> A strapping newborn baby boy is understood to have set a New Zealand record, weighing in at a whopping 6.85kg (15lb 1oz) - the equivalent of nearly seven 1kg blocks of cheese.
I mean, the kilogram is an SI unit, but uh, I do not know if clarity has been added here.
Fundamentally both "gambling" and "insurance" are about trading a stream of small guaranteed payments for a chance at receiving a large payment. More generally, it's about trading risk. In insurance the risk is transferred to the insurance company; in gambling the risk is trasnferred to the gambler.
They're precisely the same transaction, just packaged in different ways, and with tons of overlap. What differs is the participants.
Individuals don't tend to want or need a lot of risk, so a transaction where risk is transferred from an individual to a large company (like an insurance company) is generally good, and one where risk is transferred from a large company (like a casino) to an individual is generally bad.
The problem is that Google forces actual good cooks to make their recipes look like worthless blogspam, but a good original recipe is not actually worthless blogspam, even when disguised in the way Google requires.
When it looks and acts like the spam sites, then what difference is there really? If I have to scroll 4 pages to find the ingredients and then scroll around like crazy to find the instructions (then scroll back and forth while cooking/baking) then it does not matter how good the recipe is, the page killed it for me.
I'd argue that most web users have a higher tolerance for ads than HN users, so they put up with the scrolling. And if it results in a tasty recipe, then they'll do it next time too, since that's seemingly the (tolerable) price to be paid for good food.
But lots of recipe sites now have a "jump to recipe" link at the top, so they've realised the junk is annoying for some fraction of their users. Although page junk is a pain, shortcuts for low-tolerance users seems like a good compromise.
Look it's not OK to milk humans like this. It's manipulative and rapey. Just because the NPC meme is true does not mean you get to hack their programming for a buck and call yourself a good community member and businessman.
Because websites aren't free to build or run. No one is obligated to put ads on their site, sure. They're also not obligated to work for many hours to provide you with free content or pay $X/no to serve it to you.
But they can also have a separate job that doesn't ruin the internet and produce out of generosity, like some of us, free content that is not span ridden.
Also web hosting doesn't cost much when your website is well made with some frugality in mind.
And there are also better, cleaner ways to make money on the internet: getting rid of the ads and spam and having the content accessible to paid members.
While it is admirable that you are willing to produce content out of your own generosity, it seems a little optimistic to assume that everyone making content on the internet is both willing and able to share it for free.
I am somewhat curious to hear more about the better and cleaner ways to make money on the internet, but I have a suspicion that in some circumstances (such as recipes) they may put you at a competitive disadvantage. I certainly have no desire to pay to access recipes I find via Google searches.
We need to find a metric for anti-profitability. I think that index could yield much higher quality results.
Detect sales/commercial language and structure,* and specifically target that for removal from results as if sales-oriented sites were hardcore porn and the child safety filter is turned on.
*Buy and cart buttons/functions, tables containing prices with descriptions but don't look like long-form reviews (which would be it's own filterable tag), etc, and domains trying to obfuscate are blacklisted permanently.
Really just removing all sites with ads would be a huge improvement. Regular old websites trying to sell you something are usually not nearly as bad as those that want to monetize you while pretending to be free.
The thing is, even if you don't put ads on a page or tool, Google will sometimes not index it because it doesn't think there's 'enough' content, no matter how little sense that makes. At least half the issues with recipe sites and company sites come from them trying to get a site that doesn't need reems of text content indexed by a search engine that seems to blindly value the quantity of content and time spent on the page over all else.
The people who have bad content are the ones to get money, while those who have good content are not. Logical result is that people with good content stop producing that content while the people with bad content continue producing it and being rewarded for it.
Look I hate these SEO-laden pages just as much as the next guy, but I think the binary classification of "good content" and "bad content" lacks nuance. I would refer to it instead as "bad packaging" of (often) good content. As much as I loathe having to hunt for the "jump to recipe" button on my phone each time I open one of these pages, I also appreciate being able to freely view recipes which I enjoy and cook regularly.
