Hacker News Reader

frandroidon Germany considers free public transport in fight to banish air pollution

I wish India would ban two-stroke engines (phase them out, not ban them outright obviously), that would make a huuuuggeee difference in the air pollution of the large cities.

frandroidon Unilever threatens to pull its ads from Facebook and Google over 'toxic content'

These companies see all of these goods as being part of the same category: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/fastmoving-consumer-goo... Fast-Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG)

> These are consumer goods products that sell quickly at relatively low cost – items such as milk, gum, fruit and vegetables, toilet paper, soda, beer and over-the-counter drugs like aspirin.

frandroidon Google is buying Chelsea Market building for over $2B

Not wanting to lose commission?

frandroidon John Perry Barlow has died

Who didn't? Every article on him started with that tidbit.

frandroidon In Baltimore, Brazen Officers Took Every Chance to Rob and Cheat

Hey, it happens in Canada too.

https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2012/06/29/saga_of_a_toront...

frandroidon My Forgotten Language: the brain can lose and reclaim an abandoned mother tongue

Programming languages don't have the grammatical complexity of languages we use to communicate with each other.

frandroidon Union Is Formed at Los Angeles Times and Publisher Put on Leave

I used to think that as well. The problem is that if you don't have an arbitrary employment security clause (seniority, aka LIFO), employers can find ways to fire you/lay you off arbitrarily for union activity under the cover of other reasons (e.g. unrealistic performance goals). I don't know how to resolve this problem. But without LIFO, you can be guaranteed that most people who use the union for its intended purpose doesn't have much of a future at the company.

frandroidon CIA rendition flights from rustic North Carolina called to account by citizens

Sarah Silverman's encounter with a troll recently was a great demonstration of what you explain here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/inspired-life/wp/2018/01...

frandroidon CIA rendition flights from rustic North Carolina called to account by citizens

One thing that happens is that I'll have a debate with someone, try to refute all their points and kind of end up in a stalemate because I don't want to give in. But when I have another conversation on the same topic with someone else, the points made by the person in the previous discussion become my points.

frandroidon The MacBook Air: A Decade’s Worth of Legacy

> Being able to scrub through media

Isn't that something you could do with a modifier key and the touchpad?

frandroidon Lyft says nearly 250K of its passengers ditched a personal car in 2017

> It served 23 million different passengers, itself a 92 percent YoY increase

Wow.

frandroidon Bitcoin Can Drop 50% and China Miners Will Still Make Money

http://foreignpolicy.com/2013/05/30/the-bomb-didnt-beat-japa...

frandroidon In Tucson, subsidies for rainwater harvesting produce big payoff

Wow thanks for that.

frandroidon North Carolina Is Ordered to Redraw Its Congressional Map

It doesn't even have to be a complex mathematical equation. Gerrymandering is a particularly acute American problem which isn't present in most other industrial democracies, because in most cases, an independent commission is picked to define district boundaries, and they are mostly guided by common sense and fairness, which seems to work well enough. The problem the U.S. has is to leave this task to people who have an inherent conflict of interest in the outcome of the process.

frandroidon North Carolina Is Ordered to Redraw Its Congressional Map

> It's a thing you do to win short term gains, but you can't keep doing it over and over.

They redraw the map every 10 years, and they do do it over and over.

Sure, sometimes demos shift, but even then it's a crap shoot as to whether enough people move, and if those people move in are of a different party.

> state-wide popular vote election

That's party-list proportional representation. It's done in many countries, but not in the U.S. or countries of the British Commonwealth. Any U.S. state could decide to adopt it though...

frandroidon Suburbs That Haven't Recovered from the Recession

Can you expand on this? Are large businesses spread across the land in these areas?

frandroidon How the Scripto App Became a Fixture of Late-Night Comedy News

Yes.

frandroidon Tesla's New York Gigafactory Kicks Off Solar Roof Production

Okay, the tiles are made of glass. Does the carbon footprint of the fabrication different much from terracotta tiles?

frandroidon Tesla's New York Gigafactory Kicks Off Solar Roof Production

I have this set to false and it's pretty annoying. It seems that the same triggers that make auto-play work are used to play regular video. So I always have to fiddle with Youtube to get a video to start, and Vimeo videos don't play at all. I've had to keep from using this flag in Chrome so I have a backup browser for such sites.

frandroidon The Spice of Life

Quality food usually requires less transformation and thus resources. Might require more labour tough...

frandroidon Why is 11 am and 1 hour == 12:00 pm?

When the bells of Big Ben — or any chiming clock that rings out the hours of the day — chimes with one bell, we know that the first hour has just been completed. As one commenter observes, having it ring zero bells wouldn’t tell people what time it is. You can’t go from ringing eleven bells one hour to not ringing any bells at all an hour later to then ringing one bell the hour following the one in which you failed to ring any bells at all. People wouldn’t be able to tell what time it was because of something they didn’t hear!

Imagine this dialogue:

    TOM: Oh good, it’s time for lunch!

    JERRY: Oh really, and how do you know that?

    TOM: Because it has to be noon, since I just now didn’t hear the clock!

frandroidon Million Short allows users to remove up to the top 1M sites from a search set

"Nice startup you have there. We have found that users like what you do, so we've added your algorithm as an option on our search engine. Your business case just vapourized." --Google

frandroidon Million Short allows users to remove up to the top 1M sites from a search set

I had a friend who had a whole list of dozens of banned sites configured for his google searches, which made Google way more useful. And then one day, Google decided to cut that feature out, as part of their drive to remove power user features across their products.

frandroidon I was given new hands for Christmas

That's one of the challenges countries with public healthcare have been facing recently, along with generally skyrocketing medication costs, when medication is covered by the system (Canada has haphazard coverage, from Québec which has total coverage to many provinces which have none). New treatments are opt-in, so once in a while someone with a rare disease will be denied coverage due to the expensive nature of their treatment, or its unavailability in the jurisdiction. Until 2017, there was only one clinic in Canada which did sex re-assignment surgery, in Montréal, so out-of-province patients who want the procedure have to go jump through a lot of hoops to get covered by their own province and have the whole trip covered by their provincial healthcare system.

frandroidon AMD ships microcode update to disable some branch prediction

You'll get targeted through a web ad which will then install a BTC miner on your machine, so your performance will be shot anyway.

frandroidon Why Raspberry Pi Isn't Vulnerable to Spectre or Meltdown

There might be some side-channel attacks if your rows are too close to each other....

frandroidon Why Raspberry Pi Isn't Vulnerable to Spectre or Meltdown

> 5 to 20 μs resolution

Updated for those of μs confμsed by this μngainly grammar

frandroidon I was given new hands for Christmas

It should end at treating medical conditions. Gender dysphoria is a medical condition.

frandroidon Mistakes to avoid when asking for a raise

"If I change the input in your equation, the result changes" !!