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ddoran

1 karma · joined March 26, 2023

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ddoran··on Grandpa’s Basement House
A basement house featured on Zillow Gone Wild this week [1] . According to the same account it went sale pending after 1 day on the market.

[1] - https://twitter.com/zillowgonewild/status/152662553013669478...

ddoran··on Moving House
The Shipping news [1] (Pulitzer and National Book Award winner) featured a house being moved over ice and Oscar and Lucinda [2] (Booker Award winner) featured a glass church being moved on water, as did their respective movies.

[1] - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7354.The_Shipping_News [2] - https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/316496.Oscar_and_Luci...

ddoran··on Lessons from Owning a Bookstore
Rough Draft in Kingston, NY is another one. It's definitely my favorite bookshop right now. It helps to have a great coffee bar and booze bar and a cool historical building, but most of all it helps to be in a city to which hipsters have been migrating in droves in recent years. To be fair Rough Draft are as much a driver of that recent migration (along with other new similar businesses) as it is a beneficiary. They do a great job in curating their book selection, unfortunately the crowds and morning coffee queues keep me away more than I would like.

https://www.roughdraftny.com

ddoran··on No news is good news
> Fake news is a term to describe news that is merely untrue

In my experience it is more commonly used to describe news which the speaker does not like.

ddoran··on The global streaming boom is creating a translator shortage (2021)
Or that translators are paid. But ideally a combination of paid and volunteers - just like most other roles in charity/relief work.
ddoran··on Uber funds new lobbying group to deny rights for gig workers
A driver won't just chose profitable over unprofitable, but also more profitable over less profitable, and this ends up hurting some passengers on less profitable / less desirable routes.

If you wanted a cab to Brooklyn from Manhattan 20+ years ago, you had to get in the back of the car before telling the driver where you wanted to go. Otherwise the driver would just drive off without you. The ride was definitely profitable, but they knew they'd pick up another Manhattan ride on the next block and so on - a more profitable option that to risk not having a fare back from Brooklyn. Many drivers wised up and wouldn't let you into the cab until you told them where you were going. It was a major PitA.

ddoran··on Pentagon and CIA shaped thousands of Hollywood movies into effective propaganda
As someone who moved from Europe to the US, the pervasiveness of the military in televised professional and college football game is incredibly jarring to me yet is so normalized to Americans. Count the number of times there is a reference to the military, a cutaway to uniformed people in the stands or by the touchline, a clip of troops watching the game while deployed overseas, flyovers etc. Still, after 10 years, my reaction is "what has that got to do with sport?".

I've always assumed this to be a very deliberate strategy to build an implicit association between the "nobility" of sport and war, to boost recruitment and win over the hearts and minds of the American public for past, current and future military action.

Now count how many times you've seen any sign of the military at a sports event in Europe - rare to never. It's not normal and it's sad to me that it is so normalized in the US.

ddoran··on Jerrycan
Related article and discussion from 11 years ago: "The Wehrmachtkanister, a/k/a Jerrycan: Astonishingly good industrial design from the 1930s" [1]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2692840

ddoran··on Computer History Museum curator picks for holiday reads
On the topic of computer history museums, I strongly recommend a visit to the American Computer & Robotics Museum in Bozeman, MT if you're in the area [1]. It's a small space born from a personal collection, which Edward O. Wilson describes as "inch for inch, the best museum in the world". An original cuneiform tablet, Principia Mathematica, Enigma machine, NASA artifacts, early Apple computers - All here and much, much more. Run, don't walk.

[1] - https://acrmuseum.org

ddoran··on Billions and Billions to Be Wasted
Caveat lector. If you are looking for a non-partisan review of the pros and cons of the bill, this is not the article to read. The author of the article has been a long term advocate for defunding rail[1] and it is published by The Cato Institute, which is " libertarian in its political philosophy, and advocates a limited role for government in domestic and foreign affairs"[2] and has been funded in no small part by the oil industry.

I'm not saying the article is without merit, but it is utterly partisan, and like so much online and traditional publications in the US, it is critical to know the lens through which it has been written.

I find it increasingly difficult and tiring trying to find genuinely balanced/non-partisan analysis about important topics such as this, the spending of vast sums of our tax dollars.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38510332-romance-of-the-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cato_Institute

ddoran··on When “Foundation” Gets the Blockbuster Treatment, Asimov’s Vision Gets Lost
I'm sticking with the show but as a huge Foundation fan, it's bitterly disappointing so far. For me the reason comes clear in the accompanying (official) podcasts. The writers are so enamored with their own smarts, that the story takes second place to literary navel gazing. Rock bottom for me was when Brother Day - a supposedly omnipotent figure - travels across the galaxy to quell a religious uprising but just stands silent as a new leader takes up the mantle with an overwrought speech, one of many in the show. The taking of terminus was another example of characters that speak with great intelligence and then act dumb. Ugh. I'm only hoping the writers take the feedback from Season 1 and change course.
ddoran··on When will the new MacBook Pro be refurbished?
No, you misspelt forager as forger in the URL :)
ddoran··on The Curious, Astounding Collection of the Magician Ricky Jay
Directed by David Mamet and exec produced by Joel Silver. I didn't see that coming!
ddoran··on Crews are abandoned on ships in record numbers without pay, food or a way home
I enjoyed "The Cargo Ship Diaries" [1] by Niall Doherty about his time traveling as a paid passenger on merchant ships.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21868783-the-cargo-ship-...

ddoran··on Houses in Japan are going for as little as $500
Correct me if I'm wrong, but Japan does not allow dual citizenship ... rather your children are young enough that they have not had to declare their ultimate citizenship?

