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__blockcipher__on Netflix lays off about 150 employees

Where did you get that absurd interpretation? They’re saying: a good IC gets fired by a bad manager. Later bad manager gets fired by their manager (we’ll call them good manager). Good manager then goes back and asks good IC if they want their job back.

__blockcipher__on Sleep helps process emotions

Usually what is really meant by stress is a state of chronic sympathetic arousal / insufficient parasympathetic activation

(I agree that people use the word vaguely and in a lot of different ways)

__blockcipher__on Hannah Gadsby on her autism diagnosis

Methylation is a metabolic chemical reaction your body does, facilitated by enzymes, that sticks a methyl group onto stuff. There’s different genetic mutations for more or less copies or less efficient copies of the relevant enzymes.

The idea is some people are genetically very low/poor methylaters so they’re methylation impaired. Generally the solution if found to be a poor methylater is to take forms of vitamins that are already methylated, like methylfolate

__blockcipher__on What doctors wish patients knew about long Covid

> Even if prevalence per case is the same as flu; covid would still at least double the overall societal prevalence due to it being in addition to flu.

This sounds true if you don’t think long and hard about it, but actually the mechanics of viral spread are not quite that simple. For example there’s the phenomenom of interferon-mediated “viral interference” where infection with virus X wards off infection from virus Y (say, the influenza strain de jeur), which is thought to be attributable to acute upregulation of the innate immune system.

So, it’s not always quite so simple.

__blockcipher__on Most U.S. workers took an inflation pay cut in 2021

Here's a good heuristic: if those same experts are ones that denied that inflation was a risk before it actually happened, you can take their opinion with a grain of salt.

I saw many classical economist types denying that printing trillions of dollars and flagellating the global supply chain would lead to inflation. They were proven very, very wrong.

__blockcipher__on Russian Ruble just lost ~30% of its value

Calling them “neutral” is a mistake. At least from Putin’s perspective.

__blockcipher__on Twitter based map of Russian troop movements

Or conversely, when you have a flappy monitoring system that constantly complains about non-problems and half-problems, it gets very hard to notice when an actually serious alert is firing.

__blockcipher__on Twitter based map of Russian troop movements

https://youtu.be/Vpwkdmwui3k?t=133

If Trump is Putin's puppet why did he publicly criticize Germany for being overly reliant on Russian pipelines for their energy needs?

__blockcipher__on I'm so sorry everyone. Or: why I'm switching to Cloudflare

The capacity for the company to pay a hypothetical dividend increases as the company generates more free cash flow. So that increases the value.

You are hitting on a correct notion here though, which is that if the market totally went away - ie you held your shares but couldn't sell or buy - and you're an investor who owns .0001% of a megacorp and >50% of the shareholders won't vote to issue a dividend, then the security is worthless to you. Similarly, if the market does still exist but for whatever reason the company is "unfairly" valued extremely low by the market, then having dividends gives you an "anchor" to hold on to - at least your asset is giving you a 1% or a 3% or a [insert dividend yield here]% dividend while you wait for the market to value it fairly again - whereas without the dividend you've got nothing.

__blockcipher__on I'm so sorry everyone. Or: why I'm switching to Cloudflare

> It's easier to fix issues and deploy new or experimental technologies in a period of easy money and customers flooding your doors than it is when you're skating by on thin margins.

But this describes to me the "sell $1 for $.90" strategy, not the other way around. IOW I think it's an argument for why selling cheaply is often not a good idea.

And wrt the parts of your grandparent's comment you quoted, it's not really accurate to call it "growing your customer base" when you're growing it via giving away unreasonably cheap services. It is often the case that the majority of customers acquired in such a way won't stick around when prices are later increased to a realistic level.

This is why in general I advocate for businesses to price well, not cheaply, and to try to get real growth - that is, people willing to pay the money your services are actually worth. There are times where "acquire new customers at all costs, even by giving unrealistically good bargains" is the optimal strategy, but I think it should be something done 10% of the time rather than the 95% of the time it's done in our industry.

__blockcipher__on Trudeau Invokes Emergencies Act

> "got natural immunity which is superior" is factually incorrect, at least to every statistical study done by national health orgs.

