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ubernostrum

12,994 karma · joined June 4, 2008

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ubernostrum··on Antitrust, the App Store, and Apple
How does Apple get a 30% cut out of me using Netflix? If I want Netflix, I go to netflix.com, sign up and give them payment information, and then use my browser, or Netflix apps on phones, TVs, etc. The Netflix iOS app is listed as free to download. Where is Apple's 30% cut of my Netflix subscription coming from?

Same for Amazon's Kindle and video apps. Same for Spotify's app. The trend there seems to be they make the app free, and let you sign up and pay for their service on their own website (which you can do in Safari on iOS, if you want to). So I don't understand how Apple's "skimming" anything out of those apps -- 30% of $0 is $0.

ubernostrum··on Why Most of America Is Terrible at Making Biscuits
Metrication in the US and UK are very similar. The US has an actual federal law on the books declaring metric to be the official system of weights and measures nationwide.

And... we still use a mix of systems, including in "official" things like road signage. In much the same way, Brits still order beer by the pint, read their speedometers in miles per hour, etc. etc.

ubernostrum··on Parliament seizes cache of Facebook internal papers
Sending them in town has no close equivalent in the US, maybe threatening someone to be in Contempt of the Supreme Court.

The US House of Representatives and the US Senate also have Sergeants at Arms:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergeant_at_Arms_of_the_United...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergeant_at_Arms_of_the_United...

There have been multiple occasions in recent decades when, in theory, either house of Congress could have resorted to enforcement of a Congressional subpoena by sending its Sergeant at Arms to arrest the non-responsive party. The most recent occurrence was early in Trump's term when several of his high officials refused to appear before Congressional committees which sought to question them; there was talk of whether Congress would provoke a showdown by issuing and enforcing subpoenas. And a court ruling during the George W. Bush administration confirmed Congress could compel members of the executive branch to appear and answer questions:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-congress-bush-idUSN31...

ubernostrum··on Why Most of America Is Terrible at Making Biscuits
And we wish you'd learn that not every Latin-derived word with a long "e" spelled it "oe" or "ae". And that you'd stop insisting on "dual carriageway" as a term for roads that have only ever existed in the age of internal combustion. And that you'd learn what a jumper actually is. And how to pronounce the letter "r". And that you'd understand that if you've "lost a stone" it means a jewel fell out of your ring, not that you're on a diet. And for that matter, that you'd pick a system of weights and measures and stick to it. And that you'd clarify whether there is in fact any type of food in existence that cannot somehow be classed as "pudding".

And... well, shall we go on?

ubernostrum··on What a Real Train System Looks Like (2009)
Acela carries (per Wikipedia's cited source) around 3.5M passengers per year.

From Washington Dulles airport, approximately 265k passengers per year fly to Boston. Another 715k fly DCA-BOS. DCA-LGA accounts for 318k. DCA-JFK, IAD-LGA and IAD-JFK do not crack top-ten lists of busiest domestic routes for their origins.

To get a feel for just Acela (which is not the only Northeast Corridor train service), it's slightly less than the annual passenger volume by air SFO-LAX, SFO-JFK and SFO-BOS combined.

The entire Northeast Corridor carries approximately 12M passengers per year. If it were operated by air, it would be the second-busiest route in the world by passenger volume, slotting between CJU-GMP in Korea (13M/year) and MEL-SYD in Australia (9M/year).

In 2012, the New York Times reported that 75 percent of travelers between New York and Washington used one of Amtrak's Northeast Corridor trains (Acela isn't the only one), and between New York and Boston 54 percent used a train:

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/16/business/hassles-of-air-t...

There certainly are things that could be improved. But Amtrak's operations in the northeast are not some hypothetical potential maybe-someday competitor to air travel. They are and for years have been a real and significant competitor to air travel.

And for what it's worth, Amtrak also has a farebox recovery ratio for its entire nationwide network that hovers around 95%, second in the US only to BART Oakland Airport Connector (96%).

ubernostrum··on 40M people with diabetes will be left without insulin by 2030, study predicts
You posted this comment using a network whose fundamental tech was developed in a government project. You posted it using a device descended from an original which was built as part of a government project, based on theories developed with no immediate profit motive.

Would you like to re-think whether it's possible to invent and develop important new things without immediate profit motive?

ubernostrum··on U.S. Federal Railroad Administration Legalizes Lightweight Train Cars
You probably want to watch this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPF4fBGNK0U

ubernostrum··on U.S. Federal Railroad Administration Legalizes Lightweight Train Cars
A lot of what's been happening with safety features is a steady trickle down from the high-end to the average consumer car of things like automatic emergency braking, lane-keeping systems and so on.
ubernostrum··on You Snooze, You Lose: Insurers Make the Old Adage Literally True
And you can deliberately or accidentally leave something out, yes, or go to other lengths to hide information.

