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vacrion Why ProtonMail is more secure than Gmail

> ProtonMail takes the opposite approach and by default, does not monitor or record user activity, not even IP addresses.

Hrm, where's the pricing? Oh, it's based on "Messages per day" and "Folders / Labels"...

This doesn't detract from the meat of the article, but when user activity is involved in the pricing, you clearly can't claim 'no activity monitoring'.

vacrion 11-year-old girl inspired by Flint water crisis creates cheap kit to test lead

So the head of a science department should be snubbed because they're supported by a team doing work for them? Since when did science become A Pursuit Of The Lone Hero?

vacrion Memoir of Growing Up Fat Forces France to Look in the Mirror

... and from your link, almost all the countries were over 20% in 1975 as well. Plenty of them have barely changed.

> but the rate is still up more than 20% since 1975. 18.5% for adults in 1975 vs 21.8% in 2016

Nitpick: a rise of 20% on that 18.5% would make it 22.2%

Edit: I'm also not sure why the 20% marker seems to be your cutoff for "having an obesity problem". Ethiopia's famous famine went from 1983-85, yet their obesity rate for '85 is 18.7%. That seems to be an awful thin line to walk, where 18.7% marks a famine and 20% marks obesity problem.

Similarly, the Second Congo War went from 1999 to 2003 and almost 4 million people died, mostly from famine.. yet throughout that, the Democratic Republic of the Congo maintained obesity rates above 20% in your link.

vacrion Memoir of Growing Up Fat Forces France to Look in the Mirror

So of your 'six' citations, [1] is a book I don't have access to, [2] and [4] aren't citations at all, and [5] and [6] has nothing to say about companies getting better at their thing.

It doesn't say much for 'being easy' when you have to pad out your list of six with two non-citations, two irrelevant citations, and a difficult-to-source one.

> When you eventually provide evidence for your claim that people exercise their willpower less, I won't require citations for everything.

"When I give you evidence, you won't require evidence"?

> I hope this is enough evidence for you.

It's worth noting that I didn't demand evidence for the original claim; I only demanded it as an illustrative point to people that were demanding it of me.

vacrion Tesla Strikes Deal With Shanghai to Build Factory in China

There is - just don't do your business in China or the US if you want that. Most developed countries fall in-between those two extremes.

Of course, the disadvantage is that it'll be harder for you to crack the lucrative American market...

vacrion Memoir of Growing Up Fat Forces France to Look in the Mirror

> evidence of plausibility is easy to come up with.

Cool, it's easy: then provide some, please. Provide some citations for it rather than just accepting the common knowledge, since common knowledge is often wrong.

> asking for evidence means giving you the chance to show that you have convincing reasons for your opinion.

No. Asking someone for more information, or asking someone to round out the idea more is giving the chance to show convincing reasons. Asking bluntly for a citational proof is mere dismissal.

vacrion Memoir of Growing Up Fat Forces France to Look in the Mirror

Yeah, "I doubt that" is a claim set in concrete that requires support, whereas "A possibility" requires no support for any claim at all.

I made no claim about greater moral fiber, but if you think that past generations didn't "make do with less", you're now making an extraordinary against-the-grain claim. So, "give us a citation proving why you should be suspicious of that comment". See how annoying that is?

vacrion Memoir of Growing Up Fat Forces France to Look in the Mirror

Jeez, talking about begging the question. No, not 'essentially every culture in every country worldwide' has an obesity problem, so your strawman doesn't even fit.

vacrion Memoir of Growing Up Fat Forces France to Look in the Mirror

Why are you asking for evidence for my claim, and not the parent's "another possibility"?

I'm getting tired of this new fad of dismissing someone's comment by demanding evidence for it.

vacrion Fact Checks

But your examples aren't 'facts', they're 'opinions'. Unless we're going to just throw away the definition of 'fact', we shouldn't be pretending that those example claims can possible be 'fact'.

vacrion Memoir of Growing Up Fat Forces France to Look in the Mirror

> I doubt people's willpower has changed much over time.

I doubt that peoples' capacity for willpower has changed, but that the exercise of that capacity has. There's a lot less personal discipline than there used to be, across the board, and the less you exercise your personal discipline, the harder it is when you try to.

vacrion Parents are exhausting their children. An eighth-grade boy explains how

Teenagers are minors, but not "children". Painting them as "children" leads to silly things like a 16-year-old being considered a child right up until birthday 17, at which point they can join the army.

Holes appear in the story in the article when things like "seven straight hours" - do kids not get lunch or recess breaks anymore? It's clear the teen is overstating the case to make it sound worse. That doesn't mean there's no problem to address, but I wouldn't take the statement on face value. I'm also not sure I'd take that letter as typical (for an adult, let alone a young teen), given the quality of the prose.

vacrion Ubuntu 17.10 Artful Aardvark released

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/?field.tag=unity8-desktop&...

They look like they have only had half a dozen bugs lodged in the last six months. Doesn't seem too vibrant for an actively-developed desktop.

vacrion The latest experiment in basic income will be coming to Stockton, California

If those things aren't charity, then let the red states relinquish the extra money they get from the blue states (+ texas), and see what happens to their police and other government services.

