jamestnz

> what I came to call “the Law of Conservation of Ugly”. In many software problems, there’s a part that just is never going to feel elegant

This may be an instance of the Waterbed Principle: in any sufficiently-complex system, suppressing or refactoring some undesirable characteristic in one area inevitably causes an undesirability to pop up somewhere else. Like there is some minimum amount of complexity/ugliness/etc that it is possible for the entire system to contain while still carrying out its essential functions, and it must leak out somewhere.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterbed_theory

The article's author seems to be part of the team behind the Mac disk-cloning/backup utility, SuperDuper.

https://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescriptio...

I think OP is engaging with a remark (possibly[1]) from the futurist and writer William Gibson: "The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed".

[1] wording and attribution varies

High infant-mortality rates account for it.

If there are 10 births, where 9 of the children die in infancy but 1 lives to be 100 years old, their average life expectancy would be about 10.

Are labour unions generally done one-off like this in the US? I keep reading stories where individual branches/locations make efforts to unionise, which the company fights off whack-a-mole style.

In my country the unions are fairly well-established and tend to sit across an entire sector, covering all businesses operating in it (workers individually choose whether or not to join, but the company isn't allowed to discriminate either way). Like there will be a Nurses union, a Teachers union, a Public Sector union, a Warehousing and Logistics union, a Port & Dockworkers union, a Retail Workers union... the list goes on. One US example I've heard of like this is in trucking (Teamsters union?), but I know little about the history of US labour relations generally. Could there be an Amazon Workers union that covers an entire state?

Employers of a certain size here are also obliged to provide registered unions with access to business premises, ability to hold certain (non-mandatory) union meetings during work hours, etc. Some industries have upwards of 20-30% of all employees joined to the union, a few even higher.

I'm sure this does happen sometimes, but I print plenty and can't find any such files on my Monterey-running M1. Neither is it true on my Catalina-running Intel Mac.

Also, I keep seeing this claim repeated during the last week or so... what gives?

I wonder if this is all based solely on a rather breathless (and now deleted) reddit post from 9 days ago? https://www.reddit.com/r/YouShouldKnow/comments/yhftqo/ysk_m...

People in a different subreddit were less convinced:

https://www.reddit.com/r/macsysadmin/comments/yho0cf/ysk_mac...

>A tax on revenues would kill a lot of high growth businesses

And also low-margin businesses. If you tax a business on its total sales rather than profits, a low-margin and high-volume operation cannot survive as easily.

Example. A supermarket chain makes many sales, collecting average 5% margins on a sale. A seller of high-end automobiles moves fewer units, but can take a 15% margin. Assume both businesses make the same $1m sales in a year.

If you're taxing profits at 20% the supermarket pays $10k on $50k profit while the car dealer pays $30k on $150k profit, for a total tax take of $40k.

If you're instead taxing total sales at 2%, each will pay $20k on their $1m sales. The same total taxes were raised, but the tax burden (at least in terms of retained earnings that are now available for reinvestment) has fallen differently. The supermarket is paying 40% of their profits in taxes, the car dealer is paying 13.3% of their profits in taxes.

And if a business makes only 1% average margin on their sales, they are underwater by this scheme. ($1m sales, $10k profit, $20k tax).

> Citation needed that this was a knowing conspiracy as opposed to bad intelligence

Within hours of the planes hitting the towers on 9/11, before any information was in, Rumsfeld's aides were drawing up plans for striking Iraq, despite zero evidence linking Saddam Hussein to the attacks. The number one priority for the White House, above finding out who the real culprits were, was to figure out how to use it as a rationale to invade Iraq. This is not really a controversial viewpoint, it is documented fact [1].

When the 9/11 rationale for invading Iraq became untenable, it was replaced by the idea that Saddam had Weapons of Mass Destruction, that he'd definitely been procuring uranium from Niger. Except these were lies too (and the WH knew it, because they'd sent Joe Wilson to investigate and he'd reported back as such). When Wilson heard them saying it despite knowing it was false, he contradicted them in public [2]. In an act of retribution, the WH leaked his wife's position as a CIA agent, burning valuable contacts and networks, and endangering friendly lives.

Then they moved onto the argument that regardless of WMDs, the Iraqi people actually wanted the invasion anyway, US forces would be welcomed as liberators by gift-bearing citizens, etc. When that didn't pan out either, a final argument became that Saddam was a tyrant and that fact alone provided sufficient moral and legal justification for preemptive war (i.e. The Bush Doctrine) [3].

[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/plans-for-iraq-attack-began-on-...

[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-49856792

[3] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/truth/why/

I stumbled upon an unusual policy when trying to order from B&H the first time. They are not open for business on Shabbat (NYC local time), and this includes their online checkout!

