danepowell

I love the A380 as an aerospace enthusiast, but absolutely despise it as a passenger. In my experience (with Lufthansa), the boarding process is chaotic and takes forever, the seat pitch is minimal in economy, and never have I felt more like cattle than when sharing the situation with 700 other passengers.

I'm curious how your experience as a passenger sounds so different from mine.

I'm skeptical that birds have a means to dodge something moving at hundreds of miles per hour. If anything, a human controlling a drone from a distance has more perspective / ability to dodge a plane than a bird does.

Now whether we should actually trust said human to do so... that's a different question, as is the potential damage vs birdstrike.

Are there any cell providers out there that don't do this kind of shady stuff? It's unfortunate that this seems like another market failure, where consumers have no real choice and the only solution will be punishment/legislation.

I'd love to read more about the crossbar and switching systems, can you recommend a specific book?

Pennies per play is a hard metric to grok. Let's compare this to CDs.

Assume a CD costs $10, and half of that goes towards the distribution of the physical media. It has maybe ten tracks. If you listen to it every day for a few months that's roughly the same "price per play" if I'm doing my math right.

Maybe that's a little high for an estimate, but streaming is still within an order of magnitude, and probably reaches way more customers than a given CD track ever did.

I don't see what about front-loading washers would make them especially prone to standing water or mold. I would expect that vertical washers could just as easily have standing water. Worse, it's probably out of sight behind the drum where you can't clean it.

WeWork wouldn't be profitable on a private cabin model, as lovely as that sounds. Pitching the open floorplan as a "networking" perk is just a necessary evil, or good marketing, depending on how you look at it.

Sounds like an example of Goodhart's Law: "When a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a good metric."

Optimizing for something as abstruse as "engagement" seems like a great way to completely ignore everything that actually makes social networks compelling.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

I'm surprised the article didn't recommend the simplest solution for individuals, which is to use ear plugs. Nowadays you can get versions that are tiny and flesh-colored, i.e. nearly invisible. I felt a little dorky wearing them at first, but they make a world of difference, and I've seen other people start to wear them as well.

Obviously this doesn't exactly address the root of the problem, which is that restaurants shouldn't require the kind of PPE that you'd have at a concert venue.

Not necessarily. Tests have costs and risks of their own. I would consider a test not justified in terms of cost and risk to be a "mistake". However doctors are far less likely to be sued for a thousand small mistakes than one big one, so they err on the side of too many tests.

I'm frankly surprised that more people haven't died at Schlitterbahn. Although this article appears to reference negligence at a corporate level, you have to keep in mind that the staff is comprised largely of high school aged kids, and all it takes is a few moments of inattention for someone to drown on these rides.

Case in point, I could have easily drowned as a kid when one of the staff allowed too many riders in tubes to go down a chute at once, creating a log jam at the bottom that I got pulled underneath. The strong current held me underneath other riders' tubes for a good thirty seconds or so until the jam loosened. No one noticed or cared even as I came up coughing and sputtering.

Don't get me wrong, most of the staff seemed to take their job pretty seriously, but in a place as crowded and inherently dangerous as this it doesn't take much for someone to get hurt.

Honest question, is it truly possible to build yourself out of a housing crisis? Or is housing like roads, where an increased supply just leads to even more demand?

In other words, traffic exists not because of a lack of roads per se, but because people are willing to accept a given level of traffic when deciding whether to drive somewhere. In an area as beautiful and in demand as SF, will people essentially keep on immigrating until it's unattractive enough that they stop, regardless of supply?

Edit: thanks everyone for the thoughtful replies and for pointing out some of my potentially flawed assumptions. It's refreshing to have civilized exchanges of opinion on the internet every once in a while :)

If I'm pretty sure I had money in Mt Gox but I'm not sure how much, how could I ever file a "proof of claim"? It's not like Mt Gox was sending depositors balance statements every month or something.

Clothing, especially designer or specialty / technical clothing, can be marked up 1-10x. In other words, a jacket that costs $10 to produce might sell for $20 or $100.

Don't worry, they are still making money on your wife.

