Ask HN: What would you like to rant about?

[iamalizard]

There are many things I could rant about, and have (on other forums), but I don't want to hijack the thread with my rants.

By rant, I generally mean a few paragraphs of something that bothers you, whether in society, tech or elsewhere.

I know it's rare to find a thread where one of my rants would be relevant so I guess it's similar for you.

[jerhewet]

Mine would be "helicopter shots" when I'm watching the evening news.

I don't want to watch 45 minutes of "live coverage" from a news chopper hovering over a building on fire (or, from recent events in Los Angeles, water being sprayed on some storage tanks) while all of the talking heads try to make it sound interesting and relevant. Or, even worse IMO, a helicopter following a car chase for three hours, from freeway to surface streets and back to the freeway. Or a helicopter hovering over somebody's house for an hour because there are dead people inside.

This is worth 30 seconds of coverage. Tops. Move on to the actual news, please, and if it's worthy of a follow-up when there's an actual conclusion, another 30 seconds to wrap it up.

If I turn on the news and see a helicopter shot, I change the channel.

[iamalizard]

I think that stems from the format. It has to be video so they must show something. Better than a stock footage of a fire or, as South Park did, an "imagine if that school was full of rabbits".

We see the same useless media in thumbnails of text-based news and in the articles themselves with irrelevant stock photos.

Not only is it useless but it makes me consider the site/network less reputable if they're engaging in such attention-grabbing practices that tend to pander to idiots.

[legitster]

The five-star review was a mistake.

Every product and service now sits on a scale between 4.1 and 4.9. It's a useless metric that has inflated beyond comprehension.

Do anything else. Use a Net Promoter Score. Or binary thumbs up/down.

Personally, I think more things should be based on percentiles. If IGN wants to say a game is a 7/10 it should mean the game is better than 70% of other games they have reviewed.

[dabinat]

I stayed at an Airbnb once where they had a sign on the fridge saying that they considered anything less than 5 stars to be a negative review.

[legitster]

To maintain your Airbnb Superhost status, it's required to maintain an overall rating of 4.8 stars or higher.

So, yeah. It's not just that hosts are egotistical. Airbnb punishes you for 4 star reviews.

[iamalizard]

When someone says "7/10", what do they mean? It could be "it's pretty good but not spectacular" or "it's barely usable but I've seen much, much worse". I agree that we need a new system.

[legitster]

I forgot where I heard it, but I remember a game journalist saying that they preferred 7/10 games to 10/10 games. And I just wanted to scream at them. "Then fix how you rate games!"

[not_your_vase]

I'd like to rant about people who have no idea what they are doing and why they are doing it, but still, they consider themselves an authority. I'd really like to rant about this for 40 minutes without breathing pause, but the truth is that I have 15 minutes limit on HN, and afterwards I'm locked out for 4 hours.

[iamalizard]

I'd love to read even 10 minutes of that rant.

[dlcarrier]

I'm amazed by how many professionals don't understand how the technology they work on works. I worked in an office that had low-voltage light switches, and when they started wearing out, they hired an electrician to come in and replace them, but instead he replaced the control board, misswired it, missconfigured it, and only replaced one or two of the dozen or so bad switches. Until we could get someone competent to fix it, we not only had to continue to jiggle the broken switches just right, we also had to keep track of which ones needed to be switched the wrong way, and to turn the lights back on after they would turn off during random points of the workday.

Richard Feynmann ranted about this kind of nonsense often, and I have to agree with you and him on that. Here's a relevant XKCD comic about software quality: https://xkcd.com/2030/

[sgt]

Probably about AI, but there's already a story about that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48292224

[Imustaskforhelp]

at a certain point, we just have to accept the world as is, the world can get better, but it can also get worse and it is getting worse and its saddening to see and the incentives of the systems sometimes if not mostly promote the worse aspects and shine them.

While the goodness is left out. and I feel like every single age of time isn't free of it. That was always borrowed time and tints of nostalgia and I think it can go all the way back to us humans in forests hunting and gathering.

as such, it is unclear to me what the system should be replaced with, certainly something better but its unclear to me if its just the structural thing or not when you have 8 billion people interacting with each other. No other animal interacts in a way we do, monkeys can't do cooperation with more than 100 and they fight and quarrel yet we are expected to do it with 8 billion and we do but the system has shortcomings precisely because of it as we weren't intended to do so but we did it for our own good perhaps.

My point seems to be close to the point that I watched in a video similar https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jH0rxb2_KWs&t=566s [ Why Life Never Really Stops Hurting — Peter Wessel Zapffe]

To put it short, suffering exists, (which also side note: seems to be a point made by most if not all religions but I am not that religious per se but what does it mean to be religious)

Now with the existence of suffering being everpresent, I just have to navigate myself in this foreign world. I have tried to accept hardships in life because they are the only constant and if that means accepting hardship, then I anticipate it.

