141–150 of 443 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The law exempted canned and bottled sodas. It was targeted at things like the Big Gulp, and movie theater sodas, where the small size starts at about 24oz.
I did not know this. Makes sense but also seems fairly weak/overly specific given it basically only targets movie theaters.
Apparently google has an Ethicist. Ctrl-F: Ad Huh. Zero mentions of the thing that manipulates people by design. I guess I don't blame him, because even with a blind spot to ads it would seem Google still doesn't give two shits about his input. He explicitly calls out a problem YouTube feature, which he certainly would have voiced internally before externally. And he doesn't work at Google anymore. Google must want r…
> Apparently google has an Ethicist. Well, had . From his bio snippet at the bottom: "Ex-Design Ethicist & Product Philosopher @ Google"
Wow, I'm glad this was posted. I think the way we use technology today will be looked back on the same way we look back at naive cigarette smoking in the 1950s. Modern app design isn't about creating things that are good for the user, but about creating want in the user. This is a problem. For example, there are several studies showing that using Facebook in general makes people less happy. User happiness just happen…
I was about to post the same sentiment re: smoking. Given that we see this type of behavior in all industries (not just tech), it seems to me it's actually a systemic problem. People / organizations are incentivized universally to optimize for their own selfish interest, because they do not incur the cost of their decisions on everyone else. In this case, designing your product to maximize e.g. addictiveness or time…
This is not just a problem at the consumer level. My entire career I have been told that I couldn't do X because it wasn't "industry standard" or "best practice" or some other code word for "not on the menu."
As a manager it's an interesting balancing act. There are reasons things are done the way they are done and sometimes they are "because we've always done it that way" but more often it's because we've done it enough to understand something someone new to the company or industry doesn't. It's hard to know where to let go and where to draw the line. I try to provide an environment where new people can 1. Try an idea an…
Does anyone else feel the slot machine effect here on HN is the karma displayed on the top-right? After a submission or comment, is that number the first thing you check when you come back to the site?
I've always just created a new account for any comment I make here. In the beginning this was simple privacy consciousness. Paranoia, if you like. I just didn't want a long-lived trail of comments, however apparently benign, to be trivially associated with my actual persona. As the years went by, though, I found that the lack of score consciousness was itself a noticeable relief of cognitive load from my earlier stat…
The reason? Nothing more than HN has the least solvable captchas going and I was tired of a dozen attempts every time I create a new one.
I still think of it as a throwaway though, so don't care about the karma or pay heed to it. Ironically the comments I expect to go heavily negative often attract the highest positive response.
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I think the more apt metaphor is lead in Roman pipes. They knew lead exposure made you crazy but they still used it in their pipes, on their plates - and it drove them mad. After the planet has warmed beyond a point of no return, after antibiotic resistant bacteria make routine surgery a life-or-death decision, after we have squandered away our resources and used what little we had left to wage futile wars, we will f…
Actually, the Roman pipe store is a bit of an urban legend. According to this PNAS [0] paper: "Lead pollution of “tap water” in Roman times is clearly measurable, but unlikely to have been truly harmful." [0] http://www.pnas.org/content/111/18/6594.full
This is not just a problem at the consumer level. My entire career I have been told that I couldn't do X because it wasn't "industry standard" or "best practice" or some other code word for "not on the menu."
As a manager it's an interesting balancing act. There are reasons things are done the way they are done and sometimes they are "because we've always done it that way" but more often it's because we've done it enough to understand something someone new to the company or industry doesn't. It's hard to know where to let go and where to draw the line. I try to provide an environment where new people can 1. Try an idea an…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But it is very irritating when the doomsayers don't adjust their doomsaying based upon current scientific work. I love this line. It's like somebody just submitted doomsaying homework, and you are not taking issue with their premise per se, but taking off points for the sources they used.
Heh, yeah. It's like talking to climate "skeptics" - people who believe climate change is real but disagree on the level of human agency. You can show them graph after graph of greenhouse gas emissions being pumped into the atmosphere at alarming rates and they'll say "I'm not that alarmed, we don't know how much of an impact it will have." Meanwhile, coral reefs are bleaching, Florida is flooding, and we are experie…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a manager it's an interesting balancing act. There are reasons things are done the way they are done and sometimes they are "because we've always done it that way" but more often it's because we've done it enough to understand something someone new to the company or industry doesn't. It's hard to know where to let go and where to draw the line. I try to provide an environment where new people can 1. Try an idea an…
I applaud your willingness to let people try new things, but the way you describe it seems to assume that all new ideas are bound to fail. They aren't. Different is not necessarily better, but better is necessarily different.
After that they can take the time to learn why best practices are best practices. From that understanding we can talk new ideas.
I've had so many employees come in convinced their idea was the best idea and then be frustrated and resentful that we wouldn't immediately start using it reciting the mantra that we do it "because it was always done that way".