KeytarHero

Buying short isn't the opposite of buying long - it's the reciprocal. Which is an important distinction: if you buy a diversified portfolio of 10 stocks and one goes bust, if you bought long you've lost 10%. If you bought short, you're completely broke.

> Why not just do the exact opposite of whatever their initial hunch is.

If your initial hunch is to buy a stock you don't own yet, you can't sell it instead.

Yeah, the only "proof" that people tend to cite is that the WHO has classified EM radiation in a class that basically means "we have no idea if it causes cancer or not, but it might", along with just about everything [1].

I lived in Victoria for a few years. My landlords there had refused a smart meter - yet they had WiFi, and both had cell phones.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_IARC_Group_2B_carcinog...

I guess the residents of the San Juan Islands must be quite a different demographic from the Canadian islands just across the border. This would never happen on one of the Canadian Gulf Islands, because too many residents are worried about the "wireless radiation" causing headaches or cancer. (This is also where 1 in 6 residents refused a smart power meter [1], mostly out of supposed safety concerns.)

[1] "Gulf Islanders 15 times more likely to oppose BC Hydro smart meters than Vancouverites" http://www.vancouversun.com/technology/Gulf+Islanders+times+...

I see this attitude of "I don't like this product that was never meant for my use case, therefore nobody else will want it either" a lot among tech people, and HN is no exception. Just look at yesterday's comments on the Raspberry Pi touch screen [1]. Or really, the comments on almost any large consumer-oriented product launch.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10184510

Also this video from their first time playing it (1 year earlier), which I found a bit easier to follow (it's also only half as long)

http://www.shutupandsitdown.com/videos/v/susd-play-megagame/

"ll" may not be the best choice of default alias - it's pretty common for people to already have it aliased to "ls -l" (or -la, or -lah, or whatever their preferred default flavor), especially for the type of power users this is targeted toward.

I realize this is a bit of a moot point since the user can always change the alias, but it's generally better UX if the default is something most people will use.

> Firefox doesn't revert you to defaults

You mean besides that time Firefox reverted everyone's search engine to Yahoo?

> I've never understood how people can truly believe that by checking (or unchecking) a checkbox their privacy is fully protected.

You mean besides the fact that collecting personal data without your consent is illegal?

> it did not wave the arms

It fundamentally changes things because it's so easy to do anonymously. If someone drops rocks off an overpass, it's pretty easy for police to track them down and arrest them. If someone attaches a bomb to the bottom of a car, sure it's harder to get caught than dropping rocks off an overpass, but you still need physical access to the car, and it's still relatively traceable. But if remotely hacking a car, it would be pretty easy to stay anonymous. Plus, in both those other cases it's obviously foul play, whereas if a hacked car runs into a wall it's probably not going to be so obvious.

Plus, the anonymous nature of the internet makes it much easier to become detached from the real-life consequences of your actions. Just look at all the examples of online harassment from people who would never say things like that in real life. Look at people who go and grief kids' minecraft servers, yet wouldn't go and kick over their sand castles in real life. Look at morons who swat people.

Actually, come to think of it, maybe it's not so different - if it was found that a big car manufacturer had a problem with their door locks and you could open it just by sticking a toothpick in, you can bet they would take the blame once they started getting stolen.

I'm not saying the responsibility is solely on the manufacturer, but they definitely bear a major part of it. When you buy a car, you expect a reasonable amount of security. I guess the question is where we draw the line as to what counts as reasonable.

> But the way most people are talking about this you'd think that as soon as the method for doing this hits the internet, script-kiddies are going to start randomly crashing Jeeps into bridge pylons.

You mean the same script kiddies who think it's hilarious to sic a SWAT team on someone's house? It's not like script kiddies everywhere would start doing this - but all it takes is 1 before you've got a problem, and I'm sure that if it was easy enough for any script kiddie to do, at least one of them would.

Say the car manufacturer made no attempt at security whatsoever - all you had to do to take control of the car's critical systems was know its IP address and guess its 8 character max admin password. Would that really not be on the manufacturer?

Uhh, the same way almost every non-luxury car made between 1960 and 2010 did it? A dial each for temperature, fan speed, and where the air is blowing. Plus a button for air conditioning and/or recirculate. No touch screens, no menus.

