Hacker News Reader

clock_toweron UK virtual reality firm Improbable raises $500M

Whatever their problem is, they're not the only ones to have it. Japan's been in the doldrums for decades; my understanding is that the country turns a profit, as it were, but doesn't have many opportunities for further investment.

Of course, Japanese capital isn't the only capital that chases stupid stuff, especially not right now. We're all Japan these days. :)

clock_toweron Bills before the California Legislature would crack down on NIMBYs

Not many want to live in these areas yet, but there was a time when Paris was a few mud huts on an island, and Venice was a swamp.

Determination, patience, and wealth are what create destinations, even if you don't have California's climate. (And Idaho's climate is pretty nice, from what I've heard of it, certainly better than the South's and the interior Midwest's.) And in the meantime, there's a great deal of unspoiled nature to enjoy -- as a sibling comment points out.

clock_toweron More Robots, Fewer Jobs: capital vs. labor in production

There's revolution, and there's also a general fading into irrelevance. The Ottoman Empire probably stagnated and collapsed because their land-use practices led to steadily declining agricultural yields; the US's increasingly strange allocations of capital may be yielding similar results.

clock_toweron The Arctic as it is known today is almost certainly gone

> That being said, what is feasible to do?

On a personal scale, at least: live close to work, and save as much money as you can; the amount you spend is a tolerably good measure of your carbon footprint.

The ideal would be to live close to work, save money, and do a bit of backyard bio-sequestration (like growing dwarf hazelnut trees and burying the nuts' hulls); but it's not likely that you'll have a backyard if you're living close to work. Cities with compost collection are the next best thing on this score, then.

clock_toweron Why do we love chilli?

But they do mask the quality of other ingredients -- note the Frenchman's comment above.

clock_toweron Why do we love chilli?

Like a MOAB drizzled with chocolate sauce? :)

clock_toweron Why do we love chilli?

I agree with what he's saying, but you do have a point. Good prose is lucid; eschew obfuscation, as the saying goes.

clock_toweron Why do we love chilli?

You sound like you'd enjoy Mexican chocolate drinks, if you get the chance. I once had the chance to try freshly-prepared Mexican hot chocolate -- at a museum, actually, in connection with Day of the Dead festivities -- and it's certainly very different from what one thinks of as hot chocolate most of the time. The drink's kind of like coffee; you can certainly taste the chiles (note: NOT wasabi :) ), and it feels like it could get you drunk if you drank enough of it.

Spanish and Hispanic chocolate drinks, from what I understand, are pretty close to the old Mexican style. (Even Nestle's "Abeulita" milk chocolate mix tastes pretty similar, at least to my palate.) There was a reference in Braudel (The Structures of Everyday Life) to an Indonesian Muslim prince who was intoxicated when he drank a chocolate drink that a Spanish embassy served them, and was enraged that they had treacherously given him an intoxicant to make him lose his reason; Braudel is really skeptical of the account, but trying Hispanic chocolate, especially Mexican, makes it sound a lot more plausible...

clock_toweron Why do we love chilli?

"Sugary water" is pejorative because it's just sugary water; so I'd say that the answer to your second question is no.

clock_toweron The Boring Company [video]

Exactly!

clock_toweron Why do we love chilli?

Protein! And fats, for that matter; there's much more to milk than sugar.

clock_toweron The Boring Company [video]

Dense cities and narrow streets would solve the same problems with fewer technical demands. Look up New World Economics and "Really Narrow Streets"; the author provides a blueprint of sorts for traditional cities with minimal commute/transport expenses.

clock_toweron The Boring Company [video]

Wide-open spaces, even enclosed ones, can reduce the psychological burden of confinement quite a bit -- there's a variety of Russian strategic-missile submarine with a swimming pool, for example. This subject also comes up frequently in SF (science fiction, not San Francisco, which has the opposite problem); there was some discussion of it on the "Atomic Rocket" worldbuilding guide, IIRC.

clock_toweron The Boring Company [video]

> It seems crazy, but there's also some appeal in the idea of opting out of all the legacy infrastructure. If we could rebuild our roads from scratch today to serve a vehicle for the 21st century, what would we build?

I don't know, but we did rebuild our roads from scratch to serve as a vehicle for the 20th century, and it was a disaster. Let's first fix the problems that the last attempt to start from zero created (read up on Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs), before trying to start from zero again.

clock_toweron So you think you know what a number is

You should join the Unicode Consortium; I'm pretty sure you'd fit right in. :)

clock_toweron Getting Fired Can Be Worse Than Divorce

> What's up with the massive drop in happiness of fired women between years 3 and 4 post-firing?

Noise from big data, were I to guess. There's no logic involved in this sort of thing, just a lot of self-reported correlations and just-so stories about the results. I can't say I'm happy that this is what "science" tends to mean these days...

clock_toweron Blooming lovely: medieval texts that reveal the activities of English gardens

Looks like you meant to post this over at 14214401 (Bloomberg on why losing a job is allegedly worse than, at least, getting divorced).

clock_toweron India Is Winning Its War on Human Waste

The trouble is that the ice trade is 19th-century, but Braudel quoted a source from the 17th century about taking everything iced.