Natural immunity of an unvaccinated person is superior to a vaccinated person without natural immunity, all else equal, and the difference isn't even close. It concerns me that people still don't accept this.

See https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.24.21262415v... for conclusive proof of this. I don't have my notes on that study in front of me right now but off the top of my head natural immunity was at least 7x superior when compared to people who were double-vaccinated but with no exposure to the actual virus.

__blockcipher__on Trudeau Invokes Emergencies Act

> At least 1000 workers of the Rideau Center are out of a job because the protestors kept trying to force their way into the shops without masks.

Those workers are "out of a job" because of the very COVID policies that the truckers et al are rallying against. COVID did not take away those jobs. COVID policies did.

__blockcipher__on Trudeau Invokes Emergencies Act

And the truckers and everyone else on their side feels that leaving the emergency powers in the hands of the government is unreasonable. Thus why the two respective sides are at an impasse.

__blockcipher__on Trudeau Invokes Emergencies Act

Not the GP but it seems like for most people their line is a full end to all the COVID restrictions, not just the vax mandates.

That sentiment was echoed in this podcast I listened to the other night: https://youtu.be/H-T_EGVdYwk

The guy being interviewed is just a dude, not a leader in the movement AFAIK. But he’s probably a good representation of what the average person attending the protests wants.

__blockcipher__on Trudeau Invokes Emergencies Act

Alberta hasn’t fully lifted the restrictions, nor has Kenney taken the option of reinstating the restrictions off the table.

__blockcipher__on Those writing extensively on note-writing rarely have a serious context of use

It’s (imo very obvious) satire. It’s pointing at the implicit belief that one can solve the deep problems in one’s life through the process of time, through becoming more productive/efficient/etc. I think it’s an implicit belief set that’s familiar to many of us here.

__blockcipher__on Swiss back further restrictions on tobacco advertising

> is one claim I am not familiar with (usually I hear “psychologically addictive”, like any pleasurable activity), but maybe I am out of date on the latest research.

That's because there is a lot of misinformation spread by stoner types that try to rationalize cannabis usage as "non-addictive". Speaking as a former stoner myself (with nothing against smoking, I just don't partake anymore).

Cannabis use can absolutely cause physical dependence. It can absolutely "cause" (be part of) psychological dependence. It can absolutely be part of a pattern of addiction. The idea that weed is "not addictive" is simply propaganda.

Now, it is true that when compared to drugs like benzodiazapenes, alcohol, and opioids, that cessation of long-term cannabis consumption causes much less severe side effects. You don't get seizures from stopping weed abruptly. But there are absolutely still withdrawal symptoms.

TL;DR: It's a myth that cannabis is a magic plant that one can't get addicted to. It's basically a cope put forward primarily by internet stoners.

__blockcipher__on Spotify not caving under pressure to censor is admirable and important

Who here is arguing that private businesses can’t deplatform? I’m arguing that they shouldn’t, not that they can’t.

I’m not going to bite on the ivermectin/ventilator stuff because it’s just completely absurd. BTW the way you used the “it’s easy to argue” construction backwards.

__blockcipher__on Spotify not caving under pressure to censor is admirable and important

Customers are always free to leave. Nobody is forcing someone to pay for spotify so your argument is absurd on its face.

__blockcipher__on Spotify not caving under pressure to censor is admirable and important

Yeah as an example of the maga censorship they removed songs by Bryson Gray for anti-lgbtq themes

I don’t care for his music myself but personally I don’t agree with censorship

__blockcipher__on COVIDtests.gov – Free at-home Covid-19 tests

Agreed.

Some people feel that the mass asymptomatic testing serves to give perpetual fodder for sensationalist media headlines, as well as justification for public officials to impose new rounds of lockdowns, etc. As such those people believe that participating in asymptomatic testing only worsens those problems by creating "cases" in the absence of any actual clinical problem (that is to say, declaring people who are asymptomatic as COVID-19 positive even though COVID is an acronym that includes the word "disease"). They may also be against the general idea of constantly testing for the presence of a specific respiratory virus, however unique SARS-CoV-2 may be.

Better to ship the tests to the people that actually want them.

