aristophenes

The photo of the wall in the article is obviously digitally altered, just to the left of the person walking. The rocks change into uniform smooth grey, and it doesn’t match the reflection in the water. Is it supposed to be the digital plan of the wall vs the real thing?

You should edit the code in your original comment, someone is bound to copy paste the code somewhere…

What took down SVB was mortgage securities. In the USA mortgages are typically 30 years long, with a fixed rate the entire time. Actual average duration is only a few years in a declining rate environment and 5-6 years in flat rate environment. In a raising rate environment, which we haven’t really seen for any length of time in most people adult lifetimes, it’s probably 10-15 years. This transition is what harmed SVB and it’s hurt all the banks but most didn’t leverage up so much on them and didn’t have only large, flighty customers. Very unique situation. There are also lots of ways big banks can protect themselves from this duration risk, if they actually care.

It sounds like in Australia (and Canada and the UK) the risk has just been shifted from the professionals to the consumers, with only five year mortgages. You can’t pay off your entire house in five years, so many people are dependent on being able to refinance, and are going to be in a lot of hurt over the next few years as the mortgages come due. This does not sound like a better solution.

I’m sorry, this was an utter mess, shouldn’t have happened and lots of people share blame. But I don’t think it was wrong for depositors to pull deposits from an insolvent (or nearly insolvent) bank. Neither is it wrong to encourage companies you’ve invested in to move money. The only thing I have a problem with is when some of the VCs, like Jason Calacanis, deliberately tried to spread panic to other banks to make SVB more important to the government so they’d backstop his deposits. That was pretty bad.

But realizing your badly run bank is badly run and pulling your funds and encouraging others to do the same is a very reasonable thing to do. Certainly not worthy of this virtual tar and feathering. They are, or would have been, the innocent victims of this banks poor risk management.

Edit: Link to tweet of screenshot of Jason trying to get everyone to panic about the entire banking system, with the only fix is the government to backstop large SVB deposits. https://mobile.twitter.com/nuancerocket/status/1634922146555...

For one this article is now on the main page of hacker news and it reports four days since last Elon on hacker news :D Might just be that it hasn’t been on the front page long?

As I’ve gotten older I’ve fallen into this problem but also climbed out of it. It is worrisome that it is permanent, but it likely isn’t. There were several things about my life that I changed that helped me regain my focus and deep concentration abilities.

First was reducing TV, social media, and just scrolling internet news. Doing those things all day was training my brain to have a 1 second attention span. A vacation, if used to just chill out and do boring things for hours at a time can help snap you out. Your body and mind don’t want to live in that frenetic state so your stress will reduce too.

Diet and exercise is also important in making your body run as it was designed and helping your brain to be in a more relaxed, nourished state that will give you more mental stamina. Exercising first thing in the morning is good, but anytime you find your brain conking out is a good time for a run and often i’ve felt better immediately. Cardio helps me, I don’t know about weight training.

Diet is very important, and if you eat lots of carbs, especially late in the day you probably aren’t sleeping well and you might have high blood sugar that is impacting your ability to concentrate. Reducing carb intake, eating good breakfasts and light dinners, and not eating for several hours before sleeping (go to bed hungry, you will sleep much better and feel better in the morning) can make a big difference. If you work remotely and get drowsy after eating and you can take a nap early in the day, go for it!

Also just doing whatever it takes to calm yourself down and sleep long and deep night after night can help a lot.

At this age it is also a very good idea to get blood work done to see if there is any imbalance which could be affecting your well-being.

Finally, like muscles our brain seems to atrophy over time and strengthen as you use it. If you’ve been coasting for a while and haven’t had a real challenge, it might take a couple of weeks of frustration before you rebuild that mental stamina.

All of these life changes are very difficult to do at first, but once you make the change and feel the effects it becomes a lot easier and you feel so much better. I’ve done everything I mentioned here and gotten back my ability to learn and focus to a similar level as my younger self.

It’s actually significantly less capable than the network being attempted by ASTS.

Your argument basically boils down to you don’t really use your glove box and prefer the slightly cleaner aesthetics. In your case you might argue for a car that doesn’t have a glove box. But if the glove box is included it should be intended for use. To not be able to access it by the passenger while driving, or while the car is off can be very frustrating for people who like to have a glove box.

This is an amazing explanation, thanks

This is the most common approach even if it isn’t done on purpose, and I think it should be formalized with terminology and studies. The current zeitgeist of immunity as understood by the general population and, importantly, politicians, just can’t seem to incorporate the concept of something that is so contagious but changes so quickly. But it’s the reality for almost all sickness we get, this is the norm, not the outlier. Why are we still even thinking about vaccinating people with the original covid vax? We give the annual flu shot more respect.

