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didroe

165 karma · joined March 10, 2009

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didroe··on Insured, but Still Owing $109K for a Heart Attack
Why are you quoting figures for the entire tax take in a discussion about healthcare? To give you some perspective, the healthcare-only figures for those countries are US: 16.8%, Denmark: 10.3%, Sweden: 11%, Germany: 11.2%, France: 11.1% and UK: 9.9%. Data here:

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.CHEX.GD.ZS?year_...

didroe··on The YouTube Contract for Indies
There were only a couple of people discussing that, and only a handful of comments. Most of the discussion seemed to be about how terrible the terms were and whether there were any alternatives to YouTube.
didroe··on Will 7nm And 5nm Really Happen?
My limited understanding is that heat is related to the square of the voltage. And that by reducing the size of a transistor, you can lower the voltage. I don't think you can lower the voltage by quite as much as the reduction in size, so there must be a point when you can't just pack more in. Though gate design or choice of materials can reduce the voltage needed as well. They can also make the chip smarter about switching off parts that aren't needed at a given point in time to keep overall heat down.
didroe··on Will 7nm And 5nm Really Happen?
It's much simpler than that. It actually makes writing a compiler easier as you have higher level abstractions to work compared to generating machine code. There are many languages that compile to C which should prove to you that it can be done. I don't see why targeting C++ would be any different and I'm sure there are languages already out there that do.
didroe··on Firefox 4, 5, 6 and 7 to be released before the end of 2011
I personally find larger version numbers a bit odd. Generally people tend to work better with smaller numbers. I think the Ubuntu system is pretty good, use the major version for the year and have the month as the minor version. The Chrome 2 month releases could go 1.1, 1.3, 1.5, etc. That way they wouldn't chew through so many numbers. Ultimately I guess projects must go through a reset of their versions before they get to really ridiculous numbers.
didroe··on Courtney Love does the math (2000)
You have to hope you can become popular enough that when your initial deal runs out you can dictate terms to the record company and not the other way around. Or that you can use fame to generate revenue from other sources.
didroe··on UK Chancellor targets IT projects in £6 billion cuts
I'm pretty sure you could save £6 billion just by never ever using EDS again. It's like some kind of abusive marriage, the government keeps getting screwed over and then goes back for more.
didroe··on Academia and the decline of wealth in America
One of the charts in that link is GDP per capita adjusted for CPI, and it's still shows growth at a pretty constant rate.
didroe··on Square's On-the-Go iPhone Credit Card Scanner Will Cost $1
Isn't this just Paypal? But instead of giving someone my email address to transfer funds, they have to get their dingle-whatsit out and I have to get my card out and mess around?
didroe··on Crime in America keeps going down, yet the American public refuses to believe it
Broadcast media and print are doing a fine enough job on their own with sensationalism and scaremongering.
didroe··on Facebook makes HipHop for PHP open source
Javascript? :)
didroe··on H.264 Licencing and Free Software
Because for Mozilla it's not a case of side-stepping the law. It's a case of their moral intentions. They want the web to be usable for people who want to run free software, or at least for it to be possible to write a browser stack based on open code.
didroe··on Ask HN: I've built a product - how do I take payments in the UK?
We use http://www.sagepay.co.uk

You get the choice of using their servers to handle card details and processing, or you can do it yourself and hand the numbers off to them using an API. They were recommended by RBS.

didroe··on It's all about the cores. Why AMD doesn't use HyperThreading
This was covered in the article:

>Then in 2011, we plan to introduce Interlagos...we’re designing some shared components that help reduce power consumption and die size, but you won’t see us sharing integer pipelines, the meat of the core.

didroe··on A new approach to China
Saying something is never good doesn't equate to saying it never happens. And saying something can be good doesn't imply that it always is.
didroe··on GSM encryption broken
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Communications_Headq...
didroe··on How do I know China wrecked the Copenhagen deal? I was in the room.
Assuming their population has stayed the same and that they haven't built anything on lower lying land since then.
didroe··on Why the HTML5 ‘Video’ Element Is Effectively Unusable
Is it possible to start playback on the HTML5 video element without Javascript? I thought it was a requirement.
didroe··on How Private Property Saved the Pilgrims
Most countries have some socialist and some capitalist aspects. I don't know of a single country that is purely one or the other. Nothing works perfectly so we mix and match a little of everything. There are countries where either word is bad but they still have aspects of that system.

ie. the US (from experience with people online) seems to be fairly "capitalism will save us all, teh socialism is evil" yet you're also one of the most protectionist countries in the world and have lots of social programs.

didroe··on FlowingData tutorial: make a choropleth map using python and svg
A better method (IMHO) is to run it through Beautiful Soup once to strip the fills out and then just build a stylesheet every time you want a map.
didroe··on Firefox flaws account for 44% of all browser bugs
>Firefox accounted for 44% of all browser bugs reported in the first half of the year.

And what about the ones that closed source IE and Opera didn't report?

didroe··on X264's abstraction layer for cross-platform x86 assembly: now free to use
Couldn't a vectorizing compiler be used to generate the code rather than assembler?
didroe··on Plan to write big software - and you have already lost
I'm so glad car manufacturers don't bother with airbags, or ABS, or traction control, or side impact bars, or...
didroe··on JDK7 to have escape analysis on by default...also back ported to JDK6
Why not? The TCO is done on the caller end and is completely transparent to the callee. You just don't bother pushing your return address when calling a function, so it'll return to the previous one instead.
didroe··on Two common mistakes when using databases
I liked the OPs reply to this message:

>Thanks for your reply. It was quite interesting, though I get the feeling you used my question solely as a trigger to share with us a long-held dissatisfaction with the current state of affairs concerning the use of databases, regardless of whether it actually applies to my particular problem.

didroe··on Mistakes we made when naming our computers
We just switched to greek gods, ran out of muppets and magic roundabout characters.
didroe··on Britain's libel laws are making things tricky for science writers
If you look at it the other way around, it's currently a supressor's paradise. If you say something I don't like, I can sue you and you have to prove that every tiny detail of what you said is factual. Most people aren't going to be checking the dictionary definition of every word they speak or write just to check that they're being 100% factual. So therefore the person suppressing their speech will most likely win. The rest of the world likes to be a bit more sensible, it's up to the claimant to show that the information was incorrect, for things that actually matter this will be relatively easy to do.

Free speech with a few people getting away with a bit of name calling vs supression of valid points due to tiny mistakes in delivery. I know which one I'd rather have.

didroe··on How to get a temporary EMail ID
I just append something to my Gmail address with a plus character. Like: myaddress@gmail.com might become myaddress+hackernews@gmail.com. I can then set up filters to sort or delete specific sources of mail.

According to Wikipedia, this is called "sub-addressing".

didroe··on One reason I wish JS had goto
Given the Python example in the article:

    def f(n):
        num = 0
        while num < n:
            yield num
            num += 1 
what's wrong with:

    function f(n) {
      var num = 0;

      return function () {
        if (num < n) {
          return num++;
        }
      }
    }
didroe··on Ask HN: What are the new ideas of the last 10 (or 5) years?
>Isn't this already done?

That's the point of this topic, to discuss things that have been done but didn't seem obvious 5-10 years ago.

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