I just stopped looking for receipts online if I can avoid it. It became literally faster and easier to search in old school cook book. And there was period when I considered those completely outdated.
I sympathise with the author and agree that there are some pretty terrible stories and numbers floating around, but the unstated premise of the article seems to be:
The game industry is monolithic, it has recently undergone a sweeping change, but no further change is possible, therefore it is safe to make a linear projection based on what's happened over the last six months out to infinity. And I'm skeptical that those are good assumptions to make.
> Epic Games in September laid off over 800 people, almost 15% of the entire company. Epic is one of the most successful and profitable game companies that exist. [...] For years, every other game company has tried to copy Fortnite, and mostly failed at the attempt. This is not enough to ensure job security
Okay, yeah, that's interesting, and no doubt traumatic for the people who were fired, their colleagues we have so far avoided it, and for devs working in the broader industry, and I am sympathetic. But: Sometimes companies overhire, sometimes corporate priorities shift, sometimes a company decides to reorient towards a leaning production model. Sometimes it works; sometimes it doesn't. There isn't any industry where overall profitability is, alone, enough to ensure job security. (And I'd also suggest that putting these layoffs in the context of the broader tech industry and the end of zero interest rates might also yield some useful insights...)
In any case, if Epic fires a bunch of devs, and profitability drops, then that was a mistake and they will try to staff back up. And if it doesn't (or rises) then that suggests that game development is actually more profitable than previously expected and individual game devs are more productive than previous realised, which will of course be cold comfort for the devs laid off, but suggests that overall employment and compensation across the broader industry will be tracking upwards not downwards, which is good news for game devs as a whole in the medium to long term.
To be clear: I do not want for one moment to defend the big studios (who appear, by and large, to have C-suites full of pod people who delight in human misery), or to minimise the very real pain suffered by gave devs, but the idea that an entire industry can somehow run off a cliff in a way which is permenantly non-recoverable is...well, let's say it's a bold claim that needs extraordinary support.
> Games in 2024 and 2025 will be a few labors of love...
Yeah, plausible. But what do you think is going to happen in 2026 and 2027?
We're talking about a hundred billion dollar entertainment industry. Video games have come a long, long way from the odd circumstances in 1983 which notably only affected the nascent industry in America, not Japan or Europe.
People interested in this might also be interested in Orion from the Kagi team: https://kagi.com/orion/
Orion is built on Webkit, has a focus on privacy, built in ad blocking, and runs on macOS and iOS. It also has a lot of other interesting features baked in, although the last time I tried it I ran across a couple of glitches too (to be fair, it's in beta and under active development). Another point of favour of Orion is the Kagi team is clear it's strictly funded by users and there's an "Orion+" thing where you can subscribe and get access to RC builds.
It doesn't seem to be clearly stated, but I think Quetta is built on Chrome? I'm not thrilled with the ongoing march of Chrome as the universal core of every nominally independent browser. And they also seem to be a bit cagey about what their monetisation plans are, which might be an oversight but is a little concerning.
Wish Kagi just focused on Search. I don't see how building both a search engine and a browser is possible with a startup team. I tried Orion a lot of times but there's still too many bugs for me to switch over from Arc.
I, too, found it buggy, but I don’t agree that they should only focus on search. Chrome is proof of how important a search engine is to a browser, and vice versa.
We should welcome browser competition to fight against Google’s dominance, and if there’s a company I trust to have my best interests in mind for this job it’s Kagi.
What is so wrong with product managers writing this lies? Do they know that there's an important thing called trust exists? Do they care a bit about its meaning?
I mean, given a roughly 1:1 gender ratio that would be difficult to be entirely true. And I suspect if you speak with many women, you'll get some pretty strong pushback on this. More systematically, surveys consistently show equal levels of dissatisfaction with their dating lives between men and women.
For both men and women, it's actually relatively easy to find a partner that you wouldn't consider dating; finding an optimal partner is hard.
