Can you explain what your point really was then? Belittling the idea of hotlines seemed central in your messaging and the possible exploitation of data more of a secondary thing.
It's fine to be cynical but it's also good to remember that there are real people that do care and try to improve the world as well.
Most people don't believe in incremental progress anymore, either it works 100% of the time and solves everything forever or it's a failure and you probably wanted it to fail because you're evil.
No I believe that what you have with the 11 percent decrease is reflective of diversity among people and what causes crisis. Suicide hotlines work for some people in some cases, that is undeniable. But it's not incremental in that you're not going to then iterate on the hotline and make it more effective and one day we've got 20% and so on. That won't be the case because the hotline is just not appealing for many people. It's good for the people it's good for, but that doesn't mean it's not a civilizational CYA/"not my problem".
Not the OP, but I saw it as a bandaid. Creating a hotline vs fixing underlying societal issues is a quick fix but doesn't fix the real drivers of the longterm increases.
Sure, concretely, my point was that hotlines are a very capitalist feeling thing for me. Probably because of trying to deal with corporiations, from monopolies/utilities to things like airlines. My experience in this realm has been one of alienation. So, taking the hotline and applying it to people in suicidal crisis is like peak alienation in my mind.
Personally, I'm not anti-capitalist, but capitalism to me is tied up conceptually with money and expedience. Feelings, in my opinion, are sort of in a different human realm.
But yes, for sure, that alienation as I allege it, is probably good for many people in crisis who are uncomfortable with the people around them. However, the question of why it is that such people aren't comfortable with anyone around them is the bigger one in my mind.
> Please drink responsibily
To me, although they work, suicide hotlines appear to be a naked corporate CYA, just like gambling and other addiction hotlines. Civilization will beat you down, won't give you health insurance except for a few free COVID shots (then, suddenly, people can totally mobilize to administer collective healthcare), but hey when you've just about had it, here's a hotline you can call (and we'll sell your data hahahahaha sucker).
Existence, where you're just thrown out there to sink or swim and that's thats. If you're lucky you have parents and/or friends who can help you. If you're not, well... good luck!
I didn't think that in Netherlands, Germany or France you can live like a normal person if you are, say, depressed or addicted to drugs and don't want to or can't work.
I never "learned" react because the "create react app" would literally never install for me in the early days. There were literally so many dependencies I never got it to build as a novice, I tried svelte everything worked and I got to spend that time building.
I can only speak for Svelte, in Svelte 3/4 it was so dead simple that I built my first basic webapp with 0 javascript, css or html experience in 3 days.
By week 2 I was trying out different UI libraries and css frameworks, that part was super rough though, back then lots of compat issues.
Use Vite. It was a misstep by the React team to continue to recommend create-react-app long after it was deprecated, but Vite is what's commonly used today.
My (personally) humorous interpretation was that they were extending your joke by implying the only users using FF are devs and they are the ones that care.
Readability is subjective. I personally find fold almost always more readable than a for loop when the accumulator variable has a simple type. This is because merely seeing fold can already telling me several things: it will iterate over the entire collection without early exits like "break" in a loop; the data dependency between each iteration is made clear into a single variable.
I find it slightly difficult to read when the accumulator variable actually has multiple parts, like a complicated tuple. It's worse when part of the accumulator is a bool indicating whether it's finished; that's just a poor emulation of "break" in a for loop.
afair I've mostly only used fold when doing maths not covered by the standard sum or product. Fold is similar to map reduce but it's just one expression.
It's 100% sarcasm. The capitalization should have made it obvious to anyone. The only place I've seen struggling with recognizing sarcasm is hackernews.
Every time that somebody calls me a software engineer I correct them that I'm a software developer. The word engineer has specific meaning and unless an accredited university gave you that title you should not be using it.
I realize that HN has many actual software engineers, but it seems like every frontend dev today calls himself an engineer. Even on the Laravel website, the default job title for new members is software engineer.
In most fields, there is a distinction between an engineer, who designs solutions, and a technician, who implements them. It is a bit blurred for software as it is common for one person to do both the design (an engineer job) and the code (a technician job), in fact, it is common for the design to be expressed in code. And because of the two, the title of engineer is the more prestigious one, they are all engineers.
I remember seeing technician jobs for programmers (not "developers"). The difference was that engineers were expected to have a masters degree (5 years) while technicians were expected to have a associate degree (2 years). The contract also was different, usually with a fixed schedule and a lower pay excluding overtime, as any overtime was expected to be paid. But for the job itself, there was essentially no difference between a junior engineer and a technician. Now, listed technician jobs are becoming rare.
Note that it is in France, where degrees matter more than in the US and employment is more regulated, the distinction probably wouldn't be as meaningful in the US.
I have the displeasure of having acquaintances that have done some pretty bad things, of the fraud and bribery persuasion. They did so because they had no regard of the secondary cosequences. However, this didn't mean 'I understand this horrible secondary consequence is going to happen, but I don't care'. That would be evil. Instead, it's more common to not dedicate an iota of time at thinking of possible negative effects at all.
You'll see this all over risky startups. What starts as hopeful optimism only becomes fraud over time, when the consequences of not committing fraud also seem horrible. It's easy to follow the road until all your choices are horrible in different ways, and they pick the one better for the people around them, yet worse for everyone else.
Our judgment of societal ills and the concept of "evil" rests too much on the question of "is this a bad person?" today. Most people who do heinous things are not bad people, but the fact that they did bad things really ought to be enough to mete out punishment.
Lack of foresight isn't a virtue, it's as much of a vice as knowing the consequences and ignoring them. If you lack foresight and that causes you to commit fraud, you committed fraud, plain and simple. That is evil.