Going to go to college soon, I wish to do the hard things in life not to get rewards out of them instantly but uhh to do the hard things for the sake of doing them because over the longer terms they absolutely make sense doing.

Anyways, I think that I have this weird habbit of trying to make things make sense and the world doesn't make sense but I have to make it make sense in my head.

Another rant: I recently met a lady in jordan through someone on HN themselves and I wanted to ship my spare 15 year old laptop to her just so that she can get the interface but the shipping costs don't make sense (150$ and more)

I researched more into Jordan and basically, that place exists as the sole function of getting refugees (1/3rd of population there is refugee) and the place gets funding to just feed the population. I can't help but wonder why countries (America) and well off countries spend trillions of dollars in funding wars but spend only a very very fraction of that in at max to then help the people who were genuinely impacted by those very wars. Those people have it so much harder than me and it then led me to that point very above that I said earlier as well.

Also side point: I don't believe that any country is remarkably better than another, I mean in some sense yes, but I feel like everyone is feeling the pinch whether you are american, german, UK, french,finnish, africa,middle-east (jordan,iran,israel,Uae,dubai), india,china, pakistan,afghanistan, australia, japan,south korea, north korea.

I am probably just naming countries at this point and some countries can be doing better than another and certainly America is better than North Korea but my point is that perhaps I used to think of any country like gold standard but basically each country has its own set of tradeoffs which it makes and imo there are always problems but some might be more than others and a country can be good for X,Y but not Z people. I don't know what i am speaking at this point but this ties to my first point again as well which means that not any country is infinitely better than other. I am certainly up for travel if it helps me to advance in the things important to me but yea as I said in some sense earlier yeah.

What bothers me is that we can improve but we don't as we accept the things in front of me but there are people who wish to make real change and sometimes i must admit, I wonder, why bother? I am stuck in this contradiction and I wish to just have enough headspace for things valuable to me personally like a stable career and learning and to then take my free time for these other things but basically re-evaluating my priorities once again.

I hope I am able to share my point, the nationality part about something like jordan still troubled me and there's more nuance to it on the issues that each country faces individually within all countries that I listed and there are certainly issues within one country which might impact the general public more than that of other country but I hope I am just able to explain my overall point, that's all. I do still feel sad for the inequality overall too but this just ties back to the first point I made, I think.

Edit: wanted to add one more line but every decision might be a compromise but yeah, I am unsure if this message is able to make sense to (anyone) reading it because I think that all of my points above do try to catch onto it but yeah there might not be Utopia in the sense of every decision might be a compromise and as such whether nationally or personally, one has to ask which are the things worth fighting for, for the sake of it. Doing hard things for the sake of doing them hard at the moment because they overall will help you long term for example. I think I am very influenced by Stoic philosophy in this regard because I don't wish to worry about things outside of my sphere of influence but they still very much happen and its human to have it as such well, yeah. Thanks for reading if anyone is reading up till here.

[iamalizard]

About suffering, it's everywhere, sadly. I think most of life is suffering. Our own life is likely a mix of suffering and pleasure but if we view all life (not only humans but other animals), most of it is suffering. I think the way out of this is by intervening in nature, as nature has a lot more suffering than humans themselves do or have even caused. Look up David Pearce or even Peter Singer. Pearce's "The Hedonistic Imperative" was written in a very hard-to-read way, at least for me. Like, I had to constantly re-read sentences and look up words. Nevertheless, I loved his ideas. Singer's ideas are also worth considering. What I remember from reading Pearce and Singer years ago is that there's a lot of suffering in the world, that humans' suffering is just at tiny bit of it and that we should strive to reduce the overall suffering. It might sound like a pipe dream to intervene in nature - someone will say "we'll only make it worse". And probably right now we will, but I believe we'll reach a point where we can actually intervene adequately.

Zapffe makes interesting points but are too close to what I consider attempts to describe human psychology through vague philosophy. Yes, isolation, anchoring, etc. may be useful things to talk about, but his philosophy, at least from the minuscule amount I've read, doesn't discuss suffering generally (using terms and ideas like qualia, etc.), doesn't extend suffering to non-human animals and doesn't offer much of a solution beyond some psychological changes we can implement (which could only benefit humans).

But I love that you're focused on suffering. It sucks and it's the thing that sucks the most and that could suck the most - by definition, even. I rarely find people acknowledging suffering as something to eradicate. It's usually something more specific, like a problem with economics or unions or tech or mental health. But all these lead to suffering and suffering is what matters in the end.

I have yet to reread the rest of your post and reply (as I don't like to just reply immediately).