avinashv

I want it everywhere badly in west as well as east and middle(-east).

It's already there.

With the exception of the US, almost every country I've traveled to in the Middle East, Asia, and Europe has tap-pay enabled. The Middle East has virtually everyone paying with their phones via NFC. In India Apple Pay doesn't work but when I travel there I can use my phone every time. NFC cards are also the norm.

This is possible because of a concept called a flash loan. Using a smart contract, you can borrow (without collateral) and the smart contract would reverse the transaction if the money is not repaid. There is a cost to borrowing, but in this case it obviously made sense. Cryptocurrency arbitrage bots were some of the first implementations of flash loans that I know of.

https://www.coindesk.com/learn/2021/02/17/what-is-a-flash-lo...

Not the OP, but it claims to be ~2x faster than CPython. I haven’t done extensive benchmarking, but for my small projects that seems about right.

I really don't like FG either. I use Roll20[1], but if you are completely home-brew, Owlbear Rodeo[2] is very simple and great. Character sheets on D&D Beyond[3] and the Beyond20 Chrome extension to link DDB and Roll20.

[1] https://roll20.net [2] https://owlbear.rodeo [3] https://dndbeyond.com

Your snark is unnecessary. Had you Googled a bit more, you would have seen that they also share towers with Airtel, among others. Airtel is also a retail telecom competitor.

There is no hatchet burying relevant to this: Mukesh and Anil's Reliances are separate. Reliance Communications direct competes with Reliance Jio.

Completely false. Across three factories in two states, I don't get "guaranteed" power. In fact, the only place I see basically uninterrupted power is in the nice parts of residential Bombay.

Potential for misuse is near infinite though

Fully agree, though I see the potential for good to be more.

While the author is pretty clear that "only a passing knowledge of modern microbiology" is necessary, I think that understates some of the technical language in here. I really laughed at the line, "Silencing a gene with CRISPR/Cas is incredibly simple." Still, I learned a lot. This is the closest I've come to feeling like I know what's going on in CRISPR.

CRISPR has got to be one of the most important scientific achievements of the past few decades, right?

Whether I agree with the number or not is irrelevant, but the implication I get from the article is that the judge is more upset that after TWC was sued, they still made 74 calls. I assume that the per-call fine was upped because of that.

No need for a laptop if you have an iPad. Synthesia has an app. My iPad sits on my music stand connects to my digital piano via USB-MIDI.

Not at all. The fabric can be woven to specifically avoid this problem.

Are you trying to say that Indian credit cards that are 3D-secure enabled don't work for IAP? This is absolutely untrue. I have both AMEX and Visa cards issued in India, and simultaneously use them for domestic and international online purchases, IAPs, and in-store. Never had a problem. Frankly, I've never heard this.

I killed those animations in settings the day I installed iOS 7. You should too!

I had the Desire, and that was less a trackball and more an optical sensor. A much poorer experience than a trackball.

But what value does the overhead of having the foundation and all its associated risks (such as those highlighted in the article) have over the current scenario, when many marks are happily going along day-to-day?

I guess the site should have been indicative, but I'd love to have had more details about the study. Even little things: he posts a photo of his food tray. How does he eat something like spaghetti and meatballs(?) (or whatever that was) using silverware while inclined -6 degrees from horizontal? What was the result of muscular atrophy? How did he use a laptop at that angle to play SC2?

I can see and agree with all sorts of flaws in the games, but they'll remain special simply because at the time, they were.

I don't really have much to add to that, except that this is a really succinct way of describing, I think, what you, the author, and I are trying to say.

I don't own a Wii U and I don't unfortunately have any plans to get one. That sale is popping up all over the Internet though, so I guess this is the first time it's been offered on the Wii U as a bundle?

I've long suspected that Super Metroid is my favorite--and I think this logic applies for many other video game series--because it's not only the first one that I played, but the first one that I beat. I find myself nodding along to every criticism of the game, but there is just something special about that first play through. That incredible sense of simultaneous delight, fear, wonder, confusion, and suspense is still a really vivid memory for me two decades later.

Believe it or not, I have never played any of the Primes.

This is a beautiful piece about a wonderful, wonderful game. As much as I love Super Metroid (which, despite her criticisms, I think is superior in gameplay and puzzle-platforming), she is spot-on about the ham-fisting of the story.

We should all write like this about video games from our past that made us feel something special.

Samus’ motives in keeping the last metroid alive are unclear: are they purely utilitarian, or has she had a change of heart? The game’s rules, possibly mirroring Samus’ wishes, don’t allow for the metroid baby to be killed—bullets seem to barely miss or pass through the metroid. Of course, killing the metroid would doom Samus to a slow death deep underground, but this is not immediately apparent.

