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sewer_bird

71 karma · joined April 21, 2017

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sewer_bird··on Remembering Huxley's “Brave New World”
It’s a reference to “Snow Crash” by Neil Stephenson
sewer_bird··on Tesla pushes U.S. to boost fuel economy penalties
You’re allowed to have a storefront and have that not fall under what most reasonable people call “doing advertising”
sewer_bird··on Egyptologists uncover rare tombs from before the Pharaohs
Ah, true: I mentally read “president”
sewer_bird··on Egyptologists uncover rare tombs from before the Pharaohs
This isnt true. She died in 1913.
sewer_bird··on When tipping was considered un-American (2015)
Presumably an obese one.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/most-obes...

sewer_bird··on Mars Problems vs. Venus Problems
That’s not really super meaningful in terms of interplanetary travel. For example, for most of the year Mercury is the closest planet to Earth. Change in orbital velocity matters more than distance
sewer_bird··on Supreme Court declines to hear cases over qualified immunity
It's pretty dense because of all the subordinate clauses.

"... cases that asked the court to revisit the existing doctrine. This doctrine protected police from lawsuits concerning police conduct, where their conduct didn't involve an obvious crime."

sewer_bird··on Git partial clone lets you fetch only the large file you need
Yes, but 95% of devs, even fairly talented ones, don't really know how to use Git.
sewer_bird··on How a billion dollar autonomous vehicle startup lost its way
It's not really inferiority: the commonality of the other countries is that they typically follow a different regime of negotiation of the road. In specific, the USA and other anglophone countries are extremely strict about what motions are allowed on the road: the expectation is that everyone stays precisely within the lanes and drives a bit robotically.

This, however, is actually not that common in most of the world, where the road is much more 'negotiated': speeds are slower but the streets more chaotic. I wonder sometimes if it's more like treating the vehicles as horses rather than boxes of death, or something similar: it's a markedly different mode.

I imagine his point is that self-driving cars rely on the robotic driving customs of parts of the West to do as well as they do, and that he's skeptical of these vehicles' ability to interact with more dynamic streetscapes filled with e-scooters, rickshaws, tuk-tuks, people carrying stuff, and so on.

(Source: living in China/Asia)

sewer_bird··on Ofo Beats a Retreat From the Dockless Bikesharing Battle
To be fair, most Ofo bikes in Shanghai have the same auto-unlock feature in later Marks... maybe about 75% of the ones I've tried.
sewer_bird··on Ofo Beats a Retreat From the Dockless Bikesharing Battle
Can corroborate, also in Shanghai: I had much preferred Ofo to the Mobikes because they were a 'normal bike' without a belt chain. But then... time passed and rain poured, rusting up the chains and riders bending the wheels in innovative ways. Sometimes I'll luck out on a fresh Ofo bike, and then it's fine, but for every one of those there are 8 bikes I have to ditch because the chain won't go back on or the wheel isn't even planar.
sewer_bird··on Ask HN: How do you keep checklists?
Indeed! I keep my to-do lists in vim and have added a few lines to my syntax file to recognize/color a couple extra checkmarks like

- [?] question - [o] blocked by someone else - [~] in progress - [H] on hold - [Y] Is X true? (yes) - [N] Is Y true? (no)

sewer_bird··on Booze, Sex, and the Dark Art of Dealmaking in China (2015)
It can be both. The article says there's the idea of sussing out that the different businessmen are "the same kind of person" with similar 'desires'. That's why the article mentions cases of men trying to signal wanting to have wanton sex, but actually going to lengths to not engage in it.
sewer_bird··on Kubernetes Containerd Integration Goes GA
Indeed, K8s is a numeronym[0] for K(ubernete)s.

[0] Compare i18n, g11n, and i10n https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numeronym

sewer_bird··on How to write a spelling corrector (2016)
"But they didn't, and come to think of it, why should they know about something so far outisde their specialty?"

