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SteveGregory

329 karma · joined March 13, 2014

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SteveGregory··on Erlang/OTP 29.0
Can someone please explain the innards?
SteveGregory··on Viagra May Also Lengthen a Man's Lifespan, Swedish Study Finds
As a layperson interested in effects of compounds on the human body, this is not super surprising.

It’s a vasodilator, which lowers blood pressure. That takes away one of the main limiting factors on lifespan - the heart’s ability to keep pumping.

SteveGregory··on Amazon owns more than $2B worth of IPv4 addresses
At this point, it’s the same as RF spectrum. Yet clearly there is no regulatory body to manage it.
SteveGregory··on Calm Before the Storm
Nuclear is the only technology that sufficiently solves the heat problem.

Lots of our energy is spent on heat, whether residential or industrial.

Nuclear produces heat. If only we used this for district heating, container ships, and electricity

SteveGregory··on Norweigan oil fund
First, a nitpick - your numbers should be per million people, not per person:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_oil_produ...

Second - the output itself depends on management, so I'm not sure it would be fair to compare current production numbers to show the potential help to the population. In fact - Venezuela has more proven reserves per-capita than Norway, by an incredible margin:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_proven_oi...

SteveGregory··on Tesla’s ‘Anemic’ High-Margin Model Sales Extends Profit Struggle
The media might not be intentionally manipulating the stock so much as publishing information which short sellers find, package, and hand over for free. The incentive is there to create a misleading information campaign even without assuming the media is being very deliberate or coordinating.

Edit: I have no idea why I'm being so downvoted here. All I am saying is that short sellers have incentive to hand the media whatever they can to help their case (not so controversial, right?) and that the media might be taking it for free rather than, as the parent poster says, coordinating to specifically harm Tesla (is this the controversial bit?)

SteveGregory··on YouTube videos that have almost zero previous views
Others are suggesting practical reasons for having watch history enabled, but I would think that the vast majority have it enabled simply because that is the default.
SteveGregory··on Twitter was down
I was also under that impression until the Cloudflare event happened. I do not actually know what their dependency was, but all shops were taken offline.
SteveGregory··on Twitter was down
The Google, Cloudflare, and Stripe outages all affected Shopify. So Shopify has had several meaningful outages over the past few weeks.
SteveGregory··on Mailchimp to Sendy: Cutting Email Costs
It's worth noting that there are a few open source email marketing platforms out there too. Sendy is $60 and obfuscates some of the source code.

Mautic and Mailtrain are two that I have tried. In my experience, both have some odd areas, but Mautic is a bit more flexible and has fewer significant bugs.

SteveGregory··on Too much money and too few places to invest it
I've wondered if, in this context that we are in, it actually starts to make sense to both raise interest rates and simultaneously monetize government debt.

We want some inflation, but we also do not want a late-1980s-style Japanese asset price bubble.

I cannot find a real answer to this question anywhere - would this plan produce any negative effect? The plan would, as far as I can tell, help the long-term outlook of our currency and economy while incentivizing wealthy people to stay invested.

I might be missing something obvious. Maybe this would lead to businesses having a harder time employing because of the higher borrowing cost (but we are at full employment now), or maybe the effect is just too uncertain on the money supply. Either way, I really want to know the answer, so I'm asking it here.

To be clear, I am not suggesting that politicians have direct control over monetizing debt, but rather that the central bank deems this to be best for the economy in the long term.

SteveGregory··on 3D interfaces are usually worse than 2D interfaces
John currently works for Facebook as CTO of Oculus.
SteveGregory··on Nest, the company, died at Google I/O 2019
I've been using Node Red for a few automation things too, basically as a self-hosted ifttt/zapier, and it's been working well. I would recommend it beyond home automation for the kinds of things that are "too small" to warrant their own code project and deployment setup but are still important enough to be automatic. This includes things like checking a webpage every 10 minutes and sending a text if it changes, or remapping webhooks between random services.
SteveGregory··on Elixir, Phoenix, Absinthe, GraphQL, React, and Apollo
This is not totally true. It’s not 100% syntax. Elixir has one additional and widely used feature: macros.

In Elixir, as in Lisp, you can transform your code as a data structure into new code. This is importantly used in Ecto, the de-facto object data mapper in Elixir. It’s also used in Absinthe, a library from the posted link for making GraphQL APIs.

SteveGregory··on Firebase.com and all firebase hosted apps are down?
Mine were down and just went back up. What really made me panic was when seeing no issues on the status page:

https://status.firebase.google.com/

For a moment, I thought it was an issue with my account.

