mundo

You sound like you're arguing with me, but all of the rules you described seem to suggest that what the strikers did in this case was legal. They didn't blow up anything or steal anything, they quit working at an inconvenient time.

Also, I think you're imagining a set of gentlemanly Marquis of Queensbury rules around strikes that don't exist. This isn't an elaborate ritual like the filibuster; labor dispute precedents are written in blood.

What a terrible analogy. This strike didn't hurt anyone, it cost the employer money, which is exactly what they're supposed to do! A strike that doesn't cost money isn't a strike, and a union that can't strike is a social club.

The underlying assumption here, that there are some areas that decided to lockdown and others that didn't, and each had different pros and cons, seems wildly inaccurate.

The reality is that almost everywhere in the world did a lockdown of some kind, but in some areas it was effective and in other areas it was not; and, while everyone has suffered consequences of some kind, the consequences suffered by the latter group exceed those of the former by a wide and obvious margin.

I can imagine that on a slow, lazy flip with a big coin, but is this realistic with what I think of as a "normal" flip, i.e. a US quarter, flipped rapidly end-over-end with the thumbnail, 2+ feet in the air? It's hard to believe that even decades of practice would get this reliable, and I don't think I've ever seen a stage magician rely on it in a routine.

For comparison, the other method (where the coin rotates about its vertical axis) is something you can learn to do tolerably well in a few minutes, and to do very well after a month or two at most. The motion of the coin will look perfect, and you can even get the "ding!" noise of a real flip. The only giveaway is the hand position; a real flip is done with the thumb under the coin, and this trick (for me, anyway) requires the thumb to be on top.

Source: taught myself to do this many years ago. I'm not a magician and have never used it to win money, I just use this to settle arguments between my kids.

Watching Urbit through the lens of HN comments over the last few years has been utterly fascinating. The hatred it attracts is unmatched - no topic has reached the front page only to be brigade-downvoted off of it again so regularly.

And yet, for all the indignant posts about how it's performance art, a scam, or the ravings of a madman, it just kind of keeps on keeping on. It gets a little more stable and adds a few more features every year, like a regular old open source project.

My position on it has remained unchanged for 5+ years: I hope it succeeds because it aspires to solve a use case that I genuinely want to use, I don't care about the (ex-)founder's politics or his old blog, but seeing as the existence of the latter seems to have destroyed any chance of the former coming to fruition so I'm kind of hoping Jeff Bezos decides to build a clone (presumably, one that has much lower ambitions and elides most of the weird stuff).

I agree, and I would add that there is one good subjective way to measure the productivity of individual developers, and that is talking to their teammates.

In 2017, Pai voted with his fellow Republican commissioners to remove rules that prohibited internet providers from blocking or slowing traffic to particular sites and offering higher speed “lanes” at higher prices. Many major internet providers have not yet taken advantage of that rule change, however.

It seems likely that this is because they consider the looser regulations likely to be overturned in Biden's presidency, not because they don't actually want to make changes they spent millions lobbying for the right to make.

A number of commenters seem hung up on the actual measurement of information, which I think is a little ancillary to the point (which I think is valid). So I'll add that I think the author's point here is that the press has shifted from focusing on surprising news to reiterating things we already know, because that is a good way to reassure and flatter their audience.

Consider a headline like, "Trump says illegal immigration is a big problem." He's said that many times, it's very unsurprising that he would say it again, and hence it contains very little information. However, each time he says it, it affords the press that agree with him a fresh opportunity to talk about why he's right, and the press that disagrees a new chance to talk about why he's wrong.

That is the point here - that what we call "news" has shifted from spending most of its energy informing us of things we don't know towards reinforcing and emphasizing things we do know. If that trend is true, then certainly it represents a reduction in information (in the Claude Shannon sense as well as the everyday sense).

There's a lot of risky investments. Anyone over 18 can bet their life savings on roulette. That has nothing to do with this. "Well other investments are risky too!" does not apply here because "Investing in startups is super-risky!" is not the reason why accreditation requirements exist.

