> I see. One similar food delivery business I consulted at had a healthy (for the startup) margins at 30% from each order, so I suppose it's beefy enough to absorb some fraud.
Alright, cool, a consultant. And then…
> Sri Lanka (where I currently live and run a bakery business),
And suddenly a bakery business.
I wish my life one day would be as interesting as yours. HNers are quite interesting.
On topic, FoodPanda is another popular one I’ve seen in Asia. And yeah, the markup for all of them seems to be close to your stated range. Though, it seems that Grab’s delivery fee changes depending on the number of available drivers (motorcyclists?) unlike their competitors like FoodPanda which is static from my experience.
Sometimes I wonder if we should try building a news site optimised for seeing the effect of appeals to authority.
To write an article for the site, we would need to:
1. Write a headline with no mentions of any experts.
2. Write another headline mentioning at least one expert in it.
3. Write the content without mentioning any experts.
4. Write the content and sprinkle names of experts as needed.
5. Publish.
Now, the reader would then:
1. Be exposed to the no-experts version of the article - both headline and content.
2. Once finished, the reader will be prompted to write their thoughts on the article.
3. Click “Reveal”.
4. The reader would then skim or read the whole article again, but this time it would mention the experts.
5. Prompt the reader to evaluate how their thoughts had changed after reading the expert version of the article.
I’m so gullible, seeing experts in anything especially when names of prestigious institutions or titles are tacked onto them, tend to shut down the reasoning part of my brain altogether.
Bear in mind, the site I proposed is not a place to police how articles should be written; rather, it’s all about increasing its readers’ awareness on how much mentions of an authority can impact their initial reasoning and judgement and sometimes make them stop reasoning at all. My view is that mentions of an authority are useful for calibrating our judgements after we tried to reason on our own but not before that.
And yeah, I have no opinion on the original post. Just like to go off on a tangent once in a while.
I am struggling to think of a more fitting analogy to describe this overvaluation of self-assembled items.
What’s similar to IKEA, as in the self-assembly bit, but also doesn’t have the “it’s exactly what I need” effect that confounds the “I love it because I assembled it myself” measurement?
Or maybe I’ll just call it the Effort Effect. Ugly, but I’m not much of a marketer so I’ll take it.
This post reminds me of this excerpt from the book How to Measure Anything by Douglas Hubbard:
> What many organizations do to assess risk is not very enlightening. The methods I propose for assessing risk would be familiar to an actuary, statistician, or financial analyst. But some of the most popular methods for measuring risk look nothing like what an actuary might be familiar with. Many organizations simply say a risk is “high,” “medium,” or “low.” Or perhaps they rate it on a scale of 1 to 5. When I find situations like this, I sometimes ask how much “medium” risk really is. Is a 5% chance of losing more than $5 million a low, medium, or high risk? Nobody knows. Is a medium-risk investment with a 15% return on investment better or worse than a high-risk investment with a 50% return? Again, nobody knows because the statements themselves are ambiguous.
[…]
It is true that many of the users of these methods will report that they feel much more confident in their decisions as a result. But, as we will see in Chapter 12, this feeling should not be confused with evidence of effectiveness. We will learn that studies have shown that it is quite possible to experience an increase in confidence about decisions and forecasts without actually improving things—or even by making them worse.
For now, just know that there is apparently a strong placebo effect in many decision analysis and risk analysis methods. Managers need to start to be able to tell the difference between feeling better about decisions and actually having better track records over time. There must be measured evidence that decisions and forecasts actually improved. Unfortunately, risk analysis or risk management—or decision analysis in general—rarely has a performance metric of its own. 3The good news is that some methods have been measured, and they show a real improvement.
From what I’ve read on this page[0], Ghost does allow other providers which I presume includes self-hosted emails.
> I still want to use a different provider to send email newsletters, why can’t I do that?
You can. There is no requirement to use Ghost’s built in newsletter delivery feature. Before we released this feature, thousands of people sent their newsletter using all sorts of other services such as Mailchimp, Sendgrid, Convertkit, and many others. You can easily sync your members database to an external newsletter provider via Zapier, or by following our detailed integration guides.
I don’t know anything about self-hosting, but I’m curious to know if there’s no place for self-hosted email servers when it comes to integrating with Ghost.
> We are all experiencing what happened when politicians regulated the web. I hope you are enjoying your cookie modals; browsing the web in 2022 is an absolute hell.
What would they do with email?
