mactrey

Isn't it weird to use the word "sprawling" here? A world where major cities are affordable would be more dense. It would be easier to preserve land for its natural beauty. The US today is sprawling.

Two ways to think about why I'd rather have $1,000 today than $1,000 a year from now:

- I could invest the money today and have more than $1,000 next year

- I might die before next year and never get to enjoy the money

Some people have complicated taxes (need to itemize; IRS is missing information). Some people have simple taxes (standard deduction; IRS knows what they owe). Why should the second group have to pay for tax prep software or fill out forms by hand? Just to share the pain of the first group?

So why not just invest in Bitcoin outside of your tax-advantaged accounts?

Er, so can you show any numbers to the effect that Covid is deadlier than the flu among some Covid-vaccinated subpopulation? Even if it's true that Covid "scales" (becomes deadlier) as a function of age more steeply than influenza does, it's not clear to me that Covid is deadlier in any single age group.

Starcraft I also discouraged death balls of ground units with the terrible pathing..

Or perhaps having the experience itself ("I survived the jump") is a significant contributor to their not regretting it.

There could even be multiple mechanisms there: "turns out being that close to death is really scary," or "my survival means there is a higher power looking out for me," or "my life flashing before my eyes made me realize something about my life"...

You make it sound like those studies were bad because the sample size was too small. In reality bad study design or having an unrepresentative sample are more common issues.

Any benefit is earned with a suitable definition of "earned"...

Did Vancouver pass limits on foreign purchases because that was the underlying reason for the high cost of housing, or did they pass limits because that was easier than actually building new housing?

To me suicide is an reaction to this thought: "things are bad for me, and they are never going to get better." If you think your life might get significantly better in the next couple of years, you probably aren't likely to commit suicide.

I'm sure many people experienced sudden and traumatizing depression with the onset of Covid. But we mostly all knew it would be temporary - we knew things would get better again, even if we didn't know the timelines. There wasn't a "forever" there, so suicide wasn't a common reaction.

I'm so attached to starting all my where clauses with a TRUE (1=1 since SQL Server doesn't have boolean literals) that I do this when I need some OR clauses:

    SELECT foo
    FROM bar
    WHERE 1=1
      AND (1<>1
           OR baz > boom
           OR fizz >= bang
           )
      AND foo is not null

So you can comment out lines starting with OR individually. Some people might hate it but it makes sense conceptually for me since almost every query I write takes a chain of ANDs in the where clause as a starting point.

A 32 is still 96th percentile, or a little better than "okay" for most Americans. In the future if you want to argue that ACT doesn't predict academic success it might be more effective to leave your own score and academic success out of it.

There are no two ways about it: the Syrian refugees who were planning to buy RTX 3060s for mining are going to be hurt by this announcement.

OP is referring to Nintendo cancelling a Splatoon tournament because competitors were using the #FreeMelee hashtag

https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2020/12/nintendo_cancels_s...

That's true, I generally don't care about the welfare of apple sellers, and I'll take a deal when I see one.

But, and I hate to stretch this analogy to its breaking point, it's more like the overwhelming majority of Americans are apple sellers (read: wage laborers) and they have no way to achieve basic human rights like food, shelter, and baseline medical care without selling their apples. And they can only sell to one buyer at a time as part of an apple contract (employment contract) and if that buyer decides to stop buying from them ("restructuring"), which the buyer may do at any time (right-to-work laws), our apple seller has to go looking for another buyer (job search) which can take months all while their savings dwindle...

So you can see why some people might think this is not the optimal way to structure a society. Or to just put the analogy in its coffin, they might see this situation as more complicated than just a few apple-buyers getting a bargain.

This ignores any effects of market power. Amazon is not bargaining with its workers in the way that you are bargaining with Alice for her apple - a lot of these workers have very few other options to sell their labor. And sitting at home and not working is a false choice in today's America. That inequality in pricing power helps maintain the gap between wages and marginal revenue production of labor - and as OP says, that gap at scale is what makes a billionaire.