Outside ;)

sewer_bird··on Windows 7 patch for Meltdown enabled arbitrary reads and writes in kernel memory
I think he means Linux kernel developers hate (their own) solution for Meltdown.
sewer_bird··on Wyoming Passes Forward-Thinking Computer Science Education Bill
They do: there's a very prominent amount of windmills along the I-80 in Carbon County that's quite a sight to drive by :)

http://www.uwyo.edu/werc/wind-wyo.html

sewer_bird··on Who will be remembered in 1,000 years?
A total extinction event is pretty unlikely: a nuclear war could perhaps end our civilization, but there'd still be folks around, even if their lives were harder. It's believed that we've already as a species gone through a very small population bottleneck, and homo sapiens can probably survive a nuclear war of even the worst kind.

That said, a thousand years is a long time to research a Death Star I suppose.

sewer_bird··on Racing for Realism
Could be: a lot of the 'branding' of the actor these days is about curating what films they show up in. Like, if Johnny Depp is in a movie, you know generally what kind of film it'll be. The AA (Artificial Actor, haha) would benefit from having an agent, much like real actors, to keep consumers' meta-dissonance down.

That said, actors swap between wildly disparate roles all the time and no one seems to care!

sewer_bird··on New Model Warns About Crispr Gene Drives in the Wild
Reminds me of this Guardian article investigating such a plan to combat Zika, Dengue, and so on: https://www.theguardian.com/global/2016/feb/10/should-we-wip...
sewer_bird··on Universities spend millions on accessing results of publicly funded research
One can feel sympathy for someone without absolving them. If they're so desperate, then why deny them their moral agency as well?
sewer_bird··on Lost Einsteins: The Innovations We’re Missing
I don't see a contradiction between Equality of Opportunity and welfare programs. Indeed, they seem to be proposed hand-in-hand by most people, so I'll set aside for a moment the emotional content of your argument.

I do not see how invoking 'authoritarian capitalism' serves as a refutation that cultures of human beings creates winners and losers.

The distinction to make here is that Equality of Outcome requires everyone to have the same outcome. Feeling as you must do, surely you would prefer a reduction in inequality, not mandatory equality?

sewer_bird··on Lost Einsteins: The Innovations We’re Missing
Equality of outcome's implication is a culture engaging in an authoritarian and quixotic pursuit of perfect human misery. It is hard enough to ensure a specific outcome for yourself, let alone another, and even less so to make two people come out exactly the same. Equality of opportunity at least acknowledges that culture produces winners and losers.
sewer_bird··on From Markdown to remote code execution in Atom
The central dilemma is that there are myriad ways to do it wrong for every one way to do it correctly.
sewer_bird··on Qwant, a European search engine that respects your privacy
I think I switched to DDG perhaps 5 months ago, although I'm not sure. Happy ducking, hah!
sewer_bird··on Qwant, a European search engine that respects your privacy
DGG has about as much red on it as Hacker News: is it such a heavy use of color? At least on desktop in Safari, the site is pretty 'white', and I'm surprised you get literal physical anxiety.
sewer_bird··on China Forces Norway to Adhere to ‘One China’ Policy
"who is still to this day behind bars while his wife is enduring a strict house arrest."

Liu Xiabo is since dead, actually: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/13/opinion/liu-xiaobo.html

sewer_bird··on Show HN: A simple, tiny Vim and kilo-inspired editor
"feels like Vim, just different enough for you to be frustrated" is true, but I like the Lua built-in: it's a fantastic language for this kind of thing, and feels more inviting to a new plugin-writer than, say, Vimscript might.
sewer_bird··on Japan Is Selling Ice Cream That Doesn't Melt
It's a plot device from Kurt Vonnegut's book "Cat's Cradle". It's a good read if you're looking for a recommendation
sewer_bird··on The R. Kelly ‘cult’ story and the ‘Gawker Effect’
If you're not even going to source/verify some hearsay, why bring it up, especially in such an equivocating way?
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