wfleming

The biggest, densest city in the country being below-median among other major cities for that stat still seems pretty good to me! Particularly since 1. NY is dragged above the national average on the cumulative stat by what are arguably “less severe” violent crimes (i.e. not murder, rape) and 2. Almost every city ranked better on that stat is very small comparatively, only two have >1M people. Every city that you could really consider a real peer of NY (LA, SF, Chicago, Miami, etc.) does worse.

Is this the list you were looking at [0]? NY is 20/100 for murder, 16/100 for rape, 40/100 for robbery (where 1 is safest). Below the national average for murder & rape according to [1] (above it for robbery, which isn’t great, but at 40/100 I’m guessing that robbery overall is more prevalent in cities and NY is still doing okay compared to other cities.)

Not sure what maps you’re looking at either, but visualizations of stuff like this sometimes mess up if they aren’t accounting for pop density well. NY is very big and very dense, over twice as many people as the next biggest (LA) and twice as dense as the next densest big (>1M people) city (Chicago). [2] (Note these are actual city boundaries comparisons, not metro area, which I believe is consistent with the crime stats used.)

I think the person you responded to is still technically wrong that “NY is the safest it’s ever been”. Crime rose nationally around 2020 and I think it’s only this year we’re starting to see pre-COVID crime levels again a lot of places. I think they were probably thinking of in comparison to the bad old days of the 70s, when NY was decidedly unsafe.

NY has problems like everywhere else. And with >8M people terrible things that make the news will happen every day even at below-average crime rates. But put in the perspective of large urban dense cities I feel like the city is kinda okay from a crime perspective.

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities... [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States [2]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities...

I recently watched the new Aliens remaster and actually thought it mostly looked very good. It was definitely a bit jarring at first because it doesn’t look like an 80s movie anymore: it’s too crisp. But once I got over the strangeness of it and realized some of my attachment to the original look was nostalgia I liked it. I do wish they’d kept more film grain, it’s a little too cleaned up, but it looks good nevertheless.

From what I’ve read the same team did all these Cameron remasters, and True Lies was the first one so they were still figuring some stuff out and it’s more flawed as a result. Haven’t seen it yet, though. But based on Aliens I’m interested in rewatching The Abyss.

I don’t want to sound like a snob, but Godzilla vs Kong looks pretty out of place on that list. Can I ask what put it on your list?

The joke on an old team of mine was that because there was always enough important/urgent work to keep us busy (partly because leadership treated too much as urgent), the important/not urgent stuff never happened, or never happened until it became urgent. Which leads to some problems. But I do think when you’re feeling overwhelmed with stuff it can be a useful categorization system for what you can put aside.

I saw a funny collision of imperial & metric measurements a while back. My BIL went through an Irish soda bread phase and wanted to learn to bake it himself. I suggested he find a recipe that used weight instead of volume, at least for ingredients like flour.

He went off and found a YouTube video by some Irish lady, tried her recipe, and was very disappointed with the result. I watched the video to help him debug and when this lady measured small quantities like salt and soda with a teaspoon she used an actual tea spoon, as in a spoon you’d use to make tea, not a “teaspoon” like a specifically-sized baking measuring implement.

So no wonder the recipe didn’t turn out for him, who knows what her “teaspoon” worked out to actually be. But it was very funny to me to run into this weird disconnect of a modern European “x grams of flour” combined with the very traditional “this spoon I happened to have in the drawer” (which of course is how measures like cups and teaspoons got started but I didn’t expect to see anyone use that approach in a published recipe this century).

> when it's not necessarily worse than previous tech

This is a good point, but on the other hand I think there is a notable difference between “the tool makes it hard to find the page with the correct info you need” and “the tool confidently gives you incorrect information without making it easy to audit accuracy”.

Well, ultimately, you pay for the rewards because merchants set their prices to account for what they expect to pay in payment processing, just like any other marginal cost.

Even loyalty programs like the card with stamps you might get at your local coffee shop got priced in somewhere along the way.