If it was possible to make millions of dollars by fooling naive people into misusing matches, matches would be regulated.

Lotteries, mortgages, and public securities are heavily regulated to make it nearly impossible to get ripped off. You can lose your life savings by buying AAPL, but you can't lose it despite AAPL going up because you didn't read the fine print on the brokerage website.

The reason for accredited investor requirements is that it's not realistic to do the same with small businesses. It is perfectly legal, and not totally uncommon, for startups to have very unfavorable terms for investors. If the LLC paperwork says the majority partner can choose to buy back your shares against your will for a dollar any time they like, then they can, and it's your fault for not reading it more carefully.

I've heard of many cases, and personally witnessed one case, in which an accredited investor put a lot of money in to a startup, and lost it even though the startup did well. The requirements may not be perfect, but I don't think it's fair to suggest they don't serve a purpose.

Trail of Bits recommends using Curve25519 for key exchange and digital signatures... it is implemented in libsodium, which has easy-to-read documentation and is available for most languages.

They did apologize, but not for the stuff Howard complained about.

A: You kicked in my front door, walked in unannounced, and stole my TV!

B: I apologize unreservedly. I should have announced myself.

I'm dismissing it because it doesn't seem to contain any evidence of Joe Biden doing anything bad. It seems like someone hacked his kid's email, went through it for embarrassing stuff, didn't find much, and so released it very close to the election because there wasn't enough dirt there to sustain a longer scandal.

Who said it was fake? I assume that if it was fabricated, it would've been more substantial. But I'm not gullible enough to think Biden's kid's sex tape found its way to the media in October by some sort of wacky accident.

I read it, but did not see any new reporting. It makes a bold claim in the lede - "a de facto union of media outlets, Silicon Valley giants and the intelligence community to suppress these stories" and offers no specific evidence for it.

It seems like Greenwald's gist is that circumstantial evidence is enough proof - that this story is so obviously important that not covering it prominently is <i>prima facie</i> evidence of bias. That's a reasonable opinion, but that's all it is, and if you didn't already believe it, I don't think there's anything here to change your mind.

Personally, I don't see the bombshell part. All I see here is that most journalists want Biden to win, and sometimes politicians' kids get sinecures they don't deserve. I knew both of those things last year. The whole debacle like an obvious attempt to smear Biden Sr with salacious stuff that his kid did, and the only reason it's getting this much attention is that, unlike Trump, Biden doesn't have any other scandals to talk about.

If we knew that (let's say) the Mexican government was trying to (let's say) keep Taylor Swift from winning a Grammy, and then a video of (let's say) Taylor Swift's cousin kicking a kitten mysteriously materialized the week before the Grammys, the reasonable assumption to make would not be that it was a lucky coincidence.

To continue this ridiculous metaphor, Glenn Greenwald is the guy arguing strenuously that this is a huge story, and anyone not covering it must be in the bag for Beyonce, because the video is authentic, it's been triple-checked, and just look at how her cousin refuses to deny it! And the rest of us are over here like, "Right, but did Tay-Tay herself actually do anything? Kicking kittens is indeed bad, but her cousin isn't the one running for President. Er, excuse me, her cousin isn't the one who's up for Best Female Vocal Performance."

Oooh! What kind of sex? Which drugs? ...yes, that would be the salacious hearsay I was referring to. If there's evidence that Joe Biden did something corrupt, I'd like to see it, but without the rest of the chaff.

It seems impossible to hold a strong opinion on this without reading the article, and in particular, seeing how it is sourced.

The elephant in the room (which Greenwald barely acknowledges in this essay) is that many mainstream news organizations have concluded that the evidence for this story was too weak to publish, and some believe it was fabricated by Russian intelligence. If Greenwald has evidence to the contrary, great, the world wants to see it, and (claims of "censorship" notwithstanding) he will have no trouble getting the word out. If all he has is salacious hearsay, it's hard to fault his former editors.

because it appreciates in value vs. fiat currency

So did Beanie Babies, until they didn't. But the point of Bitcoin was not supposed to be a vehicle for speculation, it was supposed to be...

well, I've been around HN long enough to know that it's impossible to finish that sentence in a way everyone would agree with. But, remember all those breathlessly optimistic posts and essays from early 2010s about what Bitcoin could be? It seems pretty inarguable that the Bitcoin of 2020 ain't that, and isn't on track to be.

