giggles_giggles

They should really have the right to vote!

This is clearly someone who thinks the mantle is an actual burning fire and doesn't understand that it is molten rock.

"I don't get how that fire burns without oxygen"

Well, it's not a fire...

Maybe I'm stupid but could someone enlighten me as to what "intellectual tourism" might mean? Is that like, a normal person pretending to be intellectual, or is it like browsing Wikipedia with no specific purpose except for the brain snacks? I can't even tell if that's an insult to Joe Rogan or not.

I cannot possibly encourage you more to check out magit. It is unbelievably good. I always share this demo with people to show off just a tiny portion of what it's capable of doing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzQEIRRJ2T0

My skills with git have gotten better after using magit, too, because it brings the power of git to the surface. It's a really fantastic git porcelain and the fact that it is deeply integrated into Emacs just makes it absolutely second to none.

Magit is easily one of my favorite pieces of software and I will leap at the chance to sing its praises.

It's $350 million in economic activity brought to or generated in the city, not in tax revenue. You can see the breakdown here.

https://explore.sxsw.com/hubfs/2019%20SXSW%20Economic%20Impa...

You're confusing GDP with GDP per capita, and also 350,000,000 / 1,460,000,000 = 0.23972602739 and to convert that to a percentage you multiply by 100 so you get 23.973% as the result.

According to this[1], SXSW brings Austin about $350 million annually. According to Wikipedia, Austin's annual GDP is about $1.5B so 350/1500 = roughly 23% of the city's annual GDP.

Anecdotally I know of many people who work year round to prepare for an event at SXSW and rely on it for their entire annual income.

Cancelling SXSW is a big deal to this city. It hurts. It's not to be downplayed.

[1] https://austin.culturemap.com/news/city-life/09-27-17-econom...

Local businesses are a huge part of Austin's culture

It's a typo, he meant porn

Hol' up, are you saying that there's a reason besides economics that the government might introduce protectionist trade measures to keep some critical manufacturing domestic for use during an emergency when you cannot trust your supply chains which come from hostile -- or even friendly -- nations?

It's funny because this was a U.S. conservative talking point going back as long as I can remember (for me that's the mid/late 90s). There's even an episode of The Office (U.S.) where this point of view is lampooned (Oscar to Michael: "Wouldn't you say that the services sector is much more relevant than manufacturing?"). Never thought I'd see it expressed openly on HN, and with upvotes!

Everything after your first "but" contradicts what comes before it. Should people who are at more risk get priority? Because if they should, then yes, people with regular immune systems SHOULD in fact just suck it up and go inside until there are enough curbside slots available for everyone. Then there won't be a use for a site like this and those healthy people can book their curbside slots on the grocery stores' websites like normal.

This site and others like it just guarantee that vulnerable people MUST use these sites to even have a chance to get curbside. I guarantee there are those who are not savvy enough, and young tech-savvy people who know how to use these services will use curbside while older, more vulnerable, and less tech-savvy people must go in. I feel bad using a site like this because even though my wife is in a vulnerable group, I know others are worse off and don't have the know-how to use this tool. I want them to have a chance.

You can't say that "people who are more at risk should get priority" AND say that _everyone_ should be doing the same thing as them. If everyone is a priority, nobody is. Yes, some healthy people with good immune systems DO need to take some risks in lieu of those who are more likely to die if they take the same risks.

And spare me the platitude at the beginning of your comment. If you did sympathize, you wouldn't've posted something so tone-deaf.

> One of the reasons we decided to release the app was so friends of ours who are immunocompromised could use it.

Understandable, but it becomes a gold rush if people with normal immune systems use sites like yours to reserve slots. My only real suggestion is that your site call out the moral dilemma to users.

Basically our only choice now is to use a service like this (which I guess I will now do; yes you do cover our area) or book slots weeks in advance (this is what we have been doing with limited success).

Honestly we are very lucky; services like this make me more concerned for people in situations like my wife's, but who are not married to a programmer who is aware that you need a f*king web scraper to get groceries now.

Apologies if my frustration is visibly surfacing there; I know y'all are just trying to do your best to help with this situation and so I want to provide you with some honest feedback. I would also like to make clear that I'm not suggesting your service is a net negative. Thank you for your efforts.

Well then I'm glad that the blog post linked above was written, because obviously this situation was confusing when I set up Synapse a couple years back. I might not be a genius but I'm not stupid, either, and I'm obsessed with chat systems (I trialed every available self-hostable chat server at the time), so I guarantee if this confused me, it confused plenty of perfectly intelligent individuals.

