Hacker News Reader

hanozon Experiences won’t make you happier than possessions

The buy experiences meme has always had a slight air of having been engineered in travel industry laboratory somewhere and released into the wild.

hanozon Paris’s Centre Pompidou to Close for Five Years Starting in 2025

That quip doesn't really work like it does for its more usual target, the Eiffel Tower, because unlike the tower you also can't see the Pompidou Centre from pretty much everywhere in Paris, except right next to the Pompidou Centre

hanozon No Screens Cafe

Wouldn't it do just to hook it up to an online processor, as if a web page?

hanozon Dandelion Root Recipes

That would never have flown in our (UK) class, where we grew up drinking Dandelion and Burdock pop

It was however playground lore that touching them and licking your fingers would make you wet the bed. Indeed the French name for them is literally that, pissenlit, which they must have had good reason to choose over the perfectly fine English name for them, dent de lion.

hanozon Toyota: Car location data and videos of 2M customers exposed for ten years

Okay, massive tangent, but it's been bugging me for a while and this has finally tipped me over the edge - why is it called personally identifiable information? That would be information that someone can personally identify surely? Shouldn't it be personally identifying information?

hanozon What if we tolerated diseases?

How would it be less likely to induce confusion? What is it even supposed to mean in that form? I had no idea what you were talking about until someone explained your error.

hanozon The Ugly Truth Behind “We Buy Ugly Houses”

Isn't that exactly how the the greatest acts of stealing are performed?

hanozon Reduced cancer mortality with daily Vitamin D intake

Your high latitude health service must be better than mine. I can hardly imagine my GP's receptionist's reaction if I tried to book an appointment to check my baseline vitamin D levels!

hanozon UN Human Rights Chief Urges UK to Reverse ‘Deeply Troubling’ Public Order Bill

The Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (England) Regulations 2020

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2020/350/pdfs/uksi_20200...

Restrictions on movement

6.—(1) During the emergency period, no person may leave the place where they are living without reasonable excuse.

hanozon UN Human Rights Chief Urges UK to Reverse ‘Deeply Troubling’ Public Order Bill

No, it was law. Immoral law which deserved to be broken, but that is no consolation to the millions who suffered greatly by going along with it.

To hear one of the most shameful periods in our legal history being brushed off as couple of months of half hearted barely observed lockdown is pretty disturbing.

hanozon UN Human Rights Chief Urges UK to Reverse ‘Deeply Troubling’ Public Order Bill

You broke the law and got away with it. That doesn't mean millions of people weren't having a thoroughly miserable time of it observing the law, and for a lot longer than "a couple of months in 2020".

hanozon It looks like GPT-4-32k is rolling out

> questions which you could've easily included in your first e-mail

That's not really how conversation/chat works is it?

hanozon It looks like GPT-4-32k is rolling out

If I wanted to have a conversation about it, and you wanted to charge me a flat fee per utterance on the basis that you had to reread the text anew every time, I wouldn't be paying you at all.

hanozon It looks like GPT-4-32k is rolling out

The more token capacity that's added the more wasteful it seems to have to use this statelessly. Is there any avoiding this?

Wonderous as this new tech is, it seems a bit much to be paying $2 a question in a conversation about a 32k token text.

hanozon 66% of renters say homeownership is ‘hopeless’

"Just build more houses", yet alone when framed as "it's up to you to convince your neighbors to let you to build more houses" just doesn't cut the mustard any more.

We need serious changes that are actually going to make a difference, along the lines of (for residential property):

* Outlawing mortgages for non occupiers.

* Sharing of capital gains with tenants.

* A complete end to no fault evictions.

* Universal right to buy for tenants.

* Putative tax for rental income.

hanozon 66% of renters say homeownership is ‘hopeless’

I seriously doubt there's a $120k countryside house within 500 miles of me.

hanozon 66% of renters say homeownership is ‘hopeless’

Western leaders had better start coming up with radical solutions to housing market driven inequity or there'll be ructions.

hanozon America will soon see a wave of bank mergers?

Fair point. It's a sorry state of afairs when you have to speculatively reverse engineer the algorithms run by a state-sanctioned oligopoly of private firms holding your own data gathered with, at best, coerced consent, and artificially structure your affairs in an attempt to present yourself as a dependable and unadventurous cash cow

hanozon America will soon see a wave of bank mergers?

That doesn't make sense. A credit card provider may profit more from a customer who carries a balance and maybe makes the odd late payment, but a mortgage provider inherently has a customer who carries a balance, and the ideal is a customer who makes payments on time every time, for the life of the mortgage.

hanozon Photos from the SpaceX Debris Field

What exactly is supposed to have happened to that cat? Leading with that photo with no explanation is completely ridiculous.

hanozon Gas-powered leaf blowers: The end is nigh (2021)

Why are these even remotely necessary? I've got a fair sized garden, surrounded by deciduous trees, and half an hour with a rake on a few weekends in Autumn is all it takes to keep on top of things. What am I missing?

hanozon The Sell ∀ ∃ as ∃ ∀ Scam

I'm no linguist but it seems to me that that word doesn't really work for that definition. It sounds like it should pertain to hidden form, not hidden similar form, like say, cryptoisomorphic.

hanozon A $300k Salary Feels Like $100k in the Priciest US Cities

All around the western world, money printing to prop up the house price bubble is finally reaching breaking point, with housing costs completely decoupling from fundamentals, and inflation breaching the banks and flooding into consumer pricing.

hanozon Why do ships use “port” and “starboard” instead of “left” and “right?”

> At the other extreme you have the medical profession where the first thing you learn in medical school is that left/right always refer to the patient's perspective.

Didn't know that! So how pervasive is this principal? Would it apply to a descriptive reference to a diagram in a book for example?

hanozon The elite couples breeding to save mankind

It's exactly the people keeping the wheels turning, the working class and lower middle class, who can't afford to have children at the moment. The spongers above and below are the ones able to breed with abandon. Doesn't seem sustainable.

hanozon Orient Express to axe UK section after 41 years due to Brexit

Yes, the thing that has happened, as mentioned in the article, is the treating of ones neighbors, and indeed ones own people, as criminals at the border.

hanozon Prompt injection: what’s the worst that can happen?

Can't an intelligent agent, artificial or otherwise, no matter how strict and out of band their orders, always be talked out of it?

hanozon Paul Theroux reflects on the evolving nature of rail travel

I've always thought railway journeys would be a nice subject for a podcast, in the vein of an audio equivalent of the slow TV genre. Some ponderous commentary about the carriage and passing scenery, with the soothing train track sounds in the background. Would be great to fall to sleep to.

hanozon How the Good Friday Agreement created an ‘all-Ireland’ economy

The fact that you don't need ID to move between Northern Ireland and the rest of it, has precisely nothing to do with Brexit.

hanozon How the Good Friday Agreement created an ‘all-Ireland’ economy

I'm not sure how anything beyond your opening accusation is supposed to contradict what I've said. The party that was unable to reconcile its position with respect to the new border and the Good Friday agreement was the EU, not the UK.