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hnmullanyon Climate change: IPCC report is 'code red for humanity'

India seems to be one of the countries with most to lose from climate change. If the wheat growing belt migrates north sufficiently - as it may - India will have enormous problems feeding itself.

hnmullanyon Where in the HypeCycle is GraphQL?

Another data point - user traffic to graphql.org has been flat since mid-2020 - at least according to Semrush - at about 250k visits per month. So it's a tech that people are using, but it seems to have saturated its use case.

hnmullanyon GitHub Copilot is not infringing copyright

If you have an electronic piano that requires a complex series of button pushes to produce copyrighted music - that's still a copyright violation. Copyright law has no notion that the difficulty of reproducing copyrighted content effects the fact of a violation.

hnmullanyon IRS records reveal how the wealthiest avoid income tax

It doesn't apply to housing. (And there is no capital gains on sale of your primary residence anyway).

hnmullanyon IRS records reveal how the wealthiest avoid income tax

Other countries have a time limit for how long you're allowed to sit on unrealized gains. In Ireland, for example, you have to pay capital gains on unrealized gains at the 7 year mark.

hnmullanyon An Unbelievable Demo

To be honest, Sun's whole culture treated software as an afterthought - which is part of the reason they ended up where they did

hnmullanyon How many x86 instructions are there? (2016)

Now ask how many unique x86 instructions do standard compilers emit...

hnmullanyon Psilocybin 'promising' for depression

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7034876/

Be conservative with dosage, don't do multiple doses in the same session & don't use with other drugs

hnmullanyon Writing tools I learned from The Economist

The reason why the Economist articles all read the same is that they go through a process called "subbing" or sub-editing by the same small group of editors who own the Economist's "voice".

I interned at the Economist one summer in college and wrote two articles for it - the published articles bore a small relationship to what I had submitted. The sub-editors seemed to be mostly George Smiley-type Oxford and Cambridge PhD's of a certain age with an eclectic range of expertises, as far as I recall.

hnmullanyon Netflix Made Record Profits in 2020, Paid a Tax Rate of Less Than 1 Percent

Netflix recorded a worldwide income tax accounting expense of about 13.7% last year ($438M on $3.2B of Net Income). It also paid cash taxes of $292M (cash taxes differ from accounting taxes because of timing issues - just like revenue is not the same as cash-in).

A lot of growing companies have US taxes that are quite low because they lose money for a long time while they're investing in growth. When they finally become profitable, they're allowed to roll forward those losses (within limits) to offset their profits. That's where a lot of these "Zero taxes paid" headlines come from.

On the other hand there is a legitimate gripe about using IP offshoring to shift profits to low-tax countries and out of the US, using accelerated depreciation to decrease current year profits, allowing tax deductibility of interest and lots and lots of tax deferrals and deductions for property transactions.

hnmullanyon How to Manage a Dark Ages Estate

Yes the point of using "Dark Ages" was to point out the dissonance between the detailed instructions on how to manage an estate and the idea that this was a period of total chaos & disorder

hnmullanyon How to Manage a Dark Ages Estate

This is a translation of the Capitulare de Villis - rules for managing Charlemagne's estates - written at the end of the 8th century.

hnmullanyon Modern action films fetishize the body even as they desexualize it

And most of Nymphomaniac is very very boring

hnmullanyon The Global Population Crisis That Never Was

African agricultural productivity is at about 1/10 US rates. So lots of headroom for improvement there.

hnmullanyon SVG: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

One person's bloat is another person's feature. Most of the "bloat" and inconsistent support issues in SVG are in SVG text, filters, animation and DOM interfaces. You don't run into those if you're doing the basic drawing that the OP wants to create. Basic SVG drawing is very straightforward and honestly, quite compact with lots of shortcuts and sensible defaults. (except for markers - which are craptastic).

hnmullanyon TimescaleDB vs. Amazon Timestream

There are only so many "A" teams in a big company.

hnmullanyon Materialize Raises a $32M Series B

Materialize is the real deal - completely different architecture under the hood. Origin project is Timely Dataflow & Naiad.

https://docs.rs/timely/0.11.1/timely/

hnmullanyon Ask HN: What is the best money you have spent on professional development?

From Angels In America

“Harper: In your experience of the world. How do people change?

Mormon Mother: Well it has something to do with God so it's not very nice.

God splits the skin with a jagged thumbnail from throat to belly and then plunges a huge filthy hand in, he grabs hold of your bloody tubes and they slip to evade his grasp but he squeezes hard, he insists, he pulls and pulls till all your innards are yanked out and the pain! We can't even talk about that. And then he stuffs them back, dirty, tangled and torn. It's up to you to do the stitching.

Harper: And then up you get. And walk around.

Mormon Mother: Just mangled guts pretending.

Harper: That's how people change.”

hnmullanyon InfluxDB is betting on Rust and Apache Arrow for next-gen data store

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24579905

hnmullanyon My Resignation from the Intercept

He definitely needs a copy editor. Some of those sentences are clumsy af.

hnmullanyon TimescaleDB 2.0 released, now distributed multi-node

https://www.timescale.com/cloud-pricing

hnmullanyon Coinbase offers exit package for employees not comfortable with its mission

I would encourage you to read the history of the NLRB under Reagan. They absolutely gutted the thing.

https://ucommblog.com/section/national-politics/ronald-reaga...

(And Zerohedge is a trashbag of libertarian fanfiction and russian govt talking points - with the exception of their currency coverage - which is great stuff.)

hnmullanyon Coinbase offers exit package for employees not comfortable with its mission

You know ... there's a reason that US Unions are partisan, which is that the Republican party has been on a mission to destroy them since Reagan and has largely succeeded.

hnmullanyon Leaked S-1 screenshots show Palantir losing $579M in 2019

Palintir's weren't evil spying tech. They were originally Zoom for coordinating the far flung domains of the Numenoreans. Only when the Minas Morgul palintir fell into the hands of Sauron did they become instruments of his corruption.

hnmullanyon Remote work is reshaping San Francisco, as tech workers flee and rents fall

This is going to get even worse under the new District Attorney.

hnmullanyon Remote work is reshaping San Francisco, as tech workers flee and rents fall

The Bay Area has the highest concentration of Michelin stars in the country. The bars have great cocktails, decor and vibe. The SFMoma & DeYoung are first class museums as good as any city outside New York in the US.

hnmullanyon Elite Disillusionment

I went to Harvard in the early 90's. The difference between the diverse interests and ambitions of entering freshmen and what 90% of my classmates ended up doing with their careers (law, medicine, some kind of asset mgt, academia) is profound.

hnmullanyon Tax hike on California millionaires would create 54% tax rate

Marginal tax rates in California for top earners (including the medicare surcharge) are already about equivalent to France. 37% fed + 13.3% CA + 1.45% Medicare = 52%. Compared to France's 45% income + 7.5% social security taxes.

hnmullanyon A one-year moratorium on police use of Rekognition

I'm a big ACLU supporter, but thought this was poorly done. They never released either the database or the code for this testing, and had configured the recognition level against Amazon's recommendations.

hnmullanyon Multi-node TimescaleDB is now free

Here's the original intro to Timescale blog post - https://blog.timescale.com/blog/when-boring-is-awesome-build...