throwway120385

Most of Dang's day is spent shuttling HN titles into the archives in a salt mine in Nevada in between moderation.

Some day you might need the welfare. Not everyone is infinitely healthy for their entire lives.

We could actually hold our elected officials accountable for gutting Social Security instead. Then we wouldn't have to add "stock exchange expert" to our ever-growing list of job titles.

I think if we hadn't we would've figured it out anyway. Someone would have found them interesting enough to study.

Free trade isn't the issue, the issue is monopolies. When there were 60 or 80 companies all in the same industry but in different states or counties, the economy was much healthier because those 80 companies had to have their own independent staff for functions like accounting. And they also had to compete with each other at the edges of their jurisdictions. None of them could become powerful enough to set policy across the nation and if a corporate policy was beneficial to the consumer, one of their competitors could enact it to compete. Now that there are only 2 or 3 nationwide providers of most things, those companies can just set their own policies whether hostile or not and the only control we have is regulation.

If you want to eliminate regulation and promote free trade then the best thing you can do is oppose the formation of monopolies and encourage enforcement of anti-trust everywhere.

> Can you blame them? Would you sue if the government suddenly decided your industry has to pay extra taxes, or they tried to restrict your advertising?

No. I'd probably try to understand the purpose of the tax and what it was being used to fund, but a lawsuit wouldn't be my first stop. There are plenty of industries that get new taxes all the time and don't cry about it. Frankly the behavior on display here is right out of the Phillip Morris playbook on "how to keep profiting from a product you know is terrible for the people you're selling it to."

In the 50's you'd buy it in an 8-oz can. The sizes we're getting out of vending machines are pretty absurdly large for something that basically started out as a dessert you'd buy to top off your small sandwich and cup of water for lunch.

"Heat" is really entropy gain, and so in order to do useful work you have to increase the entropy of the system to higher and higher quantities. If you want to move entropy from one closed system to another(to cool one system down) then you must emplace even more entropy in the one system than you removed from the other because you must spend entropy(generate heat) in order to force a change in the state of the other system. It's a fundamental law of physics. You cannot reduce the entropy of the universe by any means.

This is true whether you use an engine, a river, or a solid-state fully electronic device. Even humans must obey this law, and indeed there has to be some air movement for us to cool down using our sweat, and interrupting or changing that air movement costs energy and therefore increases entropy somewhere.

We could easily create a duty at the state or local level if we wanted to. The US Constitution is pretty silent on a lot of issues that are remanded to the states.

Two egg rolls is also a meal by calorie content.

Maybe we could take a page from the SWEBOK here, which contains a lot of previous thinking on this topic.

Just putty over it and get a slightly matching high-gloss or semi-gloss enamel and nobody will notice it. I've put tons of holes in things in rentals over the years and basically nobody will care as long as you restore it to like condition when you leave.

This is a killer use case, but you should also take a peek at the Human Factors Handbook -- it's got great information about how to architect buildings like homes that will help you avoid some pitfalls I've seen in custom homes that I've been the second owner of.

USB-C would suck. Part of the purpose of that proprietary plug is that it's very water resistant and very durable. Imagine getting mud or coarse sand in your USB plug and not being able to charge anymore.

Because a vaccine is much easier for the doctor to administer and manage. My GP won't put condoms on me but they do have a list of shots I get basically once and then never again.

Which medications were they trying to get? Plan B or something that works later?

ApplePay doesn't communicate with Apple through your phone, it presents the card details as a contactless EMV transaction through the card reader, so it's pretty much spot on as an example of how this should work.

Just so you know, EMV can work entirely offline if you need it to, because the reader has the public keys that the card requires to authenticate and vice-versa. ApplePay uses the same NFC standard as regular EMV contactless cards to communicate, it just happens to be a powered microprocessor instead of a radio-powered microprocessor but that's about the only difference. The smart card standard is really old and covers the exact use case of "what happens if I need to use this thing without the Internet because the Internet wasn't ubiquitous when it was developed.

