Hacker News Reader

mynameisnullon Microsoft has laid off entire teams behind Virtual, Mixed Reality, and HoloLens

It’s anecdotal but, I’ve personally known multiple high 200-400k a year earners who went bankrupt or near bankrupt over only medical bills. I myself nearly did.

The cost of catastrophic situations is still ultimately too high in the US without or with insurance.

mynameisnullon My husband was right about DVDs

If you mean the library of Congress sure. If you mean the most libraries not based on a quick google (https://www.quora.com/Which-country-in-the-world-has-the-mos...). But I guess it depends on what you mean. I am genuinely curious as there are several ways of looking at this.

Also, the person above could have been talking about compared to days past. I can tell you the libraries I had access to when and where I grew are less funded (many closed), but again depends on where and what you’re comparing against.

mynameisnullon Why older fathers pass on more genetic mutations to their offspring

We felt some of the same, not everyone vanished but several did, and I personally didn’t blame them, as we were hard to deal with. I also caught some back channel talk confirming that we were a bit too serious.

We made some friends at the hospital but after all those shared experiences and solidarity none us really kept in touch either. Which is sad in a way but honestly we were all there for one another when we needed it in the way we needed it.

We had to reboot our lives in every way imaginable and that worked for us. It doesn’t for everyone though, some people need the familiar things in life to stay grounded, my wife and I mainly needed each other.

Do your best for yourself and each other. That approach was the main thing that kept me sane afterwards and I don’t regret it for a minute.

mynameisnullon In Lebanon, solar power is booming

Yes but we should have been effectively immune because we have so much nuclear power and we were brought to this situation by a combination of several things: lack of will to continue building new power plants, maintenance schedules being behind due to Covid, and the way regulations are retroactively applied means the technical challenges are substantial in the more aged plants leaving France well below optimal nuclear capacity when it is most needed, even with that our share of gas usage to generate electricity is small and the price of electricity should be largely decoupled from gas in a normal situation.

We still use too much gas to heat our homes, but I believe if we had had the capacity expected we could have reduced that substantially by having people use electric heaters without raising everyone’s electricity bill hugely .. but alas not enough plants online have lead to France feeling the pain like everyone else.

mynameisnullon Moderna CEO: 400% price hike on Covid vaccine “consistent with the value”

Depends on the state, sort of like the quality of private companies vary and if you’ve ever lived in a part of you’re own country where the grocery stores are crap and later you move and their very competitive and a comparative delight. However, one has to experience the difference themselves to understand this fact I believe. There are a huge multitude of factors at play.

Many of us (me included for most of my life, hell maybe I’m doing it now), tend to over extrapolate how much our own experience is the experience everywhere and that what we see must be fitting some logical rule or trend. Reality is annoyingly more complex than we like.

mynameisnullon Croatia to switch to euro, enter passport-free Schengen zone

https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/turnaround-portuguese-economy...

"Business investment is growing again above the EU average. A strong pipeline of EU co-funded investment projects for the next four years is expected to provide an additional boost to investment. "

https://www.rosalux.eu/es/article/1585.the-economic-evolutio...

" Economic policy was also bolstered by a set of favourable circumstances, including the external depreciation of the euro, the relatively low price of oil, economic growth in the country’s main export destinations, Portugal’s ascent as a tourist destination (partly as a result of the political turmoil and instability in the Middle East) and the ECB’s accommodative monetary policy stance (which helped significantly reduce interest rates and minimise public interest outlay"

https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/portugals-econom...

"Gomes also pointed out that the biggest boost Portugal received from Europe’s recovery came via exports, with the continent taking up 75% of the country’s exports of goods and services. "

I can link stuff all day here. Increases in quality of education, massive rises in investment, Lisbon has become (again) a world class capital, and if anything, Portugal is overheated from their EU membership.

I can never get over Portugal being included in this list and it immediately disqualifies for me all subsequent criticism of the EU as badly misguided. I don’t know the other countries on the list nearly as well, my experience with Portugal makes me suspect the entire anti EU argument is a argument in search of data instead of being based on data.

mynameisnullon Remote work’s toll on cities

I think while the refrain maybe tiresome for you, it is for me generally true.

Older suburbs in the US did have this, and I grew up in one, it is now empty and vacant. Many suburbs I lived in were all bedroom community types with no shops, no sidewalks, etc.

I sort of did find what you’re talking about in the US later on, a newer upscale model of mixed living, it wasn’t bad. It had a lot of chains though and it was very expensive.

So I will definitely grant you it is possible in several regions that to find this sort of lifestyle, it is not easy in some parts of the US or cheap in general (in my experience).

Living in Europe now, it’s been very easy to find these integrated neighborhoods or towns, and they come in all price points.

To be sure there are still bedroom communities, they’re just not even close to as common where we are as they were in the US.

I don’t think this is a radical statement if you just compare gas prices, it is rather organic and obvious why things are this way (and 30-40 other equally important factors contributed I am sure)

mynameisnullon Extending Python with Rust

In my experience that is just the silly amount of variables you have to export to use the VC++ compiler and this is why they provide a dedicated terminal prompt for the VC++ compiler with all the right env vars loaded. I've struggled as well automating VC++ compilation in rust as a result.

If you're so inclined to revisit this using mingw with rust you can see how here https://rust-lang.github.io/rustup/installation/windows.html

This is far easier to automate imo

mynameisnullon Soaring fertilizer prices could see millions more undernourished

Average is not valid measure to use here as it's vulnerable to distribution skew.

mynameisnullon Show HN: I built a tool to help you read Hacker News on Kindle

https://www.cbsnews.com/pittsburgh/news/lasik-eye-surgery-co...

Is I believe the original