I am playing a little fast and loose with the definition of charity, yes, but so is the OP. "Charity" isn't "free money for you to play with" (that's "philanthropy"), it's "giving help to those who need help". Governments in the developed world have significant welfare costs, so it is just plain wrong that charity isn't the role of government.

vacrion Ubuntu 17.10 Artful Aardvark released

If they're going to do that, they may as well just drop the dot.

vacrion What you should know as a founder of a software company

Apple got to where it is (=more liquid cash than the US government) off the back of good looks and fashion.

vacrion What you should know as a founder of a software company

> are likely focused on selling or some core feature set that is hard to create

Isn't this what "their clients often have no other choice" means?

vacrion The latest experiment in basic income will be coming to Stockton, California

> Charity is not a legitimate role for government.

Charity is the raison d'être of government. A government is there to run your society. That means doing things for people, even if it's just printing passports and employing a police department.

vacrion Uber is charging drivers to work

Duolingo is not a game, but a language learning app. One of the most important parts of learning a language is to stick at it. The payoff for taking Duolingo's bet is that you get better at the language that you're using Duolingo for in the first place. Whereas for games, the only real payoff for winning at them is bragging rights.

vacrion Students learn more effectively from print textbooks than screens, study says

Yes, digital textbooks can have all those nifty things, but usually don't. And cross-referencing something in a digital textbook? Forget about it. In a paper book it's so much easier to flip back to check something out than in a digital textbook - even more so if you're quickly flipping back and forth comparing passages, or comparing between books. Textbooks work in most lighting conditions, don't need power/recharging, and don't have reflections of the overhead lights to distract you.

They both have their pros and cons, but the actual experience of digital textbooks falls far short of their promise.

vacrion Ask HN: Burned out 21 year old software developer, what's next?

#1: Realise that work is the way of the world. You'll need to get used to it. If you're burnt out after only 18 months at a job (and it's not the fault of a bad job etc), that's a problem you're going to have to solve at some point, because you have decades of work ahead of you.

#2: But you don't have to solve it now. Go travelling while you're young, healthy, and presumably have few significant commitments. It's not guaranteed, but you'll likely get more insight into what you want to do next while travelling as well.

vacrion 75% decline over 27 years in total flying insect biomass in protected areas

> Aside from buying ammo or survival rations, what's something proactive that I can do?

Yep, stop focusing on the movie-style end-of-the-world apocalypse, where it's just you and your guns versus the raiders. Instead of planning what you're going to do when it all turns to crap, do stuff now. In short, fix the world you're in, rather than planning for a world which really isn't going to happen.

Talking to politicians is the first thing you can do - if they don't hear the noise, they're never going to do anything about it, and they're the decision-makers. Change your behaviours as other commentators have stated. Talk to your friends so they at least have heard the issue.

But don't pretend that you're going to go off into the woods and survive like in a movie - if society ever did go that far, then you're fucked anyway - no doctors, no hospitals, no emergency services, no entertainment, no travel, so on and so forth. Few of us are actually comfortable with the idea of living permanently off the land (those survival rations won't last very long).

vacrion Photo of butchered rhino is this year's Wildlife Photographer of the Year winner

Baby rhinos don't have horns (they grow a bit like hair), and these are not domestic animals. It's like saying "why not tag all the mountain lions in the US, then you know where they all are".

vacrion A convicted felon who became a Georgetown law professor

> He was 21. People calm down and mellow out as they get older; violent crime is the purview of young people.

This is one thing that is so often overlooked. Someone who is violent at 21 and gets a long sentence doesn't come back out at age 21.

> and all of us harbor the potential for violence under the right circumstances.

My mother said she could never hurt someone, in response to some article or other on the news. I said "yes you would - if I was about to be killed by an assailant, you wouldn't hold back". She then amended her position to outside of that situation, she could never hurt someone... :)

vacrion MailChimp vs. Amazon SES – How I Reduced My Monthly Bill

As gardnr says, you need to solve this problem by involving the clients. Trying to fix this without some DNS fiddling is going to waste your time and you'll have nothing to show for it.

The world changes, and adaptation requires maintenance. 10 years ago is almost half the age of the web ago. This is more a business decision - do you let those accounts rot - than it is a technical decision. Because the business decision needs to include support time for user interaction.

vacrion How to set up continuous deployment using free hosted tools

Another very happy buildkite user here. It's extremely flexible and the crew just keep adding feature after feature.

vacrion The pitfalls of A/B testing in social networks

For [2], the analysis is a bit off. For the mix/max age settings, there's not all that much difference between men and women for max age - for example a 30yo has a max partner age of 36 regardless of gender, and a 45yo has a max partner age of 50 regardless of gender. The difference in settings is in the min setting - and neither men nor women have the same range below as above (men quite a lot more, women a moderate amount less). Men never have an equal settings range above and below, and women don't hit an equal settings range until their 40s.

When it comes to actual messaging activity, both graphs show a 'belly' of preferring to message younger partners (except near the origin); it's just that the men's one is considerably more pronounced. Both genders are sending a lot of messages to people younger than their own minimum settings, too.

In general I liked the OKC data articles, but this particular one always seemed to me like they were forcing a story onto the data.

vacrion Were There Dark Ages?

Meh. In Roman times, France, Germany, Spain, and the British Isles were all relative backwaters (Germany not even that) that didn't have much innovation anyway, so considering those places 'darker' in 500-1000CE is somewhat misleading. Culture, money, and learning was in the central mediterranean and eastern Roman empire.

vacrion Infineon RSA Key Generation Issue

There's going to be little fallout for the users of this ID card. It's too expensive to break for all but the juiciest of targets - the people that need to worry are folks in enterprise and government.

vacrion Infineon RSA Key Generation Issue

> or any other of the vastly cheaper alternatives

On how many of these vastly cheaper alternatives is it possible to simply spin up a fleet of a thousand machines?