aristophenes

It disturbs me that the authors answer became the top answer. It didn’t have a loop but was less efficient than the already accepted answer, and worse, much more complicated for a human to read and understand. It seems we are always drawn to be clever, when perfection is found in simplicity.

My understanding was the thesis is that paying too much attention to the news is unhelpful because newswriters (“storytellers”) don’t particularly care if what they are reporting is factually correct or not, they have different motives.

The guy who advocated getting the vaccine has chimed in with his side of the story elsewhere in these comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27400221

It makes sense because in some states its been basically any adult can walk in and get a shot for months already. I'm surprised there is anywhere in the country left where that is not the case.

America is made of so many subcultures. People find theirs and that's their world. The author is in a set that drinks a lot. Most Americans do not. I think overall America is much more "prudish" than other countries, despite what movies and the news may lead us to believe. At the same time we've basically been genetically selecting for extreme personalities. We're all either descendants of Native Americans or people who left their home and crossed half the world for a new life. If you become an alcoholic here, you really have a problem.

In the UK you can be an alcoholic for decades and still hold down a respectable job. Nobody bats an eye at a few drinks at lunch. I remember feeling so weird the first time I was at a formal event in the UK for a lunch at noon where wine was being served. First time in my life I had felt buzzed and the sun was out and hot. I did not like it at all. But I imagine, with the frequency of these events in academic settings, that half the academics in the more prestigious universities are functioning alcoholics. Many students and young professionals in UK/Europe make it a point to go out and get wasted as much as possible. That happens in the US too, but it seems to be looked down upon more? I think the idea that drinking is more under control in Europe would fade pretty quickly if all alcohol was temporarily banned there for a week.

How do you think any other system would work. At least we get to vote with our wallets about which companies should live or die, it’s been working pretty well. At least greedy people will treat us well to get our money. Other systems select for people who love power, and they tend to not be kind once they get it. Fear is a pretty effective way of keeping people in line.

The main thing to watch out for is monopolies. If customers always have enough choice then the customer and workforce satisfaction will get sorted out eventually, as those organizations will be selected for and companies won’t be able to exist without doing that right. It works really well, and is actually a strength of our free markets. Governments and committees stepping in and trying to fix the system tends to make it worse because the people who fall through the cracks have no recourse, and they also inadvertently create monopolies by making the system more complicated and expensive for new entrants. For all the complaining, “neoliberal capitalism” has made it the best time to be alive there has ever been, and the remaining problems tend to be around choke points where there is some kind of monopoly power and proper competition is missing. Amazon is getting there. But even so, reading through these comments, there’s plenty of discussion of how Amazon is so much better than the previous experience of many people. Amazon got to where it is today because overall the customer experience is so much better. It has raised the standard to a new level, which we will happily now complain about until someone else figures out how to do it better.

It really is location dependent, since most of the problems are caused by the shipper. Amazon will use multiple shippers, and in some areas will use what ends up being people driving around in their personal cars to deliver packages. If you have unreliable shippers in your area, it’s hard to deal with Amazon when things go wrong. In one place I lived, Amazon would use the US Postal Service, UPS, and Fedex. I had no control over which. The local FedEx team was horrible, they never figured out how to deliver packages to my building. So they would pretend to deliver, say customer wasn’t home and no secure place to leave the package for 2-3 days, then stick a notice on the outside of the building somewhere that I could use to drive to the FedEx warehouse in the next town over to pick it up. Maybe it’s different now, but there was just no way to do anything about this.

Another location and I’d get these local people delivering packages in their personal cars and that was really hit or miss. Seems like anytime they were busy they just report that they tried to deliver but no one was home. They could steal whatever they wanted, it’s a matter of trust. How does Amazon know who is lying? Maybe I’m scamming them, maybe the shippers, maybe someone else is stealing packages off my doorstep.

There was just no way to choose a shipper or report problems with one. Don’t have any problems where I am now, so I don’t know if they’ve fixed that. They should be able to tell, statistically, if packages have more problems with one shipper over the other, but smart shippers who want to steal could probably game the system.

This is a good cautionary lesson. Problems like collusion rings in computer science are more serious than they appear. If left unchecked for a decade or two, the cheaters will rise to the top and take the positions of power in the field, and then it's going to be almost impossible to fix the system.

