Logan's Run [0] (still a great movie even watching it today - especially the cats [1] :-) ) - that society sure had the lowest health care expenses on the entire planet in its fictional universe of a future earth (a statement even more true since it probably was the only one, haha).
By the way, if we want to "cut costs" we could just blow up the planet and be done with it. No more "costs". What bizarre discussions we are having these days. "Cost cutting" makes sense in narrow(er) contexts, when the goal is clear and various paths to get there are explored, but for societal meaning-of-everything goal setting? If we didn't have health care we would not need to pay for it. That's true for everything ever made by humans. On this planet one person's cost is another persons's income, until we find aliens to trade with.
People already exist (and in huge numbers!) - what do we do with them? They may as well work as doctors and nurses and in the many industries supplying the health care sector. Or they could just hang around and play games, produce meme videos for Youtube, or become insurance agents or financial advisers (but of course, without "costs" somewhere there is not much to invest in... unless we become more of a "virtual society" and just have "money" building and feeding on itself without actual real-world connection).
PS: Completely unrelated issue, just for fun search for "Logan's run" on Youtube, filter by "length > 20 minutes", and check out a few of the many results. You can do that for lots of movies, especially popular older ones. Does it seem like Youtube is overrun by millions (must be millions overall, for all kinds of movies) of fake "movies", hours-long fake movies? Doesn't that waste huge amounts of Youtube storage? Why does Google not do anything about it, ML algorithms should have an easy time finding most of those uploads?
> Does it seem like Youtube is overrun by millions (must be millions overall, for all kinds of movies) of fake "movies"
This is done intentionally by studios and fully sanctioned by Google, the intention is to pollute search results of known titles so that users ultimately become frustrated enough to simply purchase the movie.
> PS: Completely unrelated issue, just for fun search for "Logan's run" on Youtube, filter by "length > 20 minutes", and check out a few of the many results. ... Doesn't that waste huge amounts of Youtube storage? Why does Google not do anything about it, ML algorithms should have an easy time finding most of those uploads?
It's been prevalent for many years now. The files are typically a single image for the majority of the video, so compression should alleviate the storage issue.
These videos are likely very profitable for YouTube if ad-supported, given that they'll take very little data to store and serve.
I doubt the movie studios significantly care about removing them; the videos significantly frustrate pirates, likely causing a slight conversion to actual sales. To note: these results often appear on the ContentID dashboards (causing frustration for the studios), so this may be subject to change in future.
Imagine you get an email from anonymous person at your workplace. This is about as awkward for workplace culture as it gets. Knowing that there is some guy a) who thinks that you stink, and b) who is not man enough to actually talk to you and instead sends an anonymous message, and c) you have to continue to work with that person, d) but you don't know who it is. Any of your coworkers could be that socially challenged person afraid to talk openly and taking such a ridiculous route.
Either you find the guts to and talk about it openly or you let it slide. I'd much prefer you take the first route. I consider this part of being an adult. It's only awkward if you make it so in the first place.
Wow, you are seriously crazy. May I point out that your perception first of all is the result of your own brain? It is you yourself who has those ideas in their head - i did not write any of it, you found it in yourself.
As for part two of your fantastic rant, I refer back to what I wrote. You merely restate what was already said and what I responded to. Repetition does not make the argument any better.
Please don't make HN worse by responding to a bad comment with a worse one, and please don't break the site guidelines by crossing into incivility like this—let alone personal attack, which we ban users for.
If you'd read the following, and take the spirit of this site to heart when commenting here, we'd appreciate it:
I will always call idiots idiots. I don't care about this site's policies in any case, since the random downvoting (and I really mean the RANDOM downvoting, not the few times when it's obviously bad comments) is far, FAR too prevalent - AND on top of that, when some time ago with another account I upvoted a few such comments that were donwvoted for no valid reason at all you called me a "troll" for "upvoting controversial comments". That is when I lost all respect for you and your site. That's what learning that the admin is a dumb piece of shit (dumb because... that was just DUMB) does.
I started working with JS promises specifically when they were barely available in a beta runtime. It took me over a year of working with them to really get a feel for them, now it's been far longer. That's because while you can "understand" the description and use it just fine, but a deeper comprehension and intuition takes much more time. I experimented a lot and insisted on writing my own helpers from scratch, without looking up other people's code, because I wanted to get a feeling for the details.