I didn't ever think about that until just now!

http://blog.monumentvalleygame.com/blog/2015/1/15/monument-v...

Have you tried Zepto[1]? It's ~9kb gzipped, and is compatible with a lot of jQuery's API. I've found that for a lot of the stuff I used jQuery for, it's mostly a drop-in replacement.

[1] http://zeptojs.com/

I don't see why that's such a surprise. I thought the same for a split-second.

Crotch bursting (which is the hilarious technical term for it) is more common than you'd expect. Major reasons are over-washing, but a bad fit, stretch fabric, too-thin fabric, and poor stitching are the major reasons for failure.

If you are finding that your jeans are always bursting at the crotch, identify first if it's happening at a seam. If so, buy a different brand. If it's not, wash your jeans less.

If you must wash them, do it inside out, and always let them air dry. Don't use bleach, or any detergent with oxidizing chemicals (this is more common than you'd think). Ideally you should't even wash them in a machine. I think the absurd movement to wear jeans for months without washing is unacceptable if you ever plan to wear them outside of sitting down at a coffee shop, but hand washing them is much gentler and will have your jeans last for years. I own more than one pair of jeans that are years old, and have seen hundreds of days of use without any damage.

The emphasis of the scope was the word "comment" and not "Hacker News"; i.e., it's a lot to cram into a comment. Here are a handful of thoughts:

In a nutshell, I think apparel is too cheap, but raising prices isn't the solution because of the bargain-hunting and markdown pricing expectations that consumers have that is moving its way further upmarket every year. Brands are scared to raise a penny on their prices, and are right to be fearful because consumers don't have loyalty. While manufacturers are living on terrible margins, retailers (who get decent margins) have to deal with the ridiculous cost of retail real estate and stock write downs, which means that the only person who really wins is the importer (in cases when the importer exists) and the consumer. The importer can also lose this game if they work on a replenishment basis (double storage cost there if you're following along).

Plenty of other reasons exist. If we use the earlier example of a refrigerator, then things like automation come into the picture. The apparel industry, for the most part, is not really automated. I've seen TV manufacturing facilities, and they are so alarmingly automated it seems fake at first glance. Even then, companies like Sony have lost money every year for decades selling TV because the rest of the business can sustain huge losses so Sony can have their logo staring at you every day of the week in your living room. Apparel businesses don't have that kind of luxury because most are not small hobby businesses of a larger conglomerate.

Then there are lots of political issues such as the United States customs policies. FTA like CAFTA/NAFTA, AGUA, special treaties like the ones with Jordan are all affecting apparel. Do you know a synthetic garment from a country like Sri Lanka (lots of, for example, Nike production happens there, so think about an athletic garment from them) will be imported at a 32% duty rate?

"Fast fashion", which today basically means very cleverly convincing consumers to buy more clothes means the SKUs have gone up for manufacturers, but since nobody really gets paid anymore the margins get shrunk because of a loss of economies of scale right from the start of the value chain until things are put on retail shelves.

Etc. etc.

TL;DR Apparel costs about what it should, if we assume it should be a reasonably low-margin, high-risk business. Comparing it to the lower-margin, higher-risk electronics industry is not an easy comparison because of how different the businesses are.

I manufacture jeans, and this is misleading.

The strength of any textile (knit or woven) is a first a function of the yarn and then of the structure. Any heavy twill that remains unwashed for long periods of time (as all "selvedge purists" seem to do) will last longer than a pair of cheap jeans that get tumble-dryed twice a week.

Please stop perpetrating this myth that selvedge denim is somehow inherently stronger or better than regular denim. It should be indicative that most people need to turn the cuff of a pair of selvedge jeans to look for the actual selvedge before they know for certain.

To your original point that you find it confusing that apparel is expensive relative to other goods, it's probably because retail margins are disproportionate to the amount of cost it takes to sell garments for a list of reasons out of the scope of a Hacker News comment. Apparel is, at the point of sale out the door of a manufacturer, cheaper than it has probably ever been today. The amount of processes involved between planting a cotton seed and loading a container of packed garments is absolutely awe-inspiring in scope, and the fact that a pair of jeans is billed by a manufacturer at ~>$10 is crazy.

She's not yet able to comfortably read at the level of Wikipedia

May I recommend http://simple.wikipedia.org? It's obviously not nearly as expansive as the standard English version, but it's a great option for EFL adults or younger kids.

For a brief, wonderful time, I thought all academic papers were of a similar caliber

I had the exact same thought in college when I started reading a handful of well-written papers like this myself. This really set a standard that for 60+ years now academia hasn't always maintained.

Very cool! Shannon's paper was, to be honest, a little out of my comfort zone when I first read it (this isn't really my field academically), and I got a little lost on the first read of this, but someone below posted your full thesis which I will definitely read when I have the time.