Despite what we want and how we wish the world would be, the reality is that if you are constantly exposed to covid you are unlikely to ever be symptotically ill. Since we can’t prevent that from happening everywhere in the world, might as well plan for it. It also puts evolutionary pressure on the disease to be less severe, since if you feel sick you stay home, but if you don’t you go out and spread it.

Could you expound? Are you saying strong quads + weak hamstrings == knee pain? I recently started using an exercise bike in addition to squats and climbs in order to get in shape and found that I started having chronic knee pain for the first time in my life, which persisted for months even after I stopped using the bike. I don't use clip on shoes, which I would imagine would allow hamstrings to be utilized more.

Very few datapoints right now, but my knees seem to feel better, not worse, after sprinting exercises. I've been very athletic my whole life and never had knee problems before.

These are some very smart academics who have figured out how to get their institutions to fund their parties, and probably became very popular in their social circles

Yes, and the carbon storage of all the seagrass sugar in the world is roughly equivalent to one day of automobile driving in the USA. But everywhere in the article it is phrased to make it appear like a world changing amount of carbon. Why?

I love how the article says that ground water and microbes are responsible for most of the degradation, then blithely quote the computational evolutionary biologist “This confirms the widely held suspicion that claims of DNA from dinosaurs and ancient insects trapped in amber are incorrect" though things trapped in amber are protected from exterior microbes, groundwater, and even oxygen. If they did the study on things trapped in amber they could have come to that conclusion, but they didn’t. Scientists are people and have the same flaws as the rest of us.

I had to cancel my gym membership because I was moving, and it required me to send a physical letter. I did this, but found out later that somehow I owed like 2 dollars, so they didn’t count my cancellation request because my account wasn’t up to date (should be illegal). They continued to bill me the entire membership fee, but my credit card had changed, so they sent my account to a collections agency. Right when I was trying to get a mortgage to buy a house. Cost me hundreds of dollars and much more in annoyance. Thanks The Edge for doing that to your previously loyal customer! It ought to be a law that once a customer informs you via email, text, phone or mail (and all must be easily found) subscription services can no longer accrue new charges.

You’d have seven roommates and would also have no window. Looking at the layout, it’s like sharing a tiny apartment with 7 other people. This is the worst part, if you have one disruptive person out of eight, they are going to make everyone else miserable. Hard to get sleep, hard to study.

This is why I often read the comments more than the articles here on hacker news.

Thermonuclear weapons use fission to ignite fusion, and is how modern nuclear weapons work. Developed in the early 1950’s.

I don’t understand the appeal of this type of fusion (as opposed to the plasma reactor approach). We’ve known how to get positive energy out of fusion fuel since thermonuclear weapons in 1952. The really hard part would seem to be capturing that energy efficiently. This experiment is stuck at the ignition phase. When that’s positive energy they won’t be done, they’ll be able to start working on the practical problems of sustaining it. What am I missing.

Mozilla (the non-profit that makes the Firefox browser) has a VPN service and not only do I trust them more than these other private companies but I like supporting them as an organization. A VPN is the best thing for a crook or spy to run, so I expect that eventually they will be all run by them, if they aren’t already. Even SSH encrypted content can be man in the middle attacked by SSH proxying, I don’t see how your VPN couldn’t have access to your bank account or anything else you’ve logged into.

I knew a guy who was Canadian, but had a summer job in the USA. Everyone got told they needed to register for the draft so he did and got drafted into the US military for the Vietnam war. Someone figured out he wasn’t American at some point, but they didn’t let him out, he just served a year at a base in the US instead of being deployed. And he didn’t even get citizenship out of it. He was not super bright.

It's good to also think about security of paper ballots. Usually, in the United States, public observers from all political parties are allowed to be at all polling places and observe (and help count) all the votes. There is a limited amount of time between the vote and the count, and in that time anyone can watch to make sure nothing is tampered with.

This is why people get uncomfortable with vote counting taking too long or ballots being moved and stored before counting is done. The accountability is gone and whoever controls the process has the ability to tamper.

If these machines need to be observed at all times to prevent tampering, just forget about it. It's unrealistic. Even if they can be protected the public can't trust that, the only people who could truly confirm that would be the people who are in the position to tamper with them.

The Mesa County Clerk wasn't trying to hide what they were doing. If any other County Clerk wanted to tamper and not hide, well we wouldn't be having this discussion because no one would know about it, even if there is a video feed on the machines. Has this happened anywhere else? Can you, as a citizen, confirm no other voting machines in Colorado (or elsewhere) have been tampered with?

