Hacker News Reader

CraigRoon U.S. Athletes Are Taking Full Advantage of Free Healthcare in Olympic Village

Universal healthcare is great if you are part of the elite that gets to skip the inevitable lines. Canada and the UK systems require interminable waits in certain areas and for certain specialties.

CraigRoon Why Do 70% of Families Lose Their Wealth in the 2nd Generation? (2018)

Shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations. I’ve heard this since I was young; this is hardly new.

Inherited wealth does not encourage frugality, nor does the third generation generally find working hard to be as fulfilling as the first did. You see a lot of artists and lifestyle businesses in the third generation coupled with a fairly plush lifestyle

CraigRoon Olympic Games Probability Rankings

Population is not a great predictor when certain countries import improbably good athletes in niche sports. E.g. there have been incredible numbers of Portuguese speaking beach volleyball players at the Olympics

CraigRoon Ask HN: How do you choose a hostname for personal devices?

Salads:

PCs are named after lettuces Printers are tomatoes Routers are condiments like croutons Cameras are carrots

CraigRoon Why do some people lose more weight through exercise than others?

https://www.powers-study.org/about/

There's a study being done on humans that is trying to answer this and other questions.

CraigRoon Five Just Stop Oil activists receive record sentences for planning to block M25

Hopefully individuals blocked by these people can sue them

CraigRoon US Tariffs at 60% Would Halve China's Growth Rate, UBS Says

It would create an incredible incentive to smuggle or hide the point of origin

CraigRoon The Law Firm Hitting Businesses with Disability Suits

Fee shifting statutes create an environment in which lawyers get paid out of proportion to the economic damages incurred. The plaintiffs have no skin in this

CraigRoon Argentina to sell dollars on parallel market as part of anti-inflation drive

The costs associated with high and unstable inflation dwarf everything else. Get that down and the economy will take off as investment gets funneled into productive endeavors

CraigRoon The cutest monopoly: Koala Kare

It was developed for young men doing late summer football practice. It is quite good for that use, or for manual workers doing a combination of cardio and strength work in very hot humid conditions while wearing protective clothing. I've painted houses in these conditions, and it can be hard to drink and keep down enough water; you also lose a lot of salt. Gatorade has salt and sugar in it but at relatively concentrations. You can make your own from scratch, but the bottles are studier and tend to stand up to more abuse

CraigRoon Effectiveness of high-fat and high-carb diets on body composition and strength

Translation: if you go on a diet and train a lot and have the motivation to go through such a complicated medical study, you will look better

CraigRoon She Thought She Caught a Man Cheating, So She Posted on TikTok

I do hope that someone sues one of these creators for defamation

CraigRoon Coffee helped the Union in the Civil War

The traditional ratio is that one pound of coffee is 50 cups. So they drank about 5 cups per day. Though if the coffee came green, it might have been a little lower

CraigRoon Relational Algebra Primer

I can explain this in about 2 minutes to a novice using the idea pages of graph paper.

This is overkill.

CraigRoon Harvard Railroad Economics Exam (1906)

A poling yard is one where the tea cars are sorted by pushing them with a pole using an engine on an adjacent track. They are banned today

CraigRoon Research on WWII Dutch "Hunger Winter" Has Terrifying Implications for Gaza

There's no conclusive evidence of famine. That article was propaganda

CraigRoon The rise of the disposable car

The issue is that people who drive super unrepairable cars create externalities for everyone else. Insurance should only cover up to the 90th percentile of repair costs

CraigRoon Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

Being really smart and inquisitive for 30 years .. I've been lucky that people paid me a lot of money to do whatever it took to make lots of different products work, at levels from extremely low to high. Just because people don't post their work to public archives doesn't mean they aren't working and learning all day. So this filter tends to catch people who are at second tier employers and are a bit bored

CraigRoon Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

I had to learn cobol last year. Not hard if you have read lots of books from the 70s and 80s and have a strong background in algorithms. It is expensive and annoying to maintain these systems, but until there's a business case to replace the underlying application, he's safe

CraigRoon Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

For those of us already putting in 10-14 hours per day at our day jobs, or who work in regulated industries, this is a nonstarter. My experience is that the people who are really good are kept pretty busy by their employer

CraigRoon Cloudflare CEO bought a newspaper to change reporting about his new house plans

Buy the whole hill then.

CraigRoon Millionaires' Effective Tax Rate Has Been Cut by Half Since Mid-20th Century

If your husband works and hits the 50+% bracket, and you are younger and make less... You either have to make 3x what your nanny does before you even keep a dollar- any less and you are paying to work.

This is incredibly disheartening friends have complained about being involuntary housewives bc it would cost them too much to go to work

CraigRoon Millionaires' Effective Tax Rate Has Been Cut by Half Since Mid-20th Century

This was summer camp and hunting camp for the executives. If you read the man in the gray flannel suit, you'll be surprised by how a lot of white collar execs didn't work that hard. Things moved a lot slower

CraigRoon Millionaires' Effective Tax Rate Has Been Cut by Half Since Mid-20th Century

I know of an airport, a bunch of hunting and fishing lodges, teams of housekeepers, etc. that basically allowed the executives of a fortune 500 company to live a pretty amazing life as if they owned an estate without actually paying for any of it.

As soon as marginal tax rates came down, these things got eliminated -- it was far more efficient to just pay people.

Likewise, smart people tend to marry other smart people. If one does well, the other got taxed at 90%. Guess what actually happened? She didn't work. Huge huge loss for the economy.

CraigRoon Millionaires' Effective Tax Rate Has Been Cut by Half Since Mid-20th Century

The lengths that people would go to avoid paying those marginal tax rates was legendary!

https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-nocera-tax-avoidance-...

There were also a lot of 'perks' paid for by companies, and a lot of spouses who didn't bother working.

You can have a high marginal tax rate, but it tends to be economically counterproductive.

CraigRoon Google Cloud rolls out self-designed Arm chips in its data centers

The article omits to explain how this chip achieves better performance per watt or dollar, and what you give up to get that

CraigRoon The U.S. government may finally mandate safer table saws

People will disconnect the safety system, and we'll have a 500$ saw with a 300$ piece of useless gear

There are lots of things you can't saw with a sawstop, and if triggered, it is very expensive to replace

CraigRoon std::launder: the most obscure new feature of C++17 (2016)

This is an April folks joke

CraigRoon No Data Correlates School Success to Life Success. Literally. None

Avg Harvard grad salary at 30 vs HS dropout salary at 30? Feels like her data sources are biased or omitting things