shutupalready

but customers don't for the most part. It's a lot easier than trying to explain to them that there are two kinds of ounces

It's that kind of stuff that makes people think that jewelers and gold buyers are crooked. Some customers--perhaps only a minority--do know the difference, and they will become suspicious and tell others.

Whenever a professional of any kind (car mechanic, doctor, tax preparer, vet) tells me something that is contrary to a known basic fact, then alarm bells go off in my head. I start thinking that this guy is either incompetent or trying to cheat or trick me in some way, and I will tell friends to watch out. Fortunately it doesn't happen all the time. I generally trust doctors for example.

In one of your other comments, you said, There are a staggering number of honest jewelers and gold buyers out there. But stories about obviously crooked people are what makes everyone say "see, these guys are ALL crooks".

Maybe the jewelers and gold buyers--like used car salesmen--have gotten the reputation they deserve.

28.35g per ounce

No, it's 31.10g per ounce. The price of gold is always quoted as troy ounces[1]. You used the figure for the avoirdupois ounce which is used for anything that isn't a precious metal[2].

Though it doesn't really affect the argument you're making since 28.35g and 31.10g are pretty close, but how do you not know about troy ounces as a "former jeweler" (as it says in your profile)?

That's like a doctor saying body temperature is 105F or 40C.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troy_ounce

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avoirdupois

but I suspect that's the kind of project shutupalready was referring to

Yes, those are precisely the kinds of projects I was thinking of. (I was worried that if I gave examples, the conversation would derail into the viability of fusions reactors, ion drives, human level AI, or whatever.)

The topic was what people leave their money to (after death). All of the people you mention are alive.

It's not always about the "big picture".

No, it's never about the "big picture".

High net-worth people almost never leave their money to a "space shot" type of endeavor.

An observation on what the super-rich never do for their legacy:

There's something that super-rich individuals can do that vastly richer governments, organizations, and companies can't do. They can make long shot bets. That is, they can invest in something that needs a large concentration of capital (an idea, research, enterprise, discovery) that carries very long odds but could have massive world-changing effects if it succeeds. Those are things that neither governments (too many people need to agree) or companies (no short- or medium-term profit) can normally do.

I'm avoid giving examples here because it'd detract from the point. Besides, there's an infinite number of such long shot bets.

It's sad and ironic that people are more risk averse with what happens to the money after they pass away than when they're alive.

Lisa logged on to her computer and pulled up their bird-cam. There was the crow she suspected. "You can see it bringing it into the yard. Walks it to the birdbath and actually spends time rinsing this lens cap."

Why wouldn't they put this video in the BBC article?

When conveying nuanced ideas, I believe they will be much closer in length, with perhaps a small advantage for French.

I've looked in bookstores at expert translations of French novels to English, and English novels to French, and in either case, the English is shorter. This seems contrary to your claim.

had a hypothesis about drug addiction, designed an experiment to prove his hypothesis. Performed the experiment, measured the results

That's the very definition of the Scientific Method, so I don't understand what problem you're pointing out:

"The overall process of the scientific method involves making conjectures ( hypotheses), deriving predictions from them as logical consequences, and then carrying out experiments based on those predictions." -- from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method

(That the experiment has not been replicated as you claim could be a bad sign, but that's a separate matter.)

Not to detract from your observation, but just as an aside, I wanted to mention that less than an hour after your comment, googling for "cow thiophenol romanesque establishment" (with or without quotes) lists this very page as the first result. Google must be indexing certain sites (like HN) very frequently.

The tiny tab allows gravity to cause all the pullers to hang in the same direction as they fall into a rail toward the left.

The explanation above makes it sound like the pulls are getting re-oriented (flipped around) which is not what I see in the video.

I think a clearer explanation is this:

The pulls are aligned 50% tab-right (good) and 50% tab-left (bad) as they approach the feeder chain (or rail at the left as the OP calls it).

The tab-rights fit into slots in the feeder chain and proceed to the next assembly step.

The tab-lefts don't fit into the slots and simply drop away into the rotating pan below (from which they presumably return to the pot and make another attempt at the feeder later on).

1. The comment you're talking about is from, essentially, someone who doesn't know what they're talking about.

Yes, of course, the person who made that comment is clueless about technology -- just like 90% of the population. The comment shows that most people think it's really cool that the diagnostic device uses a smartphone and don't realize that the smartphone wasn't needed at all.

2. ... than to develop a new, bespoke microcontroller.

Nobody needs to develop a new, bespoke microcontroller. You use a tiny cheap off-the-shelf microcontroller (like the PIC) and program it. Based on the information available in the original article, the program might be as simple as light the red LED (positive) if the color sensor indicates it's above a certain threshold and light the green LED (negative) if below a certain threshold. But even very complex algorithms can be ported to microcontrollers.

3. Imagine it as one person and a smart phone testing 4 villages

I did say databases and uploading were a possible reason for the smartphone, and do I agree that a smart phone does make sense for the use case of testing a whole village. This doesn't change my original point that a smartphone wasn't really necessary, not even to reduce costs, and might in fact be more expensive than a standalone device. The original article makes a big deal of the smartphone connection without explaining the real reason why the smartphone is there.

