dandelany

You know when & where it happened, and have a rough make/model/color of the car and maybe some description of the driver - surely people regularly report crimes based on less than that? I'm not sure why this wouldn't be enough for a police report, at least to have some paper record of it to wave in Uber's face.

Sorry to hear this happened to you, sounds a bit scary and traumatic. Good luck.

Great post. Just to be pedantic for a moment:

> it gives you results that are 100% correct, which is pretty important!

Not quite 100% correct, as the `ST_Distance_Sphere` function uses a spherical earth model, & in fact the earth is an oblate spheroid :) The slower-but-more-accurate `ST_Distance_Spheroid` also exists if you care about such things.

What you are calling charity (which also lumps in patronage since patrons don't pay "fair market prices") is precisely how music has been funded for hundreds of years and how classical/orchestral music continues to survive today. No one funds opera houses or gets their name on one of the bricks because they think it's a smart business decision or a fair market transaction. It will hopefully continue to be a big part of the equation going forward, I think a whole community being able to see live orchestral music based on the generosity of a few is a good thing that should continue.

Your whole comment is somewhat baffling to me as you decry "charity" or anything not based in free-market economics as "not the way" but provide little in the way of specifics on what should be done, other than that we should "reconsider the more fundamental assumptions".

Here's the fundamental assumption being reconsidered: the idea that the only value the consumer derives from a product is the direct first-order utility or pleasure they get from using the product. Let me put it this way: there's a market for "free trade" coffee that is more expensive than regular coffee. Is that charity? I don't think so, instead I think it recognizes that there is actual economic value in the consumer's personal satisfaction or belief that they are purchasing something sustainable, that they can feel good about. Call it charity if you want, but it is a very real economic force.

"marginal cost of streaming OR downloading a song is effectively zero" - only if you don't consider royalties to be part of the marginal cost? What's weird to me is the seemingly pervasive idea that the cost of everything should be 100% directly related to its marginal cost + some small fixed percent. Things are priced based on what consumers will pay, which is related to how much value they derive from it.

Personally I'd be happy to pay $2 a month when I don't listen to much music and up to $30-40/month when I'm obsessed with album(s) and listening to them every day - how much that costs Spotify is somewhat irrelevant to me

I’m no chef, but I live in a dry climate, and for soft cookies I get good results by storing them in sealed containers with a slice of bread immediately after cooling. The moisture in the bread makes it like a humidor for your cookies so they stay soft longer :)

Relevant Medium article linked from the Talk page: https://hmoluseyi.medium.com/was-nasas-historic-leader-james...

Sorry, but I just recently watched a crowd of angry trolls sell memes and Internet in-jokes as facts to droves of angry Facebook users, and then they combined forces to elect a fascist. I no longer believe this kind of crap is inconsequential.

I’m honestly so tired of hearing this lame conspiracy theory/in-joke. It’s so dumb and trollish and barely funny, all it does is give ammo to repubs who think dems are wackadoos. Fellow dems, this ain’t it.

Meanwhile in the Theranos thread next door… “What just amazed me is how gullible all the investors were, and how they didn't do due diligence, hire outside experts, or anything. Weird.” Financial professionals do dumb things, sometimes en masse, and I think there are still some opportunities to make money if you have a good nose for BS/mass delusions.

However, the problem with this strategy is, as Keynes put it: “The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.”

Probably studying axonal transport, the ability of some neuroinvasive viruses to spread from one neuron to the next via the axon & its connection to other cells.

I was the same for years until I had a pourover at a coffee shop in NYC that knocked my socks off. I still enjoy bad coffee but the pleasure I’ve gotten from making better coffee over the years has been worth it IMO.

Incidentally, it’s entirely possible to enjoy good coffee without becoming a total snob, just like it’s possible to use vim without being a dick about it :)

This. The sanctimoniousness of this post is pretty grating - you don’t get the good parts of emergent behavior without letting people mess around and explore the space in some weird ways you may not like.

Also agreed re: the nsfw part. I think someone could probably make a subscription service out of something like VQGAN + a properly tagged corpus of porn (thisporndoesnotexist.com?) that would fill a weird niche of letting people describe exactly what they want to see, though there is a huge “uncanny valley” problem where you could accidentally make some pretty horrifying images lol.

You can just use PureComponent instead of implementing shouldComponentUpdate, but you're right that it doesn't come "for free".

PureComponent : class components :: memo : function components

Ha, I suppose in context your interpretation makes more sense :)

Here’s my reading of it: when speaking about dynamical systems with several interdependent moving parts, humans are fond of asking “why” questions and looking for simple narratives in such systems where satisfying answers may not exist.

