RangerScience (u/RangerScience)

RangerScience commented on Do things that don't scale, and then don't scale derwiki.medium.com/do-thi... · Posted by u/derwiki

coldtea · 19 days ago

>Pro tip: You don’t get to decide for someone else what’s “just” politics. If someone else says it’s important, while you’re interacting with them, it’s important.

It's rarely, if ever, important to any concerned party's day to day life. It's bullshit partisanship instilled into idiotic brains by the media and social media.

Just because they say it's important, doesn't make it so.

RangerScience · 19 days ago

Eh. While that might be true in the course of say, governance - where IMO it’s important and worthwhile to use scientific methodology (statistics, etc) to establish “importance” -

…your family around the notional holiday dinner table? The personal is what’s important, kinda by definition. The point is the subjective and emotional.

RangerScience commented on Do things that don't scale, and then don't scale derwiki.medium.com/do-thi... · Posted by u/derwiki

coldtea · 20 days ago

This goes both ways (old to young and reverse), but family goes before politics. You don't cut out, or disown, or stop visiting, or badmouth family because you disagree with their politics...

If you do so, you were a shitty relative to begin with.

RangerScience · 20 days ago

AFAIK, you cut off shitty relatives…

…and you usually find out they’re shitty because of how they handle (or don’t) “political” conversations.

Pro tip: You don’t get to decide for someone else what’s “just” politics. If someone else says it’s important, while you’re interacting with them, it’s important.

RangerScience commented on How to rig elections [video] media.ccc.de/v/why2025-21... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

mrguyorama · 22 days ago

What was the party that continually lost all the important elections supposed to do? The law is very clear that they are not in power in any way.

There's no such thing as a power that the losing team has. The people with authority in the US come from the majority party.

You want the DNC to do stuff, to solve problems, to execute plans that grow this country, you have to put them into power first

Republican voters understand just fine that if republicans don't win the election, their will does not become law. Why is that so hard for Democrat supporters and voters to understand?

RangerScience · 22 days ago

Because notionally, the “game” isn’t supposed to be winners-take-all. And democrats believe in the game even when they’re not winning.

RangerScience commented on We shouldn't have needed lockfiles tonsky.me/blog/lockfiles/... · Posted by u/tobr

RangerScience · a month ago

No, no, a thousand times no.

The package file (whatever your system) is communication to other humans about what you know about the versions you need.

The lockfile is the communication to other computers about the versions you are using.

What you shouldn't have needed is fully defined versions in your package files (but you do need it, in case some package or another doesn't do a good enough job following semver)

So, this:

  package1: latest

  # We're stuck on an old version b/c of X, Y, Z
  package2: ~1.2

(Related: npm/yarn should use a JSON variant (or YAML, regular or simplified) that allows for comments for precisely this reason)

RangerScience commented on The untold impact of cancellation pretty.direct/impact... · Posted by u/cbeach

Jensson · a month ago

> I didn't see anyone (with one exception) pick sides immediately

> the accused ended up damning themselves (or not!) pretty immediately when I talked to them about it

So you mean yourself being the exception?

RangerScience · a month ago

Haha. No. I spent hours before hand talking with involved other people, and then I spent hours talking with these people, and then hours more processing the conversations (on my own and with advisors).

It’s just that in the end, it turned out that the things that decided it one way or the other had come up pretty early in the conversations with the accused.

RangerScience commented on The untold impact of cancellation pretty.direct/impact... · Posted by u/cbeach

Aurornis · a month ago

I do not know anything about this author’s situation and won’t pretend to, but I did watch a sexual misconduct accusation play out in person once. The speed at which everyone assumed the story was true and turned against the accused was basically instant.

However there were some key details about the accusation that didn’t add up. The accuser tried changing the details of the story once they realized others were noticing the problems with the claims. It also became clear that the accuser had an ulterior motive and stood to benefit from the accused being ostracized. The accuser also had developed a habit of lying and manipulation, which others slowly began to share as additional information.

This was enough to make the situation fall apart among people who knew the details. However, word spread quickly and even years later there are countless people who only remember the initial accusation. Many avoided the accused just to be safe. The strangest part was seeing how some people really didn’t care about the details of the situation, they viewed it as symbolic of something greater and believed everyone was obligated to believe the accuser in some abstract moral sense.

It remains one of the weirdest social situations I’ve seen play out. Like watching someone drop a nuclear bomb on another person’s social life and then seeing how powerless they were to defend against it. In this case it didn’t extend to jobs or career. Their close social circle stuck with them. However I can still run into people years later who think the person is a creep because they heard something about him from a friend of a friend and it stuck with them.

RangerScience · a month ago

I've seen four "in person", one very public (just purely IRL public).

I didn't see anyone (with one exception) pick sides immediately; although most people's "picked" side was "not involved". (The one exception was a community organizer who definitely has Been Through This Before).

For three of those, I did my own homework - a lot of asking around, and then a lot of conversations with both people. In the end, most of that didn't matter: the accused ended up damning themselves (or not!) pretty immediately when I talked to them about it.

RangerScience commented on The untold impact of cancellation pretty.direct/impact... · Posted by u/cbeach

throwaway290 · a month ago

Not nothing. The events described by the original letter are very something. Something rapey. https://medium.com/@yifanxing/my-experience-with-sexual-hara...

And none of that was shown false. It looks like all that the court said was "no evidence was provided".

Duh imagine being a victim there and providing "evidence". It looks like any text messages would be careful and all the stuff would be IRL (if he did it).

He himself could say "I didn't sleep with a young attendee of a conference I helped her get into, by getting her drunk in my airbnb" on this letter. But he didn't deny it. He just said "fake evidence" and "short relationship". C'mon...

It's clear as mud.

RangerScience · a month ago

> It's clear as mud.

NGL, love this phrase for this situation; I'm reading it as: "utterly opaque but also clearly what it is (mud)"

RangerScience commented on The untold impact of cancellation pretty.direct/impact... · Posted by u/cbeach

RangerScience · a month ago

It's worth noting, when looking at these kinds of situations, that we do not have effective systems of addressing intimate / domestic crimes and accusations.

Near as I figure, it comes down to this: Our legal tradition was developed to mediate and resolve conflicts between groups; not within them, which is where this kind of thing happens.

RangerScience commented on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (August 2025) · Posted by u/whoishiring

vnchr · a month ago

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RangerScience · a month ago

This looks interesting! Is there a way to reach out more directly? (It’s my understanding that regular submission systems as getting pummeled by bots..)

RangerScience commented on The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality english.elpais.com/cultur... · Posted by u/geox

blueflow · 2 months ago

I'm surprised. What is the objective aspect of quality? Can you have quality without a human-intended purpose?

RangerScience · 2 months ago

It’s worth noting that the author of Zen and the Art literally went crazy in pursuit of this.

I don’t mean this to say “you have asked a bad question”, but rather to say, “you have asked so large a question that a man once went insane in trying to answer it.”