Was it really necessary to involve a smartphone at all?

color change [is] picked up by a set of photocells in the dongle, and the results are then sent to an app

The logic to discriminate a color change could have been handled by a 75-cent microcontroller. Add a cheap display or a couple LEDs to show the test result, plus a cheap AA battery, and you have a self-contained gadget for less cost than creating the smartphone interface.

Pregnancy tests and all sorts of sophisticated chemical test strips don't involve a smartphone.

I'm thinking that the smartphone hookup is either:

(1) a way to add future functionality like maintaining a database of the tests or uploading test results to somewhere (with all the privacy implications and risks of those), or

(2) a marketing ruse since we all know that a smartphone app that does X is way cooler than a old-fashioned self-contained gadget that does X.

An an example of how easily people fall for coolness of having a smartphone do something that doesn't actually need a smartphone, check out this comment to the original article:

"I have been resisting the smartphone trend for years because they are expensive and there was no unique use for them: everything a smartphone did I ALREADY own a gadget for. This changes the game. Now I want a smartphone."

ought to be prima facie evidence of ineffective/incompetent counsel

A much more likely explanation is that the writer and her lawyer know perfectly well the difference between gross and net, but this was the best deal they could get, and it was better than nothing.

Writer and her lawyer: "We demand 3% of the gross."

Studio head: "I'm not offering any percentage of the gross."

Writer and her lawyer: "OK, we'll settle for 2.5% of the gross."

Studio head: "I told you: nothing on the gross. Zero. If you don't like that, get lost. I'll hire another writer."

Writer and her lawyer: "Well, OK, how about 3% of the net."

Studio head: "I think we can agree to that."

"BLANK to City: Drop Dead"

He means fill in the blank here:

"_________ to City: Drop Dead"

Older news junkies would know the answer to be:

"Ford to City: Drop Dead"[1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Ford#Budget

What joy it is to finally uninstall Flash. The last time I was this happy to uninstall crappy software was when I realized that I no longer needed RealPlayer.

For those that don't know it, RealPlayer was a very popular proprietary media player (with its own proprietary formats) circa 2000. The company's stock was worth $380 a share in 2000; it's now worth $6.

The only explanation for RealPlayer's popularity was its DRM I think; lots of commercial users wanted the DRM.

But it got more bloated with every release, and I had to go through its countless option settings every time I updated it to disable all the sneaky ways they came up with to violate user privacy. I'm relieved that we no longer need either Flash or RealPlayer.

Thank you, but I still don't get this part:

The Landsat images seem to be much larger than they need to be for the level of detail they provide.

For the level of detail I'm seeing, the same information could be represented in a 2MB download (rather than 600-700MB that's currently downloaded).

I was expecting the Landsat images to be something like satellite view in Google maps. I realize that close-up views in Google maps are collected by airplanes, not satellites. I'm not expecting to see individual cars and houses in the Landsat images, but the images I looked at were very disappointing.

The ones I downloaded were TIFF files, 8k x 8k (or sometimes 16k x 16k), 16-bit grayscale, covering large areas (~100km square), and if I zoomed-in the image quickly became blurry.

With photos that I take with a digital camera that are only 2k x 2k, I can zoom in quite a lot and see a lot of detail. The Landsat images seem to be much larger than they need to be for the level of detail they provide.

EDIT: To give an example, here's San Francisco that I zoomed-in on and cropped:

http://imgur.com/IoRFgCu

You can see that zooming more will not make it better. Is that the best we get from Landsat?

Also, why does the download contain a dozen files (named xxxB1.TIF, xxxB2.TIF, xxxB3.TIF, etc.) that seem to cover the same area?

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

I think it's perfectly appropriate for HN. Do tell us your thinking about why apparel is expensive relative to other goods. I've wondered this myself.

He's obviously concerned about being sued by, for example, McDonald's because you made and used a logo having golden arches in the shape of an "M" with on a red background with text "McDonald's" at the bottom. There's no way he can detect or prevent every such possibility.

going with a friend really really really helps too

My experience has been exactly the opposite. It is much better to not have a friend with you. Whether at a computer conference, backpacking through Europe, or trying to meet the opposite sex, starting alone has always been better for me.

Typical problems that comes up if you're with a friend:

- You're more likely to sit there talking only to your friend. This is the biggest problem.

- If you're brushed off by whoever you meet, it feels awkward to return to your friend, explain what happened, and try to resume your earlier conversation.

- If the person you meet suggests going for coffee or you get involved in long conversation, what do you do about your friend. Ignore him? Tell him to wait? Ask him to join you even if he's not interested in the person you met or topic you're discussing? You can end up looking rude in so many ways.

- If you're with a friend, you yourself become less approachable by others.

I agree with the rest of what you said, but it's funny that the "friend" part is 100% different for me.

No it's not the same logic.

If a 1000-word article had 50 misspelled words, would you then say that it was a pretty accurate because it was 95% correctly spelled?