To be honest, I kinda like seeing a lot of cookie modals out there. Yeah, the experience can be hellish, but it highlights how many sites are actually collecting data from their users.
With that said, I wonder what alternative regulations are feasible if we don’t rely on politician-mandated regulations.
> To chain science to objectivity or to any kind of formulaic process may help everyone to agree on results, but it impedes the evolution of the scientific process (or better, processes) itself. There's nothing wrong with methods that in different places drift into different directions, because overall this makes for a more competitive field of methodologies. in fact something even as stupid as Lysenkoism serves a purpose, it's in itself part of the scientific map of ideas that need to be discovered before they could be disregarded.
Not chaining the scientific process to objectivity might improve the evolution of scientific processes, but it won’t really bring the world any good as of now. Objectivity, as nebulous as it can be sometimes, is reliable enough at aligning what we think the world is and what it actually is. Plus, having competitive methodologies would just create silos of scientists all working on their own “science is X” methods, with nothing binding them all together. And how would you get someone who believes ‘science should be X’ to listen to someone who believes ‘science should be Y’?
Maybe if we’re on a new planet, an ‘epistemic anarchy’ is worth trying, but not on Earth, where the objectivity train is full speed ahead on an Ouroboros track.
> After a decade of discussion about the replication crisis, open science, and all the ways we could reform the way we do research, we’re more aware than ever of how biases can distort things - but also how we can improve the system. So throwing up our hands and saying “science is always political! There’s nothing we can do!” is the very last thing we want to be telling aspiring scientists, who should be using and developing all these new techniques to improve their objectivity. Not only is the argument from inevitability mistaken. Not only is it black-and-white thinking. It’s also cheems. Even if we can’t be perfect, it’s possible to be better - and that’s the kind of progressive message that all new scientists need to hear.
A layman’s perspective: While not necessarily because of politics, the replication crisis had made some, if not many, people very skeptical of psychology research and maybe the whole scientific enterprise as whole. Whenever someone brought up anything about science, they’ll link to some news about the replication crisis or some other flaws of the science, followed by preaching about how much of a sham science can be.
It’s not that skeptics don’t think there’s value in science. They might believe in science as a theory but not in its application. Evaluating the application of science can be very difficult and time-consuming especially for a layman. If the application of science is as flawless as its theory, we can just read the abstract and be done with it. But that’s not the reality, and people are expected to have a bevy of skills to read scientific papers. When they don’t have the skills and try to share their interpretation of the papers, you can expect someone criticising them (normally with a very adversarial tone) because of their incompetence, ignorance, blindness, biasses, etc. Because of the difficulty and intellectual battleground surrounding scientific paper discussions, some people would rather take the default route of not caring about or even denigrate science; the replication crisis is the best they could’ve hoped for to justify and bolster their positions.
The progressiveness espoused by the author shouldn’t be limited to scientists. Anyone interacting with science should try to read scientific papers even if they’re not some hotshot supposedly unbiased scientists. Similar to the scientists, non-scientists should also try to improve their objectivity, and not think that they should be supremely objective before they can read anything.
Maybe a lot of her clients had said: “It’s all just semantics. I don’t want those, I want solutions. I swear I should’ve just taken meds only and none of these so-called therapies”.
By the way, I’m pro-therapy. That would probably be what my nightmare patient would say, if I was a psychologist.
> This illustrates a difference between proper nouns and common nouns. Common noun phrases describe their referent. Proper noun phrases do not describe, they merelydesignate. A woman named Joy can be in a bad mood; a man named Ernest can dissemble; and building named Green can be a light brown tinged with crud.
> Call them improper nouns. It's like a stealth proper noun: like a proper noun phrase, it designates, without describing, but it sure looks like it's just garden-variety description.It has none of the ordinary indications that proper nouns do that twig us it is designating without describing. Proper nouns, for instance, are designated with capital letters. In real-world MIT, the confusion fostered by the name of the Green Building is strictly an aural artifact. There's no confusion that the Green Building is not merely a green building in writing. Of course, we have no capital letters in spoken English, so there's ambiguity aloud. In our hypothetical color-coded MIT, that ambiguity persists in writing, because "the green building" is not just not a building that is physically green, but not capitalized either: it's an improper noun.
I can understand this part. Improper Noun is not a grammatical error, but the designation of a word that purely designates as a word that describes.
> First, over on Reddit's r/science, somebody posted an article about research into the "highly sensitive person". A lot of commenters were very upset and bewildered by what they took the research to be saying about people who were particularly "sensitive", in some sense or another.