Relying on altruistic tendencies for people in academia is not adequate. Everyone starts out in academics as school children, and get filtered out or filter themselves out pursuing other things. Those who remain will be the ones who love to learn and teach, those who just cannot accept loss/failure, and, sadly, those who are afraid of change. The more competitive the field becomes, the harder it is to succeed, the more we select for the hyper-competitive or fearful over the altruistic.

You think Fireeye had massive security lapses because they reported they were hacked. Everyone else was also hacked and FireEye was the only one that figured it out and blew the whole thing wide open. Now if the best incident responders in the world can’t always prevent malicious activity on their network, how is an oil company going to do that? Or utilities, transporters, hospitals, defense contractors, or universities? The truth is everything is vulnerable, and what you think is the stability and security of all the other organizations you don’t hear about getting hacked, is just the current set of hackers working hard to be discreet. I think if war was to break out with certain other nations we’d find it in a hurry how much our infrastructure has already been compromised.

My understanding is that the way they intend to operate it, the coin will start out rather highly valued, won't have too much capacity to grow in value, and the number of coins that can be "farmed" is already known, and will reduce in the future. At the rate it's growing, it'll probably be at the point where it isn't worth it to buy new SSDs for this sometime this week or next. And it will likely rapidly get to a point where it isn't worth it to buy HDD soon thereafter.

And therefore, the "rash of exploits" has already happened and is still ongoing. I think it's just so inconvenient/scary to most people to understand how much is hacked/hackable that they refuse to believe it.

In my opinion the smooth operation of our infrastructure relies less on its security as it does on the discretion of the hackers that have already compromised it.

Anyone familiar with EU politics care to comment on how likely it is that this funding actually goes through, and a probable timeline?

This article implies that forgiveness and mercy are immoral. People have the capability to create evil. Seeing as there is some good around, we must be able to create good as well. As moral creatures who can create good and evil, are we not obligated to create as much good as we can, and extinguish evil where we can? Or should we shrug our shoulders and say, it’s not my fault I am bad, there was evil before me, evil was done to me, and I will embrace it myself.

There are a lot of false dichotomies in the article, especially the idea that it isn’t possible to disincentivize or even punish evil without embodying evil yourself, therefore confusing evil and good. There is too much to write, it seems foolish to even have to explain. Thousands of years of (mostly) successful criminal justice assumed that dispassionate, fair judgment is at least possible.

Most importantly, building on this twisted logic to say that to be wronged makes you immoral (by either unjustly ignoring evil, or through grudge and retaliation becoming evil), is not only hurtful to victims, but justifies a world that forever echoes and amplifies pain and evil. I steal from my enemy because he has done me wrong. I steal from you because my enemy has made me evil. All evil for everyone is justified.

This is a touchy subject, but I feel the need to state the obvious, that 12 year old children think and do a lot of foolish things because they are figuring out themselves and the world. We need to trust parents to help them and protect them, that is our job. We know them better than anyone, we have experience, we even share DNA with them.

I know there are exceptions, but the default state should be to trust parents with their own children. Nobody is perfect and mistakes will be made. That’s life, we try to do our best. And no committee, politician, doctor, even therapist is going to be able to ensure they won’t make mistakes that are worse. And I love my kids much more than they ever could.

I wouldn’t be surprised if this was Fireeye figuring out how they got hacked, then them or federal investigators checking around to see if it was done anywhere else.

This could probably be explained by the fact that most other animals have predators, and humans don’t (at least not successful ones). It is true of apex predators (that are not themselves killed by humans).

> reasonable people trust scientists across the globe who spend their entire careers studying this who all say the same thing in the same way.

This appeal to authority is another example of what I am talking about. It's meaningless because if there was a scientist questioning global warming they wouldn't be able to hold a related job or get funding. Additionally, people tend to conform, especially in fields where your career depends on your reputation. For example, the scientific consensus prior to World War 1 was that citrus didn't cure scurvy, even though it had been doing so for hundreds of years prior and had been scientifically proven before.[1] So people started dying from scurvy again. Even the very well prepared, intelligent polar explorers were unable to deal with it properly even though they researched and planned for it, because they relied on the consensus of the scientific community instead of good science.

[1] https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/24149/how-scurvy-was-cur...

Indeed, that data is much better. Was that in the article? It seems that there is more to the article behind a paywall, I didn't realize that before.

This way of showing climate change is not robust. I could balance this single example with the fact that temperatures below 0 F were common in the northern United States earlier this week, which is extremely uncommon in October. It would seem that cold polar air moved down over the USA while warmer air was sucked up over Russia, delaying freezing.