The point was to be an illustrative example of why it can be useful for health-care providers to share information. HN, predictably, took it as a challenge to try to work around and find as many possible ways to hide the information as they could.

ubernostrum··on Ditching the MacBook Pro for a MacBook Air
If you were already carrying a 15" laptop plus full-size external keyboard plus mouse plus power brick for the laptop, a dongle is not much of a burden to add on. And many people who did that with USB-A machines tended to carry other accessories as well and end up with an external USB hub in the bag too.

I have a keyboard and mouse at my desk. I plug them into my laptop when I'm working at my desk. I don't carry them with me at all times, though, and I don't know many people who've ever done that.

ubernostrum··on An elevator in a Chicago skyscraper fell 84 floors, requiring a dramatic rescue
Relevant to your question: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyatt_Regency_walkway_collapse
ubernostrum··on You Snooze, You Lose: Insurers Make the Old Adage Literally True
A patient sees two doctors for different conditions.

The doctors prescribe different medications.

The patient goes to two different pharmacists to pick them up.

In a victory for privacy, the patient dies from a fatal interaction of the prescribed medications.

In the US there is a strong medical privacy law. And it includes an exception for providers of medical care to share treatment information with each other, for precisely this reason. Even so, every single time you see a doctor in the US, you are handed a notice saying they'll share information for permitted purposes (the triad of "TPO" -- Treatment, Payment, and Operations), and given a form to sign saying you have been made aware of this.

ubernostrum··on You Snooze, You Lose: Insurers Make the Old Adage Literally True
Since when did insurance companies become doctor advisors? That's very alarming.

If you want to, you can make this sound sinister. But it's pretty common, and the reason behind it is simple.

Many people who need medical care do not see a single doctor for all of their needs. They have a primary doctor, but also see one or more specialists, perhaps have occasional visits with a nurse, deal with a pharmacist, may sometimes need to go to a clinic that's open on a day they can't get an appointment with their regular primary doctor, etc. etc.

Out of that potentially large pool of providers, how many do you think are automatically and quickly sharing full records with the primary doctor? How many others of them receive that level of records from the primary doctor and from all the other providers? How many of them even know about all the others' existence?

This is a genuine problem, because it means that none of them see the full picture of the patient's health. They see isolated bits and pieces of it. And that's dangerous. Pharmacists get a reputation as the last line of defense for many people against different doctors -- ignorant of each others' existence -- unknowingly prescribing badly-interacting and possibly fatal combinations of medications to a single patient, for example.

In the US system (and this is not an endorsement of it), there is exactly one entity that sees everything: the payer (i.e., insurance). All of those providers want to get paid for their services, so every one of them submits claims to the payer, including details of diagnoses, procedures, and so on.

Given this status as the only entity which actually sees the whole picture, it makes a lot of sense to be sharing that information with the medical providers who see the patient. This is part of the original idea behind the HMO model of health insurance (where all the providers are a single super-entity coordinating with each other), though it comes with the widely-hated downside of being unable to see a doctor who isn't part of the HMO. And for many years, even PPO-model insurance plans have introduced more and more active collaboration with providers.

ubernostrum··on Sweden’s Push to Get Rid of Cash Has Some Saying, ‘Not So Fast’
The problem is that while it may be personally true for you in the country where you live over a short window of time, it's not generally true for the world. Internet outages are more common than demonetizations.
ubernostrum··on Sweden’s Push to Get Rid of Cash Has Some Saying, ‘Not So Fast’
Are you suggesting that demonetization of existing coins and notes is a more common occurrence than internet outages?
ubernostrum··on Django core no more
Possible I'm unusual, but I actually like writing documentation as a way to learn a new codebase.

When I started a new job earlier this year I actually jumped at the chance to grab some documentation tickets, because it meant I had to not just halfheartedly skim through the relevant code but actually read it in detail and understand what was going on.

(and, of course, I ended up finding a bug)

ubernostrum··on Apple iPhone Supplier Foxconn Planning Deep Cost Cuts
I guarantee there's something you spend money on that someone else would make this same comment about.
ubernostrum··on Apple iPhone Supplier Foxconn Planning Deep Cost Cuts
The price of a new, unlocked iPhone XR in the US right now appears to match the price of a new, unlocked iPhone 8 at this time last year.

It is generally the case that the standard current-year iPhone model takes over roughly the previous model's price point at release, and the now-previous-year model undergoes a price drop.

