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hundt

361 karma · joined May 28, 2013

chris@judicata.com
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hundt··on Coyote v. Acme (1990)
I took my 7- and 10-year old and they enjoyed it, especially the 10yo. We watched a couple hours of Looney Tunes compilations on YouTube the day before to introduce them to the characters.
hundt··on Why would anyone need JavaScript generator functions?
This article[0] and a clarifying comment[1] answer the question for JS. I think it's the same for Python. Apparently your model (which was mine, too) is out of date!

[0] https://hacks.mozilla.org/2015/05/es6-in-depth-generators/

[1] https://hacks.mozilla.org/2015/05/es6-in-depth-generators/#c...

hundt··on Accounting For Developers, Part I
As the article explains, debits increase the balance of debit normal accounts, whereas credits increase the balance of credit normal accounts.
hundt··on Supreme Court limits EPA’s power to cut emissions
I think the argument is that there are multiple judicial philosophies that can be chosen from, and you can generally predict what outcomes will result from following a philosophy consistently over time, so a justice chooses the philosophy that results in the outcomes they want. And therefore they could have chosen their philosophy for partisan outcome-based reasons, so consistently following it is no defense to accusations of partisanship.
hundt··on Heatsink Skiving (2021) [video]
I think the heatsink and platform it is on are moving horizontally and the blade only moves vertically.
hundt··on When families un-adopt a child (2018)
I would call it a duty more than a debt. I feel that I have a duty to look after my elders, but I do not think my children owe me a debt for conceiving them or for performing my own duty to take care of them.
hundt··on How to Work Hard
One possibility is that he "works hard" at that, too, e.g. by consciously thinking about what the best things to do with them are and endeavoring to spend as much as possible doing them. Perhaps if you internalize the idea that spending time with your family is in fact work, of a different but also valuable nature, then you will not find it as difficult.
hundt··on Welcome to the Golden Age of Masa
As I wrote, I didn't find the "drying out" step to be necessary. If you are patient enough you can process the nixtamal into dough with only a tiny bit of water added.

Edit: I don't have a wet grinder so I can't compare to that. It is smooth enough to get the pocket though.

hundt··on Welcome to the Golden Age of Masa
This is an excellent question that I never thought of!

My guess is that

- there is a large range of cal concentrations that work fine without tasting bad, and

- the amount of water absorbed by the corn is very hard to predict, as it varies from batch to batch, and

- unlike brining meat, it is unlikely that two people doing this by hand would vary how much water they are adding by 5x or even 3x, because there is no reason to add a lot more water than is needed, and

- recipes are simpler if you base the cal amount on the corn amount and then add "enough water" (which may change once you start cooking).

So maybe no one doing it for non-industrial audiences has bothered narrowing it down.

I use around half as much as you (3:1 water to corn and 1% cal by weight of corn) and it works well for me.

hundt··on Welcome to the Golden Age of Masa
You can get a smooth product from a food processor if you are willing to do it in small batches, very slowly (I take around 5 minutes to process 1 cup of nixtamal in my 11-cup food processor, with pauses to scrape it down). I can do that without adding too much water (and in fact I have to add more water after I'm done processing).

I also bought from Masienda; they are indeed great!

hundt··on Tax details of US super-rich allegedly leaked
> to actually do anything with that paper wealth, he needs to sell the stock or engage in a similar realization event, in which case that gain will be taxed

The ProPublica analysis that the BBC refers to [1] explains it: you borrow with the capital as collateral and then when you die the debt is repaid by selling some of the capital. But because of the stepped-up basis on death there is never a "realization" of positive gains.

[1] https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trov...

hundt··on The security scanner that cried wolf
Having implemented it for a job, this has been my impression of container scanning as well. Either your container has an OS, in which case you don't use 99% of the software on it and so 99% of the vulnerabilities found do not affect you, or else you have a container with "scratch" as the base image, in which case the scanner has no insight.
hundt··on Twitter hides Donald Trump tweet for “glorifying violence”
Maybe, but did you read my post? You need a cause of action. It is not libel to moderate someone's tweets, so even if § 230 does not protect them you can't sue them for libel based on their moderation.
hundt··on Twitter hides Donald Trump tweet for “glorifying violence”
My understanding is that (c)(2)(A) is only about liability for the act of moderation itself, e.g. suing Twitter because they banned you. If they did that in bad faith you could hypothetically maybe sue them for it, but there would need to be a cause of action, which there normally wouldn't be.

'gnopgnip may be referring to the much broader liability shield, for the content that you do not remove, which is provided by (c)(1) and has no good-faith requirement. That is Twitter's main "legal protection from defamation and libel" that you mention above.

Trump's executive order suggests that the (c)(1) liability shield could go away if you don't meet the (c)(2) good-faith requirements, which I gather is not considered a strong legal position.

hundt··on macOS Catalina 10.15.5
I tried the XPS 15 7590 late last year before I switched back to Mac when the 16" MBP came out.

It felt like absolute garbage in comparison. Trackpad was so bad I had to use the touchscreen to scroll. Internet stopped working intermittently. Display felt like far inferior quality (and, like you said, your choices are too few pixels or too many).

It was honestly a confusing experience to me, like reviewers or other people who treat these machines as comparable were living on a different planet or something. Of course I don't expect everyone to like Macs and there's nothing wrong with preferring the Dell but I don't understand why the quality differences are not more widely acknowledged.

hundt··on No One Goes There Anymore
Two meaningful things they can do without realizing the gains: borrow against it and bequeath it.
hundt··on WinUI – The modern native UI platform of Windows
Yup, had this exact experience, except my prior mac was a 2015.
hundt··on Intuit to buy Credit Karma for $7B
Sorry, I'm still not clear what you're referring to. There are multiple ProPublica articles linked in this thread and I'm not sure what statement you're paraphrasing with your "soup to nuts" quote. Are you referring to this article[0], which says the OMB suggested in 2002 that the IRS develop a free option, and the IRS opposed it then and consistently since?

