I think there's two factors. One is the nonlinear utility of money, and the other is the cost/value of losing/winning.
In general money has a diminishing utility, your first dollar is worth more to you than your millionth dollar. In order for it to be worth it to play a -EV lottery not only does you utility graph need to be nonlinear, it cannot decrease monotonically. At some point your nth dollar needs to be worth more (to you) than your first dollar. For example, you have one dollar and a life saving drug for your terminal disease costs 1 million dollars. You would see a sudden spike in utility at the 1 million dollar mark. It would be rational to play the lottery in this case.
Another possibility is that the event of winning money or even just the thought of possibly winning that money gives you more value than simply having the money alone, and this tips the scale. This would be like the opposite of insurance. For some people the experience of losing, or worrying about the possibility of losing money is so negative that it still makes it worth it to buy insurance.
One reason is that comments get stale. People need to maintain them but probably won't. Second reason is that they think the code should be self-documenting. If it's not then you just need better names and code structure. Many books like clean code advocate this approach, and that's where I first learned the idea of don't write comments as well.
Personally now I've held both sides of the argument at different times. I think in the end it's a trade-off. There's no hard and fast rule, you need to use your best judgement about what's going to be easiest for the reader and also for the people maintaining the code. Usually I just try to strike a balance that I think my coworkers won't complain about. The other thing I've realized that makes this tricky is that people will almost always overestimate their (or others) commitment to maintaining comments, and/or overestimate how "self-documenting" their code is.
Regarding masks I don't think you can really compare what is happening in Japan to America. People screaming and getting kicked out of stores and airplanes. The reasoning is different also, I imagine in Japan it's mostly about laziness but in America it's more about freedom and not being told what to do.
Of course in the ideal world only the people that are correct would think for themselves or everyone would be correct all the time. But it doesn't work that way, usually people that think for themselves are wrong. When a culture has more people willing to go against the grain sometimes they will be right and make things better but more often they will be wrong and make things worse.
I think it's the difference between an individualist and collectivist culture. I'd guess that especially the kind of people that would come to hackernews will have a hard time seeing the upside of collectivism and the downside of individualism (subservient having a strong negative connotation), but I think it's really mostly a tradeoff. Yes individualism is probably better for generating entrepreneurs. But you don't see things like people refusing to wear masks in Japan. There's lots of stories of things like Japanese people taking a long trip to return a lost wallet or picking up after each other at sports stadiums. I would say that in general there are more social obligations but also as a result more social trust. Probably if you grew up in a collectivist society then a lot of the things that you can see happening in the West will seem dysfunctional. Also I doubt more people are lonely in Japan than America, and some brief skimming the internet, research seems to support this.
When a variable can be reassigned it adds the complexity of time dependence. Meaning that if you don't keep track of the order of values that variable was assigned then you probably can't understand the program. The problem is compounded by the size of the scope that variable exists in. That's why we avoid using global variables, globals force us to track the order of updates from potentially anywhere in the code. The problem is further compounded if there are multiple globals that depends on each other. Then you need to track the relative order of updates across all globals. That's the worst case scenario.
In OOP you try to limit the scope of state, private variables inside an object can update its value but can only be directly accessed from inside the object. But still those objects are inherently stateful. In order to understand an object, how you can use it, whether it is working correctly, you are still forced to understand where/when it is in the timeline of updates.
Purity means that if you understand a variable or object in one place in your code then you understand it from anywhere in your code. You don't need to know how it was used before because it can't be changed. If it were changed then you would know because it would now be a different variable or object.
> but if the claim is indeed true that racists/sexists think the blog is great... that needs to be addressed as to why they are attracted there
I'll try to put this as objectively as I can. There is now a cultural overlap between those that support varying degrees of "censorship" and progressives, and between those that support "free speech" and, let's say, anti-progressives. This makes sense because now racism/sexism is more likely to be censored than extreme progressivism. Probably if it were the other way around (if extreme progressivism were more likely to be censored) then those same progressives would become staunch free-speech advocates and anti-progressives would be fighting for more "content moderation".
So if you are generally for the toleration of ideas, perhaps holding some unpopular opinions yourself, and against censorious tactics, you tend to attract extreme anti-progressives as well. For the most part, racists and sexist do not see themselves as racists and sexists, they see themselves as holding true but unpopular beliefs. Another interesting example of this is Sam Harris somehow having a fair amount of Trump-supporting listeners even though he spends a lot of time ranting about how incompetent and morally-bankrupt he thinks Trump is.
This thread is a really good example of why people like SSC. Personally I have no problem believing biases against minorities exist in this industry. And to whatever extent it does exist I support trying to fix that. But then the discussion starts to get heated and people start saying things that stop making logical sense to me with the implication that if it doesn't make logical sense to me then I'm a racist, sexist or whatever.
Someone in this thread asked how it's not a pipeline problem if 80% of graduating CS students are male, and your response is to just stop caring about CS degrees. But how does that make sense unless you think that there is an equally disproportionate ratio of uncredentialed yet qualified women programmers? And frankly the rhetorical techniques you're using here feel dishonest, implying that if I don't accept your argument then either I didn't think hard enough about it or I'm sexist. Or the "this is my last reply on this topic". If people have genuine questions why not answer them?
And after seeing this kind of discourse so many times there is such a sense of relief when someone is willing to say "let's look at the truth even if it's an inconvenient one" because to come up with a good solution you have to start with what's actually true right? For a lot of people that's what SSC represents and that's why they feel so strongly about defending it.
> Even if you want to learn a language, if you can't learn it by using it, do you even need it?
I'm not really into flashcards, but I'm seeing a lot of comments like this, that flashcards are only good for memorization. I think they're more useful than that. You can use flashcards similar to how you would train a machine learning model, large iterations of input and feedback. People who are serious about language learning with SRS don't just study words but whole sentences per card. You could probably use flashcard to train yourself in many things that would be considered skills, not just knowledge. For example, you could put chess problems with answers on flashcards. If the resolution were high enough you could probably train yourself to recognize forged paintings. Things like that.
I think probably the main issue is that a lot of people just don't enjoy studying with flashcards. You could tell them it will literally make them 2x more efficient, and even if they believe you they still won't want to use it.
In general money has a diminishing utility, your first dollar is worth more to you than your millionth dollar. In order for it to be worth it to play a -EV lottery not only does you utility graph need to be nonlinear, it cannot decrease monotonically. At some point your nth dollar needs to be worth more (to you) than your first dollar. For example, you have one dollar and a life saving drug for your terminal disease costs 1 million dollars. You would see a sudden spike in utility at the 1 million dollar mark. It would be rational to play the lottery in this case.
Another possibility is that the event of winning money or even just the thought of possibly winning that money gives you more value than simply having the money alone, and this tips the scale. This would be like the opposite of insurance. For some people the experience of losing, or worrying about the possibility of losing money is so negative that it still makes it worth it to buy insurance.