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Erwin

2,405 karma · joined April 10, 2008

@ andreasen . org
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Erwin··on Ask HN: Favorite purchases of last two years?
Staub iron cookware has an enamel, so it does not require seasoning nor does it have issues with tomatoes or other acidic things. I use their cocotte, since I often put things in the oven but it's also good for e.g. steaks at max temperature.
Erwin··on Fuck the Bread. The Bread Is Over (2020)
How about:

"Welcome to my very old antiquarian bookshop, Daniel"

versus:

"This is a place of mystery, Daniel, a sanctuary. Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens. This place was already ancient when my father brought me here for the first time, many years ago. Perhaps as old as the city itself. Nobody knows for certain how long it has existed, or who created it. I will tell you what my father told me, though. When a library disappears, or a bookshop closes down, when a book is consigned to oblivion, those of us who know this place, its guardians, make sure that it gets here. In this place, books no longer remembered by anyone, books that are lost in time, live forever, waiting for the day when they will reach a new reader's hands. In the shop we buy and sell them, but in truth books have no owner. Every book you here has been somebody's best friend. Now they only have us, Daniel. Do you think you'll be able to keep such a secret?"

Erwin··on Ursula Le Guin Books
This year a Danish female writer is nominated: https://thebookerprizes.com/books/employees-by-olga-ravn
Erwin··on Silphium
While their normal perfumes are 130 EUR, they offer a 5-sampler for 30 + shipping, with their 4 other perfumes also having some quite interesting branding histories: https://www.storaskuggan.com/collections/all -- I suppose a parfume you learned about from a wikipedia page is quite the hacker thing to wear!
Erwin··on The Web MiniDisc App (2020)
Back when I used Netscape on DEC ULtrix, connected from a Windows X client some 20+ years ago, I sure would not have believed that one day device drivers would be written in scripting language and run in my browser.
Erwin··on Prince Philip has died
She looked at the message

she'd crafted and penned -

A letter to Philip

that she'd never send.

From reddit's resident poet, "poem_for_your_sprog": https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/mnerwn/prince_ph...

Erwin··on Transiting the Suez Canal in a Private Sailboat (2003)
He's also a HN user: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=lutusp
Erwin··on The Joy of Fuck-You Money (2018)
Looking at IRS data, top 1% tax payers in US in 2018 paid 38.5% of the federal income taxes. Bottom 90% paid 28.6%. So I don't think they're as good as hiding their money in the Cayman Islands as you think they are: https://taxfoundation.org/federal-income-tax-data-2021/

In comparison top 10% of the Danish tax payers paid just 31.3% of the total income tax, despite Denmark having rather high taxation (the OECD method that puts it as #1 is controversial, but I pay e.g. a 42% marginal tax rate on any capital gains).

Erwin··on Based Cooking
There are some food writers that are good at getting to the core of a dish idea, listing out the variations. Felicity Cloake's "Perfect" column in The Guardian for example.

For the Wikipedia of food, Nikki Segnit's Lateral Cooking / Flavour Thesaurus are great -- you start out with basic "stew" technique and then a dozen usual and unusual variations.

Erwin··on Functorio
Angry aliens, or angry end-users?
Erwin··on Czech gunmaker CZG buys Colt in cash and stock deal
That's one cool looking gun. Like that futuristic FN Herstal's P90, featured in Stargate.
Erwin··on Spanish crew shot an alternative Dracula after Bela Lugosi had gone to bed
The 1999 soundtrack for Tarzan by Phil Collins was also recorded by Collins himself in English, Italian, German, Spanish and French: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m03Wcfx8dPE

For a more extreme example, Pocahontas' "Colors of the Window" in 33 languages: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLKD8tIMlV8

Erwin··on Hedge fund Melvin sustains 53% loss after Reddit onslaught
You can use a site like this to compare: https://portfoliocharts.com/portfolio/total-stock-market/ versus https://portfoliocharts.com/portfolio/classic-60-40/

Mixing bonds gives you a slightly higher safe withdrawal rate but you do lose 2 percentage points average yearly returns.

Erwin··on Over 700k paintings from the Rijksmuseum online copyright free
I'd also like to recommend the rest of Ian's site, as it has lots of periodic, often geeky, information about London, especially Underground. Like his weekly review of alleys: https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/blog/category/alleys/
Erwin··on Bill and Melinda Gates: America’s Top Farmland Owner
Similarly, the largest land owner in Scotland (and UK) is... the Danish clothing magnate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Holch_Povlsen ( the richest Dane, #254 on Bloomberg's list ahead of e.g. LEGO family whose wealth is split).
Erwin··on Voat Is Shutting Down
Reddit has plenty of discussion about violently overthrowing, imprisoning or murdering anyone anyone who is currently "too rich" like Jeff Bezos. Strangely the American redditor seem unaware that the rest of the world might also claim their wealth.
Erwin··on Airbnb’s Stunning IPO
I had another fun experience like that, but triggered by the guest reviews. I booked a place for my parents to stay which suddenly disappeared. All I was told by AirBNB is that the host cancelled and the user nor the place was no longer to be found on the site.

