funkymike

Plunge is probably what was meant.

That can be okay. Depending on the nature of the library it might legitimately be "done."

Personally, I would rather see this than a bug fix being committed every week. That makes me question how many more bugs there are and how much I'm going to have to babysit updating the dependency.

I wonder if a big part of the difference is that HN has only one stream of postings. If there were a HN-politics, HN-tech, etc. each may end up as an echo chamber like reddit.

I've tried to get my mom to use KeePass with limited success. To her having her easily guessable passwords written in a little notebook next to the computer is fine.

I think a prerequisite is getting buy in on the idea that passwords need to be treated like the keys to your house or your bank account numbers.

A bigger issue is blindly executing "curl ... | sh -" for something you are going to use to generate passwords (though it's bad in general).

I gave up on dual booting on a regular basis when Windows 10, once again, turned fast startup back on with a forced update. Now I use linux for everything at home.

Windows 10 is basically malware at this point.

Even better is to create a .inputrc configuration file. This is used by readline so it will affect your shell and some other utilities. You can do even more in there too.

For example I use this:

  set editing-mode vi

  # Up and down arrows keys search history based on what is already typed.
  "\e[A": history-search-backward
  "\e[B": history-search-forward

Imagine if your browser history was local but every time you use the history feature to revisit a page that URL was sent to Mozilla. How private is that really?

The Pocket code tells Mozilla what ads are being shown and which are clicked on. Since they know that the criteria for ad X is that phrase Y or Z is in the history, then they are gathering data on the type of content you are looking at on the web. This is only one step removed from the actual URLs.

Perhaps then the best lesson he has to teach is that execution (with a bit of luck) is more important than the idea.

This is a genuine question. What value does bitcoin have if not as a currency? What use case is there?

Really, it's that there is a menu, but they won't show it to you, only tell you when you ask for something they won't serve.

"What would you like to eat today?"

"A bacon cheeseburger with cheddar, with lettuce, ketchup, and onions. Fries on the side."

"Sorry we don't offer fries with our burgers. What could I get you instead?"

"I see french fries at the next table!"

"Oh, you asked for fries, not french fries. Sure, we can do french fries. What would you like for your side?"

"... I want french fries."

...

It's not actually true that any input is accepted. Pretending that it is just creates frustration.

I have an example that illustrates this.

Just this morning I stopped at McDonald's for breakfast. I gave my order, they entered it, and it showed up correctly on the screen at the drive through. However, the order taker read back something completely different (than what they just entered). Since I saw that the order in the system was correct I ignored that and simply said "sure that's right."

This is why I prefer an interface that bypasses the human order taker. They may say one thing and do another. Even in my case, they may have then thought "well he confirmed what I just said back, and that doesn't match what the screen shows, so I'll fix it to match what the customer agreed to." Then I would have the wrong order. That can't happen if I interact directly with the order system.

A good day is when I delete more code than I add.

You've hit on what I see as the big problem with stop signs in the US - they are inconsistent. Sometimes they are used at intersections where failing to stop is very dangerous, but much more often they are used when a yield sign would be sufficient. It conditions people in their normal driving to think of stop signs as recommendations, not requirements. This would seem to increase the danger of intersections where stopping fully is really necessary since people are more inclined to roll pass the stop sign.

This is my tactic as well. If I can't trust them to know they have the right of way and use it, then I won't trust them enough to put myself in front of their vehicle. That goes for driving as well as walking.

The non-existence of free has huge policy implications. There are many discussions of this. For example the top result on Google for me looking for "free will justice punishment" was this:

https://www.orlandocriminaldefenseattorneyblog.com/2016/01/f...

If a criminal has no free will, then they are not responsible for their actions since responsibility is dependent on moral agency. I disagree with that author's conclusion though, that you have to let every criminal go. I think that when someone is apprehended and determined to have committed the crime the decision to be made now comes from a different perspective. What treatment of this person will produce the best (or least bad) outcome for society on the whole? In one case that could mean letting the person go if every indication is that they will not commit another crime regardless of any punishment. In another case it could be locking them up and never letting them out, even on a first offence, if it is very likely that they will commit serious crimes if freed.

Of course there are still discussions to be had weighing the impact of the sentencing decision on the victim, the perpetrator, and the rest of society. There's also how much trust to place in the scientific models of likelihood for recidivism. But accepting that people have no moral agency undercuts the most basic premise of laws and the justice system.

How many of those relationships only survived before due to lies? They could simply be lies of omission, never really saying to family and friends that their opinions are bonkers. In some sense this is at least more honest. Whether that is better overall could be argued either way I think.

In some sense those relationships were fake. How can you call someone a friend if you aren't willing to have a discussion, even argument, with them and respect them afterwards?

Personally I don't discuss politics or religion with most of my family. I know that my views are in strong opposition to theirs. Things may be more harmonious this way, but it does mean that no one challenges anyone's ideas.

