zweep (u/zweep) - Readit News

zweep commented on Japan's PM to ask all schools to temporarily close www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/e... · Posted by u/jdshaffer

davidw · 6 years ago

Kids staying at home with grandparents means far smaller groups of people though.

When my daughter started preschool... boy did she ever bring home every type of disease known to science. We ended up pulling her out and just having her grandparents look after her, which worked out really well, because I kept getting sick and missing work myself.

zweep · 6 years ago

But those preschools build immunity.

zweep commented on RFC: Let's Disrupt Dating Apps dvt.name/2020/02/24/rfc-l... · Posted by u/dvt

balls187 · 6 years ago

I'd like to know more about your specific circumstances, as there is a lot that you have not said.

Are you getting dates via dating apps, and are those dates with people who's looks* rate lower than yours?

And lets take that further--have you found a long-term relationship through these dating apps, or is your goal casual dating?

Of your dates, how many of them lead to 2nd, 3rd, and 4th dates with the same person?

The original comment was creating an app for people who are effectively 3-7 out of 10 on desirability scale, because presumably dating apps only cater to 8-10/10.

* Looks being a proxy for desirability.

zweep · 6 years ago

Dating apps cater to men ~9-10 and women ~4-10. Many women would rather have sex once every two weeks with a polygamous man they consider a "9" than sex every night with a monogamous man they consider a "5". This has always been true but dating apps have enabled it at scale in society-transforming ways.

This isn't just speculation, it's from data that OKCupid blogged and then un-blogged when they were acquired by Match.

zweep commented on RFC: Let's Disrupt Dating Apps dvt.name/2020/02/24/rfc-l... · Posted by u/dvt

fenwick67 · 6 years ago

Okay, assuming your information is correct (women are a hot commodity on dating apps and get lots of attention, and conversely men have a hard time getting any attention), if you put out a hetero-only dating app with a 1:1 men:women ratio, why would women choose to use it, when on Tinder they would have men clamoring over them?

zweep · 6 years ago

The wildly unbalanced gender ratio makes men frustrated, which causes them to invest very little in reaching out to women so that they can reach out to dozens/hundreds/thousands, which makes an experience for women of thousands of dick pics/"hey"/etc, along with earnest high-investment outreach from men who are too ugly/poor/short/whatever to capture their interest.

If there was a system for people in the 25th to 75th percentiles of desirability to have a dating market where the men were only allowed to contact 3 women per month, I think it would be very popular among women.

zweep commented on Paper Clay Air Humidifier maximelouis.com/paper-cla... · Posted by u/tonymarks

xvector · 6 years ago

I've used this in the summer to cool down in apartments with no AC.

But is it actually effective for humidification? The top comment mentions that it takes 5 gallons per day to humidify a small studio apartment under ideal conditions...

zweep · 6 years ago

It's very effective for humidification, the difference is immediately noticeable. The room is probably 100 square feet, I'm only humidifying it at night, so by your calculation it should take only about half a gallon of water which is probably what fits on a towel give or take.

zweep commented on Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real? thewirecutter.com/blog/i-... · Posted by u/zdw

ThePhysicist · 6 years ago

It's funny: I always thought the Internet and platforms like Amazon with the collaborative reviewing system would make brands more and more obsolete, because you could just pick high-quality products from smaller manufacturers by looking at user reviews.

Now I find that I rely more and more on brands to decide which things I buy, because I simply cannot trust user reviews in most of the cases. Recently there are more and more Chinese products flooding Amazon (Germany) with products that have hundreds of well-written positive reviews. I have to assume that most of them are fake because there's no way that some niche product can have more reviews than let's say a PS4 or Nintendo Switch, which is sold millions of times.

Really a shame that Amazon does not seem to care much about this, maybe a chance for the smaller shops to take back some lost business though. I find that I buy more in smaller e-commerce shops, because I find they're much less affected by the review fraud and often ship things just as fast as Amazon.

zweep · 6 years ago

This was one of the early theories about how Facebook would monetize -- that your real-life friends would value their relationship with you too highly to recommend anything but truly great products to you. That hit the reality that people would squander most of their friends for their stupid MLM scheme.

zweep commented on My Startup Failed, So We Open-Sourced the Tech veniqa.com/... · Posted by u/Viveckh

amoitnga · 6 years ago

why 10 mil? where the number come from?

zweep · 6 years ago

It’s obviously not precise. But roughly after that you are making about a million a year minimum in cash flow and can think about spending $250k+ on custom software.

zweep commented on Paper Clay Air Humidifier maximelouis.com/paper-cla... · Posted by u/tonymarks

zweep · 6 years ago

To mildly humidify my baby son’s room without having to maintain a humidifier, I use a towel soaked in water, draped over a chair, with a fan pointed at it overnight.

zweep commented on My Startup Failed, So We Open-Sourced the Tech veniqa.com/... · Posted by u/Viveckh

themgt · 6 years ago

Not to be a jerk, but IMO this is a good example of why not to build your own greenfield e-commerce solution for your B2C idea. They were a "a New York based fashion retail startup that served consumers in South Asian countries to shop from luxury western brands" so it's entirely unclear why their own in-house e-commerce platform would be anywhere near enough of a value-add to be worth the investment.

Skimming the code it looks like mostly an overengineered CRUD/SPA with a lot of non-DRY code, possibly some security issues, and no obvious major game changer that would have made it worth building in the first place. And building it would drastically slow down ability to iterate on the actual business proposition of selling stuff, down to e.g. the HTML for customer emails hard-coded into JavaScript.

I sorta see this as the inverse of the no technical founder problem - it's the solely technical founder problem, where you're supposed to be focused on selling luxury fashion to South Asian consumers but that's boring and you'd rather be a cool startup writing your own e-commerce app using "MongoDB, Express.js, Vue.js, Node.js, Mongoose ORM, Redis", etc. Like seeing a nail and deciding to build a hammer factory from scratch to supply yourself with a single hammer.

There are companies doing millions of dollars per day in sales on Shopify or similar platforms. You should at least be at a significant fraction of that or doing something extremely weird before you consider DIY.

zweep · 6 years ago

Nobody doing marketplaces etc. should be using anything but off-the-shelf software until $10 million annual revenue.

zweep commented on The SILE Typesetter: Simon's Improved Layout Engine github.com/sile-typesette... · Posted by u/jhoechtl

sjwright · 6 years ago

Generally when you can’t discern the rational for a preference, it often means the underlying basis is associative rather than objective. That’s how most of us discern most things most of the time—a particular appearance tends to correlate with past performance.

You’ve probably read a bunch of very good papers typeset in TeX.

zweep · 6 years ago

What I mean is that, with some things like music, I can say that this recording is better than this one because the musician is playing with better dynamics, or better pacing, etc, but with two chocolate cakes from a restaurant I can only say “this one is better.” I can’t give any advice to the chefs. Typesetting is like the latter, I can say “this looks better” but can’t say “it’s because the margins are wider” or the serifs are fatter.

zweep commented on The SILE Typesetter: Simon's Improved Layout Engine github.com/sile-typesette... · Posted by u/jhoechtl

choeger · 6 years ago

Does it have a context-free syntax? Because this is basically the only problem with TeX: You cannot parse it.

zweep · 6 years ago

What does context-free syntax mean? And what does “you cannot parse it” mean? Meaning you can’t stream it, you need the whole file first?