I personally tried a lot of dev fonts several times over the years but keep coming back to dejavu sans mono, which is always missing for some reason from showcases like this. I find all the others to be imbalanced. Too wide, to skinny, too short, etc.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
I am sure there are plenty of people who misunderstand or misinterpret statistics. But in my experience these are mostly consumers. The people who produce "science" know damn well what they are doing.
This is not a scientific problem. This is a people problem.
I haven't found this to be true at all. In fact, I'd say the majority of studies I read - even from prestigious journals - is fraught with bad statistics. I have no idea how some of these studies were even allowed to be published. Some fields are worse than others, but it's still a huge problem pretty much across the board.
People conduct science, and a lot of those people don't understand statistics that well. This quote from nearly 100 years ago still rings true in my experience:
"To call in the statistician after the experiment is done may be no more than asking him to perform a post-mortem examination: he may be able to say what the experiment died of."
> I am sure there are plenty of people who misunderstand or misinterpret statistics. But in my experience these are mostly consumers. The people who produce "science" know damn well what they are doing.
As a statistician, I could not disagree more. I would venture to say that most uses of statistics by scientists that I see are fallacious in some way. It doesn't always invalidate the results, but that doesn't change the fact that it is built on a fallacy nonetheless.
In general, most scientists actually have an extremely poor grasp of statistics. Most fields require little more than a single introductory course to statistics with calculus (the same one required for pre-med students), and the rest they learn in an ad-hoc manner - often incorrectly.
Psychology is IMO in the state alchemy was before chemistry. And there's no guarantee it will evolve beyond that. Not unless we can fully simulate the mind.
A long time ago I operated an email blacklist. Since then I don't just trust by default when people shout "they banned me for absolutely no reason, I swear!".
I am not saying anything about this case, I just notice people on HN always take these post as 100 percent true. When money is involved, people get caught and their revenue affected they are capable of spinning the wildest tales.
A while back, I operated the postfix mail servers for a B2B app. AFAIK the only way to get email from these servers was to work at a company using our product, add your email to the app, and explicitly opt into getting notification emails. And even then, the only emails they'd send were transactional emails; the marketing dept did their own unrelated thing. In spite of this, we semi-regularly found our servers blacklisted for allegedly sending spam. Since then I don't just trust by default when people add things to blacklists.
All this is to agree with the sibling comments; maybe your priors give you a particular default view, but it's not universally shared, and even so Google rather suffers from a long history of banning people in ways that sure look arbitrary and then refusing to say anything about it to anyone, which rather assists in the banned party looking sympathetic.
> they banned me for absolutely no reason, I swear!
I tend not to believe the "no reason" part, but I still stand on their side when their privileges are revoked without human intervention and without a human customer support agent available by phone.
I tend to always assume that when people say absolutely no reason, they mean no reason provided. What makes it worse is that there is usually no way to know because they cannot even get to talk to someone. I understand that fraud detection people don't want to let their methods public but this became the norm for most/all companies.
I myself was wrongly banned more than once by automated systems. Google even identified gmail pulling email over pop3 from another gmail account as an attack! Hilariously bad.
But think about it from the other perspective. Can they involve a human in every ban? Can they offer human support for appeals? You have nefarious actors with automated systems submitting malware and then automated appeals. How would Google or any other company cope with providing human support in every case?
I could understand this worldview if talking about some random unknown person.
But this is creator of Anti Idle - a game with million+ players and a pretty sizeable TV Tropes page.
Similar situation with the creator of uBlock Origin (8+ million installs on Firefox and 39 million on Chrome) Being treated like shit by Mozilla (uBlock Origin is sole reason people still use Firefox)
> Since then I don't just trust by default when people shout "they banned me for absolutely no reason, I swear!".
Email shenanigans and the shenaniganiers will quickly erode any sense of faith in your common man. That said, it's easy to believe these stories after dealing with support at any number of big tech companies.
Yeah, some of these stories that get posted here definitely have more going on than the author admits. Some, not all.
But like with email blacklists, false positives do happen, and are probably quite common. Mistakes happen and that's okay because all of this is a hard problem. For email this is usually not too hard to rectify this. For Google Play ... not so much.
A bit off-topic but the number of IT workers still using small 1080p monitors in 2024 is absolutely shocking to me.
