Why?

Quick story: I was in an elevator with a coworker I didn't really know and he told me a story of when he asked a stranger in a restaurant if she were pregnant. She was not! And he said he was so embarrassed that he had to leave.

I didn't get a chance to ask him, so I'm asking you fellow tilderinos - why ask this question at all? Especially to a stranger? What motivates this question? Is it really asking why someone looks fat?

Have you been on the receiving end of this question? (If you're a women older than 25, I'm going to guess yes). What are your stories?

I'm re-reading through some investment books right now and thought I'd throw one them out here with my thoughts and questions.

Investing and the Irrational Mind: Rethink Risk, Outwit Optimism, and Seize Opportunities Others Miss

by Robert Koppel

The title of this one intrigued me. Author Robert Koppel is a former investor/trader on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. He covers a lot of research on what psychologists have discovered about biases and irrational thinking, particularly as it relates to investing and trading. He's also interviewed many other investors and offers his own observations from extensive experience.

He goes back and forth between having and investment plan and using intuition, which as it turns out are both tactics investors have used. I think the valuable part of this book is the way he ties in research by Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman and others on biases to what happens when we make good and not so good decisions in finance. An example of one of those common pitfalls:

We also experience a reflection effect whereby individuals make irrational choices to enter or exit an investment based on a subjective reference point determined by whether they have already experienced a gain or a loss. An example of this would be someone waiting for a “breakeven” price before exiting from an investment that is performing poorly rather than looking at the market objectively, without reference to the purchase price.

The book isn't so much an investment strategy but rather a good overview of what's involved in the process. As someone who has handled his own investments for years, I found that Koppel's book is realistic and practical, especially for those of us who've had to make those hard decisions on buying and selling, either for the long term or short term.

My own particular problem is watching things too closely and losing a sense of longer term movement. Investing And The Irrational Mind is a great tool for giving me pause and reflecting on the mistakes I've fallen into over the years.

Even as basic a rule as "cut your losses short" is hard to follow and really give me pause to think about issues I've held onto for too long as well as others that went on to go up and away. I've love to hear your thoughts.

If tildes wants to foster deeper discussions I wonder if there should be some mechanism for linking off to external background knowledge. This could possibly be semi-automatic based on the containing tilde & topic tags.

If we end up with news discussions around topics like say Israel & Palestine in order for anyone to begin to understand wtf is going on (and so reasonably discuss the current news topic) there's a load of relevant history. It seems like it would be nice to have a link so that a topic from poltics.news with the tag Israel could automatically get some further reading links.

Wikipedia has the advantage that it's another user driven org so this could have the added benefit of motivating people to fact check & improve it.

I already canceled moviepass. Their new rules of only 3 movies a month plus getting "up to" 5 dollars off on more movies was a kick to the kidneys. The blacking out of mission impossible was absolutely it for me.

Anyone keeping it or have you already canceled? My sub lasts until the 15th. Hopefully I'll be able to see christopher robin and a few others before then.

I'm in a bit of a rutt with my journey to learn how to write software, and I really have no idea where to go from here. I've taken a bunch of software engineering courses on edx.org, and I've done a few personal projects with what I've learned, but I still don't know enough to be able to contribute to open source projects or make anything useful.

TL;DR
How can I learn to actually make things?

Hi,

It would be nice to have a privacy aware youtube/vimeo/etc video player (by this i mean, not the official one), not sure if this is feasible, but it would be a really good feature (i remember that there was a website that implemented an opensource player, but i don't recall the name)

This would help, but not completely fix, two issues that seem to be inherent in the Tildes design:

\1 Voting is mostly treated as an "I agree" button. You'll see this in pretty much any thread where there's back and forth discussion. When you reply to a comment you're implicitly saying "this comment is worth engaging with," in which case an upvote is warranted.

Same thing for topics: leaving a top-level comment should force an upvote for the topic.

\2 It encourages non-engagement with comments that maybe shouldn't be engaged with. For example, one hot topic of this week has been the calling out of low-effort posts and how the community ought to chill out a bit. By forcing an upvote, it discourages replying to said posts, which makes it more likely that such comments will be ignored and drift to the bottom of a topic.

Edit: Whether this idea is implemented or not, as long as Voting = "I Agree" this site will become an even bigger echo chamber than Reddit because there are no downvotes to balance out the "I support the message of this topic/comment" crowd.