Hacker News Reader

obvious_throwon Nevada strikes $1.25B tax break deal with Tesla

The answer is clout. A 25 employee software company that is equally innovative on a per-head basis would get laughed out of the government offices if they requested a rate-equivalent tax break.

Your point is taken, but the ability of Tesla to do this whilst other companies do not have the same opportunity strikes many as unfair.

obvious_throwon Show HN: MealDays – Meal planner for my wife

It's the presumption that traditional household structures are archaic. Plenty of modern households operate on the basis of traditional role separation, and it has nothing to do with oppression.

obvious_throwon Nearly All U.S. Home Depot Stores Hit By Credit Card Theft

Many of us in the US still use exclusively cash for POS. For us, blasé attitude is to be expected.

obvious_throwon The Unexotic Underclass

The Boston Beer Company (maker of Samuel Adams) is still technically a craft/micro brewery, since they produce (intentionally) less than 6 million barrels annually. The entire craft brew industry produces less than 8% of all domestic beer.

Calling Sam Adams a "major brand" is a bit of a stretch.

obvious_throwon Home Depot Investigates a Possible Data Breach

Or you could, you know, use cash.

obvious_throwon A Call for a Low-Carb Diet

Excessive protein ingestion causes kidney failure, hypertension and heart attacks.

Too bad for you that there is absolutely nothing in the current medical literature that supports these ridiculous claims.

obvious_throwon [dead]

Meta Prediction: As has occurred everywhere else on the web, two-sided discussion of this topic will be buried and censored rapidly here, as well.

obvious_throwon Live map of Russia advancing into Ukraine

Is it that the Russian propaganda so strong

The opposite, actually. Many of us see through the transparent and obviously ham-fisted attempts of the U.S. propaganda machine to drive us into another war.

obvious_throwon LendingClub Files for $500M IPO

6% returns in a ZIRP environment are actually quite fantastic. Even junk bonds yield less than that.

obvious_throwon Social Media and the ‘Spiral of Silence’

This is only accurate within the perpetually-expanding conception of "human rights" that many seem to assume is static.

obvious_throwon Changing currents in the Atlantic Ocean key to global-warming pause

Not to sound like a AGW denier, but is this really how science is supposed to be done?

  1. Posit hypothesis A, with predictions X
  2. Gather data to falsify A for twenty years
  3. Data contradicts predictions X
  4. ???
  5. Invent hypothesis B to avoid falsification of A.

obvious_throwon Old car batteries could make cheaper, more efficient solar panels

Where are you seeing 20-25% effi PV modules? The physics of silicon's bandgap prevents getting much above 18% without (expensive) multiple junction layers (of different material) or concentrators, which tend to reduce module lifecycle time.

obvious_throwon A Reminder To Investors

"all the time" in the mind of Shanley Kane, et. al. Disclaimers like these are mainly CYA statements such that the rabid hordes of social justice warriors don't throw Y Combinator under the bus on Pando because of a disgruntled founder looking to capitalize on feels where capitalizing on actual talent or acumen failed.

obvious_throwon Is a Hard Life Inherited?

Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study.

Be careful reading it though, facts are racist.

obvious_throwon Autoweapons (1987)

Even the part about concluding an academic presentation by shooting a colleague in the face?

Exactly what kind of ridiculous caricature of the US does your local media give you?

obvious_throwon Bikanta’s (YC S14) Tiny Diamonds Find Cancer Before It Spreads

Ok, I've read the article twice and I am missing something here.

I get how these can be used to help imaging, but I'm not clear on how exactly they target cancerous cells in particular. Are they attached to antibodies that seek out specific antigen markers of cancerous cells?

obvious_throwon $1,000 Hepatitis Pill Shows Why Fixing Health Costs Is So Hard

No basis?

The basis is that these people choose, of their own agency, to shoot up with used needles. This isn't some poor guy getting the cancerous genetic bit flipped by a cosmic ray or an uninsured single mom getting disabled by a drunk driver. These are consequences brought on by the patients themselves. By what moral basis should society be paying for the consequences of willful degeneracy?

obvious_throwon $1,000 Hepatitis Pill Shows Why Fixing Health Costs Is So Hard

An easy fix here is for the patient to be evaluated for fault. If you got Hep C via botched transfusion, you're covered; if, however, you are a degenerate who chose to scrounge up used heroin needles from alleyways, then you're not.