When every storm, fire, drought is provided as evidence of global warming it makes reasonable people suspicious. Don’t provide anecdotes. The world is a big place and anomalies are always happening. Show good, comprehensive data and be skeptical of the rest or you haven’t earned trust.

It’s dangerous because you can see in the comments that there are intelligent people that want to do very unnatural things to the air or water to fight global warming, and it feels to me like children playing with fire. They don’t understand the consequences of what they are doing, but are scared into doing reckless things because they believe it’s do it die. Maybe it is, but I’d like to see better science than this before we go that route. Remember the historical environmental catastrophe for our planet is ice, and the natural pattern is to swing in and out of ice ages. If we accidentally kick one of those off, say goodbye to 90% of life on earth.

You’re allowed to say whatever you want and I’m allowed to sue you if you tell lies about me. Twitter and other social media platforms are made exempt from this because they are hosting other people’s content and they’d be sued into oblivion if they could be held responsible for what everyone posts on their service. But as soon as they start censoring whatever they want, they aren’t a true public platform anymore, the content you see is what they want you to see. So they should also be liable to civil suits if the information they allow to disseminate is not true. This isn’t about the second amendment, IMO.

I never thought about it like that before, makes sense. Thanks.

The problem with this is the diesel powered boat delivers, on average, 1,142 cars per day. The wind powered ship, being slower and with a slightly lower capacity, delivers 583 cars per day. Therefore, to deliver the same number of cars, you need two of the wind powered ships.

This extra 35,000 ton ship will be offset by saving 100 tons of CO2 per day (120 tons created by the diesel, minus ~20 tons created by the two sail ships). Is this worth it? How much CO2 does it take to build a 35,000 ton ship? And then of course the cost of a ship vs. diesel fuel.

Plus I presume the sail ships are now dependent on weather, which introduces logistical problems.

I suspect that coating the top of the diesel ship with solar panels and using the energy to supplement or replace the diesel engines might be a better use of resources?

Haha, yes the difference in the bathroom stalls is real. I've had a few hilarious conversations about these issues over beers in a pub. Personally, I think the stalls in the US are as they are to discourage problematic behavior inside the bathroom stalls (vandalism, drugs, and worse), and it's just good etiquette to not look through the cracks. Having an actual little room to yourself with a full door in a public toilet in the UK is nice.

This is purely anecdotal, but for me every toilet I use in the UK feels like the result of the local plumber trying to invent the toilet for the first time. So many varieties, so many weird ways of getting it to work, most of them failing to do their simple job. Mechanisms plastered behind the wall, using pumps instead of gravity fed tanks, little waterfalls in the bowl that circulate water instead of flush it down. Square bowls, unreachable toilet paper, even pumps to get the waste water out! I don't understand.

Feels like a solved problem in the USA, where a $100 toilet will use 1.3 gallons (~5L) of water to flush away whatever will fit down the tube. And do it through a gravity fed system that works without power and has about two moving parts that are easily accessible and repairable by any dummy that is using the toilet at the time.[1]

Is this a regulatory thing or a cultural thing? I've had so many issues with UK toilets. Why is this a problem.

[1] https://www.lowes.com/pd/AquaSource-Henshaw-White-WaterSense...

Not that anyone will read this now, but I am disappointed how all these replies ignored the equation. If you want freedom to choose what goes in your body, you need to absolve society from a responsibility to take care of you if you screw up. It’s totally ok to want freedom for what you put in your body, you just have to be consistent and get the government out of the business of providing for you. Everyone saying let us take whatever drugs we think we should, no one saying they want the government to stop other services.

The US has social safety nets.

I can partially understand that point of view for marijuana (though I think it’s important for a functional society to obey laws, and get them changed if they aren’t working instead of just breaking them based on personal preference). But the guy had been selling methamphetamine too, which is life destroying poison. Our government provides costly services for people who are incapable of taking care of themselves, and that drug creates a bigger burden on those programs. Unless you also advocate for the removal of social safety nets I don’t see how you can justify thinking that the government shouldn’t try to limit drug use.

One of the answers was edited to “portion”, which is the same idea, I think either portion or proportion is elegant and simple. If anyone has been using proportion then I’d stick with that, though portion is nice and succinct.

You don’t need to pay more than the black market would, but the more you pay the more time people can spend on it. If the bounties are high enough, you can attract more, and better, white hats to test your system for you. The black hats are out there anyway doing what they will do.

Is this what is called “p hacking”? Looking a among many different criteria until you find one that is statistically significant?