Hacker News Reader

Coffeewineon Who can die? Canada wrestles with euthanasia for the mentally ill

It’s deeply unfortunate, I can certainly see why a person who has a severe mental illness might prefer euthanasia. That said, as a number of mental illnesses can make it difficult to verify consent, it seems the bar should be higher for those persons.

Coffeewineon Lyft’s business model is broken. Here’s what I saw when I became a driver

The point of the comparison was to argue that one would expect a system which involved vastly more human labor to be much more expensive, yet the author had figures which suggested it would be less expensive.

The implication presumably being that Lyft must be overspending somewhere.

Coffeewineon Intel’s Take on the Next Wave of Moore’s Law

I don't know about production chips with such things integrated, but it's certainly been tried. The below article is from 2008.

https://www.eetimes.com/ibm-git-demo-3d-die-with-microchanne...

Coffeewineon Google believes ‘Android Tablets’ are ‘future of computing’

I can’t comment on google’s offerings, but I loved my shield tablet back in the day and would love to see more spiritual successors. Sure it was less speedy than most comparable iPads, but I quite enjoyed being able to run emulators, software from f-droid, etc. If Google wants to carry on that torch sounds good to me.

Coffeewineon Reasonably priced color e-ink display

I have a three color model from waveshare, and the way it works for it is you have to send a black and white bitmap, followed by a color and white bitmap. It's possible for these guys you need to repeat that five times.

Coffeewineon Salaries Get Chopped for Many Americans Who Manage to Keep Jobs

I don't think that's quite true - food insecurity has significantly increased since the pandemic response has began.

https://www.hamiltonproject.org/blog/the_covid_19_crisis_has...

Coffeewineon Why Child Care Is So Expensive

The listed reasons:

> First, although child-care workers aren’t expensive on an hourly basis—their median hourly wage is less than that of non-farm-animal caretakers and janitors—labor is the biggest line item for child-care facilities. Unlike, say, car companies, they can’t cut spending by moving labor to poorer countries or by replacing human workers with machines.

> The industry is highly regulated, perhaps reasonably so, given the vulnerability of the clientele ... Other costs include insurance to cover damage to the property and worker injuries, as well as legal fees to deal with inevitable parent lawsuits.

> Finally, there’s the real estate. The most expensive child-care facilities tend to be situated near high-income neighborhoods or in commercial districts, where the rents are high. And they can’t downsize in a pinch, because most states require them to have ample square footage for each kid.

Coffeewineon Ask HN: What tech choices make “new” Reddit so unbearably slow?

To build on this point, even the discussions which aren’t literally US politics are predominantly incredibly negative. To a degree that’s the internet these days, but Reddit exhibits it quite strongly.

Coffeewineon Test Scores Cast Doubt on U.S. Education Reform

So this may be a dumb question, but by which metrics did the united states have one of the finest education systems in the world?

Coffeewineon West Virginia Inmates Will Be Charged by the Minute to Read E-Books on Tablets

I suppose it depends on how you interpret the 2nd and 4th, but prisoners certainly can’t bear arms or refuse arbitrary searches. Similarly they lack the right to freely assemble.

Coffeewineon Engineer Says Software Firm Cut Her Maternity Leave Short After Her Baby Died

Sometimes a family member such as a grandparent, sometimes a company who the parents of the child pay to look after the child. Businesses which provide this service are called "daycare" in the US.

Coffeewineon The Chinese Threat to American Speech

It’s slightly ironic that were even having this conversation because the Chinese government is a (for all but a few) safe topic for Americans to criticize. There is no shortage of companies within the United States were criticizing say, Christianity would result in censure, but we don’t see that as a first amendment violation in the same way.

Coffeewineon Oil Prices Jump Most on Record After Saudi Strike

Might be cheaper to surround it with a colossal chain link dome, if money is no object.

Coffeewineon Tech firms “can and must” put backdoors in encryption, AG Barr says

Just out of curiosity, does that extend to things like chemical or biological weapons?

I suppose such an interpretation would have the side effect of making literally any hazardous substance legal to possess.

Coffeewineon Tokyo's suburban housing became vast ghettoes for the old

A very interesting read, clearly concentrating the elderly poor in this fashion was not intended, but I imagine now that they are concentrated it will be quite hard to resolve as the lack of services must make the area very unattractive to anyone with the freedom to choose.

It seemed doubly tragic that many described in the article were estranged from their families, though it’s hard to tell if that is representative or unique to the individuals.

Coffeewineon To Keep Track of Reddit Conversations Around NYT Articles, We Built a Slack Bot

My org is still writing new code in perl5. The degree to which it's unappealing is, in my opinion, greatly overstated.