You missed my point entirely. The fact that a "breach" could happen and is something that is dangerous means the conspiracy theorists are correct. They feel about the Secretary of State like you feel about the Mesa County Clerk. If the situation was reversed and the Mesa County Clerk was the Secretary of State, would you feel confident about the elections? Who is getting access to the voting machines and what are they doing?

If having access to the machines means that you can affect the results of the elections, and the public cannot safely audit that, then these machines are unusable at all times.

You trust the Secretary of State. You think everyone in the state and country should trust the CO Secretary of State. Fine. But eventually an untrustworthy person gets to that seat of power, it's naive to think corrupt people wouldn't try and succeed. And from that point on they decide election results, and only other corrupt, complicit people run the government. The only real skill they need is to appear trustworthy, as grifters are already good at doing.

The conspiracy theorists just think this has already happened.

We should have a voting system that you would feel comfortable to be overseen by your ideological adversaries.

Your implication is that whoever has the administrator passwords can tamper with the machine to affect the results. And that someone, who is not the general public, should have access to the passwords. How is that better? So certain chosen individuals an have the power to tamper with the machines, but no one else? Isn't that the exact problem that is concerning people?

Machines that cannot be completely publicly inspected shouldn't be used.

The Colorado Secretary of State is unintentionally showing the conspiracy theorists are correct. A single person having physical access to the voting machines, months before the election, who has different political views from the Secretary, is enough to make those machines unusable. When the entire election in a district is run by officials from a single political party, with unlimited access to the voting machines, what is the other political party supposed to think?

I had no opinion before now, but clearly these machines are unusable anywhere.

I got the vaccine, and recommend others to do so. The reason I have this debate is because the people who are so offended by anti-vaxxers constantly straw-man them instead of being sympathetic and trying to understand them. Like you are straw-manning me, implying that some obvious poison that immediately makes people sick is what I am talking about. Telling people they are stupid is not going to win them over, and forcing them to vaccinate will entrench their opinions and convert more to their point of view.

Try to understand, they don't trust the government, they don't trust the CDC, they don't trust Pfizer and they don't trust you. Yes you have an official list of ingredients that someone with an appropriate degree can understand. But what's the stuff in the actual needle that you are so intent on making sure gets injected into them? Seems perfectly reasonable to them that some PhDs in some pharma companies are really worried about global warming and a coming Idiocracy. Why not put something in the vaccine that reduces fertility for the unwashed masses?

Maybe it sounds crazy to you and me, but a lot of people hear experts saying seemingly ridiculous things (like needing a vaccine for a disease you already got and recovered from), see how everyone falls in line with the narratives as they come and go, watch mainstream news and social media restrict all alternative points of view. And they don't trust the system. And its clear to them that this system they don't trust, also doesn't like them. From that perspective, of course they don't want the people who lie to them and hate them to have the authority to stick some chemicals and DNA (I know, mRNA) in their arm.

That by not focusing on vaccinating only the most vulnerable, we are just selecting for strains that the vaccines are not effective against.

I don't understand your first point, what does that have to do with the immune system getting geared up for an infection months or years later?

The second point, your worst case scenario doesn't even address the worst concerns of people who don't want to take the vaccine. They don't trust that spike proteins are the only things in the vaccine. The worst case scenario is not that the vaccine acts like the virus but that it acts different than the virus. And then you get conspiracy stuff like new world order types deliberately introducing things to the vaccine that will make it harder to have kids or stuff. And unfortunately our trusted organizations telling white lies to the public to elicit the behavior they want hasn't helped this trust issue.

But this is all moot for two reasons. First, because someone actually did a study and found that the immune response from infection was ~10 times stronger than from the vaccines[0]. Second, because we've already selected for a virus that is highly contagious and can infect vaccinated people, and will thus continue to be selected to specifically infect vaccinated people since most potential hosts are vaccinated at this point.

In summary, we might have to all be infected, nearly all at once, for this to be over, or just get lucky and the dominant strains will be attenuated to the point where they aren't a major problem.

[0] https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.29.454333v1

Without time for a study, wouldn’t it make sense to assume the most common thing, that a natural infection provides more immunity than the vaccine? Taking the line of reasoning where we assume the worst case scenario until proven otherwise, would it be reasonable to assume long term medical issues from the vaccinations?

The “Sandia Cooler” architecture simultaneously eliminates all three of the drawbacks of conventional air-cooled heat exchanger technology

... and replaces them with brand new drawbacks that we aren’t sure how to mitigate