A former job of mine forced candidates to fill out a form for one of those abominable HR candidate tracking sites, maybe ICIMS, and I saw the following gem from one applicant:

Q: "One of CompanyCo's core values is Openness. How have you demonstrated openness in your career?"

A: "I am open about my contempt for bullshit questions like this one."

And specifically, few people want to join services that are mostly populated by people who got kicked off of other services.

The "ripple" of the graphene is described as thermal, i.e. brownian motion, so presumably this is not a closed system - i.e. the work dissipates a bit of heat from the graphene, which is replenished from the surrounding environment. I think the abstract confirms this, in that it claims the power dissipated by the load resistor equalled "power supplied by the thermal bath".

I'm no expert and this article is clickbaity, but I think the basic claim here does not sound crazy. If regular freestanding graphene does have a natural "ripple" of current caused by thermal energy[0], it seems reasonable to place an electrode very close to it and harvest the work done when charges move relative to each other. The circuit described in the youtube video[1] does seem like it would work, if the "ripple" is predictable and slow enough to switch the circuit in phase with.

It's not "limitless" obviously; it's just converting heat energy to electricity. But if this principle works, and if it can be implemented in the real world (which seems like a big if - I can imagine it being fouled up by temperature fluctuations, physical effects on the graphene like sound vibrations, etc) it sounds like it might be very useful for things like sensors with very low power needs.

0: The same team claimed to describe this in a 2014 paper - see https://phys.org/news/2014-04-track-ripples-freestanding-gra...

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiLTEjm8zLw

https://github.com/MattIPv4/hacktoberfest-data

I'm not missing that point, I'm asking whether it's true. The right way to answer that would probably be to find out how many of the new submitters from previous years went on to continue to become valuable contributors.

I'm sympathetic, but I'd be interested to know whether there's also an increase in non-spam contributions. We probably need to wait a while to find out, since it's reasonable to expect the spammy t-shirt-seeking PRs to be front-loaded and the substantive PRs (if any materialize) to take some time.

edit: and it's worth saying, sometimes a newbie's first PR is pretty indistinguishable from spam. It would be ironic if one of the results of this project was teaching a bunch of young programmers that they're not needed or wanted in FOSS.

It seems like what you're describing as positive is only a small part of what the article is complaining about. How did you get from e.g. 'If you have "bad friends" on social media you might pay more for your loan' to the return of politeness to society?

I agree that it would be nice to see people imposing their views on others less - "Live and let live" is a basic requirement of a Liberal society. But the dystopian future evoked by this microsite is sort of the opposite of that - an enforced uniformity, where instead of tolerating difference we attack it until people learn to hide it more effectively.

You don't have to choose. There are anti-Semitic books in libraries, yet libraries are not overrun with them. The problem here is not that lbry endorses or embraces bigots, it's that the non-censoring platforms are new/wonky/unpopular enough that no one uses them except people who are banned elsewhere.

Do you want a video platform that deletes stuff? Or one that doesn't? Choice A leads to the problem this thread is discussing. Choice B leads to the problem you're describing.

Personally I would prefer a choice C, a platform that deletes stuff I don't like and nothing else, but I don't think that's on offer. The closest thing available is platforms that delete stuff that offends their target demographic, as determined by a conference room full of SV middle-management types, i.e. youtube, which we already have and which isn't all that great.

I'm not trying to snark you, I don't like the content on lbry either. But sometimes it seems like HN's consensus opinion is that censorship is terrible, and also that censorship-resistant platforms are terrible.

"John can dig a hole ten feet deep in an hour. How long would it take him to dig a hole five feet deep?"

The first sentence of that problem is an axiom. It is absolutely 100% true, within the context of that story problem. It could contradict another axiom, but it can't turn out to be false, because it's not a statement about the real world.