Coffeewineon Photography and racial bias

From the article:

Photography is not just a system of calibrating light, but a technology of subjective decisions. Light skin became the chemical baseline for film technology, fulfilling the needs of its target dominant market. For example, developing color-film technology initially required what was called a Shirley card. When you sent off your film to get developed, lab technicians would use the image of a white woman with brown hair named Shirley as the measuring stick against which they calibrated the colors. Quality control meant ensuring that Shirley’s face looked good. It has translated into the color-balancing of digital technology. In the mid-1990s, Kodak created a multiracial Shirley Card with three women, one black, one white, and one Asian, and later included a Latina model, in an attempt intended to help camera operators calibrate skin tones. These were not adopted by everyone since they coincided with the rise of digital photography. The result was film emulsion technology that still carried over the social bias of earlier photographic conventions.

Coffeewineon Apple Falls from First to 17th Spot in 'World's Most Innovative Company' Ranking

The list was an interesting read, but I don't think anyone should really take it terribly seriously. It's 50 companies from a billion different industries vaguely ranked against each other.

Coffeewineon Almost everyone developing Tor was or is funded by the US government (2014)

Dumb question - is the supposition then that HTTPS is completely broken as well? Or is it merely that the NSA will be able to see who tor users are talking to, if not what they say?

Coffeewineon Ray Tracing Is No New Thing

The article concludes with a succinct TL;DR, but it's worth a read if you're at all interested.

So, ray tracing. It’s a rendering technique that has been around for over 45 years. It’s nothing new. Finally seeing the benefits of this technology enhance the environments in our games and VR worlds — in real time — thanks to a new API and dedicated consumer hardware, that’s the New Thing.

Coffeewineon Mojolicious 8.0 released: Perl real-time web framework

I've been using Dancer/Plack for a number of years now, are there any particular features of Mojolicious which make it preferable to your mind?

Coffeewineon Microsoft has sunk a data centre in the sea to investigate energy efficiency

That backblaze report is absolutely fascinating! I'm curious though what the statistics would be from a more consumer point of view, with regards to quantity of use, operational temperature and so forth. I imagine most consumer drives sit idle almost all of the time, whereas theirs are more likely in constant use.

That said, that paints a pretty handy real world picture of what one might expect.

Coffeewineon Emergency room patients can face steep bills even when treatment is declined

> “I decided to decline treatment because I can’t really afford any surprise bills right now,” she said. “The bill I’d probably incur would not be worth saving my ear, which was sad but a choice I had to make.”

She felt that losing her ear was a possible outcome of the accident, which certainly seems like an emergency.

More broadly, it can be difficult for a layman to determine what warrants emergency care vs what doesn't.

Coffeewineon Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Replacing Intel

AMD's cross-licensing agreements are unfortunately, or fortunately depending on your point of view, nontransferable.

https://www.kitguru.net/components/cpu/anton-shilov/amd-clar...

Coffeewineon AMD, which lost over $2.8B in 5 years, takes a hit after new report

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/17/business/martha-stewart-s-...

> for lying to federal investigators about a stock sale that she called ''a small personal matter.''

Coffeewineon A roadmap to an industrially self-sufficient Mars base in the minimum time

The plot of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_Plus !

Coffeewineon Epiphany-V: A 1024-core 64-bit RISC processor

I agree completely, it's still impressive to me that they presumably managed a competitive offering with such a system. I imagine having it be a highly homogeneous design also helped.

Coffeewineon Epiphany-V: A 1024-core 64-bit RISC processor

This is fascinating:

The Epiphany-V was designed using a completely automated flow to translate Verilog RTL source code to a tapeout ready GDS, demonstrating the feasibility of a 16nm “silicon compiler”. The amount of open source code in the chip implementation flow should be close to 100% but we were forbidden by our EDA vendor to release the code. All non-proprietary RTL code was developed and released continuously throughout the project as part of the “OH!” open source hardware library.[20] The Epiphany-V likely represents the first example of a commercial project using a transparent development model pre-tapeout.

Coffeewineon Show HN: Jpeg.io – Convert any major image format into a highly optimized JPEG

Has anyone gotten it to accept a webp image as input? It threw 'Error while processing this file' for the ~10 files I attempted with. They were all created with cwebp and the photo preset.

I was, of course, quite curious if it could improve upon file size, as that was the main reason I was using webp in the first place.

Coffeewineon Decentralized Reddit using a DHT to store content and a blockchain to rank it

Do they say anywhere what mining scheme they're considering? It seems a weakness of this scheme would be the distribution of points. If they have a scaling difficulty similar to bitcoin, it seems possible that early adopters could wind up with vast quantities of points which late adopters would be starved for, allowing them to control what content is rewarded and published for a goodly while, impairing the initial attractiveness of the platform.