Hacker News Reader

NoSorryCannoton New Zealand plans to make it illegal for kids to buy cigarettes – for life

That definition is overly simplified and derives directly from the controlled substances act and similar programs, which refer to many drugs but especially opiates as "narcotics".

Nicotine is not a "controlled substance".

NoSorryCannoton New Zealand plans to make it illegal for kids to buy cigarettes – for life

Not a narcotic in any sense of the word.

NoSorryCannoton New Zealand plans to make it illegal for kids to buy cigarettes – for life

There's certainly an argument for it but I disagree that loss of liberties is prerequisite to socialized healthcare.

NoSorryCannoton SF suspends cannabis tax to help dispensaries compete with drug dealers

I have noticed that the dispensary experience is very different in CA vs OR. Oregon dispensaries are often small headshop type places whereas every dispensary I've been to in California seems to be a more expensive operation with a bank-like queuing style. The Oregon dispensaries are also just more thick on the ground; can't throw a rock without hitting one. Not so common in CA and they're tucked into shitty office parks much of the time.

Not sure why they're so different but I don't think it's the cash-only property that is doing it, since it's the same deal in OR.

NoSorryCannoton An alarming trend in K-12 math education: a guest post and an open letter

They're not disjoint. At an advanced level, subjects like linguistics and psychology heavily cross displines with mathematics, logic, and neuroscience at least.

Students probably shouldn't be falling hard on one side or the other any earlier than they already do lest even more of them believe they are completely unrelated.

NoSorryCannoton What will enter the public domain in 2022

What does the average person have to do to provide their family this kind of security?

I don't think copyright needs to do double duty as life insurance and it is mostly not helpless widows that are benefitting from it.

NoSorryCannoton Horcrux: Split your file into encrypted fragments

This kind of thing generally requires a level of sophistication around data preservation and software tool use that many people don't have. So, the chances that things don't go according to plan have probably gone up.

It's still hard to beat paper for these types of applications.

NoSorryCannoton Winamp source code leak

Copyright law will generally cannot be applied to a breakfast cereal anywhere. Patents or trademarks may apply, however, but these work differently.

Is it the same everywhere? No, but it is similar in a lot of places, due to political agreements and convergence.

NoSorryCannoton The melancholy decline of the semicolon

This is spelling, not grammar. It's the same word, not a noun, spelled differently.

NoSorryCannoton The melancholy decline of the semicolon

Kotlin does the same but without semicolons so it would seem not to be essential.

NoSorryCannoton Only 90s web developers remember this (2014)

Most sites invert that effect: hovering reveals the underline. The link is still distinguishable by color, still apparently interactive by hover effect, and preserves underlining as a styling option in the text, which is preferable.

NoSorryCannoton The bullet effects in Terminator 2 weren’t CGI

Maybe strobe isn't the best word for me to use. Choppy? Whatever you want to call it, the result is kind of nauseating.

NoSorryCannoton The bullet effects in Terminator 2 weren’t CGI

In general, films are shot with a slow shutter speed because the low FPS would otherwise create a strobe-like effect. Unless that effect is being sought (famously, Saving Private Ryan), blur is preferred.

NoSorryCannoton DomainBigData asks for a Facebook like in order to delete your personal data

I think you're conflating "fair" with "strictly permissible under the law". Lawful isn't the same as being ethical, decent, or "fair".

NoSorryCannoton Police can’t demand you reveal your phone passcode then tell a jury you refused

If no one is testing the rights we're supposed to have, then it's unclear that we actually have them. Auditing should seem eminently sensible to all the engineers here.

NoSorryCannoton Hardened wood as a renewable alternative to steel and plastic

Mineral oil can be found in most pharmacies marketed as a laxative. It's a common oil to use for cutting boards and other applications in proximity to food.

NoSorryCannoton Facebook kept its own oversight board in the dark on program for VIP users

I'm not aware of any egregiously anticompetitive behavior on their part and they certainly fall well short of market dominance.