This article seems quite artificial to me, the problems mostly made-up.
I don't see the point of the first complaint. If you don't want to start right away chain it to something that it should wait for. If it should not wait, then it can start right away. Her writes "Functions rescue us in this case because functions are lazy." which I don't quite understand: what is he running through promises if not functions? Hi "betterFetch" example mixes synchronous and promise syntax - how about using async/await if you prefer the former? I admit though I don't quite get the point of that example.
I don't understand the whole "run a promise" idea either - because you don't "run a promise", that whole notion has nothing to do with what "promise" means. Just look at the word! It represents a (wrapped) future value. Where does the idea of "running it" come from? How do you "run" a (future) value?
You have a function and it is quite easy IMO: Using a promise you chain it to whatever you want to wait for. These days you can even use semi-synchronous syntax (async/await). "Running a promise" makes no sense to me, you run functions, and I don't see where the difficulty lies here?
The second point, cancellation, has been discussed very, very thoroughly - after all, this was on the table to be standardized. One of the issues he raises is the same as point one - if you have a chain it's automatic. The main issue of cancellation is that you have zero control over the actual asynchronous operation that the promise actually stands for - because this is controlled by the OS alone! If you started I/O, what does "cancelling the promise" mean?
1. If it is still waiting: If you don't want to run something make sure the previous step returns a rejected promise. You can easily "cancel the promise". Just let your promise function check something in the parent scope (via callback or it is in its lexical scope) when its chained function starts, and if that says "you are canceled" then don't do it. You can put such a check as a standalone function anywhere in the promise chain you created, just let that "amIcancelled()" function throw or return a rejected promise. The whole chain aspect is something that the article is missing.
2. If the code is already running: you cannot cancel the actual (OS controlled) asynchronous operation, nor can you cancel a running JS function (unless you use async/await see bottom paragraph).
I agree that promises are not perfect, but async/await -
not mentioned at all! - makes it a bit easier for many people - as long as they don't forget one thing: Even if your functions now look like synchronous ones there is a fundamental difference: A synchronous JS function is never interrupted by any other code. An async function is suspended and other JS code gets to run in the middle of it when it encounters an "await". This is something new first introduced by generators, before that JS functions were atomic (now some are not).
> you cannot cancel the actual (OS controlled) asynchronous operation
This is way too broad a claim. If I do something like:
(sleep 1 ; echo "done") &
kill $!
I'm pretty clearly "cancelling the actual (OS controlled) asynchronous operation". Now it may have done some sleeping at that point, and if you replace the sleep with something that has side-effects, then some of those side-effects may have occurred, but the operation is still being "cancelled".
Obviously it's not the case that every operation can be (meaningfully) cancelled, but some can. This is even more true when you consider that when you're using JS, you're generally way above the OS level. XMLHttpRequest has an abort() method for a reason: The underlying socket request may be queued up based on your browser's connection limits and, even if it's kicked off, your browser is going to have multiple opportunities to abort the process even if none of the underlying sub-operations can be preemptively cancelled.
> It took me over a year of working with them to really get a feel for them
I had a similar experience. It took quite a while for me to stop shooting my foot. My takeaway from that experience was that, while they do have certain advantages, Promises suck. Any abstraction that is so unintuitive that it takes beginners dozens or hundreds of hours to master is probably not an abstraction worth using - especially if it is supposed to be a primary feature of the language.
I had the same experience with the callback pattern. It literally took a whole year to grok. And I code almost every day. I'm now a ninja with callbacks. So it's a hard to motivate myself to learn Promises. Syncronious code is more easy to deal with, and you get concurrency by thread abstraction. But it will eventually bite you when you start to get double transactions eg line 1 checks if there's funds in the account, line two draws money, line 3 inserts good. But then another thread takes the money between line 1 and 2. And then the "single threaded" event loop actually becomes easier to deal with then making sure your code is "thread safe" with locks etc.