For example, imagine a three-body planetary system which exists in a pseudo-stable configuration for millions of years, until suddenly one of the planets gets slung off on a wild orbit and ejected from the system. A layman might be inclined to ask, “whoa, that’s weird, why did that happen?!” while the physicist will reply “All I can say is that planet A is where it is because of planets B & C, and B & C are where they are because of A.”

It’s just PR. It matters to Apple whether the story is “Apple steals tech from tech startup & gets sued” vs. “patent troll frivolously sues Apple”. It’s not to convince a judge, it’s for the court of public opinion. Lawyers spinning the story in the press to make their side look better is not a new phenomenon…

Interesting article. I also can’t imagine that it’s either sisal or Americana exactly, both are so tough & fibrous, and are in such widespread cultivation that this preparation would be more well-known. The agave heart or “piña” used for mezcal is somewhat similar but not that similar. Agaves very quickly grow some massive asparagus-shaped flower stalks before they die, is it possible this is the base of an enormous stalk rather than a stem? Never seen one this big but maybe it’s out there.

I also would not discount the possibility that these are not raw exactly but prepared/treated somehow. Obviously the fact that they taste like water limits the possibilities, but maybe a stem is placed in water for awhile to make it way more engorged than it would ever become naturally. Or maybe it’s soaked or boiled after harvesting, and flushed with clean water to improve the texture and reduce toxic effects. Raw agave contains calcium raphides, a painful irritant (experienced by another commenter upthread, btw) so some kind of preparation might be necessary.

I always love a good nerdy mystery story. Good luck on your search :)

Yikes. Your symptoms were likely caused by calcium oxalate raphides, little mineral needles present in raw agave (and several other plants). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raphide

That is the case every year, as indicated by the grey mean in the background of the chart. Point is, we gained ice at a lower-than-average rate during “gains season” and now we’re losing ice at a greater-than-average rate during “melt season”.

Great idea & execution, I've definitely thought about building something similar and have tried Gource once before. However, I must add a +1 to the parent commenter re: rectangles. Circle packing is pretty, but a proper rectangular tree map interface gives you everything the circle map does with better labels, less wasted space, and less chance of a funky circle layout from the force/relaxing algorithm.

This would be great for a presentation where I'm trying to make our codebase look flashy and cool. But for actually getting work done, I'll take a tree map any day. Check out the mac app GrandPerspective if you haven't seen it - great use of tree maps for cleaning up hard drive space.

I have thought about this too, retrograde orbit buys you a lot of “free” energy for deorbiting things going in the other direction. The “puff coherency” problem as you succinctly put it seems like the hardest problem. Maybe if the gas is ionized, you could use another spacecraft[s] to generate a magnetic field that could trap the cloud long enough to get the “puffer” craft out of the way before impact.

The principled thing to do about software you consider spyware is to not use it. Not paying for a paid product you use daily and continuously derive value from is hard to justify in my view.

I think of it as “in [any] orbit” vs “on [target] orbit”

This oversimplifies but there is some truth to it too.

I am mentoring two junior devs at the moment, one at work and one friend. In some ways I really miss & envy the happiness they feel when we get something to work. One of them finally got a D3 chart to render correctly and got up from his chair and started whooping and throwing his fists in the air - I was grinning from ear to ear.

But then I realized the flip side of this - every time we run new code and it produces an error, I hear “AUGh what the FUCK?!! D:”

I have been at this for ~15 years. I see a new error, I feel nothing. Better that way. But I still take a minute to crack a smile when I get something working for the first time :)

Let’s say we have 12 iron mines with known amounts of iron ore supply, and 10 steel foundries with known amounts of demand. For each (mine, foundry) pair, there is a known cost of shipping the ore from point A to B. Which mines should send how much ore to which foundries?

AIUI, that is the general “optimal transport problem”. Now replace ore with colors and it applies to the problem above :)

What a bizarre comment. I guess we should get rid of ALL queer lit then, since the least charitable reading of “queer” is a slur?

I’d rather be a part of a community that gives folks the benefit of the doubt/charitable interpretation despite sometimes being duped by bad actors, than one which shuns and demonizes anyone who says anything that could be taken the wrong way despite their true intentions.

Nine pages? All this hoopla for the month leading up to the release and we get NINE measly pages with no supporting documentation? am I missing something? I expected to see something similar in quality/detail to an FAA accident investigation, this is a worthless executive summary.

Density isn’t everything. It’s likely a lot cheaper and less environmentally destructive to dig a big hole in the ground than to manufacture a lithium battery.

Well said. Perhaps the proverb should be “an ounce of prevention is worth a one-sixteenth chance of a pound of cure” :)

My thoughts exactly. They literally didn’t even mention Hackaday or Tindie. Doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence as a Tindie seller.