Planet fitness is the absolute worst offender in my mind.
I had a membership once at a location and did not close it before moving out of state. Fair to assume I could just cancel over the phone, but this is not something they would do. Apparently the contract says cancellations have to be in person at the branch you opened your membership at.
Even after explaining I was multiple states away and could not do this they refused to close my account and continued to bill me.
I asked my bank to deny all future payments to them, and this worked for a month or two before payments started getting pulled again.
this went on for over a year until I eventually went back to visit friends and was able to close the membership in person.
I can't imagine this is legal, but I guess it's probably worked out well enough for them to be worth it. I've heard the same story from a few people since this all happened.
Readit Newscsorrell commented on Ask HN: End of days – are subscription dark patterns simply becoming fraud? · Posted by u/lifeisstillgood
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I think the issue with almonds is that by growing them in massive monoculture you create bee deserts for the majority of the year when the almonds aren't flowering. Once the flowers disappear, any remaining bees will starve until the next year. So this criticism could be leveled essentially against almost any large scale monoculture crop.
I'd be interested to know why almonds (and avocados) are usually highlighted here. Are other flowering crops typically grown in more diverse environments?
Almonds as a crop aren't going to provide enough nutrients for bees, but yeah, it's an issue anywhere large monocultures exits.
csorrell commented on Ask HN: I've been slacking off at Google for 6 years. How can I stop this? · Posted by u/futur321
Yeah I've been anywhere from like 0.5x to 10x in my career. Guess what changed? Sure wasn't my IQ or work ethic.
Generally, the "10x devs" are the ones who got to do the initial greenfield work. They are the ones who understand the system, including all the undocumented domain knowledge that has been embedded into it over the years.
Ironically this actually rewards incompetence at times. If you do that greenfield work, and make a perfect system that is easy to comprehend and maintain, you will not have an advantage and will not be a "10x" engineer. You have to make the system work, and make the bosses happy long enough to earn their trust... but don't make it too easy for anybody else to come onto your team and be productive.
Of course, this incompetence is also created by management sometimes. Let's say you are a very competent dev who has the desire and talent to make a nice greenfield system that is easy to scale and maintain. Well, management will surely make sure this does not happen 90% of the time because of changing requirements and unrealistic deadlines.
>Generally, the "10x devs" are the ones who got to do the initial greenfield work. They are the ones who understand the system, including all the undocumented domain knowledge that has been embedded into it over the years.
I think this is exactly right. Especially when working on large projects with complex business logic.
csorrell commented on Crows could be the smartest animal other than primates bbc.com/future/article/20... · Posted by u/hhs
Saying something displaying a certain behavior makes them seem like a certain race is racism, even if you don't find it offensive.
it's an Irish joke, that speaks the the Irish sense of humor. Irish people will jab at the Irish way all day long. It's really not offensive; certainly not as offensive as someone else coming along and deciding to be offended on others' behalf. lighten up.
I wouldn't, no. if a teammate wanted to do a video chat or quick phone call with me they can ping me on slack and ask if it's a good time. this sort of feature adds an unspoken expectation to my home office... that I'm supposed to be immediately available whenever someone wants to turn on the video feed. I'm not interested in that.
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csorrell commented on Some people who take psychedelics continue hallucinating indefinitely slatestarcodex.com/2019/0... · Posted by u/pelt
Something I'm surprised hasn't come up yet is the ability to flex... "something" in your brain and turn hallucinations on and off.
I grew up in a Buddhist family and was meditating since an early age. I'm not sure if this was related at all but since I was young I could look at things when I was bored and do something in my brain that would cause the patterns to move. If I then needed to concentrate I could focus and it would go away.
I did some research and found out that there is a common effect with meditators that they can meditate while on drugs in order to mitigate or in some cases even deactivate some of the effects. So if you want to experiment it might be good to learn a bit so you have an extra tool to work with your mind while you're altering it.
YMMV of course.
I have a similar experience with HPPD...the ability to "flex" the mind to either increase or decrease the degree to which I was experiencing the visual pattern distortions. it was mostly just a matter of directing attention into the experience vs. pulling out of it. anyway, fascinating thread on HN this morning.
I'm probably in the minority here, but I prefer live coding exercises. Definitely more confident showing my competence than trying to explain it.