Hacker News Reader

Dominision 34% of remote workers would quit rather than return to full-time office work

For me, its all about the commute. Just do the math.

1-Hour commute time both ways: 21.8 Days a year you are spending commuting to/from work.

3-fucking-weeks of time, poof, gone.

I'll get my social interaction else where for 3 weeks of my life back. Thanks.

Dominision Why facial recognition has led to false arrests

I worked in a Law Enforcment office that used Facial Recognition. Every single time we would give officers a potential match, it came with a disclaimer that it was a POTENTIAL match. It was up to the detectives and officers to actually do their job and find other pillars of information.

This isn't a failure of facial recognition, its a failure of the stupidest people I went to high school with thinking its some sort of perfect system.

Dominision The Great Asshole Fallacy

Ah yes, spoken like somebody who hasn't achieved anything in their life because everything is beyond their control.

Dominision The Great Asshole Fallacy

I agree with you here.

In a previous career, I was responsible for delivering timely and accurate information to people who then went and put their lives on the line based off of that information.

I was regarded as "brash" and an "asshole" because I would correct my colleagues information as they were giving it to those individuals who were going to put their life on the line.

I wasn't doing it to demean or belittle the people who I was correcting, I was doing it because had those operators gone out with wrong information, it could lead to their deaths. And I would much rather be thought of as an asshole than quietly and kindly "talk" to my colleagues AFTER they had delivered bad information and corrected them in private.

Dominision Remote work can also be a source of socioeconomic inequality

Nah, I think he is pointing out that if more remote work becomes the norm, urban areas will see an exodus to more rural, cheaper areas to live, and the demand for living spaces will decrease lowering the costs of rent in urban areas where most poor people live.

Dominision Inside the Philip Morris campaign to 'normalize' a tobacco device

Funny aside, you know what else is considered a "Sin Industry" by the US tax code? Golf Courses.

Dominision 70% of Americans Support Solar Mandate on New Homes

https://news.energysage.com/shopping-solar-panels-pay-attent...

You're right. 4 on this list have 25 year warranties... but the rest.. ouch.

Dominision 70% of Americans Support Solar Mandate on New Homes

>Your investment is recouped in 5-7 years.

(Oops, then edited it to double that estimate)

>Your investment is recouped in 8-13 years.

So, right when you recoup your investment, the 10 year warranty runs out. Great.

Dominision Astronomers want public funds for intelligent life search

> In what world do you conflate "detectable" with "visible with the naked eye"

They are literally synonymous and only vary in the instrument we are using to detect it. Your eye versus, say, an antenna.

Visible light is also on the electromagnetic spectrum, it also abides by the inverse square law.

> What's more, the ratio of visible light to IR would be... highly abnormal.

No, it wouldn't. The sun radiates across the entire EM spectrum including IR and Visible light.

It would take ~6200 structures that have the same area as the United States including Alaska (3.8 million square miles) to block out 1% of the EM radiation that the sun produces.

>You mean like the energy output of, you know, a star?

IF a sufficiently advanced civilization could magically conjure up enough materials in the solar system strip mining the solar system AND we had 100% efficiency in collecting then radiating 1% of the energy the sun gives off.....

Yeah isn't gonna happen.

Dominision Inside the Philip Morris campaign to 'normalize' a tobacco device

So is fast food. So is Junk food. Casino's were designed with no windows or clocks so patrons would lose track of time while giving out free alcohol.

Dominision Astronomers want public funds for intelligent life search

The issue with using general "Earth-like electromagnetic communications technology" is the inverse square law.

Our own communications aren't distinguishable from the cosmic background radiation even at our closest neighbor.

The only way we would find something is if they pointed a VERY powerful noise source directly at us, or us at them. And even then, we are looking at maybe a 100 lightyear bubble (~600 main sequence stars).

Dominision Astronomers want public funds for intelligent life search

What.

IR radiation is bound by the same laws as all other forms of radiation, most namely the inverse square law.

You would have to be radiating monumental amounts of energy, more than say a red dwarf, to be detectable from "millions of light years" away without fading into the cosmic background as noise.

Think about it this way. With the naked eye you can see a bunch of individual distinguishable stars around ~4000 light years away. These stars produce more energy in a second than mankind has ever produced.

But our closest neighbor, Proxima Centuari, you can't see with the naked eye. Its a red dwarf. And while it still produces unfathomable amounts of energy AND is the closest star to our own. You can't see it.

TLDR: No, a Dyson swarm would not be detectable from "Millions of lightyears away"

Dominision Sweden gives employees unpaid time off to be entrepreneurs (2019)

My current job is doing 4 days 8 hours because the boss read an article saying it increases productivity.

So, his opinion is that we should be more productive in 4 days than we are in 5. I do enjoy the 3 day weekends, but I have to admit that I don't like the immense pressure of the shortened week.