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dfrey

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A $10K lottery is a horrible idea. Most people know that on average you will lose money by buying lottery tickets. What makes it worth playing (for some people) is the (very small) chance of winning fuck you money. If I win $10k, I would be excited and happy about it, but it's going to have very little long-term effect on my lifestyle.

Do you need a VPN? 9 years ago

The content owner could still request your information from the VPN provider and the VPN provider might provide it (even if they say they won't). I think the main benefit is that there are so many individuals torrenting copyrighted material that aren't using VPNs that it means you aren't the "low hanging fruit" so you're considered not worth the effort by the content owners.

They don't sell the $6 bread in the grocery store that the maid shops at and they don't sell $12000 couches where she buys her furniture.

She lives in a different world, so it's very likely that she has no idea how much a couch costs by looking at it.

Cool visualization, but kind of a useless statistic. The question that matters is: How many years will it take me to pay off my mortgage after my expenses (food, transportation, housing maintenance, utilities, taxes) are taken into account?

It doesn't matter how cheap a house is if you can't save any money.

It's kind of a poorly stated problem. It would be better if they said:

1000 people were asked the question "Is this car blue?" and 900 answered yes, what is the probability that the car is blue.

or

1000 people were asked the question "What is the color of this car?" and 900 answered "blue", what is the probability that the car is blue.

The second question is far more likely to produce responses like "navy", "turquoise", etc that aren't exactly blue, but are very similar.

It's an interesting problem because there are so many factors and even the goal isn't constant from day to day.

Goals

- get from A to B as quickly as possible

- get from A to B as safely as possible

- get from A to B as enjoyably as possible

Factors

- fitness of rider

- type of bike (Riding a fixed gear bike up a steep hill is bad for enjoyment, but riding a mountain bike up a steep hill is not)

- weather (headwinds, tailwinds affect time, affects safety of certain routes as well - don't tell me to ride down a steep windy hill when there is a possibility of ice)

- time of day (affects safety due to light levels)

- traffic volume

- number of lights/stop signs (this affects fast riders more than slow ones because of the effort wasted accelerating and braking is greater)

- number of turns (turns make the rider slow down and wait for traffic and also increase the complexity of following a route)

- scenery/environmental factors (eg. ride through an industrial area or through a waterfront park)

This reminded me of a chunk from an [interview with Linus Torvalds](http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/linux-at-25-qa-w...)

Stephen Cass: You’re a much more experienced programmer now versus 25 years ago. What’s one thing you know now that you wish your younger self knew?

Linus Torvalds: Actually, I credit the fact that I didn’t know what the hell I was setting myself up for for a lot of the success of Linux. If I had known what I know today when I started, I would never have had the chutzpah to start writing my own operating system: You need a certain amount of naïveté to think that you can do it. I really think that was needed for the project to get started and to succeed. The lack of understanding about the eventual scope of the project helped, but so did getting into it without a lot of preconceived notions of where it should go.

Yes, but a lot of the big tech companies like Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Google and Microsoft want people to work at their head office location rather than opening up satellite offices across the world. I understand how it simplifies logistics and communication, but it's not without its own problems.

snapchat baffles me. It's just another instant messaging platform except that they came up with the idea of messages that delete themselves after a time period. The problem is that this killer feature is easily subverted by taking a picture of your screen. So basically, they have provided an instant messaging platform with one extra useless feature.

Why should rental be more expensive by definition? A fleet of autonomous vehicles can operate 24/7. Your own personal car gets a trip to work and a trip back home every day and maybe another round trip to an activity or chore.

And DLink will continue to try to save money by releasing products without following proper security procedures because you will keep buying them because they are cheap.

It's tough for security to affect purchasing decisions because it's difficult to measure. I can measure horsepower, megapixels, gigabytes, milliamp-hours, etc. so it's easy to make purchasing decisions based on which of those things are important to me.

This is false. There are lots of small, old crappy houses in Vancouver. It's just that they cost a ridiculously large amount of money.

Here's a pretty typical example: https://www.realtor.ca/Residential/Single-Family/17409318/55...

Before you ask, no that's not even in a really desirable part of Vancouver.

That will cost you another million. See this as an example: https://www.realtor.ca/Residential/Single-Family/17850427/31...