HN user
"Back in the day" is the key idea here. It's the valuation that doesn't make sense in today's market. What does Cursor offer to be valued at $60 BILLION? Its models are alright but nowhere near SOTA, and pretty much superseded by open source local models at this point.
Flounder might even work, since my initial complaints that the generated designs obscured the wearer's eyesight were met with solutions that just moved the offending eye to the side of the person's head :)
That's great, though I wasn't even thinking at the scale of reflection or refraction. My test was if the image generators could come up with a novelty pair of glasses that incorporate the year digits into the shape of the frame itself with some whimsy, rather than just plop the numbers on top of regular boring frames. So something like [this](https://p.kagi.com/proxy/oardefault.jpg?c=-4THVYblKrsgkzFTNE...) rather than [this](https://p.kagi.com/proxy/2026-Glasses-4-Color-New-Year-Glass...). A lot of the initial designs just incorporated the numbers into the frames, with no consideration for relative placement to the eyes, completely obscuring vision. Additional prompting might lead to cutouts for the eyes, but that was unsatisfying. At least as of this past new year's eve, I couldn't get any of the image generators to give me something even passible. Images 2.0 also couldn't give anything acceptable till I gave it some examples.
That's lovely. My own personal benchmark has been to ask the various models to generate a functional pair of novelty New Year's Eve glasses on a person, that don't just plonk the year onto the top of regular frames.
I've used their "perfected" xanthan gum which is a separate SKU from their regular xanthan gum. At least for gum arabic they seem to only offer one SKU, so I'm guessing it's not prehydrated.
Is the Modernist Pantry gum arabic pre hydrated?
I've sometimes used baking soda to accelerate softening of beans, and I imagine the effect is more appreciable at higher altitudes perhaps? Some of the usage of baking soda could be innocent enough.
It's largely unfiltered, but it is still treated for disinfection. Chlorination and UV is standard for NYC water, and its fluoridated as well.
Its heavily contested if these were chariots. If anything, I would suggest that the consensus scholarly opinion is that these were ox drawn carts, not chariots.
- no horse remains or equestrian objects have been found, anywhere in India for this time period
- solid wooden wheels (shown in the reconstruction) are too heavy for horses to draw, for which spoked wheels were developed in the Steppe
- the shape of the yoke that would be tied to the animals is straight, the way ox carts have, like Harrapan ox carts. By contrast, yokes for horses are curved, to match the animal's posture.
Fair enough - in which case the Mint just needs to pad the sale price a bit to cover interchange fees, and make a little extra on top, and shipping can be extra. 10% on top of the face value should be more than enough, and would have the side effect of sapping any would be manufactured spend. Yet the prices on the Mint are way above that - it looks like more than 50%. Sure, if the novelty or collector market values it at that premium, great. What I struggle to understand is that this is primarily to combat manufactured spend. I still don't see why manufactured spend is a problem for the Mint to solve, rather than the credit card companies.
That seems ... odd. I can pay my apartment rent with a debit card with a fixed transaction fee (eg, $999.99 and up to $1,999.99 the service fee is $4.95), while covering it with a credit card has a different fee structure of a flat 2.95%. This is with Rent Cafe in NYC, and from what I can tell, it's a very widespread platform across the country. The 2.95% fee specific to credit cards will wipe out the points earned for a credit card under almost all circumstances.
I don't follow. Why would Manufactured Spend specifically cost the Mint money? It's not great for the credit card company, sure, but why the Mint? If the Mint was previously eating the interchange fees & shipping, ok, but that's not a manufactured spend specific issue.
credit card companies aggressively shut down manufactured spending when they notice it.
I'm familiar with the concept of manufactured spend, and why credit card companies would try to clamp down on it. What I don't get is why the US Mint would care one way or the other for the concerns of credit card companies. The usual way to eliminate manufactured spend would be to add a credit card specific transaction fee that cancels out the spend points. By the Mint increasing the base price for everybody, this affects even people who might be paying with a debit card, or an ACH transaction (not sure if they're options, just positing).
That seems reasonable, but why would the US Mint care about manufactured spend for credit card companies?