If you are one of the "I don't want a monitor that is too big" people: a larger (30+ inch diagonal) monitor allows you to place it further from your eyes which is the number one eye health and comfort factor. So the relative size of the display does not change, you won't have to move your head to see all of it. And you can scale up your display to >1 factor so the text won't be small either for hidpi displays. There's absolutely no downside to having a large diagonal large dpi display, aside from needing a wider desk if you have a very narrow one now.
So you want me to go spend money on a fancy new monitor... because by having a big enough desk and with a lot of tweaking, I can negate the extra pixels and get back to what I have now? (A lot of tweaking also includes having to jump through hoops when doing screen shares)
And possibly a deeper one. My 24" is pushed as far back as my desk will allow and a bigger monitor would be too close to me for comfort. At least it's not 1080p, although at 11 years old, I'll be looking to upgrade it fairly soon.
Type of article: country X or company Y or city Z has it bad for such and such decisions, policies, culture. My rule of thumb for these kind of articles: if they don't mention external factors they are not worth reading.
An entity's situation is influenced by much more than its agency. There's competition from other similar entities, historical circumstances, geography, weather, happenstance, the list goes on and on and on. We like to think that everything depends on what we decide when in reality it's far from it.
These observations have been triggered in myself by reading history. Leadership is always blamed in difficult situations even if they were not (or not completely) responsible for the situation.
There's an unspoken premise here and I'm going to question it. Avoiding tension, conflict, hard words and other things of the sort is not always the right choice. Sometimes letting conflicts play out gets you the best outcome with the least amount of suffering. Just like ripping off a band-aid.
There's plenty of times when wining a conflict is far better than avoiding it. And I see articles like this, books like Nonviolent Communication, ideas like "emotional intelligence" (check it out, no such thing exists) - as misguided as it always puts you in the defensive/de-escalating role even when you might be better served by letting things play out or even attacking, baiting your opponent into attacking, etc.
Violence is sometimes the right answer. When to apply it and when to avoid it is the hard question. But we didn't evolve an amygdala for nothing, and especially not for a "coach for leaders" (what the hell is that?) to tell us to always ignore it as an unquestioned premise for a promotional blog post. Because leaders should not always shy away from conflict, that much should be pretty crystal clear.
Yes, agree. This is all a continuation of the Positivity Cult. Anger is a method of communication that is greater than words, and it puts the explanation point at the end of some of the most important statements.
> The Need for Chaos trait is particularly damaging for individuals who also feel that they’ve been failed by society
This is the main trait and cause in my experience. Individuals who for faults of their own which they don't recognize can't reach the level of social or financial or whatever succes but they feel they deserve. Their read is the world took a downturn (they all have a favourite moment) and now everything is wrong.
But this applies not only to voting. They behave in this manner in traffic, they throw garbage wherever, they are rude to people, etc, etc. Fuck everything and everyone because the whole house is going down anyway.
But of course we have elections in the US so the article has to put a political spin on this.
One thing I know for sure about marketing to engineers: they are only human and vulnerable to the same tricks. They have particularities of course, but every consumer group has them.
For example I've seen this play out multiple times during my career: old tech has some problems. New tech products come in to solve those problems. They buy awareness at conferences, they invite influencers (yes, those exist for engineers) to use their product, they give incentives to the first wave of customers, they undercut the existing competition by initially taking a loss, they offer excellent support in the beginning (and only then), all the classical schemes from any market targeted at any buyer group.
By the time the new product establishes itself the fact the it isn't actually better - it just makes other compromises and thus introduces new problems - starts to become apparent. But guess what. The new shiny turd is already in production, may even be the new industry standard. And even if you are a marketing immune stellar engineer who saw through all the smoke and mirrors you have no choice but to use it. So the marketing worked.
And all of the above might be pointless theorizing because let's face it, engineers rarely hold the decision of what to buy.
This is not the most popular idea these days but talent differences exist and they make a huge difference in the outcome. In my profession and in my hobbies I've seen plenty of people with 20+ years of experience who are quickly overtaken by a talented newcomer in less than a year. And I've also seen people who put a lot into a field they really have no proclivity towards and they get absolutely nowhere.
I see talent as the base of the pyramid. The limit to how high you can build your pyramid is the talent. There's certainly plenty of people who never reach their full potential for lack of prerequisites, opportunities, resources, etc. But there's a clear difference in how high and how fast different people can build even with equal circumstances.
reply