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chokmaon In defense of flat earthers (2020)

The "feeling of wrongness of the world" can also be rooted in other problems to which they find a reality denying escape mechanism. In Germany, many sovereign citizens (Reichsbürger) have legal or financial problems (taxes and debt), so deciding to be the king or president of your house and garden empire seems like a valid opportunity to deny all those pesky demands.

chokmaon All Bitcoin private keys are on this website

The best quote for this is from Bruce Schneier:

"... brute-force attacks against 256-bit keys will be infeasible until computers are built from something other than matter and occupy something other than space."

https://security.stackexchange.com/a/82412

chokmaon Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W

I build a Hadoop cluster with 5 Raspberry Pi-2B in 2015.

It works, but the ratio of power consumption to compute performance was worse compared to using a standard PC.

edit: with the huge increase in performance, Pi-4 models may now be competitive.

chokmaon Advice to New Managers: Don't Joke About Firing People (2020)

In school, we had a teacher who as famous for making jokes at the expense of others. One time during chemistry in front of the class he said to his most-liked pupil: "We have enough poison here to kill everyone in class. Well, except me and you, of course."

And that was the time the class decided to go to our head teacher and tell her that his jokes were not funny at all and she reported back that our chemistry teacher was surprised about how someone did not appreciate his brand of humor.

chokmaon GitHub Copilot

True, and if the specialists retire, there may be some parts that no one understands properly anymore.

See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko / Preventing the Collapse of Civilization / Jonathan Blow

chokmaon I Will Never Use a Microsoft Account to Log Into My Own PC

I tried Manjaro recently - just in time to run into the Nvidia update disaster (black screen on boot, broken X-server due to system update). And no amount of fiddling with the config files and nouveau / proprietary drivers brought the system back into a usable state. So back to Ubuntu it was...

chokmaon Winners and losers of the work-from-home revolution

A former colleague of mine has three children and no spare office room in his house, so his work-from-home met with school-from-home. He thought about buying a trailer like those used on construction sites, but those are also not prime office-material. I guess once the children are at school again, he will be happier.

chokmaon Writing books is not really a good idea

Some more:

  https://www.patreon.com/user?u=48733767 Casualfarmer 2.8K
  https://www.patreon.com/Zogarth 10K / month
  https://www.patreon.com/C_Mantis c.mantis / 4.2 K
  https://www.patreon.com/SelkieMyth 5.3K
  https://www.patreon.com/InadvisablyCompelled 2.8K
  https://www.patreon.com/Shirtaloon 14 K 
  https://www.patreon.com/DefianceNovels 1395 patreons

Some of those are also on Kindle Unlimited & Kindle.

chokmaon Signed Char Lotte

It reminds me of a darker poem ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Perl

chokmaon Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

Performance got worse on Linux, too. A year ago, JavaDoc would be displayed instantly. Now I have to wait 5-8 seconds for the IDE to display information about a class / method. It may be a kernel related bug from what I have found on the net, but it seems strange that some operations are still fast, while others take several seconds (like opening a menu).

chokmaon Say goodbye to hold music

It's also a good idea to cancel services via mail and to demand a written response confirming the cancellation. Otherwise, Vodafone (from your example) may conveniently forget the exact date of your cancellation... and good luck proving you cancelled an account on time if the confirmation SMS is now stored on a no longer valid SIM card, you cannot prove anything.

Yeah, Vodafone ... still sending invoices which deny I cancelled my contract half a year ago.

edit:grammar

chokmaon Apple, Epic, and the App Store

Not to forget the 50% that telecom providers would demand for premium SMS / MMS (with one "chat" message costing 5€, half of it would get to the network provider). Which also explains why they had little incentive to prevent predatory services like SMS spam telling people to call / message high priced service numbers with subscription keywords.

chokmaon A Google bot scrapes pricing info by adding items to carts

Your are right, normally VAT is a fixed integer value. But that is not guaranteed, historically we had decimal values, too. (My father encountered this once at IBM in the time of punch cards - turns out, having to change this on machines with limited RAM is quite difficult, akin to the Y2K problem.)

chokmaon 'Dord': A Ghost Word

Found one of those in the stacks of papers from my father's time at IBM. Funny how paper-based information technology was back then - the first thing that comes to mind are the punch cards, but also later program listings were printed out a lot.

We used stacks of "endless paper" core dumps / assembler listings when painting rooms, as you could just unfold a huge stack of paper to protect the floor from paint splatters.

chokmaon Open-Source Virtual Background

You could try ordering directly from a supplier. Amazon.de gave me 4 weeks delivery time, but a company which sells theatre level fabric (Molton green) was able to send several meters within ~4 days.

chokmaon Ask HN: Recommendations for Working from Home?

In my previous job, I worked from home for about 5 years. It was nice.

- If you are allowed to use your own hardware, do so - having a really large monitor and a computer that goes several times faster than an old company notebook reduces frustrating compile times & test runs a lot. Not an issue so much with modern hardware, but still. (Trying to run VMs with EMC Documentum on an overheating Dell notebook with just 4GB RAM was a nightmare.)

- The company's time keeping system was essentially a CRUD app where I would enter the time spent on each project / day, down to 15 minute intervals. I kept a really close eye on those slices of time and differentiated my work/leisure time strictly: "9:00 - 9:15: working on $foo", "14:00-14:30: talking a walk, not working". Keeping exact time meant I had a good feeling that neither my life nor my boss would loose out on the WFH agreement.

- take breaks - the freedom to go for a run or a walk in the forest or just a prolonged siesta is great, even though it means you will have to make up for the time spend on non-works during the day.