The introduction of a new tier (the higher-end, occupied last year by the X and this year by the XS) is a change, but has not done away with the iterations of "this year's model" and "last year's model" in the tiers below it.

ubernostrum··on Apple iPhone Supplier Foxconn Planning Deep Cost Cuts
iPhones without headphone jacks still come with a pair of earbuds; they just have a Lightning connector on the end of the cable instead of a 3.5mm audio plug.
ubernostrum··on Django core no more
If you know of something which is easy to set up, easy to administer, easy to use and provides better handling of multi-way threaded discussion, I'd be interested to hear about it.

(I know Python is experimenting with a forum-based solution, but I worry about the burden of both yet another account to create and site to check, and finding people to maintain and moderate it)

ubernostrum··on Django core no more
Not a fan of your word choice there.

But it's worth noting Instagram has been a generous corporate sponsor of the DSF, and hired a Django committer several years ago. I just don't know of any company that currently has employees paid to work on Django, in the same way that, say, several big tech companies pay people to work on various parts of the Linux ecosystem.

ubernostrum··on Django core no more
I'm extremely skeptical of any "just use platform/service/tool X" type of suggestion, largely because I've been doing this long enough to know that "just" needs to be in scare quotes and that often the claimed benefits don't materialize.

Django does need a place to store the tickets, and GitHub's tracker... is not great. I'd honestly want to look at adding OAuth or other easier signup/account management to Trac before I'd look at moving to GitHub issues.

ubernostrum··on NYC subway and bus services have entered 'death spiral', experts say
I think the point is that while you can find your pet example of an over-budget project, other people can find examples of projects that didn't have those problems.

Rushing to post "but what about the Second Avenue Subway" in any thread on this topic is not useful, since you've provided no evidence that it's representative enough to generalize to all infrastructure projects in all cities of all states of the US.

ubernostrum··on Django core no more
I have some ideas about how to improve that. But will probably be a little while before I can do anything with those ideas, since right now all my Django-related time is going into the governance proposal.
ubernostrum··on I’m leaving Mozilla
The process was pretty relaxed when I did it. But, again, this was 2011, so probably things have changed. Felt like it was a lot more about fit and trying to figure out which team/project I'd best slot into than it was about making me prove my abilities (though, they already knew my credentials in that department).

I was full-time remote for the entire ~4 years I was at Mozilla. It has upsides and downsides. Upside was an incredibly easy "commute" from my bedroom to the spare bedroom I'd converted into my office, and general lack of early-morning meetings (so I could keep the later hours that suit me a bit better). Downside was isolation. Even with communications channels available, and in-person gatherings a few times a year, remote work is isolating. It's also worth noting there is, or at least was, a ton of variance in what the experience was like depending on which org/team/project.

These days I work for a company that has an office around 20 miles away, but I work from home at least a couple days each week, mostly going in when there are meetings I want to attend in person. That seems to be a better fit for me.

ubernostrum··on I’m leaving Mozilla
Do you mean the process of applying and interviewing to work there, or what it's like being on one of the engineering teams there?

(though anything I know about it is probably out of date either day; I started there in 2011, and haven't worked there since 2015)

ubernostrum··on Chess World Championship: Stockfish live-analyzing game 7
/r/chess on reddit has been good at finding and linking useful commentary.

For example, here's a good move-by-move analysis of game 6, including (around the 33-minute mark) an explanation of the "missed" win:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4yzaG0Ia_fs

And tl;dr for those not following the match: a chess engine analyzing the game found a line Caruana could have used to force a win in game 6 (the actual result was a draw), but it required making such an unnatural and normally bad move (trapping his own knight in a corner) for a relatively distant payoff that commentators pretty much all agree no human would ever have spotted or played it in a live game.

Here's Garry Kasparov, for example:

https://twitter.com/Kasparov63/status/1063576827850096640

But had Caruana played the incredible 69.Bd5 Ne2 70.Bf3 Ng1!! they would request metal detectors immediately! No human can willingly trap his own knight like that.

ubernostrum··on Unscii – a bitmapped Unicode font for blocky graphics
The process of proposing and adding an emoji to Unicode is slower and less easy than you seem to think it is.
ubernostrum··on Why Google can’t technically do customer support (2011)
Google's reputation with their paid services which paying customers pay them payments to use isn't stellar, either. Basically it's them and PayPal in the finals of the candidates tournament to see who takes on US cable companies for the worst-customer-service championship.
ubernostrum··on UK austerity has inflicted 'great misery' on citizens, UN says
Considering that the youth unemployment rates there correlate with policies that didn't just involve "tightening" the belt but arguably cutting off all circulation, you might want to re-think that.

(much of Europe has been victimized by the cult of "austerity", and several countries have probably lost an entire generation's productivity thanks to these policies)

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