You can use pipe dope instead of PTFE if you want. It's just more expensive.

It's perfectly legal in the US. In fact it's legal to lean out your window and yell at them. It's protected speech here, and for good reason. Otherwise the cops could just say your speech made them feel disrespected and you could get penalized. The first amendment in the US has been interpreted pretty broadly to protect a lot of speech that in other countries could get you fines or jailtime.

It's hard to justify an iPhone Pro Max as a "cheap travel phone" though so you might actually need to buy a cheap travel phone.

What makes someone a monster in my book is their willingness to depersonalize other people to accomplish their goals. I haven't met Qiu and this is the only article I've read about him. What I think is that he did something really horrible. But was it because he was racing to be first, damn the risks, or did he really believe that his gene therapy would work based on the evidence he had?

A lot of institutional review and peer review is in place to prevent people from making mistakes like believing that they have a powerful, low-risk gene editing technique and that they can simply apply it at will. The most generous interpretation is that Qiu really thought he could do it, and that even if the side effects happened that he would be able to control them and save the daughter.

I didn't read it as making the doctor a monster. What I saw in the story is an example of how the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

You really shouldn't apply statistics this way. Expected value is useful if you're an insurance company because you can price insurance products slightly above the expected value, but if the fine is $100, batteries are $90, and you get fined after going on 10 bike rides the fine doesn't magically become $10 it's still $100 and you still could've saved $10 by spending $90 before getting on your bike. That is, unless you put $10 in a piggy bank every time you get on your bicycle, and then at that point why not put $90 down and then pay yourself back $9 per ride with $1 of interest?

Another fun fact is that it was impossible to deduce from any of Ben Franklin's experiments what material was transferred and what material remained in place to give rise to "charge" as we think of it. So he picked a convention that we've continued to use even after we learned that his negative charges were the material that gets transferred by friction.

Nvidia's software support remains "best in class" so they've become the default for a lot of this stuff. To overcome that I think you'd have to get a lot of hobbyists and by extension interested young people using your hardware instead of Nvidia. So you'd have to have good software support, decent hardware, and low hardware cost. People started with Nvidia because most machines had an Nvidia card in them, and Nvidia's software support was carried-over momentum from how they've supported their GPUs with PC gaming. I've tried AMD, for example, and the compatibility matrices and bugs and just general lacking software support for ML on their hardware makes it a total non-starter. It may be a lot better with current-generation stuff but it's going to take a lot for me to trust AMD for ML.

I'm more excited about the future partnership between Oscar Meyer and Intel. Behold the future of meat.

What's different is that the period tracker apps have women provide that information pretty directly. The data broker probably had to do a lot of work and then estimate with a confidence level. So there's a significant difference in level of effort there, and then because of the estimate the data becomes much less valuable because it's only plausible it's not certain.

This argument gets trotted out whenever people talk about privacy and protection of personal information. I hear it when people discuss LPR systems, cameras, and the like too.

These data-gathering applications of technology should be treated specially because they make it extremely easy to gather high-confidence data about individuals. I bet your data broker couldn't predict when someone was ovulating or whether they were pregnant or count how many miscarriages they had just based on purchase history? This is all data that period tracker apps capture pretty directly. The miscarriages one is particularly bad because that data could be misconstrued as abortion and in US states where that's illegal it could get you into real trouble. There's a small but vocal subset of the population that seems to want to punish women for anything other than a healthy delivery. But when my spouse and I were trying everyone we talked to had at least one if not more miscarriage stories.

Does it generate the same extremely fat binaries? I've seen Go binaries get into hundreds of megabytes for things you could do with C/C++ with a few megabytes. Most of it seemed to be string tables and other things that could be reduced but not eliminated with compression.

My truck will actually play MP3s off of a data CD. Maybe I should try that.

We really need to finish the Gollop Chamber.