This is interesting and it makes me really want to see the 5 4000+ puzzles...

I'm not a biologist but I'm not sure that follows. It could be that the experimentally-derived structure is 100% accurate to the actual physical structure but getting 90% of your predicted residues to match that is enough to get an accurate prediction of protein behavior and hence "competitive."

I'm guessing that because sweaters are not money, and furthermore are actual physical objects that have to be sent to a physical address, criminals aren't attempting to convert stolen identities into sweaters at any rate the federal government cares about. That may not be true for BTC.

Sitting on billions of dollars in stock in a publicly traded company isn't really all that different from having a swimming pool full of gold coins. The day-to-day functioning of that company is not going to be affected if the billionaire sells shares to pay taxes rather than giving the shares to their children. An initial investment in a company is virtuous but once you have billions keeping that money in the family isn't really virtuous given that the alternative is contributing to the society that made the initial investment possible.

Do you live in or near downtown Portland? Because I do, and I can assertively state that the rule of law had not broken down prior to the arrival of federal agents.

Walking around downtown recently and finding little more than a single broken window and an "I'm hatin' it" spray-painted on a McDonald's makes this kind of fearmongering comment truly laughable.

> "hate speech" is a made up word

Most words and phrases were made up, at some point. "Hate speech" still has a coherent meaning.

> and neither illegal

Nobody said it was illegal. YouTube is free to ban content creators that haven't broken the law. You agree to those terms when you use the site.

> or "bad"

I understand that the phrase "hate speech" confuses you. But these content creators openly advocate white supremacism. If you don't think that is "bad" I think you should take a deep look inward.

> You're applauding

Yes.

> a rebranded social score

No. YouTube is not assigning a "social score" - they are refusing to pay web hosting fees for racists. That has no effect on any other aspect of these people's lives - their ability to find jobs, make friends, start businesses, etc. is unaffected.

> and a secondary justice system

The comparison of YouTube consequences to the justice system is laughable. YouTube is saying "host your content elsewhere, there are lots of options." The justice system hands down things like forced confinement and the death penalty. There is really no comparison.

Index investors are not really tossing money blindly. They are investing in a diversified portfolio and then constantly re-weighting their investment by market cap.

The alternative to that, before the rise and acceptance of index investing, was people using their 401k money to buy individual stocks. But we all know that your standard mom and pop investor is not going to have time to cut through the bullshit and effectively research companies when they have a 40hr/wk job, a family, hobbies, etc. So those 401k investments were based mostly on personal hunches, word of mouth, and pump and dump schemes. That was really dumb money, and did even less for the economy.

So while I agree with you that index investing isn't doing a ton to push corporate management to do better in the way "smart money" does (in theory), when you consider the world before index investing was a thing you have to admit that money today is on average "smarter."

I don't know much about bikes but why wouldn't the blue one with the solid wheels be rideable?

People in the market aren't expecting inflation:

https://www.clevelandfed.org/our-research/indicators-and-dat...

So I don't know why people on HN so often are.

Yields are low because bond prices are high. It's not a bad time to be selling down your bond portfolio right now.

Another one: the Japanese brand 無印良品 "mujirushi ryouhin", which essentially means "Quality Goods Without Branding." Of course it's developed a little following behind its "brand" because the goods are mostly high quality, if a little pricey.

Wikipedia's rules on notability and article length prevent it from growing infinitely (in theory). So my point is exactly that - all that "low-hanging fruit" is mostly gone, and most of the actual writing work that's left is either writing a new article on a subject that is at the margin of notability, which one would expect the average adult to have less interest in than writing a new article on a truly notable subject, or rewriting a section of an existing more notable article which tends to annoy whichever editor last edited it.

But you make a good point that the maintenance work probably grows linearly with the size of the corpus, so really the flat number of active editors shows that the number of editors actively engaged in the research and writing of entries has probably actually declined significantly since 2007.

It's impressive that it's stable considering there's probably a lot less to do on Wikipedia today than there was in 2007.