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Ask HN: What’s a big trend we should all be following?

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141–150 of 313 posts

Re: Ask HN: What’s a big trend we should all be following?

#141
post #8

Increasing skepticism of science and evidence-based decision making.

Replication crisis could be called “eliminating false ideas.” It’s only been the last 100ish years of the masses shifting from sky wizards to science. There’s gonna be a learning curve and lots of “nope, not that.” The paranoia over science and the replication issue is overblown. What you should probably be skeptical of is not “science” as a concept but what other humans tell you it means. Which is just good life adv…

There is no replication crisis. The correct approach is always to just see each study as one data point and in Popper's suggestion each time a study points in one direction this lends the relevant theory more weight. You might be able to repeat experiments but outside the hard sciences there simply is no one truth to rule them all, and even if you manage to replicate this is neither proof nor disproof that the theory/interpretation is fully right or that the results ate generalisable.

Re: Ask HN: What’s a big trend we should all be following?

#142

Life being worse, year on year average, rather than better for most people in most of the richer countries. It's been mostly going sideways since 2008, now it's trending down . This changes everything. It's like a bear market for culture.

Economic downturns are often times of great cultural movements. The renaissance, hip hop, punk/ post punk all emerged from economies in decline

Economic downturns are also often times of great wars, social unrest and revolution.

Re: Ask HN: What’s a big trend we should all be following?

#143

Electric bicycles (and other light electrics) are going to remake the world's cities in the next 30 years. The signs are already in place. The biggest transformational factor is the lack of exhaust allowing a lot of personal transport to be moved indoors.

Why is that useful? Who is clamouring to rebuild all the existing roads - which bikes already work on? Who is hoping to ride miles and miles in underground tunnels and pay to build them?

Underground tunnels for fast no-traffic movement of people already exist as subways, and move orders of magnitude more people, many times faster.

Re: Ask HN: What’s a big trend we should all be following?

#144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I vehemently disagree. This hysterical scramble to label everything as racist regardless of merit, and suffocate any rational discussion of issues, is tearing the fabric of society apart, and only serves to dilute the message against police brutality.

The US was founded on slavery and racism. The majority of Constitutional signatories owned slaves. Slavery was written into the Constitution in the 3/5ths clause. The majority of people on our paper money owned slaves. Black people make far less money than white people, they are vastly under represented in politics, far more likely to be imprisoned, have lower life expectancy, have far lower accrued wealth, rarely se…

Worth a watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRCzZp1J0v0

The interviewee expands essence of the parent comment out into a coherent argument.

Re: Ask HN: What’s a big trend we should all be following?

#145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why would the euro be in real trouble. How about zero net economic growth for 20-25 years and no prospect of that trend changing? Countries in the Eurzone who have seen negative real economic growth since 2007 or 2008: Belgium, the Netherlands, Austria, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain The only growth economies over the past decade are smaller: Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia,…

I don't know what you're talking about. https://db.nomics.world/IMF/WEOAGG?dimensions=%7B%22unit%22%...

Did you just post a link that support the GP's point while arguing against it? Jan 2008 is 12.8k and Jan 2021(forecast?) is 13.6k.

Re: Ask HN: What’s a big trend we should all be following?

#146
post #3

Investing in yourself, your craft, your empathic capacity, critical thinking, integrity. And in relationships around us, family, friends, business partners, colleagues, clients... I truly believe that these kind of things bring happiness and stability.

Any resources to develop these?

Re: Ask HN: What’s a big trend we should all be following?

#148

Cloud gaming. GeForce Now immediately upgrades a $500 laptop to a $1500 gaming desktop with modern GPUs.

I'm unsure on this one; cloud gaming has been around for 10 years and little to no progress has been made on the technical issues in that time i.e. compression artifacts, latency, lack of support from developers/publishers.

Re: Ask HN: What’s a big trend we should all be following?

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you don't have to be a digital nomad. We've been living in a rural'ish city (Cedar city, UT), that isn't a tech hub for awhile now. I'm a freelance dev (underpaid probably $40/hr). But, I like living wherever I want, and not having to move. Plus wife's family is nearby which comes in handy. I think one big thing though about the have-nots divide increasing is this is going to speed up automation unlike anything we've…

Removing cashiers and automating checkouts just frees up the staff to focus on other in-store work. But the biggest benefit is higher throughput for checkouts. Self service checkouts or automated checkouts free up space for more such counters.

> Removing cashiers and automating checkouts just frees up the staff to focus on other in-store work.

The supermarkets are functioning fine which leads me to think that there isn't a whole lot of other in-store work waiting to be done if only more staff were free to do it. Automating the checkouts just reduces the levels of staff that you need.

Re: Ask HN: What’s a big trend we should all be following?

#150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you don't have to be a digital nomad. We've been living in a rural'ish city (Cedar city, UT), that isn't a tech hub for awhile now. I'm a freelance dev (underpaid probably $40/hr). But, I like living wherever I want, and not having to move. Plus wife's family is nearby which comes in handy. I think one big thing though about the have-nots divide increasing is this is going to speed up automation unlike anything we've…

Check out Robin Hanson's Twitter. His hobby horse recently has been finding _any_ evidence that total employment is affected by recent automation and he's not really finding any.

When in SE Asia, it's common to see 20 staff in a store the size of a 7-11, while here it's one or two. (Note that most are unpaid interns, but then I'm the only customer.)

So the US has already minimized the number of unskilled staff relative to some other countries.

Ironically, tech companies often have a shadow engineering organization of 10 or more customer service engineers per company sitting around waiting for an email to help onboard a new client.

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