I can relate to this. Grade school was hell. Learning cursive when I knew none of the adults in my life used it drove me up a wall. My dad worked for IBM and we had a 286. My mom was doing night classes for her degree and she always typed her papers.

Adults don't go to recess or play marbles either, were you mad about that too?

Yes, actually. It was like being locked in a prison yard. I was safer in a classroom.

Nicotine reduces appetite.

It’s also something to do.

There’s also the problem of communities that are not nice to anyone they don’t approve of.

Maybe I just have too many LGBT friends to be objective. But I’ve had to leave communities because I had to keep my head down and my mouth shut to stay in them.

LGBT communities aren’t perfect either.

Communities are messy and we have a lot of choice in who we pick to be in them. In the past, you didn’t have a lot of options and you were strongly incentivized to make compromises.

If one can be selective about who is “in” and who is “out”, then it’s a social club, not one’s community.

Community precipitates around shared characteristics; typically places or hobbies. You have no say whatsoever in who else shares that characteristic. Shunning is the only form of exclusion reliably available.

Social clubs are organized around voluntary membership, where one can choose to enter or exit the club at any time, and constraints may be placed to prevent that. Eviction is an available form of exclusion.

Discord, Mastodon, and Twitter are social clubs: one has control over interactions, membership is loosely or tightly controlled, and the threat of eviction is used by club leaders (which are sometimes an inhuman corporate entity!) to keep people in line.

Support meetings are communities: the shared property of “recovering from XYZ” cannot be revoked by others. A much higher bar of social violations — that are more or less stable per cultural context, but typical minimum bounds are sharing private conversations publicly and committing nonsexual violence — are required for a community leader to pursue exclusion.

It sounds like you’ve had to deal with a lot of awful rainbow clubs; that sucks and I empathize from my own experiences as well. I’m still modeling the language to discern whether a given group is a club or a community; my best so far is to ask: “Is this a queer support group, that welcomes anyone queer and necessitates compromise?”. Obviously this phrasing is still mediocre, but that’s not reason not to use it. It doesn’t necessarily reveal clubs at first, but it’s useful for exposing the lie more rapidly if it turns out that it’s a club disguising itself as a community but malice and exclusion are prioritized over compromise and tolerance.

I really don't understand the distinction you're trying to make. I think you're trying to make community too specific. And support meetings are very much clubs by your definition.

Also I haven't had to deal with "awful rainbow clubs". In fact my experience has been the exact opposite. Twelve years ago, I went to a furry convention and ended up joining one of the most accepting communities I've ever seen. And let me tell you, once a community gets to a certain size, it will have Problems™. :)

Ah, I clearly misunderstood. Glad to hear you’ve done well!

> If one can be selective about who is “in” and who is “out”, then it’s a social club

If one can be selective about who is "in" and who is "out", then one is a leader of the social club. There can be plenty of animosity between members.

I actually do all this stuff in my head and use hierarchies of bullet points in a text file to externalize some stuff. Some of these may end in arrows that point to a different process.

I never use paper because I'm always moving these bullet points around and inserting stuff between them. Apps are too slow.

I never write down all the information because these notes are enough for me to reload everything. It's pretty easy to see that I didn't write something when there's a gap in my notes. I never wrote it down because I'm going to come up with the same or better solution quickly.

This isn't really helpful for anyone else and doesn't work well with pair programming.

Obscurity is extremely good at filtering out low to medium skilled griefers. It won’t stop anyone who is highly motivated, but it will slow them down significantly.

Hacker News is small enough that obscurity would give moderators enough time to detect bad actors and update rules if necessary.

Is HN really that small, considering "HN hug of death"? If it really is small, then hey, we may have already talked! :)

Hacker News is a single forum with a tiny attack surface.

Literally any e-commerce site has larger and more critical infrastructure to protect.

Oh, you meant small in that way. My bad.

All of those rely on condensation, which is caused by temperature getting low enough the air can’t hold water. The mechanism for the new material is completely different. It doesn’t appear to require the air to be saturated.

We already have substances that remove water from air. In those the water becomes absorbed. This seems to work on a similar principle. The real difference is the water doesn’t stay absorbed.

It’s pretty simple. Software quality isn’t on spreadsheet. The cost to build it is.

The value of the products coming from research and development are not on the spreadsheet everyone is looking at. The cost to develop them is.

If it’s not on the spreadsheet, it doesn’t exist to the people who make the decisions about money. They have orders to cut spending and that’s what they’ll do.

This may sound utterly insane, but business management is a degree and job. Knowledge about what you are managing is secondary to knowing how to manage.

That’s why there is an entire professional class of people who manage the details of a project. They also don’t need to know what they are getting details for. Their job is to make numbers for the managers.

At no point does anyone actually care what these numbers mean for the company as a whole. That’s for executives.

Many executives just look at spreadsheets to make decisions.

You need to know when not to reinvent the wheel.

I’ve certainly done it at work because I didn’t have time (or desire) to learn a library.

But sometimes you have to understand the wheel to reinvent it.

I’m not gonna let a someone roll their own user authentication and authorization system in a rails application.

There’s so many moving pieces you won’t even think about and there’s gems that solve this extremely well. Study the gem and you will learn a lot more. Then reinvent the wheel.

Sometimes luck and starting position is far more important than skill in being successful.

That’s why a lot of advice from successful people is so varied and is not as helpful as advertised.