The problem here is that "highly sensitive person" doesn't just refer to people who are sensitive. Perhaps it should be in initial capitals, as a proper proper noun – "Highly Sensitive Person" – but in the popular press article, it wasn't. It's a psychological construct proposed by psychologist Elaine Aron. It is a technical term, with a technical definition and criteria. It is, in other words, an improper noun. The findings do not concern sensitivity per se, they concern people who meet the criteria for this psychological construct designated, non-obviously, by the improper noun "highly sensitive person".
One commenter angrily asked why would a researcher assume someone who is very easily annoyed by subtle physical sensations would also be prone to emotional rejection sensitivity. The answer is simple: the researcher didn't assume that. That's definitional to Aron's HSP construct. If you don't have both, you don't meet the criteria. Highly Sensitive People aren't just highly sensitive people, they're people who meet sufficient criteria for the Highly Sensitive People construct.
But I don’t understand this example. First, it’s most probably because I haven’t read anything about Highly Sensitive Person before, so everything I say next is 99% BS.
Second, in this case, the jargonification or technicalisation of the word ‘sensitive’ have meanings that overlap with the non-technical ‘sensitive’. It’s an improper Improper Noun: both ‘sensitive’ describe something similar, but the technical version has expanded the word to mean beyond the common knowledge, yet it still retains its HSP construct’s designatory power. It’s still a common noun, a noun that describes; maybe call it a Noble Noun, seeing how high and mighty it seems to be from the Common Noun.
> In large part by not asking restaurants for permission to list them on DoorDash's platform and publish their menus. A lot of restaurants complained about this but DoorDash didn't care. In cities like Seattle, this was made illegal but by then DoorDash was too big. A lot of these VC funded companies use shady tactics to grow and usually have powerful allies in the right places. Btw, AirBnB was also notorious for spamming Craigslist using bots to bootstrap their two-sided marketplace
How true is this?
What I understand is DoorDash lists restaurant and their menus without permission. Does that mean DoorDash doesn’t charge a listing-fee and gets revenue purely from those who order food?
> (d) Compute the mean age, and print it out as the median. It's much easier to program, and Mary Jones will probably never notice the difference.
Lol. If it’s not the most important statistic to Mary Jones, I can see why a programmer might do this.
> Mary Jones in the Accounting Department tells you that she has a file of personnel records [2022 update: an Excel sheet] and asks you to develop a program to compute the median age of the personnel in the file.
I’ll probably add option (e) if it’s Excel: Mary Jones, you can learn and do this yourself. Just Google it or something.
There should be a different lifetime attached to these cloud-based smart home devices. It's an implicit lifetime separate than the hardware: how long can the company last? And what's their frequency of plug-pulling? If it's not an established company, I would be wary buying anything from them. Even established companies tend to pull the plugs on cloud-based hardware, so caution also applies to them.
My current guideline for purchasing:
- How long will the company last?
- How likely is it for the company to sunset a product?
- Are there fallbacks in place in case of company closure or server shutdown? This should be supplied by the company, and not cobbled together by users after losing server connection.
> Strictly execute *peer-surveillance approach*that requires at least 3 peers to engage in the deployment process
> - We will adopt a peer-surveillance approach which requires at least 3 peers to engage in the deployment process. They have the responsibility to remind the main deployer of any potential risk, and make sure each step complies with the deployment guides and norms.
> - In case anything abnormal happens during the deployment process, such as bad network status or insufficient deployment fee, we should calm down and have a discussion with peers to make sure each operation is safe. Meanwhile, we should mark down every command line and returned message for further reference.
I wonder if that’s enough stack of Swiss Cheese to prevent such an accident from happening again. Hopefully they expand on the “we should calm down” to not be limited to saying “calm down please”. Calming down is quite difficult when you’re in the throes of something, and proper procedures tend to be put aside for the sake of pressure relief.
I wish them swift recovery from their predicament.
Alright, cool, a consultant. And then…
> Sri Lanka (where I currently live and run a bakery business),
And suddenly a bakery business.
I wish my life one day would be as interesting as yours. HNers are quite interesting.
On topic, FoodPanda is another popular one I’ve seen in Asia. And yeah, the markup for all of them seems to be close to your stated range. Though, it seems that Grab’s delivery fee changes depending on the number of available drivers (motorcyclists?) unlike their competitors like FoodPanda which is static from my experience.