kibbleble's comments

kibbleble | 4 years ago | on: Ask HN: I got into MIT. Should I go?

If you have sound mental health and are extremely driven, are able to focus despite the courseload and competition, and you are confident you'll graduate on time, then pick MIT. You minimize debt by graduating as soon as possible.

Average folk may take 5-6 years to graduate with an engineering degree because it's that difficult. Gotta retake classes and work part time, haha.

Regardless of college, what you do outside of classes is more important (networking). There are smart people everywhere, so you're not missing much if you skip MIT.

I will say though, the MIT campus is right by the river and has a serene feeling. Are you able to visit the place, and do you like the idea of being there for the next 4 years? If you have a mental health issue like seasonal affective disorder, you'll be miserable at MIT due to the geography, and no amount of justifying a bad location will save you.

Having some extra money means you can afford to study abroad. Picking up a new language may become your passion.

Either way, I don't think there's a wrong choice. You'll have to weigh and rank your desires accordingly.

kibbleble | 4 years ago | on: Garbage Language: Why do corporations speak the way they do?

Meanwhile I love the word "deliverable." Sometimes it's hard to think of an umbrella word for all the things you produce. It can be anything from a stack of pamphlets coming hot off the printing press, or those pin buttons that are given away during fundraisers but no one wears, or those custom printed stickers, or those table menu trifolds, or a laminated portfolio that you deliver to a client.

kibbleble | 4 years ago | on: You shouldn’t use Markdown for content anymore

I think it's helpful to distinguish between "authors" and "publishers." We can see this play out in the traditional publishing industry.

Authors are supposed to submit a manuscript with the least amount of formatting. Images are given in a separate folder and only referenced in the manuscript, maybe with a couple notes on alignment. Markdown precisely forces the author to follow this contract. Just write the content and organize the chapters.

Ultimately it's the publishing house's job to format and create the final rendition, insert and design the fancy tables that you see in, for example, a chemistry textbook. In the corporate world, their publishing houses are called technical writers/content strategy/learning development/marketing departments.

So the idea of not using Markdown is both right and wrong. It's totally unfair to expect contributors and authors to understand everything about formatting and publishing. But, Markdown is only the first step in an entire toolchain. If people cannot tell what part of the process they fall on (authoring vs publishing) then it's going to be confusing.

kibbleble | 4 years ago | on: Ask HN: How does TurboTax get away with dark patterns?

Here's a Pocket article explaining it: https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-irs-already-has-all-y...

> Consequently, of the more than 100 million taxpayers eligible for free help, 35% end up paying for tax preparation and 60% never even visit the free websites. Instead of 70% of Americans receiving free tax preparation, commercial companies whittled that percentage down to 3%.

BTW the US Treasury has been trying to get corporations to comply for years (since 2009). Here's a link to their report: https://www.treasury.gov/tigta/auditreports/2020reports/2020...

kibbleble | 4 years ago | on: The Hidden Costs of Living Alone

I think it's really funny that fantasy and DnD artists draw taverns as spacious inns with tons of rooms, when in reality most ancient people were sleeping together in the same room, peeing together in the same bathroom, and generally never alone except if you had the money to afford such a luxury, or you gave yourself alone time by running off into the forest.

kibbleble | 4 years ago | on: Missouri website that leaked SSN

According to this article, if you get accidentally declared dead in the US, companies and institutions make their own copies of the death records and they aren't kept in sync with the governments. So even after you become alive again, at any moment, someone might switch the bit on their database, and you become dead to few companies again.

https://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2019/01/how-exactly...

Kind of interesting how this HN post shows that transparency is important, because fixing an error like erroneous death in other countries isn't as bad as it is in the US.

Anyway I ended up writing about it as a use case for crypto, because the blockchain part of a transparent ledger is important for being a companion to the public memory: your birth, your marriage, your relationships with relatives, and your death.

https://www.dyingtowrite.com/posts/2021/33_crypto-isnt-what-...

kibbleble | 4 years ago | on: Ask HN: Is Anyone Here a Professional Baker?

For prep work, you can store pizza dough as little balls, or pre-flatten them and put them on racks, freezing many more pizza doughs than bread doughs. Preparing a pizza crust is as easy as using a press, but to make consistent bread you need a complicated machine that's annoying to clean. Bread also needs a proofer if you're serious about mass producing it, hence needing more space. Otherwise you can enjoy handcrafting your bread and cultivating yeast, which is another art and science all to itself.

While less pizzas fit in a pizza oven than bread may fit in a bread oven, it's easier to prepare pizzas, easier to hire for, and people pay more for them.

kibbleble | 4 years ago | on: For Teen Girls, Instagram Is a Cesspool

First of all, there's plenty of whores if you think sex is a human right. Prostitution is the oldest profession. If we normalize sex work, people can meet demand without getting shamed. Who's trying to do that? Mostly feminists if you ask me.

kibbleble | 4 years ago | on: Ask HN: Practically accepting cryptocurrency for businesses without middlemen?

Monero is so underrrated. It's always "bitcoin this, bitcoin that" as if that's the only currency which matters.

For now, since fiat onramps are pretty obvious, people report their taxes like normal. Record each transaction until it's good enough, give or take some under-the-table cash.

Here's an interesting project that's trying to encourage crypto adoption: https://cryptoforthehomeless.org/

kibbleble | 4 years ago | on: No-code in manufacturing: automation without programming

There's a time and place for visuals. Geometry is a form of visual math, but how do you "visualize" models that go beyond the 3rd dimension...?

For most people, trigonometry is enough to build stuff with. And for many ideas, a diagram communicates better than talking or writing it into an excel sheet.

kibbleble | 4 years ago | on: Cryptocurrency and the unbanked

Just because your friend misunderstood and jumped on a bandwagon doesn't mean that they're wrong. They have the right idea. Even non-technical people understand that cryptocurrency can solve real problems. However, not all implementations will be executed properly. Any new technology will have more failures than successes, and nobody can say which ones will come out on top until after hindsight. It's risky, it's business.

kibbleble | 4 years ago | on: Explaining explaining: a quick guide on explanatory writing

The article makes good points about how stories are the best way to hold people's attention. The beginning advice about not explaining the history is a little unclear. I think it would be better to say "stick to a central topic and don't go off on tangents, unless you are going to relate them back to the central topic." What if I am interested in the history of the washing machine or the chemistry of detergent? There isn't just one type of explanation. What's the difference between tutorial instructions and conceptual coverage?
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