Ask HN: What annoys you? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What annoys you?

#311

Post by detst » Fri, Jul 30, 2010, 11:36 PM UTC

nollidge wrote: post #46

People who can't keep their car at a constant speed on the highway; cruise control is the best way to do this if you don't want to keep checking your speedometer. To elaborate: If everybody picks a slightly different speed and maintains it , any encounter between two vehicles will never last very long. There's more distance between any two vehicles, so it's safer, and large, impassable clumps of vehicles are less lik…

> large, impassable clumps of vehicles are less likely to form

I'm starting to think that there are a large number of people that feel some sense of comfort in these groups. Something that I've noticed is that a passing car will often slow up as they are passing another car so as to pace them. It drives me crazy.

Re: Ask HN: What annoys you?

#312

Post by detst » Fri, Jul 30, 2010, 11:46 PM UTC

ExtremePopcorn wrote: post #28

Psychological pricing - don't tell me that your product is $9.95; say $10.

Yes. I bought some food from a place recently that had all of their prices listed on the board as whole numbers. It took me a couple seconds to register as a price because it's so unusual. I loved it though.

Re: Ask HN: What annoys you?

#313

Post by adrianwaj » Sat, Jul 31, 2010, 12:16 AM UTC

pjscott wrote: post #292

adrianwaj wrote: post #94

Iran. The Twitter Fail Whale. No excuse for either.

The Fail Whale is cute enough that I actually don't mind when Twitter goes down. If I used Twitter more, I might feel differently.

I also don't like when people downvote when they merely disagree.

Re: Ask HN: What annoys you?

#314

Post by sliverstorm » Sat, Jul 31, 2010, 12:48 AM UTC

detst wrote: post #308

sliverstorm wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It just hit me that there's a rational explanation. Being a good soldier and being a responsible drinker are two very different things. Just because you make a good soldier does not immediately imply you will make a responsible drinker. Quite frankly, 18 is a pretty darn good age to start soldiering, but I know a TON of < 21yo who are not responsible, so my idea doesn't seem completely baseless.

There are also a ton of >21yo who are not responsible. That's not a good reason. Let's just ban alcohol because there will always be people that can't handle it. Instead, why don't we look at the problem. The largest problem is that it's forbidden, so the majority of kids growing up have to sneak around and drink with other kids that are irresponsible. Telling a kid he can't do something just makes him want to do it…

You are pretty much totally right. However, my only aim was to point out what I believe to be the fallacious nature of the argument that you should be able to drink if you can be a soldier. It plays off emotion well, but the criteria for making good soldier material are unrelated to the criteria for making a responsible drinker.

Re: Ask HN: What annoys you?

#315

Post by zb » Sat, Jul 31, 2010, 1:08 AM UTC

MikeCapone wrote: post #290

Locke1689 wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I come from a family history of physicians. My father is an MD and professor at Johns Hopkins. It's difficult to conceive how little we know about the human body and biology in general. People are working on things related to it, but we're really nowhere near even understanding the problem. Just because you don't understand something doesn't mean it isn't being worked on.

Indeed. But the approach that I support is a maintenance & repair approach. We don't need to know how metabolism works, or how to modify it for it to work. We just need to understand the types of damage that accumulate in our bodies as we age (and there aren't that many kinds) and periodically repair it before it reaches a certain threshold. The problem is, almost nobody is working on that approach. It's all gerontol…

I wasn't planning to post in this thread, but now you mention it, what annoys me is people who seem to think that their particular utopia will be the first to have no unintended consequences whatsoever.

Double the annoyance factor when they refer to an engineering approach to the problem, given that the whole utopian premise is such stupendously bad engineering in the first place.

Re: Ask HN: What annoys you?

#316

Post by trafficlight » Sat, Jul 31, 2010, 1:30 AM UTC

mrduncan wrote: post #208

judofyr wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, it's 160 7-bit bytes, so that's $0.25 per 140 bytes.