No, you'd be horrified. Things like spelling, grammar, and basic facts (the capital of a country, USG policy on gifts, etc.) should be close to 100% correct. That's a lower bound to be taken seriously.

General Clapper praised the food; his hosts later presented him with a bill for his share of the meal.

Not only are they evil, but they're cheap too.

But the fact is that the hosts would have billed for the meal because the U.S. government asked to be billed.

The USG requires that officials traveling on business not accept gratuities, gifts, dinners, or anything above a certain value (which is about US$100 -- it gets adjusted for inflation, so it might be higher today).[1]

There is an exemption to allow acceptance of gifts of travel expenses of more $100 when officials travel outside the United States on business, but only if "such acceptance is appropriate, consistent with the interests of the United States, and permitted by the employing agency".[1]

In this case, General Clapper and his staff probably didn't want to deal with the question of whether it was "appropriate" or deal with reporting requirements, so they just asked for the bill. Or, their North Korean hosts, knowing U.S. policy, were proactive in making up a bill.

Either way, the NYT article should have mentioned the USG policy. If they can't get that little thing right, it makes me wonder about the accuracy of the rest of the article.

[1] http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/USCODE-2010-title5/html/USCODE-...

I know a kid whose throat swelled up, couldn't breathe for several minutes, and suffered brain damage after a one time incident of eating peanuts... Apparently, non-negligible (over 1% [1]) portion of the population reacts this way.

Lesson for everybody: Don't eat nuts!

[1] http://www.mountsinai.org/about-us/newsroom/press-releases/r...

Your argument against psychedelics is not persuasive in the manner presented.

So disappointing. I was expecting robots, bitcoin, cloning, gene therapy, integrated circuit design, space travel, face recognition. Instead it's senior care, making rental payments, social this-and-that, dog walkers, and a lot of companies simply selling on the web stuff you used to buy in a store like furniture and clothes.

Possibly the only business that sounds like it's breaking new ground is uBeam ("beams power through the air to wirelessly charge electronic devices"). I scanned quickly, so maybe there are more.

Certainly great fortunes have been made by simply selling on the web stuff you used to buy in a store (Amazon for example). It might be the economic reality, but I still can't help but feel sad that the top 100 startups--and all the creative energy and capital--are overwhelmingly prosaic and ordinary small business.

From the article

Yes, you read the article. But the hostages didn't!

All the hostage heard is "19 people rescued. You are next. Don’t lose hope". How does a hostage conclude "you should try to escape" from the preceding message?

However, with this message, they would know that the fighting is a sign of a rescue mission and try to escape.

What makes you think that a sign of a rescue mission means that you should try to escape?

If anything, popular culture teaches exactly the opposite. Think of any Hollywood movie involving a bank robbery or hijacking. The hostages lie down and duck while the police swarm in and shoot the bad guys. The hostages do not try to escape.

I'm not saying which is better (staying put vs trying to escape), and I don't know.

I'm saying that the message--"19 people rescued. You are next. Don’t lose hope"--is useless and open to whatever interpretation you desire.

Me : I think it should mean, you might be the next to be rescued.

But what specifically would you have done differently if you were a hostage and had received this message? Don't answer, "I'd keep up hope." "Not losing hope" is not an action.

The message has no particular call to action. That's my main point. My second point is that even if you named some specific action you'd take, someone else would have had a different idea because it's so vague.

A compassionate message could mean the world to a hostage. That's true. But a compassionate message and a useful message are not the same thing.

It's a great feel-good story, but the whole thing is just intelligence theater, à la Bruce Schneier's security theater.

That is, the coded message serves no intelligence or military objective. It sounds to me like the government concocted this idea because they felt they should be doing something, anything, no matter how useless( * ).

What's a hostage supposed to conclude from hearing, "19 people rescued. You’re next. Don’t lose hope". Should I run? Run now? Hide in the jungle? Run when the rescue starts? Stay put? Fight during the rescue? Don't fight? If you asked 10 different people what specific action you're supposed to take based on this message, you'd get 10 different answers.

If this message had any tangible effect, why aren't there any first hand accounts from the hostages explaining what they did differently as a result of hearing the message?

So 3 million people heard this song, yet the only ones who understood it were some of the hostages? Not one of the several thousand militants and no one in the public decoded it? This just proves the point that it's un-actionable. Case (1): Lots of people got it besides the hostages, but there's nothing to blow the whistle on. It's not as if the message says, "Raid at dawn". Case (2): Nobody got it, which also implies that the message had no effect.

( * )If the government claimed that the message was simply a way to make the hostages keep up hope, then OK (though it still seems like a lot of expense for little gain). But they're trying to make it sound like a big intelligence or military coup, which it is not.

What happened exactly?

How much did you lose (if you don't mind saying)?

How long was it before you noticed?

Do you think you were (a) individually targeted as a BTC holder, or (b) do you think someone was port scanning the Internet and stumbled onto you?

If (a), how did they know you might have BTC? If (b), is it actually commonplace for automated attacks to seek BTC wallets these days?