I hope the team has clarified this in the documentation.

Hi, my wife is on an immunosuppressant and so we have been trying to avoid going to the store at all, except curbside, because it could be extremely bad if she were to get COVID-19. Save for a single emergency, no one in our household has left home in about a month.

This service makes it harder for us to get curbside slots, until our local store is able to respond to peaking demand, because people with normal immune systems will use these slots out of fear, when they have a much better chance of either not contracting COVID-19 in the first place, or of lesser symptoms if they get it, and in the meantime should be the ones going into the store, so that those with immuno-compromised households do not have to.

Your service makes no acknowledgement of this ethical dilemma.

I do not disagree that our local grocery store should do its best to expand its curbside service. They do seem to be trying, but this product makes it harder for households like ours in the meantime.

I'm sorry if I was unclear, but

> All it does is keep track of email->matrix ID mappings for users who have published them

This is what I mean by "it leaks the userlist." Matrix (the organization) stores the email addresses of my users, along with some mapping that could allow Matrix the organization to correlate email addresses with my server. To me, as a server operator, this is a deal-breaker, even if it was just email addresses with no mapping. I see this as a privacy violation against my users who trust me to hold their information privately and securely. My understanding is that you cannot join another Matrix homeserver server with an identity established on a homeserver disconnected from the vector.im identity server, which effectively forces the homeserver operator to use the vector.im centralized identity server if you want, as an end user, to actually take advantage of federation. I do not know how a user is supposed to take their login from one homeserver to log into another one if the first homeserver is not connected to vector.im.

Please correct me if the above is wrong.

Additionally, when I set up Synapse I was not presented with any kind of GDPR info, and it wouldn't make sense that I would be, because the GPDR is for end users, not site operators. Maybe this is presented to new users who connect to the public reference Synapse instance using Riot.im or something, but I'm not talking about this issue from the perspective of an end user, I'm talking about it from the perspective of a homeserver operator. I got about halfway through the homeserver setup before I realized that vector.im was necessary for identity lookup and I realized it only by carefully following the docs. This was long before the 9/27/2019 blog post was published, so I guess maybe this has been addressed somewhat. I have been following Matrix now for the better part of a decade.

If federation is possible without identity mapping done on a central server, then I too wish that identity mapping was never implemented.

If you use the Matrix identity server, which is required to have federation, the 3rd party identity server operated by the Matrix organization retains a list of your usernames. They don't tell you up front about this, either, and I think silently leaking a username list is pretty bad. You have to really pay attention during setup to realize that the federation technology relies on a bastion operated by matrix.org.

The identity server is optional and you can use your own, but you will lose the federation that Matrix is so proud of, and the instructions to set up the reference home server don't make it clear that this is necessary in order to avoid a leak of your users' identities.

https://vector.im/identity-server-privacy-notice

This is interesting because the GP, I think, didn't intend to say "private" to mean "privately held", but I think it's worthwhile to note that GameStop and Guitar Center are publicly traded while H-E-B is still family owned.

H-E-B does a lot of things that are more benevolent than the kind of behavior that we're used to seeing from publicly-traded organizations and I can't help but wonder if the private ownership (truly private, as opposed to publicly-traded) has something to do with that.

H-E-B is one of the things I will really miss if I ever have to leave Texas. They're always there any time there is any kind of disaster, to provide relief. I've even heard that they treat their software engineers well (they bought Favor). They're really a one-of-a-kind company. I hope they never IPO.

Are you a doctor? Can you explain why a study about influenza would apply to SARS-CoV-2? Or is your doubt baseless speculation?

Wow, say what you will about whatever economic theories you're attacking, "America Brain" (with the obvious implication that you're calling the person stupid because they're American and hold some view you view as stereotypically American) is super racist.

I'm ashamed on behalf of HN that your comment hasn't been flagged or downvoted into oblivion on that characteristic alone.

Every generation inherits a world full of the problems created or only half-solved by the generation before it. It's not unique to our generation and it won't be unique to the next one, unless the young people are the first generation of perfect people capable of living their lives without creating a single new problem for the next generation.

The older generation also solved a lot of problems, and gave us great gifts, as did every generation before them, and as we will for the ones that follow us.