Sorcerer (1977) directed by William Friedkin (known for The Exorcist and The French Connection) is adapted from the same novel and is also great.

I also used a Safari for a long time and had the same frustration of “I don’t write quite often enough and it tends to dry up”. You might want to consider a TWSBI: I bought an ECO-T a while back and that thing does not dry up, they are extremely well sealed when the cap is screwed on. I also found I like the nib better than the Lamy, but that’s more a matter of taste.

Did they not leave a voicemail at least? Article doesn't seem to mention that one way or the other. I at least glance at voicemails from unknown numbers to determine if they're spam or not.

Similarly, I wrestled for years with getting good results out of Kodi/XBMC. It was mostly good but never entirely reliable and took a lot of fiddling to get to that stage. I recently switched to Jellyfin with the Android TV client app on my TV, and so far it’s been better results with almost zero fiddling.

I use a cheap-ish fountain pen regularly, and I think in some ways the fact that nobody "needs" a fountain pen (or any pen) much anymore is actually a contributing factor to this, for a few reasons.

1. Status symbols are frequently every-day objects elevated in some way. Montblanc pens were good status symbols to have on your desk when everyone used pens all the time, now they're anachronistic. So the upper end of the market shrinks as the item becomes less necessary.

2. Pens becoming less necessary for daily life makes them more of a hobby, and while people pretty much by definition are spending disposable income on a hobby they probably still have a budget in mind. Also, a lot of hobbies get kind of fuzzy between the hobby itself and collecting-as-a-hobby (is the hobby writing or is the hobby collecting pens?). A lot of people would rather own a small collection of affordable "pretty good" fountain pens with some differences between them instead of one really excellent pen.

3. The usual march of progress means a very good fountain pen can be manufactured for a lot less money than it could a few decades ago. That means businesses can serve that hobbyist market, and satisfy the craving for variety.

Same process that happens with lots of goods. Watches of any description used to be a luxury good, then cheap quartz movements were invented: the luxury market for Rolexes never went away, but a lot more people bought Timexes, and nobody really needs a watch anymore because we have cell phones, but there's still a hobbyist market. Nobody needs a turntable to play LPs anymore, but vinyl is a big hobby for probably a lot of the same nostalgia/"physical is good" reasons pens are a hobby, and you can get a very good sounding turntable today for a lot less money than you could 40 years ago.

Like a lot of stuff like this, it’s not that simple one way or the other.

Eggs are the usual example. US regulations require eggs to washed, removing a protective coating, which is why Americans refrigerate eggs. Many other developed nations forbid washing eggs with solutions that would remove the same protective coating, so eggs are frequently not refrigerated there because they don’t really need to be. The motivation in the US was avoiding salmonella, but other places have avoided that by improving cleanliness practices of the farms rather than washing their eggs.

Kind of different, but recent requirements to label foods containing sesame as an allergen led to more foods having sesame intentionally added, since it’s cheaper to add it intentionally and then label it than to prove the production facility and ingredients are 100% sesame free. It’s not removing some natural defense from a food, but that’s a regulation intended to help people with allergens stay safer which inadvertently decreased their options (and maybe made it more likely they’d buy something containing sesame by mistake if it was a product they’d been safe with before but had recently added sesame).

So I very much agree with you that the food regulations of the FDA and similar institutions in other countries are largely a blessing and huge boon to human welfare. It’s great to be confident my bread isn’t 50% sawdust and there probably isn’t melamine in my milk and stuff. But like any big regulatory environment mistakes have been made, and also sometimes regulations that made sense at one time outlive their usefulness.

It’s disappointing there doesn’t seem to be an easily available blog post or announcement (maybe I just didn’t find it), but the design doc lists a few motivations: https://github.com/ruby/prism/blob/main/docs/design.md

It looks like there was also a podcast interview last year that touches on the origins of the project: https://topenddevs.com/podcasts/ruby-rogues/episodes/the-new...

