Agathos

Recent example: the Cyberpunk people announced the latest delay after the game had already gone gold. So they’re taking an extra 3 weeks to fix it, while also pressing discs that have none of those fixes.

A third issue: the House and Senate polling was way off, much worse than the presidential contest.

> The only thing they say about flavor is that it’s classic - your granddad drank the same stuff.

And they fell into that by accident, after the infamous retreat from New Coke.

> A startup doesn't need AWS right off the bat. Planning for scale right from the beginning is a way to quickly bleed $. Of course, if you have VC money, why not spend that cash right?

Especially when the alternative is to hear a lot of, "What? You don't expect to scale? I thought you took this seriously."

Did some googling. The US is the #2 beef exporter, and Sweden is not in the top 15. Admittedly that doesn't necessarily tell me about domestic consumption.

http://www.worldstopexports.com/top-beef-exporting-countries...

Interestingly, the #1 exporter, Australia, has historically used a mix of grazing and feed grains. But they're expecting to grow more feed grains because grazing suffers during droughts, which are increasingly common. Apparently those grains are wheat and barley; corn is definitely an American obsession. I assume that will be grown on land that could otherwise be used to grow food for humans.

https://www.beefcentral.com/lotfeeding/grain-sector-faces-ne...

You really think your restaurant and supermarket beef is coming from grazing? Those cattle live in dense feedlots, where they are fed corn and soy.

Unsafe at Any Speed as an argument _against_ safety regulations? A creative approach, at least.

Most working poor have to manage their finances every day. I think about my finances maybe once a week, because I make developer money and I don't have to worry about it.

How thick does the breading have to be before fried chicken is a dumpling?

I usually spend that time distracted with thoughts of where is my delivery, why is my delivery late, I'm so hungry, why did I even order delivery? The walk is a lot more pleasant.

I think djohnston's point was that China's global reach started expanding after they stopped killing tens of millions of their own citizens, which was around the time Mao died.

"I want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less and I'm not kidding."

-- https://twitter.com/Jordan_Mallory/status/127748375624544256...

(later immortalized in foone's death generator by https://twitter.com/moshboy/status/1278202555995090947)

A casino is a funny comparison here. I doubt Robinhood wants to be regulated the way casinos are. Casinos in most jurisdictions are mandated to take at least minimal steps to address the risks of problem gambling. For example, posting hotline numbers to help problem gamblers, training employees to spot problem gamblers, and in some cases even banning known problem gamblers.

If a casino was found to be doing none of those things, when a suicide occurred, I suspect it would be in deep trouble.

An Apple keyboard is a funny example to open with. Weren't we just recently celebrating the end of Apple's ill-advised MacBook keyboard experiment?

I loved A Fire Upon the Deep, but I thought Deepness was a little disappointing because the aliens aren't alien enough. They seem like regular people who happen to look like bugs and who sometimes need to hibernate because of how their sun works. Ironically, it seems like the all-human Emergency is Vinge's vehicle to explore an alien way of thinking.

A Fire Upon the Deep has a much bigger scope and includes a menagerie of truly weird aliens.

You suggested paying a dividend was similar to paying employees. When throwaway2048 challenged this, you brought up stock-based compensation. Surely if such compensation (including dividends) was an obligation in the same way as wages, then the employee would have some recourse when it's interrupted. In other words, they could sue.

Suing your employer for wage theft because

1. They are still paying your salary, and

2. They are still granting you stock, but

3. They have suspended dividends on the shares you were granted

seems like a reach. I'd definitely be interested in reading about it if someone actually tries it, though!

It sounds like you may be assuming the dividend is required, like a debt. It isn't. A company can stop paying its dividend at any time, so Denmark isn't excluding any company. Investors will grumble when the dividend stops, but so what? The taxpayers are grumbling too.

Of course some banks have recently argued that their dividends are something like debts. They argue that cutting the dividend would cause investors to panic, so they must be essential to the financial system. This is a weird argument, but if you took it seriously you would have to include dividends in their post-2008 stress tests. You would require regulatory approval before they increased the dividend, as you would if they increased their debt-to-asset ratio.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-04-06/a-virt...

I don't really know what to make of "republicans have had control of the Supreme Court for years." Overturning Obamacare was their number one priority during the Obama administration. The Supreme Court chose not to. The five justices who chose not to are still seated. Some control.

So what? The Chief Justice can write the minority opinion next time. That 5-seat majority includes some who will almost certainly retire in the next four years.

So you're confident that the Supreme Court will overturn the 5th Circuit's decision to throw it out? The Supreme Court will be hearing the case this autumn.

And you must be confident that Trump will lose, since the 5-4 majority that saved Obamacare last time will not survive a few more Republican appointments.

I assume some HNers of a certain generation had their lives changed for the better by the likes of Byte or Dr. Dobb's Journal.

Very possibly yes. That would be a chance for additional entities to bid on Sprint's spectrum, or even to break that spectrum up. When irreplaceable assets like that are concentrated into the hands of a few bigger and bigger companies, the whole economy becomes less dynamic.

Germany: https://www.dw.com/en/germany-mulls-mass-testing-for-coronav...

The original report from Friday, auf Deutsch: https://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/medizin/coronavirus-gros...

Gamers at Work is also great if you're curious about the early days of the games industry. The discussions focus on the business side, so it reads more like Founders than like Coders. Interesting to see where some of today's giants began.

I had a 45-minute standup the other day.

Many successful interplanetary probes have launched with significant faults that had to be patched or worked around to complete the mission. Luckily the teams are usually able to do that.

The SolarCity acquisition.

If it's a DeLorean, just head back to 1978 when Proposition 13 passed in California.

Yeah, a lot of "indie" studios today are as big as Westwood was when it made Command & Conquer.