It's not productive to try to pit the young against the old, and the GP is right to point out that you too will be old one day, if you're lucky, so it's certainly unwise to reform the system so that it discriminates against the very group you should hope to join someday (and sooner than you would imagine, sooner than anyone wishes), especially considering the alternative.

I just think it's extremely irresponsible to downplay the addictive power of nicotine and it's a theme I see recur frequently on this forum. I have a caffeine addiction as well, and have broken and restarted it multiple times in my life. It simply doesn't compare. If I don't get coffee (I'm a 3-4 cup/day coffee drinker), I'll be cranky but I'll live.

When I vaped, my brain was on fire inside of an hour and a half. I couldn't get through a movie. I'd wake up in the middle of the night to vape. That has never happened to me with caffeine. There is no comparison. And I was vaping 3mg/ml liquid for the longest time. I can't imagine what the hit from a Juul or any nicotine salt vape is like in comparison.

Everyone is different. But trying to find out if you're a person who can use nicotine without becoming hopelessly addicted is like lighting firecrackers in your hand to see if you're the kind of person who won't lose their fingers when it blows up. It's stupid and it's comments like the one I originally replied to, downplaying the potential for addiction, that helped me talk myself into it in the first place. After I'd had a few hits.

I just hate seeing that in a place like this, with an ostensibly educated userbase.

Frankly there's also abundant scientific research to back up just how hideously addictive nicotine is. I shouldn't have to supply all my anecdotes but hearing this community discuss how it really isn't so bad makes me so anxious that someone might actually believe it and start to use.

I hope if someone is reading this and thinking about starting to vape that it makes them think again. Don't. It's awful.

Are you joking? When I quit I had a month of full on panic attacks over the tiniest things, and I only vaped for 5 years.

I don't understand the motive for downplaying the addictive potential of nicotine unless you're excusing your own habits to yourself. It's posts like yours that led me to think vaping "wasn't that bad" when I first got hooked. I feel like I got my life back when I finally quit and I never would've been able to do it at all without the endless support and patience of my wife.

That's funny, that sounds like exactly the kind of lie I used to tell myself when I was addicted. Nicotine is a powerful force for rationalization of your addiction to it.

I hate to tell you this, but it's not Emacs that's slow and clunky, it's Spacemacs. I dumped Spacemacs and spent a couple days building a new config with everything I used from Spacemacs and it is a good 10x faster.

It shouldn't be surprising, seeing as Spacemacs development ground to a complete halt (no new releases) something like two years ago.

Spacemacs is a neat demo of what is possible with Emacs but it adds a TON of complexity and bloat. I found it much harder to troubleshoot and it didn't keep up with the rest of the ecosystem, and it's the rest of the ecosystem (and Emacs Lisp) that make Emacs so special.

One benefit? Did you mean to say "the most obvious downside" instead?

> Why does this say that the DOJ has been pushing for this since 2016?

Because that's when Trump came into power and nothing bad ever happened under the Obama admin.

> Completely agree. It's frustrating, because with words like "capitalism" and "socialism", why use words at all? Nobody means the same thing

And there's the reason why, in my original post at the beginning of this sub-thread, I used neither of those terms, in order to communicate more precisely.

Centrally planned economies are inferior to freer economies, whether the top-down controls are imposed by democracy or autocracy; both create economic inefficiencies. History has borne that out repeatedly.

But of course, that statement disregards non-economic externalities like environmental impacts, and one may want a central power to map non-economic externalities onto economic costs through e.g. taxes and fines for polluting because the economic inefficiencies incurred are worth the tradeoff (like having clean water/air). Then the market can price those non-economic externalities accordingly, once the market is appropriately regulated.

> This might be retconned by saying that most housing is occupied and that's where you found a vacancy, but it's still pretty artificial.

Actually this just sounds like the California housing market where NIMBYs perpetually prevent housing stock from increasing, which is of course a result of central planning, not a free market mechanism, LOL!

Exactly, the pharmacist is there to provide expert advice when you have a complicated prescription or combination of prescriptions. You can tell by these comments that the HN crowd leans young -- not enough people dealing with chronic illnesses who have seen the value in having a consult with the pharmacist when you pick up your medication.

My wife has a handful of chronic illnesses and I want her to be able to ask questions of someone who has been educated in the role, method of action, correct dosages, and possible interactions of her medications.

You can also self host the upstream service if you want there features that come with logging in but don't want Mozilla to have the data:

https://blog.mozilla.org/services/2014/05/08/firefox-account...