Some interesting conversions to put it into perspective: (25 U.S. cents) / (140 bytes) = 0.18 U.S. cents / byte (25 U.S. cents) / (140 bytes) = 1,872 U.S. dollars / megabyte

But you have to admit, it's an impressive marketing accomplishment. Millions of people paying for something at a 1000%, or more, markup.

Re: Ask HN: What annoys you?

#317

Post by fezzl » Sat, Jul 31, 2010, 1:32 AM UTC

College. It interferes with my startup more than it helps it (and I'm still a sophomore going to junior year).

Re: Ask HN: What annoys you?

#318

Post by astartup1 » Sat, Jul 31, 2010, 2:04 AM UTC

I have major problem with current way of handling reputation and value of text. I think karma & points system on HN is sloppy approximation of actual quality of a text. Also it is not absolute.

In real life whenever someone talks we get large number of inputs to process about a person. For example when we speak with someone we don't judge them merely what they are saying but who they are. In pure analytical conversation it is good but where opinions matter it is bad.

If someone on Hacker News says something is bad or you should do it that way, I have no way how it relates to me and what is the credential of that person. I don't want to get advice from bad programmer about some framework. This creates lots of noise in online communication.

I wish there was a better way.

Re: Ask HN: What annoys you?

#319

Post by MikeCapone » Sat, Jul 31, 2010, 2:24 AM UTC

zb wrote: post #315

MikeCapone wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. But the approach that I support is a maintenance & repair approach. We don't need to know how metabolism works, or how to modify it for it to work. We just need to understand the types of damage that accumulate in our bodies as we age (and there aren't that many kinds) and periodically repair it before it reaches a certain threshold. The problem is, almost nobody is working on that approach. It's all gerontol…

I wasn't planning to post in this thread, but now you mention it, what annoys me is people who seem to think that their particular utopia will be the first to have no unintended consequences whatsoever. Double the annoyance factor when they refer to an engineering approach to the problem, given that the whole utopian premise is such stupendously bad engineering in the first place.

1) You are putting words in my mouth. I never said that. My stance on this is that if the new problems aren't bigger than the problems we have now of having about 150k people die each day, mostly after long periods of suffering, affecting whole families and losing humanity lots of knowledge and expertise, draining our resources into losing battles against diseases that are fatal, then we should do this. Everybody's already in favor of curing other diseases, so why not those of aging? It is also not up to us to decide for everybody that this shouldn't be developed (you can make a personal choice to refuse such therapies of you want - and we might have to chose between low birth rates or high death rates), just like if the creators of hygiene, antibiotics, better crops, vaccines, or whatever had decided that they shouldn't do what they did because "it might have bad consequences". Our current world is very different from the world a thousand years ago, and I'd rather live now. Maybe in a 100 years we'll look back and think that it was such a waste that young people died at 80, like we now think that dying at 40 is terrible (but it was common once upon a time).

2) Please be specific about what you think is "stupendously bad engineering". Thanks.

Re: Ask HN: What annoys you?

#320

Post by Eliezer » Sat, Jul 31, 2010, 2:27 AM UTC

davi wrote: post #251

Eliezer wrote: post #106

Death annoys me. People who can afford $300/year for a cheap cryonics membership and life insurance, and who don't sign up, annoy me. A lot of them are probably being held off by the trivial inconvenience of signing a few papers without a paid salesman to hold their hand. It therefore annoys me that cryonics is poorly marketed and that there are no paid salespeople - that no one gets a commission when you sign up for…

I do electron microscopy on nervous tissue. I know what it takes to get good brain preservation at the fine scale, at the level of synaptic connectivity. I know how small problems in fixation and embedding can completely trash the anatomy at this fine scale. I am skeptical that current cryonics methods can preserve the brain at anything better than 'massive stroke' quality.

Fixation? Cryonics involves cryoprotectant and vitrification at liquid nitrogen temperatures, not plastination, and the last I heard the results looked excellent under a microscope. Also, think in terms of the brain being carefully examined on the molecular level by nanotech for tiny hints in the process of being restored to its exact old state, not in terms of trying to warm people up using present-day technology and hoping they pop back to life. The whole point of cryonics is to wait until technology advances to the point of being able to restore you so long as the necessary information is physically there in any form.