As an aside, you're right about "a large % of the red state population(s)", but I'd add that most "blue" people seem to think republicans are much more anti-vax / anti-test than they are. A majority of republicans are vaccinated, and a majority appear to support masking (at least indoors), or at the least are willing to begrudgingly comply. Here in California I feel like I meet a lot of people that seem to think that republicans are overwhelmingly "anti-vax" or, even more humorously, that Trump is anti-vax (humorous because his vocal praise of "boosters" and incessant bragging that he deserves credit for the vaccines and that the vaccines+lockdowns saved tens/hundreds of millions of lives, is one of his most unpopular stances with his base)

__blockcipher__on COVIDtests.gov – Free at-home Covid-19 tests

As long as the current COVID protocols stay in place (people needing or feeling they need to get tested after every possible COVID exposure, testing young children any time they have a runny nose so they can go to daycare, etc), I doubt that the supply chain will ever be able to support the number of tests demanded. If you run the numbers it's pretty insane how many of those test-kits would be needed.

__blockcipher__on Dark Web – Justice League

> There would need to be many more meetings and countless committees from groups of random people who all acclaim to hold some sort of power.

That's a description of our statist status quo :)

__blockcipher__on Intel removes Xinjiang references from shareholder letter

(1) Hopefully part of raising your son to feel American involves instilling a sense of "Americanness" that is orthogonal to one's racial identity. And conversely, hopefully he could distinguish between "Chinese people in general" and "soldiers of the chinese communist party". Not that I'm defending cheesy, overly simplistic good-guys-vs-bad-guys type media, but I hope the objection is about something more than just skin deep for you.

(2) There is certainly a middle ground between avoiding cliche bad-guy-china-vs-good-guy-america and, say, Intel removing any references to Xinjiang from its shareholder report. Or all of Hollywood carrying water for the CCP, perhaps most humorously (in a depressing way) illustrated in how they will edit movies to display the south china sea / other disputed territories in precisely the way China wants

__blockcipher__on More Americans are saying they’re ‘vaxxed and done’

This is an artifact of the refusal to admit that SARS-2 is an endemic respiratory virus. If you have to isolate whenever you encounter a possible COVID exposure, it will always be untenable to be able to actually function as a society. We need to go back to the way it always was in pre-COVID times: you stay home when you're sick, but you don't drop everything and stop the world if a friend of yours gets the flu, or adenovirus, or any of the other 4 circulating hCoVs, etc

__blockcipher__on [dead]

How selfless of you to lockdown just to save those pesky anti-vaxxers. I’m sure destabilizing the global supply chain and continuing to worsen the epidemic of missed medical appointments, cancelled elective surgeries, et al will increase human wellbeing over the longrun.

__blockcipher__on The Importance of Price Signals

> In fact, whenever someone purchases or sells something, there are two objects being exchanged. One is a currency and the other being the object of sale. Supply and demand for the currency affects the price just as much as supply and demand for the thing being sold.

This philosophy of viewing currency itself as subject to supply/demand is literally one of the insights that led to Friedman’s philosophy. For example see the Great Depression where an insufficient supply of money was one of the primary factors.

(See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_the_Great_Depressi...)

__blockcipher__on The Importance of Price Signals

The part you quoted doesn’t seem to address the output half of Friedman’s statement, repeated here for convenience:

> can be produced only by a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output

__blockcipher__on Show HN: I wrote a book on web application deployment

Not sure if you saw it but another user pointed out that there's already a section in the guidelines about it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29542871

> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.

That guideline makes sense to me. I was previously unaware of it [the guideline] but the justification is sound, doubly so because it turned out the comments were genuine* :) My apologies.

* Albeit at least one user presumably found the post via Twitter from following the author which is a little bit of a grey area

__blockcipher__on Show HN: I wrote a book on web application deployment

Thanks for the explanation. Sorry for the false alarm. My spidey senses started tingling but I should have held back a bit.

As you mentioned, I was flat-out wrong about the previews. Not sure if I scrolled straight past that section or what.

Wishing you the best with your book. And FWIW I like the bash-based approach; I agree with the philosophy of peeling away the abstraction layers.