I would be somewhat skeptical of that without hard evidence.
It's certainly trivial to find (many, many) examples of single men complaining that there are literally no women in the dating pool while simultaneously discounting out of hand all women who are too fat, have had too many prior partners, are too ugly, are too tall, are older than them (or in extreme cases, are the same age as them), make too much money, have incompatible political or religious views (generally but not always being too leftist), violate some cultural norm (piercings, dyed hair, vegan, etc.), and so forth. And none of those are hypotheticals, but actual examples I've seen in the wild. Repeatedly!
So while yes, I would be willing to believe that more men than women might report that there are "no available partners", that may have more to do with a difference in language than a difference in the actual objective dating landscape.
(To be clear, I don't have hard evidence to prove this is the case; I'm just noting I've seen plenty of anecdotal evidence to support that it could be the case, and haven't seen any hard evidencr to the contrary. Hence, my skepticism.)
Absolutely not. If anything, that's further evidence of my point, and I literally almost mentioned it before deciding my comment was getting a bit rambling already.
Anyhow, assuming for the sake of argument that OKCupid's data is valid and replicates, then there's two responses:
The short and somewhat silly argument is that women also say they care about attractiveness a lot less than men do, so it all averages out. Men care about attractiveness and have an accurate perception of it; women don't care about it and have an inaccurate perception of it. Neither a big deal nor surprising.
The longer point though is that yes, men, judging women's attractiveness, say very different things than women do, when judging men's attractiveness (again, if we believe OKCupid's data). But that doesn't tell us anything about how men and women perceive attractiveness, it just tells us how they talk about attractiveness, and in the exact same way that we might be skeptical when a man says "there's literally no one to date" (and suspect they mean there's just no one they feel meets their standards who will date them), we might be skeptical of a woman that marks most men down as being below average attractiveness. Is there, say, some bit of cultural conditioning pushing women to rank men as unattractive when they don't want to date them for a non-appearance reason? Or to rank men as unattractive to avoid seeming too eager, even when they do find them attractive? How often do women end up dating men they rank as unattractive, and how does this rate compare to the rate of men dating women they rank as unattractive? And we could go on, but the point is that when you start to dig into it, the pattern falls apart, suggesting this is a quirk of the survey design at best, and not an real insight into meaningful differences betweem male and female bahaviour.
Whatever you say might be true, but it doesn't change the fact that say on Tinder, 95% of women go after 5% of men. It might not be physical looks as such, but whatever the metric is, women want the top, at least for casual relationship.
Again, you're assuming that men and women are using the app in the same way, and that a "like" means the same thing. If you assume that women typically only "like" men they would be open to dating, but men will "like" anyone even vaguely plausible with a plan on filtering out poor matches later in the process, you'd see data like this, but it wouldn't support your conclusion. (Is this happening? No idea; again, you'd need more data.)
Further, and much more importantly, you're looking at data showing how often men and women like potential partners, but you're trying to deduce from it how often men and women are liked by potential partners. It's interesting that women apparently only "like" 3.2% of the men they see, but that does not in any way suggest that only 3.2% of men will be "liked" by a woman.
Consider two hypothetical worlds:
In world 1, each woman is very selective (and is only open to dating 1% of men), but every woman has selected a different 1% to be interested in.
In world 2, women are unselective (and are open to dating 30% of men), but all women have chosen the same 30% of men to pursue.
Obviously both worlds seem to differ signiicantly from our own, and each has some challenges! But fairly obviously despite women in world 1 being 30 times pickier, all men could at least in theory find a partner who wanted to date them, whereas in world 2 the majority of men would never do so. And yet if you replicated the graph you linked for world 1, it would have the red bar for the female line take up 99% of the graph. It's really not showing what you think it is.
(Again, I have to stress: I am not trying to claim I know how dating or attraction works, or what the median experience for using a dating app is actually is like; I am instead pointing out that nobody seems to know this, because we lack data.)