SteveGregory··on Cloudflare Registrar
They get you to sign up, give your credit card, use their nameservers, and then if you get any serious traffic, they will conveniently be there to offer extra features with a paid plan. In my opinion, this is exceptional marketing.
SteveGregory··on Pee, Not Chlorine, Causes Red Eyes from Swimming Pools: CDC (2015)
That is because both are the same thing: sodium hypochlorite
SteveGregory··on SpaceX Launches 19th Rocket in a Year, a Company Record
Additionally, this was the first time that the fairings were recovered and are expected to be reused for a future launch:

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1069679948103847939

The fairings currently cost a total of $6MM for each launch, or at least 10% of the physical rocket cost, so this could lead to significant savings for future launches.

SteveGregory··on I’m Chinese, Google’s DragonFly Must Go On
The objections to DragenFly are not about what is best for the Chinese citizen.

This is not the concern in the signed letter. It is also not related to any of the core concerns from commenters here, as far as I can tell.

Yet somehow, many people are feeding the idea that the primary question is a cost-benefit analysis from the perspective of a person living in China. Of course, access to a pseudo-Google in China would be better for people there. It would be another option, and probably a tad closer to uncensored.

The concerns are simply not about that.

This is about setting a precedent of a company in a liberal democracy bending to the wishes of the government of a non-liberal-democracy.

The concern is that this compromise is not only something that happens in China, but also something that happens next in UK and then in Germany, and then in the US.

The concern is that any society with an "unfiltered" Google becomes a thing of the past. The concern is that the largest organization in the world controlling access to information begins "partnering" with governments and we step into an accelerated path towards disinformation.

SteveGregory··on Texas students will soon learn slavery played a central role in the Civil War
Just wait until you hear about science.
SteveGregory··on Finance makes Apple and Google forced friends
I've wondered what would happen if Apple acquired DuckDuckGo.

In theory, Apple could overpay a lot and still make a ridiculous return by using it as their default search engine. The usage would multiply overnight.

It would also reinforce Apple's position on privacy, and make Apple less dependent on Google for revenue.

SteveGregory··on Musk mulls taking Tesla private, Saudi sovereign fund builds $2B stake
Hmm the halt code appears to be T1, which is for pending news:

https://www.nasdaqtrader.com/trader.aspx?id=TradeHalts#

SteveGregory··on [dead]
A quick google search suggests that is not true. I'm curious where you heard that.

http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2018/jun/19/...

SteveGregory··on Ask HN: Is a React Native like approach to desktop apps better than Electron?
It's Google's fork of WebKit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink_(web_engine)
SteveGregory··on The Boring Company raises $112M from Musk, early employees
I disagree. I think the Boring Company FAQ addresses both labor and station costs fairly directly.

Labor: they want to increase automation so there are fewer workers needed, and tunnel faster so they can pay for fewer hours of work.

Stations: they do not want to make expensive subterranean stations, and instead just want small stations at the surface. People have questioned the throughput, but I think throughput appears reasonable if 1 car can leave every 0.5 minutes vs a normal station in which 10 cars leave every 5 minutes

SteveGregory··on Falcon Heavy Demonstration Mission [pdf]
Here’s a to-scale graph of the path each core/stage takes:

https://imgur.com/a/XvPXG

SteveGregory··on Watch the SpaceX Falcon Heavy Rocket Launch Today
Here's a to-scale graph of the launch:

https://imgur.com/a/XvPXG

SteveGregory··on Robinhood Crypto – Invest in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies
I think the feature makes lots of sense for Robinhood from a business perspective, but I cannot see the majority of Robinhood users fully understanding the risks of buying cryptocurrencies as an investment. It feels similar penny stocks and late-90s tech IPOs in that the price is driven primarily by uncertainty/unknowability in outcome and hype from recent returns.

Also I'm curious if Robinhood Gold (Robinhood's version of margin accounts) will work here, letting people easily borrow money to buy cryptocurrencies. This seems particularly dangerous for a product targeting small/layman investor.

SteveGregory··on Chelsea Manning files to run for U.S. Senate in Maryland
This is awesome. Whether or not you believe her actions were good for the country (I believe they were), this is a good example for all counties about how committed we are as a nation to democracy.

The framers designed our government to overthrow itself every few years, and I believe it was intentional that we could elect somebody who has been tried and convicted of crimes to represent us as citizens, if we wish to do so. I'm not a resident of Maryland, and will not be in a position to evaluate and vote on the candidates, but I do think the fact that this race is possible is something we can take real pride in.

SteveGregory··on Ask HN: What did you work on in 2017?
I'm making an affiliate platform that only charges a commission on the commissions. It lets businesses sign up affiliates (bloggers, news sites, comparison sites, aggregators etc) and pay commissions for sales that affiliates refer. Commissions can be paid with a credit card and don't need a connected bank account or upfront funding (lots of existing affiliate platforms require this and have minimums).

The idea is that businesses who don't know yet if affiliate marketing will work can try it without too much upfront investment or commitment. If it does work, then we can help it grow with predictable unit-pricing. And if it does not work, then you didn't need to spend any money or do anything complicated to find that out.

We'll be looking for beta testers soon. If you might be interested in trying it out, feel free to email me: steve AT referberry.com

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