DocKitKat's comments

DocKitKat | 1 year ago | on: Ask HN: How is the Spotify app so bad?

Nah, it's not a platform that generates money based off eyeballs scrolling through ads, keeping the interface front and center for longer etc.

Spotify optimises for music/podcast/audiobooks hours consumed or songs added to playlist/downloads etc. Being lost in the UI would very much be a negative signal in the data, and easy to separate out from "I love the app and am able to play the content I want" for any analytics team.

DocKitKat | 2 years ago | on: The Hole: A tiny NYC community forgotten for decades

I took it as them saying the whole phrase “forgotten community” is painting over the neglect the area has experienced. Not that it isn’t a community but that it isn’t a “forgotten community”. You don’t end up with derelict buildings and a transient population, stray dogs and a mob graveyard over decades by being forgotten. The city government clearly knows about it. They make promises every decade or so. The FBI discovered the mob was using it etc. it wasn’t forgotten it has just been deprioritized or neglected. In fact I’m surprised the article didn’t go in harder on the city’s ineptitude. Forgotten community is a euphemism in that sense.

DocKitKat | 2 years ago | on: The Hole: A tiny NYC community forgotten for decades

Some of the residents aren’t squatters but just homeowners in an undesirable area. It makes me wonder if some of the “squatters” in the area weren’t at one point homeowners whose property was damaged beyond repair.

DocKitKat | 2 years ago | on: Case for making Standard Time permanent

The problem is people won’t want to send their kids to school in the dark and end up more depressed waking up and going to work themselves in the dark.

Russia tried permanent daylight time for a couple of years and ended up switching to permanent standard time: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-29773559

For southern and middle USA , it’s not going to be a big deal, either option likely works. For Northern USA and Canada I fear going to daylight time is going to be terrible but once it’s down there won’t be any easy way to switch.

DocKitKat | 2 years ago | on: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

I WANT for bandcamp to work for me. But……

For the few albums that are there sure, it works. Unfortunately the vast majority of the time there isn’t anything there. Most artists just aren’t on bandcamp. Or the artist is on there but only a subset of their albums are. Even if I started using it more, it would be so rare, as I’d need to go use Spotify or my own physical/digital collection most of the time, which means when the album ends I’m more likely to keep listening on the current platform, not think to switch back to bandcamp to see once again if the newest Metric album is suddenly there, or if any albums apart from one are there etc. Also the amount of similarly named artist/albums that are tributes or fan “sequels” or straight up just the same named artist a a little bit of friction to make search.

Bandcamp exists in an odd space where unless I’m willing to have my music choices heavily restricted it then it loses out to traditional a-la-carte purchasing of albums whether physically or on digital storefronts, or to just using a streaming service. If I was a young kid in primary school again, it would still lose out to pirating music as well I think.

DocKitKat | 2 years ago | on: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

I too listen to albums in their entirety and don’t interact too much with autogenerated content.

But I was on Apple Music and now I’m on Spotify. The amount of new albums I get to listen to would put a massive dent in my bank account if I was buying them as I go.

I still purchase Vinyl and the odd CD, but that is reserved for my top must have records. A flat rate for music just makes sense to me, and allows me to check out and discover so many more new artists than in the old days, where my music taste was much narrower and confined to more mainstream “classic” rock and the like.

DocKitKat | 4 years ago | on: Sad Little Men: Assessing the impact of an elite education

Your link seems to give quite a few similar definitions of what a public school is, but both colloquially and from a government perspective it seems to be that they should meet: Non-local, fee-paying, expensive, endowed, boarding, selective and non-profit. The side-effect of this is that they were traditionally reserved for the male children of elites. The boarding requirement seems to be weaker, as two day schools (St Paul’s and Merchant Taylor’s) are listed as part of the nine “major” public schools.

However, the working definition given in the Wikipedia article, and definition used by the British government for the Public Schools Commission means that there are almost 300 “public” schools in England and Wales .

Your list is supported as being part of the “major” public schools AKA Clarendon schools:

‘Today, while the hierarchical distinction is less commonly used, only the "Great Nine" public schools of England – Eton, Harrow, Winchester, Charterhouse, Merchant Taylors', Westminster, Shrewsbury, Rugby and St Paul's – are referred to as "major"[citation needed] on account of this historical association. Schools outside this group are referred to as "minor"[citation needed], irrespective of contemporary influence’

Citations are missing for that paragraph however, all throughout the article it’s made clear there are certainly a few hundred public schools, and not just a handful. For instance, the link to the HMC page, of which membership seems to be more or less a good rule of them for a school being “public” : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Headmasters%27_and_Headmistr...

Colloquially I do know that boys who attended Eton only acknowledge 3 or so other public schools, but the general public does have a broader definition. Nonetheless have a few hundred is still substantially less than the thousands which exist across England and Wales.

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