That isn't what your linked graph shows. Slightly different hypothetical:
World 1: Men evaluate women on highly idiosyncratic scales. They "like" women in the top 53% of their personal scale, but it's a different scale for each man. All women are "liked" by 53% of men (but it's a different 53% for each woman). Women also evaluate men on highly idiosyncratic scales. They "like" men in the top 5% of their personal scale, but it's a different scale for each woman. All men are "liked" by 5% of women (but it's a different 5% for each woman). Due to their lower standards, men end up "liking" a lot of women who do not "like" them back, but nonetheless, every man will find a mutual match once in every 100 profiles they look at. Women are more selective, and better at focusing their attention on the type of men who might "like" them back, but overall success rates are broadly similar, and every woman will find a mutual match 1.8 times in every 100 profiles they look at.
World 2: Men rank women on a shared objective measure of attractiveness, and "like" any woman in the top 53% of the scale, so 53% of women are "liked" by all men, and 47% are "liked" by no men. Women also rank men on a shared objective measure of attractiveness, and "like" any man in the top 5% of the scale, so 5% of men are "liked" by all women, and 95% of men are "liked" by no women.
Note that in this model on average, 5% of all "likes" from men to women will be mutual, but 95% of men will "like" women and it will never be mutual while 5% of men will "like" women but it will always be mutual. Similarly, on average, 47% of "likes" from women to men will be mutual, but 47% of women will "like" men and it will never be mutual while 53% of women will "like" men and it will always be mutual. (Further note that since most relationships are monogamous, while a bare majority of women can find a mutual match, an overwhelming majority will not have it progress into a relationship since all women are chasing the same 5% of men.)
World 1 matches the graph perfectly, but describes a situation where merely looking at 100 profiles on Tinder guarantees every man a mutual match no matter how ugly or undesirable you may be. World 2 also matches the graph pretty closely, but dooms the vast majority of men and women to be unable to find a relationship at all.
Neither world seems very similar to our own to me (although I do recognise a specific subgroup of men intuit that world 2 is fairly close!), but the fact of the matter is we can't distinguish between world 1, world 2, or reality based on the graph you linked.
Such statistics can be difficult to parse. Hypothetical:
Person A chats with five people. Two seem okay, two seem like poor choices, one seems unhinged and is quickly blocked. Of the two good options they go on a date with each, selects one of them, and forms a relationship.
Person B is deluged with messages, many of them vulgar. After some filtering, they end up trying to hold coversations with twenty different people, but struggle to form a connection with any of them. Eventually they go on a date with the person who seems the best, it goes okay, and they form a relationship.
In this example, is person A or B able to be "choosier"? Which experience would you prefer if you could choose? I would argue that quantity is not valuable independent of quality. Or to put it another way, I suspect you would find that most single women would argue they have no greater number of acceptable choices than single men do.
The (obviously real) difference in the number of men sending women unsolicited pictures of their genitals compared to women sending men such pictures isn't really relevant.
Tried Obsidian for a while, loved a lot about it, but....mmm.
Obsidian out of the box is a bit limited; plugins are great and add tons of features, but then you start hitting issues with plugin maintainers abandoning plugins you rely on, or needing to make a decision between three different plugins that all do the same thing slightly different. Depending on your use case and expectations that may not be a big deal, but I really missed not having what I personally saw as core features not being officially supported.
(Also, FWIW, the sync service is a bit pricy for what it is. I get that it's how they're trying to monetise it, but...I would have preferred another pricing model, even if the total cost was just as high.)
I've personally switched to Trilium Notes which I'm finding nicer. One element I particularly like is that it has first class suport for notes being able to exist at multiple places in a tree simultaneously. I know it's a very personal thing, but for me personally being able to file notes in multiple locations "clicks" in a way that tags didn't.
> A strapping newborn baby boy is understood to have set a New Zealand record, weighing in at a whopping 6.85kg (15lb 1oz) - the equivalent of nearly seven 1kg blocks of cheese.
I mean, the kilogram is an SI unit, but uh, I do not know if clarity has been added here.