(This is just based on my experience working for a major outdoor clothing retailer, not any sort of real data)

That seems utterly nonsensical and dehumanizing. If you have a human greeter/operator, why not expose that to the customer? You are already paying for the human to be in the loop, why not benefit from the impression of a friendly human touch as well?

I'd love to know more about these operations, thanks for mentioning this.

This sounds awfully similar to a well-known Prius problem, where the transition from regenerative to friction braking takes on the order of a second and can lead to significantly increased stopping distance.

It's not even necessarily a matter of inattention. Imagine that the autopilot was driving along just fine, and when it was just a few feet away from the parked cruiser suddenly veered towards it for whatever reason. It might be physically impossible for any human, no matter how well they are paying attention, to intervene and avoid a collision.

I'm not saying that's what happened, but it's certainly possible. The mere fact that it's possible to me casts doubt on this entire design philosophy.

Has anyone compared the rates of carbon monoxide poisoning with and without keyless ignition? I could actually see an argument for keyless being safer: if people can leave a car and completely forget to turn it off, they can certainly do that and forget to take the keys with them. At least with the keyless ignition you have the _possibility_ of being alerted to your mistake (my Toyota beeps so loud that it would be pretty much impossible to ignore).

Tesla's terrible response to this and the detrimental effect on its image must be pretty obvious to most of the HN crowd. I have to wonder why they persist. Is their PR spin actually having a positive effect on the public at large?

Everyone's afraid that AI will become too smart and take over the world. They should be afraid that it's too dumb and already has.

This is a vulnerability from earlier this year. This is not the security release dropping today.

I wonder to what degree is shrinkage a compounding factor.

I used to work at an outdoor retailer where we only did inventory once a year, and by the end of the year the computer inventory would differ from actual inventory by an order of magnitude, simply due to the fact that things get lost, damaged, stolen, etc... and don't get marked as such in the computer.

If you have enough backstock, this isn't a huge problem (I think most estimates put retail shrinkage at less than 5%). But if you are using a just-in-time stocking approach, those effects could quickly compound until you have nothing left on the shelf and no more inventory on the way.

I wasn't in Hawaii, but I also imagine that I would assume that an alert like this is a false alarm. I've just lived through too many scenarios like this, albeit not on the same scale (think false fire alarms.)

Upon reflection, however, this seems like the definition of survivor bias.

There are many insurance companies that use OBD GPS trackers, as well as standalone trackers that plug in to the cigarette lighter, in order to charge based on mileage.

e.g. https://www.metromile.com/

For the Americans reading this: "drain on the exchequer" == "drain on the treasury"

Can anyone speculate what will happen if I'm using an unlocked Google device (Nexus 5X) on Verizon? Will the new app be force-installed somehow? And can it be removed?

It probably would have prevented the Tesla crash with the semi that cameras couldn't see due to low contrast with the sky. So I'd say pretty important. I'm actually shocked that Tesla has done so well without it.

I'm not sure of the official reason, but I'd imagine it prevents ejections (or worse, partial ejections) from the vehicle.

I was the first person on the scene of a rollover where a woman was pinned underneath the car (fortunately only suffering broken bones) because she was partially ejected through the open window.

When I pair my Android phone with a rental car via Bluetooth, the phone asks permission to share contacts and messages with the car (of course I deny them). Are folks saying that sensitive data is still shared in spite of this access control? This seems like a problem with Android / iOS rather than the car.

It seems like a lot of these problems could be solved by better enforcement of existing laws, rather than creation of new ones.

For instance, the article has a picture of trash piled up on the sidewalk in front of an AirBnB. Surely there are existing laws or regulations against this. People often mention noise from short-term rentals, there are regulations against this too. The benefits of better enforcement would extend beyond short-term rentals as well, and improve quality of life for all residents.

Other issues, like the "vomit covered floors", seem like strictly private issues to be handled between the host, guest, and possibly the mediation of the rental site.

I'm not saying that better enforcement should be the only solution (it can't deal with larger issues like elevated property prices), but it should certainly be a large part of it.