There are a couple of ways to rule out modern contamination.
Ancient DNA has certain characteristic damage that changes the sequence slightly, and you can use that to filter out any DNA that doesn't have that signature. Plus, you can maintain DNA profiles of all people involved in handling to ensure it's not modern contamination from the field workers or lab techs.
Yes, and it's a self-perpetuating cycle. If so few people have latent TB, fewer people develop active TB that will go on to infect others. As other comments have mentioned, poverty and its resultant poor health is the biggest correlation for developing active TB. I wonder if most of the Russian latent infections happened during the Soviet/Post Soviet collapse era, with newer latent infections falling off as quality of life improved over time?
The majority of healthy people develop a latent infection, and won't manifest symptoms in their lifetimes. The bacteria are encapsulated into nodules by the immune system, which weaken if the immune system weakens. The bacteria escape and active symptomatic infection occurs.
More like a papaya fruit.
The timeline looks scary, it looks like it took about a decade to introduce a regulation that would help protect the vultures
To be fair, the cause was conclusively identified as diclofenac only as late as 2004-2005. Even in papers published as late as 2003, various other, more likely culprits were being investigated, including pesticides, pathogens, or food scarcity. India moved to ban veterinary use of diclofenac by early 2005, slowed down by pushback from the Ministry of Agriculture for lack of an effective alternative vulture safe drug, which were only really demonstrated in studies in early 2006. Later that year diclofenac was banned.
To add to this, Chinese (and Japanese) Buddhist scholars' emphasis on retaining the original pronunciation of chants led them to hang on to the phonetically written Siddham script in which their masters had learned the scriptural texts in universities in India.
A pinch of "mineral salts", if you will.
Disagree - Seurat had first mover advantage with single cell but sucked with larger datasets that Scanpy could handle till the big change in Seurat 5. The preference for either Seurat/Scanpy is incredibly lab specific. That said, Seurat is better documented for sure, but the ecosystem for both is incredibly rich and flourishing.
What about subway lines in the Bronx?
As someone who lives & works in the Bronx, I haven't encountered any harassment in the Bronx lines. Pretty much every negative experience I've had on any subway line has been in Manhattan.
In that case, you should really compare it to the New York Metropolitan Area, which has over 20 million people.
Sure, but I think you have to consider how most people shop: if they see the bottle of maple syrup as 3 times the cost of its competitor, that's the comparison they see, especially if they have no strong emotional connection to maple syrup itself. Could they make the stretch if they wanted to? I'm sure they could, but I imagine there's a hundred other competing groceries that win out when the primary caretaker is grocery shopping. Should they opt for the name brand cereal or the store brand? Detergent? Juice? I don't think most of those grocery item comparisons are as stark as a three-fold difference, so I can appreciate that maple syrup may not make the cut for many people - even if the difference is not all that much in dollar terms.
I mean, by your own numbers, maple syrup is more than 3 times the price of its competitor. I would also imagine the type of syrup is not high on the priority list when comparison shopping.
For what it's worth, my SO grew up in Texas and absolutely prefers the taste & consistency of table syrup over maple syrup for our use cases (pancakes & waffles). I suppose it's what he grew up with and that's what "syrup" is supposed to taste like to him.
In my Indian family, this sort of skinny phenotype with a voracious appetite had a simple folk explanation - you eat so much that the food doesn't have time to be absorbed.
People stir syrup into coffee? In the US the only context in which I see people consume maple syrup is as a condiment for pancakes/waffles, and even in those situations I see many people deliberately avoid maple syrup and instead reach for table syrup (preferred taste & consistency).
It might be true for non-Canadian consumers of syrup. From my brief search, it looks like perhaps 70% of Canadian maple syrup is exported, so the tastes of non-Canadian consumers is quite important in this context.
I think the point here is that 'dads' like to watch stories about competent men they can admire and look up to, who invariably tend to be older/wiser than them. I think the situation isn't helped that there isn't a lot of prestige quality content about men their age - that tends to fall into the 'dad tv' genre (ie, Yellowstone, Billions), not 'Prestige Dad tv'.