What would excite me about VR is a game like Morrowind. While it is first person, it's not exactly a shooter. The only teleportation is fast travel, but that could even use a World of Warcraft style where instead of teleporting you just ride the animal to get there.

Put me in a foreign world with several varied environments. Let me explore it without artificial restrictions. The combat could be minimized with most potential enemies being non-aggressive by default (a change to Morrowind's mud crabs or cliff racers). For this style of game I would even expect to still have to use a controller both for combat but also for inventory management, etc.

I took it to mean that it is feasible. Instead of saying "well we used the wrong language, I guess we're screwed," you rewrite one component at a time, piece by piece, until the whole has been replaced.

This is the approach I try to use myself. It's nearly impossible to replace an entire system all at once. But replacing one part at a time is doable and you can see the improvements much sooner.

While it is a bit of time invested initially it can be very handy to keep a Windows VM around for this purpose. Make sure to keep a baseline snapshot after patching. This way you can install questionable software with full confidence it won't impact your main system. You can simply revert to the baseline snapshot at any time to uninstall the software.

That doesn't explain why a 20 year old movie will pop up on a streaming service for a few months then be unavailable again. Clearly they can sort these issues out. The content companies are stuck in a model of artificial scarcity.

For myself, when I get the itch to watch an old movie and I can't immediately find it on the Netflix or Amazon prime video I don't go try to find some other streaming service or pay for a one time viewing. I'll just find something else to watch that is available. So when they could have had one more view for old content they wouldn't otherwise make money on, thereby increasing the value of their catalog, instead they get nothing at all.

Both water bottles and grocery bags are recyclable. While the grocery store I go to the most removed the grocery bag recycling bins they used to have, I believe they are still accepted at the Target stores around town, along with other types of recyclables. You may have easy options for recycling where you can drop stuff off as part of normal shopping trips.

LinkedIn's purpose is not to help you as a worker. It's purpose is to scrape together as much personal information about people as possible to make money from it.

Likewise Facebook doesn't exist to help connect people together to create a more personal, connected world. It exists to connect people so that they can get the users to share as much personal information as possible, so they can profit from that information.

It's always important to remember that on social media you are the product. You have to weigh what you benefits it is really providing vs. what you are giving up.

I was thinking about this today after hearing a report on the radio this morning on this topic. Hospitals end up throwing away large amounts of drugs each year due to expiration, potentially hundreds of millions of dollars - although there is no real data currently.

It seems like it would be a good long term investment for a group of hospitals to partner together and begin a systematic study of the actual lifetimes of drugs. Instead of destroying all expired drugs they could send off samples to a lab for testing. They could even intentionally keep expired drugs in an off-limits area for 1, 2, 3 years past their expiration dates to gather more information. With enough hospitals participating they could gather a significant amount of data without any one hospital shouldering all of the burden. Once there is enough evidence that a particular drug is still potent the FDA could extend the allowed shelf life. This would save the hospitals money over time since they could stop paying to dispose of and replace as many expired drugs. It would also provide a general benefit to the public since people would have solid scientific evidence for the actual effective lifetime for particular drugs. This would include poison control centers, the hospitals themselves, etc. that would be able to better handle cases where someone has already taken an expired drug.

Of course an alternate way would be to require the drug companies to accept returns from hospitals of small amounts of expired drugs that they would then be responsible for testing and providing the data to the FDA. Limiting the returns to large institutions would keep the costs down (reducing push-back from the pharma companies).

I have a bad habit of staying up too late at night. What has been helping me is instead of from thinking about the last time I did so and was tired the next day I try to imagine tomorrow's me, and think of how much better I will feel if I make sure to get a good night's rest. So this is somewhat of the reverse of what you describe. It's explicitly trying to develop empathy for my future self so that I behave in ways that are beneficial today.

I'm not aware of a single company in the city where I live that provides such perks. Some companies might offer a few, but not at Google or Facebook's level. This is in a metro area with over a million people.

You may even save more than the hour commute. When I work from home I also eat lunch at home. Since I normally go out to eat just to get away from the office for a little while that's even more time before I get home vs. being done for the day when working from home. So the 10 hours out of my day when going to the office with a 1/2 hour commute becomes 8 1/2 hours.

This can go the other way as well. If developers can target WSL and run on both Linux and Windows it increases their user base. This could end up making it easier for users to move away from Windows since one of the big hurdles is software compatibility.

The arguments against allowing voice calls are not based on the technology but the idea of not wanting to listen to other people's conversations.

> Pai told USA TODAY in a statement. “Taking it off the table permanently will be a victory for Americans across the country who, like me, value a moment of quiet at 30,000 feet.”

> But Pai's predecessor as FCC chairman, Thomas Wheeler, argued that the ban had become obsolete because many airliners basically carry their own cellphone towers for in-flight entertainment.

I recall at least one instance where my mom stopped at a UAC prompt wondering what it meant. Her calling me to verify what it was doing saved her from installing some malware. So anecdotally those prompts are not completely useless. She is not a tech literate person either, not much beyond referring to the browser as "the internet."