thecyborganizer

xkcd explored this question. too fuel-inefficient to be practical. much better to use that same fuel to run a giant snowblower (and move the snow rather than melt it).

https://what-if.xkcd.com/130/

An enormous amount - see, for example, this study: https://www.voteriders.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/CDCE_V...

About 10% of eligible voters don't have the ID they would need. The people most likely to lack proper ID for voting are young, Black or Hispanic, and poor.

Lots more details in the report!

Total nonsense, there are no studies that link colic to formula feeding. Some newborns have digestive problems with formula; some newborns have digestive problems with breast milk. Formula digestive problems can sometimes be helped by switching to a different formulation, while breast milk digestive problems can sometimes be helped by changing the diet of the breastfeeding parent.

And there are sources of colic that have nothing to do with digestion - a quick perusal of WebMD lists noise/light sensitivity, nervous system misfires, and baby migraines (poor babies)!

Colic certainly might be an indicator that something is not quite right, but that doesn't mean there's always something you can do about it. As I write this with my exhausted newborn son sleeping in my arms, sometimes you just have to wait for them to grow out of it.

EDIT: I looked into this a little more since I'm pinned by a sleepy baby and as with everything with babies it's complicated. Here's a study that shows that formula-fed babies cry more at 2 weeks than breast-fed babies, but less at 6 weeks: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10193923/

This is probably also hindered by the fact that "colic" is an imprecise term - all babies cry, but at a certain point if they cry enough you call it "colic".

It would be safe and effective if we had a mechanism of distributing nuclear waste evenly throughout the entire volume of the Earth's oceans. But we don't have that and that's impossible to build!

Dumping nuclear waste into the ocean will, mathematically, result in a globally acceptable concentration of nuclear waste in ocean water - but it will be locally problematic for wherever we put it, and that's assuming it stays put.

As a doctor, why bother spending your time learning about exotic foreign cancer treatments that aren't available in your country, and your patients couldn't afford if they were?

It would be nice if doctors did anyway, but I can certainly understand why they wouldn't.

I shared this with my spouse, who worked for an ag startup in Boston (still exists, different leadership, who knows what they're up to now). They had this to say on the matter:

One big competitive advantage of [company] was that we were able to hire smart, young ag scientists, especially LBGTQ+ ones, who wanted to live in a big, queer-friendly city. We had a lot of great people who were really excited that they didn't have to live in Davis or Ithaca, as well as people whose partners' careers tied them to a big city in some way (doctors, lawyers, finance).

(They would also add UMich, University of Minnesota, and the Research Triangle in NC to your list.)

Paying a fee per job done, rather than a wage per hour of labor, is literally the entire point of the gig economy. Uber/DoorDash/etc. claim this is a perk, since you can set your own hours.

However, food delivery gig workers in New York City and a few other places have recently successfully won the right to earn a fixed minimum wage: https://www.thecity.nyc/2023/09/28/minimum-hourly-pay-court-...

From STYLE.TXT:

  - True=7 -

  Having lots of very low-level code and hardware experience, I developed a bit
  of tendancy to "minimize what can go wrong at low levels" - C treats 0==FALSE
  and !0==TRUE - most people use 0/1 ... but thats only 1 bit "difference".  I
  sometimes use 7=TRUE as thats 3 bits with no more chars to type (and of course
  foolish as such a 1 bit hardware error would "trash" pretty much any system -
  but I do tend to be a creature of habit :)

I have never heard of this convention before! Was "random bitflips messing with your conditionals" a common problem back in the day?

You can use Transit App in many cities around the world other than New York! It's a great piece of software, I rely on it heavily when navigating unfamiliar transit systems while traveling.

https://transitapp.com/region#all-regions

The mugger is a deontologist, right? We're already assuming that he'll keep his promises.

they do!

https://www.nps.gov/planyourvisit/veterans-and-gold-star-fam...

Your high school debates were judged by a jury of your peers?

We had a bored teacher on their day off. (Or sometimes a parent, or an alumni.)

New-in-box Pebbles can still be found on eBay, and a clone of Pebble's web services is actively maintained and supported by the Rebble community: https://rebble.io/

"The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" - John Maynard Keynes

If you tell a Czech that they live in Eastern Europe, they will get very upset! They consider themselves to be in Central Europe.

I learned this the hard way!

I don't know if they have explicit partnerships, but it's certainly a program that case workers in the foster care system are aware of. My foster daughter's case worker explored it with her as one of a range of options after high school. (She ended up just getting a regular job instead.)