My wife and I are naturalized US citizens. My country of origin allows me to retain dual citizenship, as does the US, but my wife was obliged to renounce her Japanese citizenship when she became a US citizen. It's annoying and unfortunate that she had to do so.

ddoran··on Redwood World – Pictures and Locations of Redwoods in the British Isles
I wish the English (and others following their lead) would stop using the phrase "British Isles" to include Ireland. Many Irish people find it highly offensive; at best it is simply inaccurate.

"In Ireland, the term "British Isles" is controversial, and there are objections to its usage. The Government of Ireland does not officially recognize the term, and its embassy in London discourages its use. Britain and Ireland is used as an alternative description" [1]

Ireland has not been a British Isle in more than a hundred years when 84% of the island re-gained its independence.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Isles

ddoran··on The Surprising Effectiveness of PPO in Cooperative Multi-Agent Games
PPO = Proximal Policy Optimization

[https://openai.com/blog/openai-baselines-ppo/]

ddoran··on Show HN: I wrote the book Building Mobile Apps at Scale
Same issue for me. Just emailed you. Thx
ddoran··on Gallup: U.S. church membership dips below 50% for first time
The "Troubles" in Northern Ireland may be over but there is still tension and violence in Northern Ireland between a subset of Catholics and Protestants. The sectarian violence still happens but does not get reported internationally because the scale is so much lower than it was up to 2010, but to say Inter-Christian conflict has been non-existent for a generation (25 years?) is wishful thinking at best.
ddoran··on Ask HN: How do we build the new remote education system
Kudos for stating your position but also presenting an opposing view. HN, heck the world, needs more of that.
ddoran··on Global circulation of influenza viruses in 2020
I was about to post the same but both horizontal and vertical axes are different scales.
ddoran··on JPMorgan to pay nearly $1B for metals market manipulation
The shareholders of JP Morgan are paying the fine. Not the bad actors behind the market abuse.
ddoran··on Hotel guest in Thailand jailed for defamation after posting bad online reviews
For anyone looking to dig deeper into the allegations of corruption on the islands and how it may have contributed to the murder of the couple in 2014, this is a good place to start:

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/nov/23/briton-thail...

ddoran··on Diary of a Fire Lookout (2008)
The author wrote a book "Fire Season" about his period in a tower.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9341909-fire-season

ddoran··on Dead Sea Scroll fragments thought to be blank reveal text
This is Manchester, UK, not Manchester, NH nor Manchester, VT.
ddoran··on The Malaysian Job: How Wall Street enabled a global financial scandal
I strongly recommend Billion Dollar Whale [1]. The relative ease with which Jho Low could get away with this, and the number of people/institutions willing to be complicit (by action or omission) was breathtaking.

[1] - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38743564-billion-dollar-...

ddoran··on Did Trump Administration Fire the US Pandemic Response Team?
Your response refers to the mission of the CDC. That's a misdirect. No one said that the mission has changed. What the article states is that "the Trump administration axed the executive branch team responsible for coordinating a response to a pandemic and did not replace it"

Also, every budget that Trump has proposed has cut CDC funding and the current proposal is to cut it by 16%. Fortunately Congress has interceded every time.

These are verifiable facts, not opinions.

The term "fake news" used to annoy me, until I realize that it always means "a truth disliked by Trump / his minions". (Minion: "a follower or underling of a powerful person, especially a servile or unimportant one"). I've been at peace with the phrase ever since, having a better understanding of the person who used the phrase and why they used it.

ddoran··on Photographer Jacob Riis showed “How the Other Half Lives” in 1890s NYC (2017)
While you're at it, take a contrasting tour at the Merchant's House Museum just a few blocks away:

http://merchantshouse.org

ddoran··on Architect of His Own Downfall
Side note - the TLS approach to EU Cookie Directive is obnoxious. The cookie popup forces you to go through multiple tabs for each purpose (not uncommon) but you only have the option to Accept All, not Reject All. The first tab has 80 checkboxes defaulted to Accept. Each one must be unchecked if you value your privacy. If I was considering subscribing to the TLS, that would be enough to change my mind.
ddoran··on The 'Spelling Bee Honeycomb' puzzle: efficient computation in R
I've started playing this puzzle every day. If you get every word that NYT expects, you get a "Queen Bee" award, the trick is that they don't tell you what the Queen Bee target is, and more often than not there is at least one word I've never heard of.

The words are revealed the next day on the puzzle page, or if you're impatient, they are in the source code for the Spelling Bee page each day.

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