Can any Filipino reader comment on whether snow ever falls there? I didn't see any snowcaps on Google Satellite View, but that's not the best of sources...

clock_toweron How the Carolinas Fixed Their Blurred Lines (2014)

It's the NYT playing to their audience, who would be surprised and put off if there wasn't at least one insult in an article on two red states.

clock_toweron India Is Winning Its War on Human Waste

China used night soil as fertilizer historically; they don't anymore (when was the practice abandoned, I wonder? And is there any Chinese interest in terra preta?), but it got them into great habits. The same is true for at least Korea and Japan; I don't know as much about Southeast Asia.

Only drinking hot drinks also helped China's health. Fernand Braudel, in The Structures of Everyday Life, discusses this in passing; even 17th-century observers felt that it would be better for the Spanish colonials to adopt Chinese practice in the Philippines rather than keeping their custom of drinking everything iced. (Where did they get the ice?) Braudel also mentions a case where St. Francis Xavier drank a cup of cold water, to the horror of his Chinese entourage, who warned him not to keep up such a dangerous practice...

clock_toweron How to Say (Almost) Everything in a Hundred-Word Language (2015)

I'll admit, they had me fooled, and they weren't even trying to fool me; at first I thought that this was an authentic Amazonian or South Pacific language, until I started reading the article more carefully. The part about only having words for 'one', 'two', and 'many' particularly reminds me of Daniel Everett and the Pirahã...

clock_toweron Google’s Project Owl – a three-pronged attack on fake news and problematic content

I'm surprised that this isn't seeing more discussion; it's not a pleasant area to think about, but it's definitely one that needs thought and consideration: the "Miserable Failure" issue, but on a grand scale and in some dangerous spaces.

clock_toweron Exercise 'keeps the mind sharp' in over-50s, study finds

If it makes you feel any better, remember that a lot of these people would be preaching Anglicanism in Hawaii if they'd been born 150 years ago.

clock_toweron People in India are angry at Snapchat but they are boycotting a wrong app

Do you seriously think that anyone on this website doesn't know the term PIGS? Do you think that I wasn't alive four years ago?

And the PIGS weren't the poorest countries in Europe; they were the most over-leveraged. Spain is much better-off than Bulgaria and Romania -- and certainly much better-off than a genuinely poor country.

clock_toweron People in India are angry at Snapchat but they are boycotting a wrong app

I've heard there's also a penny stock with the symbol NEST, which shoots up every time Nest (which is privately held) is in the news...

clock_toweron People in India are angry at Snapchat but they are boycotting a wrong app

When I first heard about this story, I thought that "poor countries like Spain" was the funniest thing I'd heard all week. (If you think Spain's poor, I hope you never witness the heartbreaking poverty of Taiwan and South Korea, its rough peers by GDP-per-capita.) But I can certainly see how it was a lot less funny in Spain itself...

clock_toweron Telling children 'hard work gets you to the top' is simply a lie

That's true -- but the top is a harder place to stay at than you think. China, the West, and the Middle East all have variations of "from shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations"; most fortunes don't last past the grandchildren of the people who earned them -- and this was even true under feudalism, where new titles had to be continually granted, and the fourth generation after the man who was first granted arms was hardly ever armigerous, if it existed at all.

The few who make it past the third generation, generally continue on indefinitely (the Roosevelts, who bought a 40-acre farm on Manhattan Island in the 1600s and still own it today, should come to mind; likewise the Rothschilds and Rockefellers in more recent times); but getting over that three-generation hurdle is a formidable task.

clock_toweron Telling children 'hard work gets you to the top' is simply a lie

This is either a nitpick of your post, or a complete agreement with it, but I'm not sure which: "work ethic" or "Protestant ethic", in Weber's original understanding, had three parts: hard work, deferred consumption, and reinvestment. Using "have a good work ethic" to mean "work hard", without the other two elements, is a good way to stay poor -- which is to say, a good way to fail to understand how to play the game, in the way you mention. More accurate sociology would probably mean more upward social mobility.

clock_toweron Tesla unveils its new ‘sleek and low-profile’ solar panel made by Panasonic

Bear in mind that "rocket science" is proverbial for a reason. Are you familiar with the THAAD (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminal_High_Altitude_Area_De...)? What convinced me that it wasn't just corporate welfare was the part where one of the tests failed because the target rocket exploded in flight, so the THAAD rocket couldn't even be launched.

In general, SpaceX seems to be much more competent and much better-run than Tesla. My guess from thousands of miles away is that Musk is just temperamentally better suited to space than to cars. Space exploration is in its infancy, still a bleeding-edge field where every product is more or less a one-off, while car manufacturing is mostly about logistics, quality control, and the effective management of routine in general. I get the impression that SpaceX is the most efficient of all companies and agencies involved in space, even though Tesla is a strikingly inept car manufacturer; I just hope Tesla doesn't drag SpaceX down with it into bankruptcy...