Cancelling the promise can be useful in fact to prevent doing computations that won't be used anyway. I tried to explain it in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16386454
Yeah, I think two very different things are mixed together:
- "Different" always takes getting used to. One's central neural network literally has to rewire new connections (and/or change the impact of existing ones) - for things that one uses often enough to have a dedicated circuit (which does not mean those neurons that are involved doing _only_ one thing, those exist [0], but more often it's a network thing). Heavy daily users of a service probably do have circuitry responding to that service in particular, and it has to reorganize itself a bit after the service changes. However, "different" does not have any bias towards a direction, "better" or "worse". It is just resistance to change because change is costly.
- Whether the change actually _is_ for the worse (difficulty: define objective criteria).
The initial gut reaction alone cannot be used to differentiate between the two scenarios. The additional difference is that the first point always happens and can be traced to real effects, but the second one can be subjective, you first have to define what the overall purpose of something is in the first place, which in the case of some non-(life-)essential website is relative (to whom you ask) and also not static.
Even if a change is for the better by some objective criteria, the effect of the resistance to the change itself will always be there. So initial reactions that are non-specific and only are about "the change is bad" are not all that useful. The magnitude of the reaction also may be a symptom of either the popularity (if people spend more time with something any change will impact them harder), that something really is worse, or a mix of both, hard to tell on its own.
If they had signs stating their policy clearly upfront I would accept it, but if not, in the cultures that I know the purpose of a coffee shop is exactly to sit there for quite a while. I'm in Germany and I used to live in the US for a decade. If I go to a real Italian coffee shop (i.e. the owner is an Italian), of which there are quite a few, I see people sitting and chatting for long times, an hour is not unreasonable at all. They don't order much after the initial purchase either.
Also, the entire history of coffee shops is that they are places of meeting people, not vending places. So if a particular coffee shop wants to have a "10 minutes only" policy I'm certainly fine with it, everybody can lead their business as they wish, but to what I know this is against all expectations, so it should be stated right away.
For laptop policy it depends more on the local context and I would not always expect to see a sign if they don't want it, but just the acceptance of larger amounts of time spent sitting there alone is a more global thing I would think taht cannot be easily deduced just from looking at a place.
> One thing that we found that actually increased his lust for reading (he definitely would rather play soccer, Minecraft or Rayman) is to give him a Kindle which has a kids app with achievements and daily reading goals.
That sounds so strange to me. I was an avid reader for as long as I can remember - and my motivator were interesting stories. I also had parents and grandparents who themselves loved to read. Of course, I didn't have the alternative of computers until I was almost an adult, and the web only was developed while I was at university already. So I am not putting too much of an emphasize on my own experience.
I could even imagine that setting a motivator that lies outside the task itself may have long-term negative consequences. It should be the task itself. I know a lot of people think things like work are counter examples - we work because we want something else, but I think that too is wrong. I always loved work, even mundane routine jobs, from early on I worked in factory settings (e.g. during longer school breaks, I grew up in East Germany) and even boring things like working on a machine the production line of a brewery (doing the same simple things over and over all day long) were fun, knowing that my job had a purpose. Only when people treated me like I had to be "motivated" (by pressure), for example when some supervisor in a chocolate factory saw me doing nothing (I had just carefully prepared a machine and was now observing its progress - it was the opposite of "doing nothing") my job motivation went from 100% to 0 in a heartbeat. I think when motivation is not there it probably is a pull issue, not a push issue. When I see purpose (incl. the one of serving society) at the far end I like doing even boring tasks, was my experience since childhood. Okay, that last comment leaves the topic at head behind, there only is what I said in my first sentence.
He is talking about five years old. Kids who learn to read, read slowly at first. Very very slowly and with a lot of effort. And by the time they finished long sentence, they have no idea how that sentence started. This period is notfun, because they cant do it yet. This period also takes a lot of time, it is long enough with 6-7 years old and even longer with five years old.
The interesting stories as motivator works for kids that already know how to read and need just some more practice. And when the books the child is inclined to read are already collected and available - when the kid is starting, it takes multiple attempts to figure out what it is that child will like.
That's not how I experienced it I remember reading suddenly clicking I think in my first year as I can remember the Victorian era school room in my villages primary.
Oddly enough I am a dyslexic but had zero problems with reading- writing, spelling and grammar not so much - chiz
I get that - I too was a five year old at some point :-) Not sure I started actually reading at five though, I think those were books heavy on images with little text, if any.
