ashtonkem

I think the best argument for things other than QWERTY nowadays is ergonomics, not speed. RSI is no joke.

I used to have a pretty high WPM, above 120 if my memory serves. You can only sustain that speed if you’re working from memory or directly copying text (as is the norm for typing speed tests). In real life I can’t formulate words anywhere close to that fast, so my WPM ends up probably being less 40 if I had to guess.

Powder and shot, more specifically. They’d seized cannons and small arms from the Hôtel des Invalides, but the under manned commander had transferred all his powder to the Bastille before the mob stormed his position.

It’s not clear how many of the no longer extant old homes and farms fell down due to design issues, due to neglect, or were pulled down for economic or aesthetic reasons. Most architectural styles go through a process where they stop being made, start getting neglected, most of them get pulled down, and the few remaining ones get lovingly restored as they get old and rare enough to become retro rather than just outdated. This tells us very little about how well they were built, even with survivorship bias in mind, because very few buildings will survive an utter lack of maintenance, and less still if many were torn down for not being stylish enough to command the level of rent that the owner is hoping for.

Resource curse. Economies that depend on a single extraction resource tend to be pretty stagnant and rife with corruption. There’s also the issue that they need to discourage local consumption of the export resource, since local consumption doesn’t enrich the country, even if the locals need to consume to not freeze to death.

By the point you’re seizing small arms from police stations you’re toeing the line between riot and revolution

This is been my experience with tool reviews as well. Searching for “best intro <power tool>“ yields a bunch of low quality SEO that’s just pulled from Amazon.

I think the interesting question is this: why is this happening? There’s always been a battle between Google and SEO black hats, but I can’t remember the last time it got this bad. Is Google just temporarily losing, or have they lost the will to fix this at all?

Following up from another thread, excluding reflections and what not, a plane at 75 feet should be 16x louder than the same plane with the same throttle settings at 300 feet. Sound follows the inverse square rule, where a change in distance of X reduces the perceived noise to 1/x^2. Since 300/75 = 4, you get a factor of 16 in perceived difference. Yikes.

Typically sound follows the inverse square rule, so the difference between the same plane at 1000 feet should be a 1/169th (1/13^2) of the noise at 75 feet. So two orders of magnitude.

Nothing until a catastrophe causes lost work, or if they wanted to collaborate with someone else.

In fact, right now the main DF developers are working with a partner studio to put a better UX on DF to sell on Steam. I bet an industry standard version control would be extremely helpful right about now.

I cannot imagine how unbelievably loud and damaging having a 777 fly 75 feet above my house would be.

In fact, there is a lot of money in supplements, lots of which aren’t FDA regulated to even work.

> And it does no matter if the number comes from HN comments or peer-reviewed journal article.

I’m sorry, that’s absurd. You will always be picking pedantic fights with people if you expect everyone everywhere to meet the standards of peer reviewed medicine.

From the outside picking a fight over the difference between “93%” and “about 93%” on a technology board is pedantic to the point of being suspicious.

It’s worth reiterating that police are effectively above the law, criminally and civilly. Aside from the obvious conflicts of interest between police and prosecutors, there is a court invented[0] principle that says that cops are immune to even civil suits if they violate your rights. This can only be breached if the courts had previous ruled that their specific actions[1] violated your rights. Since cops can’t go to trial for new abuses, new precedent isn’t being made and cops are for all intents and purposes immune.

0 - Funny how the anti-“activist judges” crowd is silent about the Supreme Court making this doctrine up out of whole cloth.

1 - Down to the terrain in which the abuse happened.

That’s really not true though. 99.9% effective might not be good enough for an Antarctic research base, but that’s a pretty unusual circumstance. We’d be thrilled if our current countermeasures against Covid were 99.9% effective; we would’ve ended this in 2020 if that were the case.

If I understand correctly, you can mathematically model how effective countermeasures have to be in order to suppress a virus with a given R0. Given that the measles vaccine is 93% effective and sufficient to suppress one of the most infectious diseases we’ve ever seen (R0 of 12-18), I think 99.9% would be in the overkill category.

It's long been a trope that Police aren't responsive to the citizens they nominally serve, but nowadays they aren't even controlled by the political leaders of their municipalities. Heck, it's not that uncommon to see cops threatening politicians and just ... getting away with it.

The German government is pretty good at putting on a face of respectability and proper process, while also doing bad things. I'm reminded of the fact that the state began a criminal investigation of FT after they reported on Wirecard's fraud on the insistence of Wirecard itself.

Lying to the FAA on other hand does come with consequences.

The thing about engine out situations is that it's not that hard to get to civilization before you bail out. These light aircraft glide great, he should have been able to ditch (or land) closer to a town or road.

Softie parachutes indicates that the effectively risk free bail out conditions are 1000ft AGL and 100MPH, with a lower speed requiring more altitude. They don't specify a max speed, but it's worth pointing out that 100MPH is pretty slow comparatively.

Skydiving rigs are also big which make them annoying to fly with. You can tell early on in the video that he's basically on top of the yoke, which would be extremely obnoxious for obvious ergonomic reasons. The idea that someone would "always" fly like that (as the pilot claims) is ... dubious.

Also, there are other videos of this guy flying without that rig, which doesn't help his case.

It's not just a closed system, it's zero sum. It's only possible to cash out for a profit if there are more people willing to buy in.

Some of the anti-bitcoin crowd tried to make the term "Nakomoto Scheme" a thing, and clearly failed. The basic idea is that things like Axie Infinity have some of the aspects of a ponzi scheme, without the central organization and coordination that makes an actual ponzi scheme illegal. While there isn't a central operator paying out old investors with new investors money, anyone currently invested can only cash out if new people join. This begins to look a bit like a decentralized ponzi, with everyone currently invested in it motivated to evangelize it and convert new people in order to ensure the fresh supply of new buyers to keep the price up and/or let them cash out.

At a certain point these look less like games, and more like status symbols being pursued. I suspect that this explains much more of the economic and social aspect of things like Runescape more than trying to think of them like a game.

That would hamper all kinds of commercial activities though, as it would effectively make free trials impossible.

It also sounds like it would be a pretty radical change to how copyright laws work, but I’m no expert here.

Why would you want to add garbage collection to rust? Doesn't that undermine one of its key value propositions?

I wouldn’t hazard a guess about the exact number, but spies being given diplomatic cover (and diplomats spying) has been the norm for centuries. A huge chunk of Cold War spy craft was about diplomatic personnel trying to evade their followers in order to meet with their contacts without exposing them.

If you can’t live a “decent” life without loans, loans will almost certainly make the situation worse.

I’m reminded of the common quip that the US military is the largest socialist organization in the United States.

> A democratic state is elected by the majority, as such, the state should share the same definition as the majority.

This is trivially falsifiable. Weed is still a federal felony, despite 60% support for recreational & medical use, and another 31% support for medical alone[0]. In fact opposition for legalization is now a trivial 8% of the population, which is basically nobody. There isn't even a party with majority support for keeping weed illegal anymore.

If democratically elected states were guaranteed to eventually share the same definition as the majority, weed would have been legalized years ago for medical use. And yet, here we are.

0 - https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/04/16/americans-o...

Be wary of whether or not you and the state share the same definition of “criminal” and “victim”.