Disney would be a more likely, though still unlikely, lightning rod for apparently having sold their streaming service as a "loss leader" and having purchased lots and lots of copyrights and trademarks which they subsequently made exclusive, directly causing the termination of Netflix programs in some cases.

NoSorryCannoton Meterorite chunk crashes into house, bedroom, pillow

The empty squares are more probable because there are more of them.

NoSorryCannoton Facebook bans, sends C&D letter to developer of Unfollow Everything extension

If everyone is entitled to interact with the internet on their own terms, then why would that not include a service being entitled to act in a way that's adversarial to your desires?

NoSorryCannoton USPS Begins Postal Banking Pilot Program

It's not unique in that respect. National parks, TSA precheck, and every version of the DMV are selling goods and services back to the public that bought them into existence.

NoSorryCannoton New York Public Library ends all late fees

I think if you were to do this today, the video store would report to the credit bureaus do they could make you a little less likely to get an apartment or that next job.

So I think we've made progress...

NoSorryCannoton Eyeglasses for school kids boost academic performance, study finds

And optometrists are permitted to cultivate a misleading* impression that you must or should buy your eyeglasses from them, and their cheapest model is $200 and every pair in the shop is probably sold by Luxottica.

Getting a new pair of glasses was an unreasonably rare and precious thing when I was growing up, because of the cost.

*in general, optometrists must produce a copy of the prescription that was paid for when asked, and then you can take it wherever. Make sure they write down your pupillary distance on it; they often "forget" to do this.

NoSorryCannoton I quit – Peak indifference, big tobacco

Just quietly ignore it and move on; not everyone needs to hear about what you find distasteful.

NoSorryCannoton Functional programming is not popular because it is weird (2016)

Minor nit, Shockwave wasn't the same as Flash. All three plus ActiveX overlapped in their time on the market, which is hair-raising to think about.

NoSorryCannoton Who Owns the US National Debt?

Uh, if accounting is a fiction, well, I'm not going to say there isn't a kernel of truth to that, but it doesn't help us answer the question of who has debt responsibilities to whom; the entire enterprise is predicated axiomatically on "accounting fictions".

NoSorryCannoton Apple Delays Rollout of Child Safety Features

If you have to be an insider to pontificate, then we can discontinue HN comments since meetings inside Apple already exist.

NoSorryCannoton The universe has already made almost all the stars it will ever make

A trillions of years long work week would leave anyone tired!

NoSorryCannoton You want enabling CSS selectors, not disabling ones

There was an important piece left out of the description of the Church of Satan: it is typically used as a device to test civil liberties and separation of church and state.

If, say, a courthouse has a statue of a religious theme, then by the law of the land, the courthouse must be willing to erect a statue for any religion. Like, say, a statue of Baphomet. Or they can remove _all_ of the religious iconography. That demographics are mostly Christian and so such things are overtly offensive makes it more effective.

So, atheists or agnostics or even people of more orthodox religious persuasion are using the Church of Satan as a vehicle of representation for a strong stance on the separation of church and state.

NoSorryCannoton Struggling to learn a new language? Blame it on your stable brain

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_period_hypothesis

There has been and continues to be a lot of research behind that cope. The effortless mastery over e..g. phonology that children emerge with is very difficult to replicate in adulthood, even after decades of speaking.

NoSorryCannoton Discord has won over gamers. Now it wants everybody else

Discord doesn't even do its one thing all that well.

The client is buggy and slow.

It makes the terrible, lazy choice of blanking the window when it has a connectivity problem.

Non-standard for-pay emojis are a terrible idea. Text should be copyable, by everyone, exactly as it is.

It's not the worst among the current stable of chat solutions. I would give that award to Teams, because wow, Teams fails in just about every way, it's a spectacle really.

Each day, I am a bit surprised at how all of the major platforms fall short of expectations, because superficially it seems like a pretty tractable problem space.