The age to start is a very different subject, I'm not convinced that rushing this is useful (nor that it hurts). Of course it depends on the overall situation, I don't want to lean out very far on anything I'm saying here. I might look at what else the kid does. If the child is active I probably wold not care if it starts reading at 5 or at 7. I think - and I also base that on a basic (but not more) knowledge of neuroscience - that moving is much more important in the early years.
I am also a life-long avid reader. I didn't really understand what makes learning to read so hard.
At least, until I started learning Japanese. After a few years of that, I realized that the pain I was feeling while reading Japanese kids' books is what all kids feel when learning to read initially. It's just been so long ago that I've forgotten it.
In short, reading slowly is very painful. You know that others can read quickly, but you can't. You know that there's a good story there, but it's constantly interrupted by trying to pronounce things, trying to remember what words mean (or worse, looking them up!), or skipping them and trying to figure out what they mean from context.
It's way more painful than you remember.
Something that encouraged me to read with outside motivations would be welcome to me. So that Kindle kids app actually sounds awesome to me as a middle-aged adult right now.
Kids don't learn if they start early enough they absorb (just like with your mother language) the problem is that the later we start the harder it becomes.
Does it matter? Even if I don't remember the feeling, it must have been as hard for me as for everybody else. So with that variable being about equal we are back to the discussion. Why would some people need "tricks" and/or pressure when others do it all on their own?
Also, I learned one other language - English - (I'm a German speaker) when I already was an adult, and pretty late too. I didn't have enough proficiency for daily life until I was almost 20, and even from there I had a decade of learning (example: no problems reading Stephen King - then I started The Lord of the Rings and for the first fifty pages had to consult the dictionary at least a few times per page; same with the jump from a newspaper like the SF Chronicle to The Economist, the same thing happened, again). But I never needed - or got - external motivation.
I'm not trying to make the (useless) point that everybody should have that kind of intrinsic motivation, I'm just saying this in response to what I think is your misunderstanding of the direction I took in my original comment. Remember my original reply was specifically about the use of "gaming" style of learning, make everything a goal and award points and use an app for that (which has become a popular topic in a much wider context over the last decade, it's even suggested for corporations).
I just watched a Twitch stream, two gamers casting Starcraft 2 games. Each time they got a donation - the main source of income of many streamers on Twitch - they were very very nice to the person making the donation.
I sure see the need and that that is what they have to do, but the whole thing is cringeworthy. There are two scenarios here for someone being nice to other people:
- They are nice because they feel like being nice
- They get a reward - they get paid
At least to me which one feels natural and nice and which one feels like an abomination and awkward and unnatural is quite clear.
The whole concept of "reward", of getting "paid" (does not have to be money), sure has taken off. There have even be suggestions to pay kids to go to school.
But mostly, I already made my points so I refer back to my original comment in response, have we come full circle?
If you rely on outside rewards it is not the same result at all. If you are nice because you are paid instead of because you are a nice person and like the other person, or if you read because you get a reward instead of because you want to read, I claim that this is not the same outcome by a long shot.
> it is as much about that as it is about solely looking after your own interests rather than a more global view
I find it very, very hard to believe that the "global view" was ever more or different from "solely looking after your own interests". You may find nuance simply because there were and are many people involved with their own respective different ideas and goals, but even when something looked altruistic on the surface I'm sure you can always trace it back to someone benefiting financially. For example, giving aid but binding it to conditions leading to money returning to you (plus interest, when it's a loan). Altruistic would be giving up some of your own rights, e.g. on patents or IP, or giving the other party an advantage in trade - it does not even have to be giving "money" (which often just fuels corruption).
It's just an excerpt of the spec, but I link to it instead of to the spec because I think it's easier to read (formatting/colors) and it has links to the spec anyway.
An aside about "opinionated", because something I did a while ago gave me a different perspective.
As a foreigner (who once lived in the US for almost a decade) I try to keep up with US news. Quite a while ago I actually added foxnews.com to my reading list - because I heard so many bad things about it (I had never even gone there before, but my list of regularly read websites is very small anyway), and I wanted to know just how bad "bad" was.