Regarding your second point: the IRS has a lot of documents but it is dwarfed by the total amount of information needed to prepare a return. Even just to determine who your dependents are is a complex flowchart[1] for which there are no official documents in existence that can provide the answers. These kinds of things come up all the time when doing ordinary people's taxes, not just in esoteric situations. (I know because I used to volunteer to do it.)

[0] https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-f...

[1] https://apps.irs.gov/app/vita/content/globalmedia/dependency...

hundt··on Intuit to buy Credit Karma for $7B
Can you point to where the IRS has said that they can prepare returns for taxpayers?

As far as I know they can correct isolated pieces of information (e.g. wrong numbers from a W-2) but do not have the ability to prepare a return from scratch.

Edit: I mean, they can obviously put all the pieces of information they know about you onto one return and do the calculations. But there will be many pieces they don't know, and I think you are unlikely to get an accurate return without them (or based on guessing). But if the IRS says otherwise I would like to know.

hundt··on Intuit to buy Credit Karma for $7B
It is certainly true that the IRS could hypothetically implement a better version of TurboTax. But it is quite a leap to conclude that the tax preparation industry's relatively small amount of lobbying is the main reason they have not done that.

The IRS is severely and chronically underfunded (a situation that gets worse every year) and can't even perform its basic tax collection functions at this point. Even if it were allocated the budget to make a TurboTax competitor (the complexity of which I think you severely underestimate) I am extremely skeptical that the resulting product would actually be as good as TurboTax. The net result could easily be us all paying (in the form of taxes) for software that no one uses anyway.

I think "IRS makes a better TurboTax" is basically a fantasy, and Intuit is a convenient villain to blame for that fantasy not coming true. They appear to be taking steps to discourage it, but I highly doubt they, or they plus all other lobbyists combined, are a but-for cause of the fact that filing taxes is difficult.

hundt··on Lambda School’s Misleading Promises
Interestingly, Lambda School has just announced a new "ISA Financing Blueprint" [0] and "Better Data Transparency" [1] which address some of the concerns from the article.

[0] https://lambdaschool.com/the-commons/announcing-our-new-isa-...

[1] https://lambdaschool.com/the-commons/building-better-data-tr...

hundt··on Lambda School’s Misleading Promises
This is very cool! How did you choose the curriculum that you are following?
hundt··on Lambda School’s Misleading Promises
Ah, I think you have a misunderstanding about what collateral is. Collateral is not generally a limitation on the lender's ability to collect the debt. In some specific cases (like certain home loans in certain states) the law adds this limitation but generally collateral is just something the lender can take in the event of default.

To bring up the car loan example you mentioned earlier, if you decide after a year that you don't want your car anymore you can't just drive it to your bank and drop it off instead of paying off the rest of the loan. If you stop paying it they can repossess it but you will still owe whatever is left on your loan balance after they auction it.

hundt··on Lambda School’s Misleading Promises
You seem to think that this "loan" that the investor makes to Lambda School only has to be paid back when the ISAs pay out, and if they never pay out then Lambda School's debt is just forgiven. That would indeed be similar to just selling the ISAs to the investors, but I don't think that's what is described in the article (as Lambda School's current practice). Rather the article says that Lambda School gets a "loan that is secured by students' ISAs" which implies that Lambda School has to pay it back with or without the income from the ISAs.
hundt··on Lambda School’s Misleading Promises
You can read what Lambda School describes as the "template" for their ISA contracts:

https://leif.org/api/products/5b5b8bd0e59b743f9a086ed9/pdf

It says that you agree that you "are entering into this Agreement in good faith and with the intention to pay us" and will "make reasonable and good faith efforts to seek employment" as long as you are not paying them.

I don't see any specific provisions describing how that would be enforced and I bet in practice it is not a major issue for the reason I mentioned above: there isn't much reason to go through with Lambda School if you don't actually want a job in tech, so it probably doesn't happen much.

hundt··on Lambda School’s Misleading Promises
My understanding is that Lambda school is very focused on teaching you what you need to get a job, so if you were just "interested in tech" you would probably be better served by Udacity, other free or nearly-free online courses, or just reading books.
hundt··on Lambda School’s Misleading Promises
Yep, if Austen misled people that's bad. I am just disputing the argument that the later practice of using them as collateral for a loan is financially similar to selling them.
hundt··on Lambda School’s Misleading Promises
Selling the ISAs would make it more indirect, but this article is referring to borrowing against the ISAs' future income, which does not make it more indirect.
hundt··on Lambda School’s Misleading Promises
Yes, and that is accurate; borrowing against a student's debt is not "making money" from the student. The transaction you describe does not hedge Lambda's risk; in fact it increases Lambda's risk because now if the student defaults they still need to pay interest as well.
hundt··on Lambda School’s Misleading Promises
> Whether or not this counts as “selling” strikes me as a meaningless semantic distinction: Either way, the school receives some money up front and an investor shoulders some of the risk of the ISA not paying out. And either way, Lambda School students don’t know that the school isn’t as incentive-aligned with them as the school’s marketing indicates.

It is certainly not meaningless! Selling an ISA means that Lambda no longer has any financial interest in its outcome. Borrowing against an ISA is completely different; if the ISA doesn't pay out then Lambda goes bankrupt, which is precisely the incentive alignment they claim to have.

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