android to build their phone here:
> All of that is to say: when we refer to the LightOS, we are referring to “our custom fork of Android 8.1 that embeds a platform-signed React Native app as the default launcher” (amongst other drivers and low-level customizations).
Which 'useful tools' is going to be pretty personal, not universal, which is why I acknowledged that an intentionally limited device is probably some kind of aesthetic.
It's hilariously tedious to argue that WhatsApp is obviously required and then some other social communication tool is obviously a waste of time.
Not really. There are really broad shared categories. Nearly all social media is a time suck for nearly everybody. Twitter is a time suck for most but a useful tool for many. Messaging apps are a useful tool for most but a time suck for some. Maps is useful for pretty much everyone. You get the drift; there are few universals, but clear distinctions do exist.
> Outside of North America, EVERYTHING happens on WhatsApp.
I've never installed WhatsApp on my phone. If someone wants to communicate with me, it's either a phone call or Telegram. If the ability to converse is less important than installing Telegram, then apparently they didn't really need to talk to me.
For context, I'm a software developer. Other than the Jetbrains IDEs everything on my desktop is open source, and I've got no more than half a dozen apps installed on my Android device. I can almost get away without touching the the phone on weekends, save for the camera.
The two are very similar. I wrote the first version of this almost 10 years ago and only became aware of the existence of Sourcetrail while doing the rewrite a few months back.
On the surface - there is a difference in languages. Sourcetrail explicitly supports C/C++/Java/Python while Code2flow supports Python/JS/PHP/Ruby.
I would love to give code2flow the capability of Sourcetrail but would need to feel very good about it making money before I devoted that time to it.
Wow. Seeing your open source project while scrolling through hacker news is something that really brightens your day. I’m happy to answer any questions people have.
This project is AMAZING. Earlier this week I had the exact same idea of a project while disentangling a bowl of spagetthi code. I'm glad I've seen it here today so I didn't have to reinvent the wheel. Also, I'm impressed by the quality of the documentation. It's pure eyecandy. Kudos!
By that website, the lowest ranked state is California (83% graduation rate), the second lowest ranked state is...Texas (84% graduation rate). So...California is slightly worse than Texas on schooling?
I wonder if something else is going on for California and Texas to rank behind Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana? I'd bet that the issue with the standard of measure, not the actual quality of education.
I disagree with that metric, because many students should not finish high school — I think the graduation rate is too high in every state. I would compare states based on testing performance, keeping in mind California’s demographics and the absurdly high number of kids who don’t speak English at home.
I should say I think its schools are fine, rather than great.
I maintain a similar (but less popular) open-source CLI that generates flow charts for dynamic languages (Python, JS, Ruby, PHP) - https://github.com/scottrogowski/code2flow/
The thought has crossed my mind to try to actually sell it as a SaaS. But by itself, call graph visualizers are the sort of thing that you would need only once or only every once in a while. That sort of software is very difficult to monetize - as 10,000 failed productivity app companies could tell you. I don't know the details of what happened with Sourcetrail but I assume it was similar - developers might have found it useful occasionally but it's not something most developers would use daily or even monthly - so it's hard to justify a subscription.
While I think it's useful to think about mechanisms of collapse, the author seems to have a clear bias towards the belief that collapse will happen which feels very non-objective.
In my experience, the vast majority of people I interact with (maybe 90%+) fall into the author's categorization of "radical denier" or "partial denier".
I don't think there's anything "radical" about the belief that while things will change, society will go on. But calling the belief radical and suggesting that this is a belief only shared by Very Evil People (e.g. Koch Brothers) is a disingenuous straw man.
For the record, if I had to put myself into this unscientific taxonomy, I might be somewhere between a technological and economic optimist.
I suppose it's largely a problem of naming. "Denier" has negative connotations, but it's also the most obvious name to use. What would be a better, non-pejorative name? Life-will-go-on-ists?
The article later refers to an ideology of "eco-fascism" which is even more problematic. That seems like a name that detractors would apply to a group, not a label that someone would self-apply. I don't know what a neutral name would be, though.
I must have been 6 years old. My dad came home with a computer that they were getting rid of at his work. He set it up that night and, having never seen a computer, I wanted to play with it. Well, for some reason, it had Kid Pix installed. I remember drawing something with a couple of green lines and a few rabbit stamps for good measure. As I recall, I then insisted that we had to print it and wouldn’t take no for an answer.