I must say it turned out, in my opinion at least, that the articles are not actually all that bad. (I ignore anything anything from Hannity though - and oh boy, don't ever go to the forums.)
Anyway, I find foxnews.com is a great example of finding bias not so much in the articles - but in the topics they select! Which of course is something everybody does. Every newspaper, website, or even private blog has a bias expressed merely in the selection of topics they cover, no matter how "neutral" the articles themselves are. If you just look at the headlines foxnews.com really stands out, but so does washingtonpost.com, which I find almost equally far from the middle of the topic distribution (they are trying way too hard to report every fart of that guy in the White House).
My point is, this made it clear to me that no matter how hard you try, you can't help being opinionated because what you choose to concentrate on already is a huge factor, and that I only noticed that my own views are likely based on a similar selection bias when I looked at a very different selection from the one I had gotten used to.
That's Fox's slight of hand. They appear fairly good most of the time, and as far as what they publish they're generally not too bad when it comes to being crazy, for that you go to Breitbart. However Fox's real sin is their television station, watch Fox & Friends or any of the others and its Coney Island.
Fox news the website has been making news on other sites in recent months. The website itself had a right lean but was far far more moderate than the tv channel it was based off. There have been recently been far more hard right posts and people have taken note of the changes making it more like the commentary on the tv channel.
Antibodies are too large to pass through the filter in the kidneys. Lower molecular weight fragments of antibodies are usually reabsorbed in the proximal tubule of the nephron.
Their fate mostly lies in catabolism, i.e. they are broken down and the components reused. Biliary excretion accounts for a very small amount of the elimination of IgG antibodies.
I missed it when I wrote my reply, concentrating on the immediate question (interesting psychological problem) - and then I could not edit it. It bothered me quite a bit but I did not want to write a third reply. Interesting to see how easy it is to get sidetracked on an irrelevant (albeit interesting) question, and how hard it is to get the discussion back on track.
Shouldn't I be able to edit this for a little while? Strange, only two minutes later and I can't edit. It had no replies.
I tried adding this quote from the linked paper:
> Thus, IgG elimination occurs mostly through intracellular catabolism by lysosomal degradation to amino acids after uptake by either pinocytosis, an unspecific fluid phase endocytosis, or by a receptor-mediated endocytosis process.
Explanation of two words in there that maybe not everybody knows:
pinocytosis: The ingestion of liquid into a cell by the budding of small vesicles from the cell membrane.
endocytosis: The taking in of matter by a living cell by invagination of its membrane to form a vacuole.
EDIT: I can still edit this comment more than five minutes later, as expected. Hmm... why could I not do that with my first comment...?
It was the 2nd comment, and since it's not been very long since the first one I remember that I edited it quite extensively, many times, for well over five minutes. This time I could start editing but could not (successfully) submit the edited text just two minutes after posting the comment, according to the time printed just above my comment after I submitted the edit (which only showed the text before the edit, and the "Edit" link was now gone).
By the way, if we want to "cut costs" we could just blow up the planet and be done with it. No more "costs". What bizarre discussions we are having these days. "Cost cutting" makes sense in narrow(er) contexts, when the goal is clear and various paths to get there are explored, but for societal meaning-of-everything goal setting? If we didn't have health care we would not need to pay for it. That's true for everything ever made by humans. On this planet one person's cost is another persons's income, until we find aliens to trade with.
People already exist (and in huge numbers!) - what do we do with them? They may as well work as doctors and nurses and in the many industries supplying the health care sector. Or they could just hang around and play games, produce meme videos for Youtube, or become insurance agents or financial advisers (but of course, without "costs" somewhere there is not much to invest in... unless we become more of a "virtual society" and just have "money" building and feeding on itself without actual real-world connection).
[0] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074812/
[1] https://youtu.be/sax6J8n1AiE
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PS: Completely unrelated issue, just for fun search for "Logan's run" on Youtube, filter by "length > 20 minutes", and check out a few of the many results. You can do that for lots of movies, especially popular older ones. Does it seem like Youtube is overrun by millions (must be millions overall, for all kinds of movies) of fake "movies", hours-long fake movies? Doesn't that waste huge amounts of Youtube storage? Why does Google not do anything about it, ML algorithms should have an easy time finding most of those uploads?