People have been using cars without touch screens for 50+ years. The UX is a pretty much a solved problem by this point. Yet now car manufacturers seem to want to mess with something that worked great, just so their cars seem cutting-edge.

It amazes me that while more and more jurisdictions are banning cell phone use while driving, vehicle makers are increasingly resorting to touch screens for things like stereo and climate control. When using a smartphone while driving is illegal, how are in-vehicle touch screen controls meant to be operated by the driver not banned?

As much as I love Tesla and what they are trying to do to the car industry, they are the worst offenders in this. Hopefully by the time I can afford one, there will be legislation making entirely touch-screen dashes illegal and they'll have the usual 3 dials for climate control, that you can operate without having to take your eyes off the road.

Well, they did mention that elsewhere:

> Shrinking gate lengths have meant 30 per cent more transistors per year for the same-sized fleck of silicon (transistors are laid out in a two-dimensional array, so gate-length scaling improves density in two ­dimensions).

I'm guessing they deliberately went with a not 100% accurate statement just to get their point across more elegantly - especially since the statement is still correct if you take "font size" to mean "font area" (even though that's not the typical understanding of font size).

At 44K (-380 F), I'd say it's more like next century's coldest snowboarding destination

Early 2000s? The company was founded in 2003, and I can't seem to find any articles mentioning them prior to 2009.

I love the snark in that PEP:

> APL apparently used +.× , which by combining a multi-character token, confusing attribute-access-like . syntax, and a unicode character, ranks somewhere below U+2603 SNOWMAN on our candidate list.

and then later, one of the reasons @ is better than the alternatives:

> Whatever, we have to pick something.

They are, but as far as I know C has no plans to remove them.

Same with trigraphs - as much fun as it is to joke about the ??!??! operator[0]

[0] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7825055/what-does-the-c-o...

    name
        alue

pairs? ;)

Wait, people actually use cL in Germany? I thought most metric countries would say "400 mL" instead (that's what we do in Canada anyway). It seems so arbitrary to me - if not sticking to powers of 3, then why not just say 4 dL?

(Not that there's anything "wrong" about this - I just don't understand why.)

Same goes for if you have a bigger screen but don't maximize your browser.

Windows has terrible virtual desktop support; as a result, I don't usually scale windows to full screen so I can actually keep multiple windows straight. One of my big pet peeves is when websites don't scale well to smaller width or height (height seems to be particularly neglected by web developers).

I doubt it. Planning to piss off the musicians you depend on and then backtrack is a risky move; it has the potential to erode public trust somewhat.

> As a rule of thumb, you should only use [personal audio] devices at levels up to 60% of maximum volume for a total of 60 minutes a day. The louder the volume, the shorter your duration should be. At maximum volume, you should listen for only about five minutes a day.

Perfect, I'm just going to plug my headphones into a 50-watt amp. Then I can have them as loud as I want without even getting anywhere close to 60%, so my ears will be totally safe!

"We're going to deliberately do something that could piss off most of our musicians, and then backtrack on it. What could go wrong?"

Yeah, but the way individual languages do numbers doesn't necessarily make sense. In French, 99 is read as "four-twenties and ten-plus-nine"

That's what 3rd party cases are for.

On Madeon's latest album, he hid his logo in the transition between two tracks: http://i.imgur.com/yPJTTs0.jpg

It sounds pretty cool too - you can hear the tones going up & down: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lz10F2Rtqv8&t=3m40s

If it's just through a cheap speaker and mic, you'll probably lose a lot of the image.

This uses a linear frequency scale (which is just the nature of Fourier transforms), whereas our ears are sensitive on a log frequency scale. In other words, the information that's most important to our hearing, which is what a mic & speaker will preserve the best, is in the bottom 10% of the image.

A cheap speaker & mic will probably lose a lot of content above about 10 kHz - which is the entire top half of the image. Even though this wouldn't be that huge a difference to our ears, it would sure look bad in the image.

As for background noise, the difference would probably look like the difference here: http://www.sweetwater.com/insync/media/2010/09/RXAdv-e-xlarg... (that's a screenshot of audio restoration software that removes noise, so it's technically doing the opposite process as best it can, but the difference would be similar).