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hexane360on I'm going to work full-time on free software

hahahah what? Those are directly based on salary, not on "salary after you spend most of it". How would you even implement a system like that?

hexane360on WeWork’s CEO Makes Millions as Landlord to WeWork

>Unless the people are being forced to work/buy/sell with amazon, they are by definition not being exploited.

"forced" can happen in more ways than one. Workers in third world sweatshops aren't forced by law to work there, but they are forced by capitalism to work there to feed their families.

Also: Exploit (v)

2. To use selfishly for one's own ends.

hexane360on Some Day, You’ll Have a Telephone with a Screen and Be Able To Dial a Book

Don't forget that three phase allows for three conductors to carry the power of three pairs of single phase conductors.

hexane360on Please do not attempt to simplify this code

Hard disagree. You still need to think of the sentence to write the first half.

hexane360on Can Repelling Magnets Replace the Spring in a Pogo Stick?

I specifically said "non-electronic" fallback.

hexane360on Why Exaggeration Jokes Work

>spends the first 60% completely ignoring [biology]

Only if you ignore the literal second paragraph:

>Even neurons are formed by habit. When continuously exposed to a fixed stimulus, neurons become steadily less sensitive to that stimulus—until they eventually stop responding to it altogether.

hexane360on Rising Waters Are Drowning Amtrak's Northeast Corridor

One takes disproportionately from those hurting the environment, providing incentives to cease and desist destructive behavior, while the other assumes that everyone and everything hurts the climate equally.

hexane360on Rising Waters Are Drowning Amtrak's Northeast Corridor

The thing is, it's not a debate against people who are well informed and honestly think the above (or outright denial). It's against lobbyists who will say anything to prevent regulation, and the uninformed who repeat whatever they heard last from those lobbyists (or some false middle ground between science and lobbyists).

Whatever actual argument is stated (geologic, sun cycles, not happening, no big deal), the end objective is the same: we shouldn't do anything about it.

hexane360on Can Repelling Magnets Replace the Spring in a Pogo Stick?

OP said "fly by wire", meaning there's no non electronic systems to fall back on. If the electronics fail there's no "manual override".

hexane360on CLEAVE – Ergonomic Mechanical Keyboard

Find some program that records key events, and hold down q, w, and a. It's somewhat likely that d will trigger as well (or that only two keys will trigger). That's ghosting (or jamming) due to only 2-key rollover.

It happens because there's not an individual electrical connection for each key. Instead, you have one wire for each row and column, and keys connect between them.

hexane360on International System of Units overhauled in historic vote

Good thing Fahrenheit's got pragmatic points of reference, like. . . the freezing point of brine water and almost the body temperature of human [1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit#History

hexane360on Non cogito, ergo sum

I find the arguments about "expectation" compelling, but isn't that fundamentally different from thinking/not thinking? Also, aren't we making a mistake by looking only at the upper end of the tail where high achievers achieve less due to self-doubt/risk aversion? Isn't the reverse true in many (if not most) situations, where risky behavior is mostly harmful?

I have one other qualm:

>But baseball players do so by instinctively following simple rules: run in the right general direction, and adjust your speed to keep a constant angle between eye and ball.

Humans definitely do calculate "complex" differential equations to estimate the trajectory of a ball. If not, they literally wouldn't know which direction the ball is traveling in, as you'd only have the position of the ball on the eye's optic plane. Just because processes are subconscious or effortless doesn't mean they aren't happening.

hexane360on A new way to make steel could cut 5% of CO2 emissions at a stroke

>If you need very high quality steel, you have to get it from an integrated mill.

This just isn't true anymore. Process control has improved a lot since EAF mills were first created.

EAF mills also provide more flexibility because they can make much smaller batches. This allows for more niche alloys to become accessible.

hexane360on Ozone: The Earth's protective shield is repairing

Gases have a thermodynamic tendency to mix, despite weight differences. The atmosphere isn't a layer cake of heavy gases below light gases. If it was, we wouldn't be able to breathe because the ~1% of argon (and all the heavier gases) would sit below the oxygen layer.

hexane360on Ozone: The Earth's protective shield is repairing

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18379734

hexane360on A new way to make steel could cut 5% of CO2 emissions at a stroke

The steel industry isn't really as "conservative" as is being portrayed here. In the past 30 years, the amount of recycled metal being used has skyrocketed, and entire companies have come to power because of it. Sure, big old U.S. Steel is behind the times, but that's true for any industry.

hexane360on A new way to make steel could cut 5% of CO2 emissions at a stroke

Actually it's 100% the opposite.

Look at your iron-carbon phase diagram: https://www.tf.uni-kiel.de/matwis/amat/iss/kap_9/illustr/fe_...