Turns out some other guest reported the host for having a hidden camera (which was really the standard Danish fire alarm). The AirBNB messaging made it out to be the host's fault.

Erwin··on Airbnb’s Stunning IPO
The price is included in Europe because EU asked them to.

When I search the map shows me a price per night for the amount of nights I picked including the corresponding part of the cleaning and service fees.

So it is not an "engineering problem" but a 100% deliberate "dark pattern" choice on AirBNB's part.

Erwin··on The Architecture of IMGZ
Is this allowed on the free tier? https://www.cloudflare.com/terms/ 2.8 says:

"Use of the Services for serving video or a disproportionate percentage of pictures, audio files, or other non-HTML content is prohibited, unless purchased separately as part of a Paid Service or expressly allowed under our Supplemental Terms for a specific Service. "

Erwin··on AMD CPU sales skyrocket with Ryzen 5000 launch, leaving Intel in the dust
An interesting feature if you want to just play Windows games once in a while is "PCI passthrough" aka VFIO. With that you can assign a PCI device to be used directly by Windows emulated within a VM, which lets you play game in Windows in emulation with almost no performance penalty.

But then you need another graphics card for your main Linux system.

Erwin··on AMD CPU sales skyrocket with Ryzen 5000 launch, leaving Intel in the dust
One of the several Danish retailers publishes their waiting list data: https://www.proshop.dk/RTX-30series-overview which are impressive -- just that one retailer received 3500 cards, 4300 clients have bought and not received them and they have ordered 24000 cards into their shop for future sales. And out of the 24,000 ordered, they only have confirmation for 860.

This is large retailer, but once of a dozen in Denmark.

Erwin··on FreeBSD Can Now Be Built From Linux/macOS Hosts, Transition To Git Continues
From the same author, "Savaged by Systemd: an Erotic Unix Encounter".
Erwin··on Notes on My Colon Cancer
Interestingly, colonoscopies here in DK are mostly without anesthesia. I prepared by looking at mostly-American sites where some doctors said 90% of patients prefer full anesthesia, and the rest some other sedative drugs.

The procedure was 20 minutes, painless and slightly uncomfortable where the nurse had to push on my stomach to help the probe round the guts, that was like some brief constipation. You get to your appendix from the inside and physically realize how much the colon takes up in your body.

BTW, in Denmark, a 40+ yo patient with rectal bleeding that cannot be physically confirmed as hemorrhoids by the GP would likely be referred to the emergency cancer track, with I think, 2 weeks before all the tests have to be finished.

Erwin··on 1Password for Linux beta
I moved from LastPass due to various security concerns, but in Chrome/Linux 1Password is a worse experience. LastPass is just smarter about creating accounts and assigning new passwords, or updating if you change them.
Erwin··on .NET Orleans
I only ran into the Orleans Virtual Actor model a few days ago. I have an application I long wanted to move to a distributed model, and I've been struggling with seemingly to reinvent everything due to an unusual execution model.

So it was quite an eye opener to read about how Orleans introduced Virtual Actors, activations and placements of actors and how these are exactly the things I've thought about over the years. I've read about e.g. the classic Erlang actors, but the concept of virtual actors in Orleans really fit my model.

I'll be sticking with Python, but starting with the Orleans paper has lead me to quite a few similar systems: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233416056_Orleans_C... that reference it.

Erwin··on Structural studies of the global networks exposed in the Panama papers
That society already exists in e.g. Nordic countries. If we look at Sweden, Finland etc, total tax revenues as percentage of GDP are 48-54%. In USA, they are 24.3%.

So here's a smaller community where the majority is fine with high taxation in exchange for freely available health care, higher education etc.

Family funds exist here (e.g. Novo Nordisk is 25% owned by a humanitarian fund, Mærsk) but are less important than US.

Erwin··on RTX3080 TensorFlow and NAMD Performance on Linux
The November 2001 top500 supercomputer had 7.2 TFL0PS: https://www.top500.org/lists/top500/2001/11/

It's fun to compare it with the historical top500 list: https://www.top500.org/statistics/perfdevel/

Erwin··on R U OK?
On a more fun note, what is considered "Chinese" varies greatly by language (it's Greek in English): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_to_me#In_other_languages

In German, wikipedia claims "Polish in reverse" (though there's no other reference to that phrase on the Net, other than Reverse Polish Notation).

Erwin··on Sid Meier: “I don’t think I could make Civilisation today”
Interesting someone bought it on Steam for 50 EUR, given XBox Game Pass for PC subscription (despite the weird naming) lets you have it for a fraction of that price (together with a dozen other good names, e.g. the new Flight Simulator and Wasteland 3).
Erwin··on Heyyyyyyyyyyyy.com
I hoped it would be HeyYeYaaeYaaaeYaeYaa.com which once used to show this important piece of Meme History: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZ5LpwO-An4
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