Reading between the lines it looks to me like this is motivated by ripper (the old parser) not being a great fit for tooling around ruby like IDE LSP integrations and such. Ripper isn’t fault tolerant (if the script has a a syntax error you don’t get a partial tree, just an exception); being implemented in ruby enough itself that it kind of depends on ruby which isn’t always convenient for integration (IDEs like vscode make plugins in JS easy, prism comes with node bindings), and maybe being enough of a crufty old code base that maintaining it and fixing those design issues was deemed impracticable.

Also worth noting if it wasn’t clear I’m pretty sure this parser is not being used or intended to be used for a ruby runtime to actually execute scripts, and that’s not what ripper was for either. This is for tooling that operates on ruby files for other purposes: syntax highlighting, linting, stuff like that.

That’s what I thought they meant as well, but B2 is more like $72/TB/yr. Maybe relevant to another story on the front page right now, they have a very unusual custom keyboard layout that makes it easy to typo e for b and 2 for 7 ;)?

MS negotiated the agreement. So “allowed” seems like a fair description of the contents of a contract they negotiated and agreed to.

The US started out that way too.

In the UK that's correct because those kinds of positions pay a reasonable wage. In the US, restaurant workers can easily be making less than minimum wage without tips. (The legality is weird and varies by state, but my understanding is that "traditionally tipped" jobs like waitstaff are exempt from minimum wage regulations on the assumption the tips will make up the gap. The restaurant owner is required to make up the gap if tips don't, so in theory you could just not tip and implicitly force the restaurant owner to raise wages that way, but in practice restaurants are the kind of low-legal-enforcement business in the US where owners already frequently try to under-pay staff so this strategy would probably mostly just hurt workers.)

So my personal approach to tipping in the US is that it starts at a base level as appropriate compensation, and goes up from there for quality of service (or very rarely goes down if service is atrocious).

> And of course, the tips and fees are always calculated "before discounts" which makes the default tip bananas

I agree Uber is employing a ton of dark patterns and their fees are absurd, but for tips at least I think this is appropriate and ethical and is how I tip in person if I have a coupon or something. Tipping is about compensating workers for the value of their labor when their base compensation doesn’t appropriately do that, as it generally doesn’t for restaurant workers in the US. If you get a sandwich for half off or whatever, the cook & the delivery person still had the same amount of work to do, and the tip should reflect that.

And in this case I think it would have been a lot of work to identify the number plate & bin logo if he hadn’t already had enough context to make a probable guess. The source image he was working from looked pretty low-res, that license plate was just a couple white-ish pixels. Like you, I hadn’t heard of overpass turbo and that looks super cool, but the rest of it was “how to confirm what you already mostly know”.

My critique is not “this behavior is acceptable”, and I certainly didn’t describe it as justified. My critique is “the industry is full of bad actors but everyone mostly yells about one particular bad actor”, which I think is unproductive.

Laptops, at least, are increasingly all-soldered RAM from many brands. SSDs are mostly still m.2, I think, so at least those are upgradable. Mac Pros were upgradeable until this most recent iteration switching to their ARM chips. The other companies also use lower-spec components than you could buy for less yourself, same as Apple.

If anything, the rest of the industry has been moving in Apple’s direction with these kinds of limitations. They’re not more evil than their competition, they’re just ahead of the curve.

I agree Apple takes it further with the gouging than others. We should absolutely complain about it and criticize them for gouging! My criticism of the “Apple Tax” complaint is that 1. Nobody ever complains nearly as vociferously about other manufacturers doing similar stuff, and 2. The particular way people complain about Apple’s behavior is always phrased to kind of imply it’s unique and not just a more egregious form of a common behavior.

It dates to at least the iPod! https://m.slashdot.org/story/21026

Probably earlier: I remember people mocking the colorful iMacs. I’m sure you could dig up some pc magazine articles from the 90s dunking on the iMacs and iBooks :).

Overcharging on those kinds of bumps is standard industry practice, though. I just checked Lenovo, and they want $224 to bump an X1 from 16GB to 32. And that’s a sale price, the normal price is $340 (which seems largely theoretical since thinkpads are eternally on some kind of sale, but that’s neither here nor there).