I'd be really curious to know how it works out for former foster youth who try it. On the one hand I can imagine the structure and support to be really valuable to kids who have been in the foster care system. On the other hand foster youth often benefit most from systems that can give them lots of second chances and can work with them to meet their individual needs, and I don't know if that's something Job Corps can offer.

Some doctors are like you're describing. I posit that the best doctors are ones who realize that the domain of "health" is broad and encompasses things that aren't germs.

Geiger believed that the greatest threat to public health of his day was nuclear war, so he founded an organization (Physicians for Social Responsibility) to try to stop it, because he thought that would be more effective than waiting for the bombs to fall and trying to treat the victims.

You can disagree with his assessment, or the efficacy of his methods, but it's pretty unfair to dismiss them as "nonsense".

Dr. H. Jack Geiger famously wrote prescriptions for groceries out of his clinic in Mississippi - when challenged on the practice, he replied, "Yeah, well, the last time I looked in my medical textbooks, they said the specific therapy for malnutrition was food."

The best doctors understand that a patient is an entire person, not just some specific problem or disease. Sometimes that means considering factors in their life other than the obvious direct medical causes of their problems. Sometimes that might include the availability of treatments, based on cost or location.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._Jack_Geiger

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/28/health/h-jack-geiger-dead...

Wilson discusses her choices in the translation of that first line in great detail in this interview for the New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/02/magazine/the-first-woman-...

You're welcome to disagree, but I find her choices fascinating, and I loved her translation. (I read the Fagles translation in school and liked that one as well.)

18 USC 1702 only applies if you are opening someone else's mail because you want to "obstruct the correspondence, or to pry into the business or secrets of another". Presumably the courts have determined that this does not apply to prison officials opening mail addressed to prisoners.

Your state certainly has a law permitting letters sent to prisoners to be opened and inspected. Mine does:

  Incoming mail may be opened, inspected for contraband and read by authorized institutional staff within the guidelines set forth in this policy.

- RI Department of Corrections policy 24.01-7, 1.4.1.B.2 (authorized by RI General Laws 42-56-1)

The customers who deposited $150 million expect some rate of return on their deposits - in fact, you promised it to them. In a year that $150 million needs to turn into $155 million or whatever.

So you need to lend it out, and charge interest, and use that interest income on your loans to pay the interest on your deposits.

Sounds like SVB made a lot of loans or investment purchases quickly, and then some of those went bad.

Isn't a rooftop water-cooling radiator just a swamp cooler? Common in dry climates.

I currently work in the laser engraving industry, and I can confirm everything you've said to be true. However, I wanted to let you know about some extremely cool technology that I had the opportunity to experiment with a year ago or so. Some companies have developed optics with adaptive focus that use liquid lenses to mark beyond a 10mm depth-of-field - see https://www.optotune.com/technology/focus-tunable-lenses for an example, and https://youtu.be/ss-tkXcClMk for a video of the system in action.

I still don't think it would work well for your purposes - borosilicate just doesn't mark well, and you'd need to start with an accurate 3D model of the object - but I hope you enjoy the video!

(And thanks for writing the book!)

There's some interesting game theory at work here. I remember learning in the early days of ransomware that the hackers would typically provide excellent customer service to the targets. They'd always promptly respond to emails or phone calls, and they'd even walk you through the process of buying Bitcoin to send. The premise was that you'll get the highest revenues if you make it as easy as possible for people to pay you - and establish a reputation for actually unlocking the data once you're paid!

Of course, just taking the money and running is a much higher-margin business, but it relies on that established reputation-building. Maybe a good analogy is counterfeit sellers on Amazon.

I initially posted this story last week, and it didn't get much attention - curiously, the next day I received an email from dang asking that I repost it! From the email:

This is part of an experiment in giving good HN submissions multiple chances at the front page. If you have any questions, let us know. And if you don't want these emails, sorry! Tell us and we won't do it again.

The victim list is a good idea, but it wouldn't have prevented this shooting - the victim in this case was simply the hapless individual living at the former address of the intended target (who gave that address to the swatter).

The victim list did recently prevent the attempted swatting of Seattle author Ijeoma Oluo: https://www.newsweek.com/author-so-you-want-talk-about-race-...

This seems ethically dubious at best, and inhumane at worst.

The 2nd amendment has the second largest lobbying organization in the country looking out for it. It doesn't need help from the ACLU.