IMO “evil” is a misconception. People have different beliefs and psychological needs, and placed in certain incentive structures that has the outcomes that we see. You can call certain behaviors “evil”, but that doesn’t explain anything about why the behaviors occur.
Nope. “Evil” still provides no explanation and no understanding of why and how things happen there. It’s the same thing as believing in miracles created by a god.
The context here is from the root comment: “Are people who commit this type of science fraud just really evil humans?”. “Just really evil” implies that that there is no other explanation, and that the fraud is committed as a function of them being “really evil”.
I don’t actually know what people mean when they label someone as “evil”, other than “is doing/saying/thinking stuff I find very reprehensible”. Which doesn’t make sense when you insert it into the above statement: “Are people who commit this type of science fraud just humans who do stuff I find really reprehensible?” Well, I guess it sounds like they are.
It seems like people want to assign a character trait when they say “person X is evil”, but I don’t believe such a generic character trait exists (and what exactly it is supposed to mean if it existed). What’s worse, it obfuscates and prevents understanding the actual character traits and circumstances that lead to the respective behavior.
I agree, "evil" is a misconception, there exists no such thing as an "evil" person, in reality, just as there is no such thing as a "darling" person, in reality. But both expressions work as an expression of sentiment. When we use it we aim to communicate that we feel no empathy for such people (in case they are "evil"); they can without further ado be thrown in the dungeon. It is a dehumanizing construct enabling hate, same as calling people vermin, or monsters, but with religious connotations, exposing a will to exclude such people from the community (often for god reason), enabling going to war, or to exploit.
However, by removing empathy, we also reduce the possibility to understand the human motivations behind heinous acts (there always are), find solutions, build bridges, make truces, end wars. So maybe we should go lightly on the "evil" stuff, as much as possible.
Perhaps if you define evil as a low quantity of ability or commitment to search for and act in accordance to what is ultimately true then that will better resonate with you. Of course, that will necessarily lead to questions regarding the nature of truth and whether it exists, but that is beyond the scope of a short reply :)
Physical pain is objective. Someone inflecting physical pain is evil unless it’s in self defense or common sense situations like a doctor performing surgery.
What is a general definition of “evil” that one could derive this from? And how does this relate to the actual reasons why someone would inflect physical pain? Are soldiers in a war evil when they happen to inflict physical pain outside of self defense? Or is that another “common-sense” exception?
The concept is emotionally laden and ill-defined, and has little relation to why the designated behaviors actually happen. It’s an incoherent concept that has no explanatory power.
Exactly. In fact, all things in the universe are subjective except exactly one thing, which is that all other things are subjective. This is epistemological monism, and it's the only coherent view.
Socrates got it. "I know that I know nothing" (else)
Because we're cowards, and declaring vast swatches of our economy and society to be evil is not good for our future prospects. In other words, you can't tell people not to put radium up their asshole!
> Why invent "safety" practices and ignore every documented software engineering best practice?
That seems unnecessarily brutal (and untrue).
> 2,000 line long modules and 200-line methods with 3-4 if-levels are considered harmful
Sometimes, not always. Limiting file size arbitrarily is not "best practice". There are times where keeping the context in one place lowers the cognitive complexity in understanding the logic. If these functions are logically tightly related splitting them out into multiple files will likely make things worse. 2000 lines (a lot of white space and comments) isn't crazy at all for a complicated piece of business logic.
> Comments that say what the code does instead of specifying why are similarly not useful and likely to go out of date with the actual code.
I don't think this is a clear cut best practice either. A comment that explains that you set var a to parameter b is useless, but it can have utility if the "what" adds more context, which seems to be the case in this file from skimming it. There's code and there's business logic and comments can act as translation between the two without necessarily being the why.
> Gratuitous use of `nil`
Welcome to golang. `nil` for error values is standard.
A lot of work can be inherently political. If your company pivots into mass surveillance is it unreasonable to speak up if it's against your ethics framework?
That's the beauty of the free market, you have the freedom of choice. You can vote with your wallet or your feet. You can leave if your personal ethics and morality no longer align with the organization you're working for. A business doesn't owe you a paycheck simply because you think you're on the moral high ground.
I'm not saying you're entitled to a paycheck - a company has the right to fire you for your differences in politics. But if you frame it as a relationship, communication can help both sides as long as it's done with some mutual understanding. There are times companies listen to their employees and change their stance. And if they don't then you still have the ability to leave. That said it also matters how differences in views are expressed, I doubt there are many cases where yelling is effective..
It’s perhaps a cultural difference. I grew up in an era (90s, 00s) where people who were overly political were mocked and ridiculed. Certainly you’d never run into it in the workplace. That’s not to say you should never voice your political beliefs, but there is a time and a place for it.
Isn't having a private entity be able to do what previously required a nation a good sign for that nation? The idea that the USA cannot re-obtain that capability again seems silly to me and there are a lot of pros for having private companies pushing the state of art forward.
it puts the concentration of power into fewer individuals hands, which makes me nervous.
The gov is slow b/c it requires sign off from hundreds of people. (For example, congress approving NASA's budget).
As a private entity, maybe 20 or 50 people are required to approve or reject missions. This lets them move faster, but if a certain CEO doesn't want to provide services for a war, they can mess with the contract.
The government is still in control. They could nationalize the project tomorrow or stop issuing launch licencees.
Why taking rides to orbits should require some massive jumping threw hops doesn't really make sense to me. If the launch and landing are secured what the problem or danger with people going to LEO?
It's fine to be cynical but it's also good to remember that there are real people that do care and try to improve the world as well.