Apple-to-apple (heh) comparison is tricky in this case since I don’t see LPDDR5 laptop chips for sale on their own, and this is a soldered-on-laptop chip so DIY after buying isn’t feasible, but an entire 32GB DDR5 desktop set can be had for about $100, so even if the low-power laptop form-factor commanded a premium, that’s still pretty egregious.

Dell is similar: for a desktop they want $200 to bump from 16GB to 32GB DDR5.

Apple might be a bit more daring with those prices than some PC manufacturers, but it’s hardly a behavior unique to them.

In the specific case of the big dig, absolutely! I moved to Cambridge right around when the dig was completed and saw those improvements accrue over the next few years. I had a bunch of friends eventually move to Southie & The Waterfront, which would have been unimaginable when I moved there. I also think the dig did make navigation around Boston easier, even if it didn’t reduce overall traffic.

I think in at least some instances of projects like this, the goal is not really "traffic reduction", even if that's what officials publicly claim to sell it to the public. As you say, the phenomenon of induced demand is well known & presumably the people involved in driving these projects are aware of it.

The goal is increased throughput/economic activity. If it takes X time to get a vehicle from A to B, and then you add lanes & demand goes up to keep X relatively constant, that can still be a net gain for community. It's about as equally frustrating for the folks sitting in traffic, but there's still more vehicles getting from A to B because there's more lanes, and more vehicles moving around can be good for the local economy.

I don’t think tinkering outside work/class is required to be a good programmer. Nobody rags on accountants for not fiddling with spreadsheets as a hobby. I think the frequent expectation in tech that programmers live & breath code all the time is actually pretty unhealthy. I got into programming as a hobby, but the longer I’ve been a professional at it the less I do in my free time because I just don’t think it’s mentally healthy to do the same thing 80 hours a week.

I do think there’s a risk, if he doesnt also pursue programming as a hobby, of being out-competed by those who do. But not to point of it not being a viable career, just maybe not being like top-of-the-heap. Which is fine, it’s a big industry, not everyone needs to be the best.

The other thing I’ll note is that programming is definitely a career that requires ongoing professional development. Tech changes, you gotta keep up with it to stay relevant to some degree. A lot of that ends up being on-the-job, but like other jobs some it inevitably isn’t.

With those caveats addressed: if he’s doing well and continues to do well, I think it’s entirely possible to have a career programming without also treating it as a hobby.

> Companies issue more stock to sell and raise capital all the time.

Sure, but that’s still a small fraction of most trades most of the time. When companies sell stock (long after their IPO) the sales kind of have to be dripped out as a small percentage of the trading volume of the stock or it would negatively affect the price (more than considered acceptable). If a company or its insiders are most of the sellers by volume (again, if a company has been public a while), that’s a bad sign for the company.

> Not directly, but indirectly it does.

Also yes, but I would quibble that this is moving the goal posts from your original statement :). “The money goes to finance the business” seemed like a pretty direct declarative statement that didn’t touch on the nuance of “buying stock -> pushes price up -> makes debt cheaper for company/makes further stock sales attractive”.

I get the point you’re making and don’t entirely disagree. But in a proud HN tradition it read as a confident and straightforward declaration that describes the (IMHO) minority case, but not the more common case and sweeps important nuance aside.

Please don’t take that to mean I thought your thoughts or understanding were also lacking in nuance, I didn’t. But I figure there will always be people coming through these threads who don’t know the nuance, they’ll read the highly upvoted top comments and move on, thinking they’ve improved their understanding, and they will be led astray, so I was responding to the words as-written.

> When you buy stocks, the money goes to finance the business.

Only if you’re buying directly from the business, which you’re usually not. Usually you’re just buying from another shareholder (could be another individual, a mutual fund, a hedge fund, whatever).

The proceeds may indeed end up filtering into the rest of the economy (I may sell you the stock to pay my mortgage, the hedge fund pays their traders), but the money doesn’t fund the business of the traded company.