Cast iron contains a high concentration of carbon, which makes it brittle. To make steel you need a heavy oxidizer to extract the (reduced) carbon. This is usually done using a "basic oxygen furnace", which is basically injecting a high pressure, very high velocity stream of oxygen into the metal to game thermodynamics into combusting the carbon without combusting the iron.

hexane360on Solar storm of 1859

All of them. This wouldn't affect low power equipment, only transmission over long distances. As others have noted, it's not an EMP.

hexane360on An error message, still found in Windows 10, is a mistake from 1974

For me the asymmetry of case-insensitivity bugs me. Even if the filesystem is case insensitive, "touch file.txt" is different from "touch FILE.TXT". In the same vein, what should the case of the file be after "echo lowercase file > file.txt; echo uppercase file > FILE.TXT"?

Case insensitivity would make sense to me if all files were stored and displayed as completely lowercase (although I'm not sure how this generalizes to other character sets).

hexane360on A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming

A good recent example of this is Reddit banning /r/GreatAwakening. There was a migration over to Voat and a couple other forums, but total searches for Q and total influence went way down.

hexane360on MIT: Drones to cooperatively explore under thick forest canopies for lost hikers

s/lost hikers/guerilla troops/

hexane360on Notorious patent enforcement entity values its entire portfolio at $2, folds

Sure, if you cover the liabilities

hexane360on Diaspora: Hello and a big welcome to everyone arriving from Google+

"Free speech, defined as the law and culture that exists in the U.S., is better in the U.S. than any other country"

You do see the flawed reasoning, don't you?

hexane360on Diaspora: Hello and a big welcome to everyone arriving from Google+

If you see everything from a binary perspective, then yes. If you have a shred of rationality, no.

hexane360on On Hold for 45 Minutes? It Might Be Your Secret Customer Score

$10/flight < ticket price

hexane360on The International Obfuscated C Code Contest

https://www.ioccc.org/2018/guidelines.txt

>We do not recommend submitting systemd source code to the IOCCC, if nothing else because that code is likely to exceed the source code size limit. This isn't to say that another highly compact and obfuscated replacement of init would not be an interesting submission.

hexane360on NY Man Arrested for Cutting Wires to Red Light Cameras (2016)

Not true in the first few states I checked. The closest is Wisconsin, where the motorist "must stop at a yellow light except when the motorist is so close to the intersection when the light turns yellow that it’s unsafe to do so" [1].

In other words, you're wrong. Also, there are multiple degrees of illegal, and I'm certain the punishment for running a yellow light isn't of the same magnitude as the punishment for running a red light.

It seems that you like correcting people enough that you're biased towards believing in unintuitive things.

1: https://www.drivinglaws.org/resources/wisconsin-red-light-st...

hexane360on Researchers analysed 1700 novels to reveal six story types

(1) stuff happens

hexane360on America, Compromised: Lawrence Lessig Explains Corruption

>as they ignore the reason for the Electoral College's existence to begin with

Yes, almost 90% of people debating the Electoral College neglect to mention it was originally created as an alternative to citizens directly electing the president. It was never about giving citizens in Montana more power, it was about giving Montana more power. Thinking otherwise is hugely anachronistic. It wasn't even technologically possible at the time to take a nationwide popular vote.

In 1789, 1.8% of America voted. Four colonies didn't even hold a popular vote. [1] In 1800, 10 of 16 states had electors selected by state legislatures. In 1824, Andrew Jackson lost despite having a plurality of the popular vote and the vote as it would be assigned today (electors voting by the state majority). [2]

BTW, California gets 55 electoral college votes while South Dakota gets 3. South Dakota gets exactly as many senators as a state over 45 times as large.

Further, your argument that the rest of the nation would be helpless in a fair fight with New York and California just doesn't hold up. You have to include the 10 largest states to reach a majority of America. Ironically, while you claim opponents of the electoral college overlook the "incredibly diverse Republic of States", your argument only holds up if you ignore any diversity between those ten states, and the people inside them. Can you honestly say that California, Texas, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Georgia, and Florida are significantly more homogenous than the rest of America?

Furthermore, the electoral college does worse than nothing to protect local interests. America under the electoral college doesn't ensure every state gets counted. It ensures that swing states get counted. Are you really better off being counted as a member of a state that's gone red all but once since 1940, rather than as a person with an actual stake in the election?

Opponents of the electoral college don't primarily take issue with the weighting of votes. We take issue with the incredibly toxic effect winner take all states has on politics and policies.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_ele...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Electoral_Colleg...

hexane360on AWS CEO Jassy follows Apple in calling for retraction of Chinese spy chip story

I'd be on board with this position if it was applied consistently. But it's not. Companies take political action, companies take credit for innovation, etc. The whole basis of a company is that it limits the liability of the people who own it.