In normal times I imagine there would be a lot more attention when a President effectively overrides a law passed by Congress and upheld by the Supreme Court.
One significant difference between this new point-of-sale prompt for a tip, compared to previous customs is that this is now asking for the tip before you receive the product or service on offer. This means that you do not yet know how your service will be, but you are being asked to tip. Also, you now worry that if you do not tip, you risk a negative response - like slower service, or worse.
When we tipped for table service at a restaurant, or a haircut, cab ride, etc, we already had received the service and could tip based on our level of appreciation, without fear of retaliation.
I totally agree that police at the moment would not likely respect the finer points of that law and may well detain you. I would not advise testing them. However, it's not likely that the DA would eventually be able to convict you. I was sharing what I found interesting about the actual law in question, which was a different impression than when I first read the claim that loitering at a school was illegal (which is technically true!) It's not actually illegal to watch kids play (with no other criminal purpose), even if we both agree that in practice you're likely to get a negative response.
I found that surprising. According to the first Google result[1], it is true that loitering near a school is illegal, BUT loitering doesn't mean just being there. It means being there with an unlawful purpose; they give an example of someone waiting to abduct a child. Watching kids play isn't otherwise a crime, so wouldn't qualify.
I definitely sympathize with the author. As a male, I would expect an even stronger reaction to hanging around watching kids with no clear intent. As others have pointed out, even if you're not committing a crime you can be in for an unpleasant response. It's sad that there are creeps out there. It's sad that as a result, certain innocent behaviors make others nervous (rationally or irrationally). It also gives me a small taste of what it's like to be judged by my category/appearance.
I use this to find a jar in the refrigerator that I know is there somewhere, but somehow I cannot see unless I actually point at each item, one at a time.
Because the hours of sunlight are limited, and many people prefer having the sun set in the afternoon over having it rise after the day's routine is well under way. Many people prefer it the other way around. There are some inconveniences both ways, but we'll make it work one way or the other.
We did this before, about 50 years ago. Going in, close to 80% of people supported permanent Daylight Saving Time. After experiencing a single winter, that dropped to close to 40%, and it was repealed. Looks like we may be doomed to repeat the experience.
How will this impact Russia's will to continue to supply gas and oil to Europe? Is Europe paying them in euros or some other currency? Where is it "stored"? If Russia's money is frozen, what use is it? Or even if it's not frozen, but they cannot use it to buy goods and services in exchange, then why would they bother selling the oil and gas?
How will this impact Russia's will to continue to supply gas and oil to Europe? Is Europe paying them in euros or some other currency? Where is it "stored"? If Russia's money is frozen, what use is it? Or even if it's not frozen, but they cannot use it to buy goods and services in exchange, then why would they bother selling the oil and gas?
Wirecutter performed a similar experiment a few years back. Their results were somewhat different, showing that the DIY version helped significantly, but not nearly as well as the best of the commerical ones they tested:
I do believe the War on Drugs has been a terrible policy, doing disproportionate harm to Blacks and other marginalized people. I'm not convinced that was the intent by most of those who supported its creation and sustained it.
I think that's a great example of the "smoothing" that I was alluding to, though not in a format accessible to most programmers. However it is still just using a function of upvotes and downvotes. I think true rating can be much better when you also incorporate number of opportunities to vote. Because having the opportunity to vote (by viewing an item, or purchasing it, or whatnot) and choosing not to vote is still a really useful piece of data about the quality of an item. Especially when you are comparing old items that have had millions of opportunities against new items with only thousands.
I'm the author of #6 on the same list. It's definitely interesting to see it has been used thousands of times on GitHub, and who knows how many more in proprietary code. I don't think it's buggy, but I now think it could definitely be improved.
I think this shows an example of a big problem with StackOverflow compared to its initial vision. I remember listening to Jeff and Joel's podcast, and hearing the vision of applying the Wikipedia model to tech Q&A. The idea was that answers would continue to improve over time.
For the most part, they don't. I'm not quite sure if it's an issue of incentives or culture. Probably some of both. I think that having a person's name attached to their answer, along with a visible score really gives a sense of ownership. As a result, other people don't feel enabled to come along and tweak the answer to improve it.
Then, once an answer is listed at the top, it is given more opportunity for upvotes, so other improved answers don't seem to bubble up. This is a larger issue with most websites that sort by ratings. Generally they sort items based on the total number of votes, including hacker news itself. Instead, to measure the quality of an item, we should look at the number of votes, divided by the number of views. It may be tough to measure the number of views of an item, but we should be able to get a rough estimate based on the position on a page, for example.
If the top comment on a HN discussion is getting 100 views in a minute and 10 upvotes, but the 10th comment down gets 20 views and 5 upvotes, the 10th comment is likely a better quality comment. It should be sorted above the top ranked comment! There would still need to be some smoothing and promotion of new comments to get them enough views to measure their quality as well.
Such a policy on StackOverflow would also help newer, but better answers sort to the top.