This is, of course, for reasons nobody can adequately respond to with reason instead of feelings, unpopular.

But it's certainly 1. fair and 2. a large cost savings, given the sheer number of Hep C patients who brought it on themselves.

obvious_throwon It takes more than practice to excel

It's scientific fact that intelligence as measured by any manner of g-factor psychometry has heritability correlates of between 0.4 and 0.5. Furthermore, studies such as the Minnesota transracial adoption study show clearly that these correlates apply within racial groups, having fully negated socioeconomic and parenting factors. We have willfully ignored reality per the ideological dictates of progressivism for the last fifty years.

Feelings and ideology trumping reality may work for a while, but it can't last forever when faced with competition from groups and nations that harbor no such illusions, such as the Chinese, who are investing in their genetic research labs to investigate the genetic origins of intelligence so as to benefit their own population generations hence. We, on the other hand, are too frightened to even talk about such investigations. Much to the detriment of our own future.

obvious_throwon Chris Beard Named CEO of Mozilla

Except that, as has been demonstrated, the position itself carries particular requirements for the candidate's personal political opinions.

obvious_throwon An Idiot's Guide to Inequality

In which upper-class HN tells someone who grew up poor how poor people think. And then downvotes the heretic, despite relevant, first-hand experience contribution to discussion. Nice.

obvious_throwon An open competition to build a smaller power inverter, with a $1M prize

Minor voltage drops can still be a problem for optimal tracking on MPPT charge controllers.

obvious_throwon An open competition to build a smaller power inverter, with a $1M prize

Likely peak and typical power output( order of magnitude difference ), as well as waveform( automotive inverters tend to output square-ish waveforms ).

obvious_throwon July 20, 1969: One Giant Leap For Mankind (2013)

Right. This is due to about 10% inspiration and 90% petroleum. We are 100W machines with 10kW energy footprints. You can do a lot of work with that.

obvious_throwon Study: Half of black males, 40% of white males arrested by age 23

Because of this:

White women live in a consequence-free environment until they don't.

While absolutely true in North America, it's one of those things you're not permitted to say:

http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

Hence, the downvotes.

obvious_throwon Inside the libertarian version of Burning Man: Guns, booze and bitcoin

You are positing as axiomatic that subsidizing the indigent is an automatic good. Citation needed.

obvious_throwon Segway Inventor Dean Kamen Thinks New Stirling Engine Will Get You Off the Grid

Renewables like wind and solar need EITHER enormous storage capacity, OR baseline supply to work with modern consumption patterns. Storage is both expensive and environmentally destructive - these engines could be a good fit for baseline generation to dramatically reduce the need for storage in a renewable system.

obvious_throwon Words known by men and women

Stereotypes are a primitive form of decision heuristics. We must use heuristics when dealing with the enormous volume of information that we are required to process on a day to day basis, or we would never get anything done as we evaluate every micro-decision at an atomistic level.

As far as missing out on great opportunities by using heuristics, it happens all the time, and not just with race/sex/age stereotypes. It happens with food, it happens with color, it happens with sounds and temperatures and fabrics and pets. We require heuristics based on generalizations and abstractions to even function in the world.

There is no easy solution to this, but the saving grace of a semi-free society is that if your particular heuristic excludes a great opportunity, it's very likely someone else's heuristic does not.

obvious_throwon Words known by men and women

I can start.

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi/10.1371/journal.po...

To wit: men and women vary wildly in their personalities, and it is very likely this is due far more to different (genetic) sexual selection pressures than it is to socialization and acculturation.

But here's the problem with attempting an "in-depth discussion" on this topic: anyone who attempts to bring facts to a feels fight will always lose. Even on supposedly "rational" HN.

So, good luck with that.

obvious_throwon 3% use IE9 and 14% have a disability. Why do we only cater for the former?

Because "a disability" is extremely broad, and covers such things as back injuries, diabetic neuropathy, and mental illnesses. I would expect that percentage to come down considerably when factoring specific disabilities that actually impede browsing.