- it's good to manage expected online time - no one will be glued to the keyboard in a WFH environment all the time. One colleague liked to sleep long and work late, so I did not expect him to answer mails before lunch. And when the online indicator of Skype (before it sucked) was "away/busy", we would usually not call / interrupt each other.

chokmaon What do we really know about the effectiveness of digital advertising?

True, you could very well cannibalize your own advertising efforts. I think that may be a problem for brands who already advertise themselves. For example, I agree it makes no sense for Ebay to place an ad for the search term "ebay" if they are already the first search result. If you have a well known brand, you will have a lot of people who will search you out directly. In that case it's a matter of running campaigns and see what sticks - if you spend 10% of your budget on an agency's ad campaign, and very few new customers turn up, you may be wasting money.

But if you have a small to medium online shop, I think it makes sense to have someone run ad campaigns for you on as many domains as possible - and pay only for high quality traffic. If you re-sell shoes from Nike, you will have a very hard time getting a click from someone who would have bought at your shop anyway, because your competitors will pay for Google PLA and other ad campaigns and anyone who is looking for a good offer will run into their ads.

chokmaon What do we really know about the effectiveness of digital advertising?

Coming from the other end (after someone clicked an ad), I got to say: ads work well. The metric used @work is: cost of sale.

The merchant pays for each click on the ad that is redirected to his product page. What seems like a recipe for wasting incredible amounts of money on an army of click bots is working - because the merchant defines a target cost of sale for those clicks, meaning for example he expects a sale worth 100$ when spending 10$ on ads (a cost of sale of 10%).

And the merchant will set a budget and won't repeat/continue a campaign beyond those costs, so it is in the ad publisher's best interest to deliver real paying customers instead of an army of bots.

Cost of sale is of course different for each product category - clothes and perfume have huge margins (so the merchant may be willing to pay 30% of the final sale price for advertising costs), computer parts less so.

In the case of ebay and amazon and other large retailers it's common to not pay per click but for a percentage of an order's total volume (x% of shopping basket's value once an order is placed). In that case, we have to trust the retailer to deliver correct sales data to us.

chokmaon The coal mine that ate Hambacher forest

Last year Germany exported about 9% of its electricity. So the country could reduce their use of lignite (~ 24% of total energy produced) by at least this amount.

And I think the math is off there - if Germany cuts 24% of its energy production over a couple of years, energy may become more expensive, driving away the factories using extreme amounts of electricity[1]. It would not result in losing a lot of jobs, and may even force some industries to become much more efficient (thus generating an advantage over competitors).

[1] eg, Aurubis in Hamburg using 1 billion kw/h per year with less than 7000 employees to refine copper

chokmaon MIDI Maze

> When they had a machine exception, they'd paint little bombs on the left side of the screen

Earlier on, they used a mushroom cloud icon, but that was not well received apparently.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomb_(icon)#Atari_ST_TOS

chokmaon Faster and simpler with the command line: deep-comparing JSON files with jq

Note: the links currently redirect to https://imgur.com/32R3qLv (image of a testicle and derogatory comment on HN)

chokmaon Old coal mines can be underground food farms

In addition to the dangerous environment, it's also likely to be contaminated with a lot of toxic stuff. In the closed German coal mines the pumps have to run 24/7 to prevent both the rising water from flooding the region* and the flame retardants and other poisons from reaching the surface waters.

* some areas like the city of Essen have dropped by 16m, others up to 40m due to mining. Running the pumps to prevent flooding is considered part of the Ewigkeitskosten (eternal costs, see: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ewigkeitskosten ).

edit: fixed numbers, added link

chokmaon Telltale Autopsy

Sounds like the "1000 true fans" concept - https://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans/ - i.e., you "just" need a 1000 people who are willing to pay a net 100$ / year for what you create.

chokmaon Brain Drain Within the EU?

70-80K € seems attainable just judging by the recruiters' numbers, but most offers of that kind come with strings attached - like moving to one of the most expensive cities (thus being equal to a 50K job in a smaller city) or being a traveling consultant.

chokmaon Gut directly connected to brain, by a newly discovered neuron circuit

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tension_myositis_syndrome

chokmaon How Reddit plans to make money through advertising

http://files.pushshift.io/reddit/

I have a little open source project for rudimentary indexing and search of the dataset as well as adding sentiment data: https://github.com/dewarim/reddit-data-tools

chokmaon No, there is no epidemic of loneliness

I can recommend Lars Svendsen, A Philosophy of Loneliness, in which he examines loneliness and its positive companion, solitude, in detail.

Not a self-help book, but a view on loneliness from both an empirical and philosophical perspective.

chokmaon Exercise 'doesn't slow' progression of dementia if you already have dementia

Sleeping with the legs up ... more blood flow to the head may also increase effects of glaucoma.

chokmaon Theology majors marry each other a lot, but business majors don’t

One of the reasons may be better job prospects.

In Germany, for aspiring protestant pastors, you may share a position in a parish as a couple (both getting paid 50-75% of a full position, with the unspoken expectation of being available for 100%).

Also the protestant churches are extremely territorial (a vestige of the medieval political landscape), so if you take your exam in Hamburg, you are not necessarily welcome in Munich. But you could marry a bavarian spouse who is also a pastor, which can be your entry ticket into the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Bavaria...

edit: corrected name of ELCoB

also see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landeskirche

chokmaon What I'm Telling US Congress about Data Breaches

The Schufa (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schufa ) provides data for their partners/customers on your credit rating and credit score.

Banks will usually not give you an account and shops won't give you credit if your rating is bad. For example, you are so late to pay your bills that the creditor has involved collection agencies or the courts to get their money.

Landlords will more often than not demand a document from the Schufa (supplied at your own expense) to consider you eligible for renting a flat or a house.

edit: grammar