I could fill up my cart, but had to come back later to do my purchase.

You don't accept that different online communities can have sufficiently different cultures that "memes" are more acceptable in one than the other, even if said communities have somewhat of an overlap in audiences?

> Is this your alter ego on HN?

Come now, let's not be obtuse. People naturally behave differently in different social contexts, a thing that is totally normal and expected.

For instance, consider how you'd behave in a professional situation, vs when drinking with your friends, vs when catching up with your grandmother.

Having different standards in different online communities seems no different.

HRV describes the steadiness (or not) of the timing between beats, as measured in milliseconds. It sounds like you are describing something else here, like your resting rate and how much/quickly it responds to exercise.

For an example of HRV, let's say you're showing a heart rate of exactly 95 BPM for a one minute period, which means an average of one beat every 0.6316 second. If the actual beats were very close to occurring exactly once every 0.6316 sec like clockwork, then you have a low HRV.

At some later time, you also measure 95 BPM during a one minute period, but this time you find the period between beats is much more variable. Sometimes it is 0.627 seconds, and sometimes it is 0.641 seconds. The beats aren't falling like clockwork, they are all over the place.

The second example is a high HRV, both examples having the same heart rate.

Accurate beat-measuring equipment is required to calculate HRV (e.g. a heart-rate watch and an app).

The Dollop, an American history podcast, also did an interesting episode on The Landlord's Game:

https://soundcloud.com/the-dollop/379-the-landlords-game

This reminds me of a fun story about another unusual failure mode involving some supposedly valid (but highly specific) input content: Where listening to a certain podcast in your Mazda will reliably crash the car's stereo system.

"The Roman Mars Mazda Virus" https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/brh8jm

> Like that paradox for self-help groups: anyone in the forum who was actually successful in self-help wouldn't be on the forum anymore.

This is exactly the view of Canadian woman "Alana" who initially coined the respectful, non-perjorative term "incel" as part of a self help group for people who had reached college+ age but, for one reason or another, not entered the dating world. They were not "losers" or "virgins"; they were "involuntarily celibate".

The term started off as "invcel" (for Alana's Involuntary Celibacy Project) but was shortened to "incel" for aesthetic reasons. She was a closted, queer, academic, socially-awkward woman who eventually made the transition from "awkwardly not dating, to awkwardly dating", and having made that transition, identified with others who had not, and wanted to help others still in that situation. It wasn't until later that the whole thing got taken over by weird misogynist extremists.

Alana says the big mistake she made, back when she started a movement in her 20s, was that she overlooked what she now calls the "student government problem": You can’t build a movement of people whose whole reason for joining the movement is to leave it. It’s not just that the people who find love then go disappear. It’s that you don’t get to have what every other movement takes for granted — the old guard.

Instead, the people who stayed in Incel were the ones who got stuck — the people who felt the most bitter, the most abandoned. When young people showed up with questions, the people who should’ve been there to give them hope they’d moved on. Even, eventually, Alana.

I highly recommend the following podcast interview with Alana: https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/76h59o

I just got through researching this issue for a client. Apparently it is at least somewhat common, and appears to be caused by RF interference/noise radiating from USB 3.0 ports and cables, which stomps over 2.4 GHz band.

Popular solutions seem to involve applying custom shielding to dongles/cables/adaptors, trying different models of these, or experimenting with their physical proximity and layout. Sigh.

Discussion, including a link to an Intel whitepaper on the topic, here: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/329970/usb-c-dongl...

>In my country, one of the electronics stores has this thing where you pay about 35 USD per month, each month for 24 months, to have a MacBook Air in your possession, but which you don't own. So I guess in a way it is sort of rent/leasing. But the nice thing is that after the 24 months are up, you will be able to exchange it for a new model.

Interesting. That sounds like a so-called operating lease, which is quite common in my country for business technology purchases, and other operating assets that become outdated quickly and need to be rolled over every few years. It's similar to a regular financing arrangement (where a customer may spread the full cost of acquiring some asset over X months instead of paying in full up front), but the customer never actually owns the asset.

Instead of paying the full cost gradually via monthly payments, an operating lease is structured so that there will be a somewhat large residual payment due if the customer wants to keep the asset at the end, which allows for lower monthly payments. And, as you mentioned, encourages the usual situation where the customer returns the items at the end of the term, and immediately takes out a fresh lease on some new technology.

Since the customer taking out the lease never owns the asset, they needn't depreciate it or worry about other long-term asset concerns, and can treat the payments as deductible operating expenses rather than as the purchase of a fixed asset that would go on the balance sheet. Paying a predictable expense every month for your equipment can often be more manageable than making one big capital outlay every few years, and sometimes has tax advantages too.

Interesting comment.

> I believe in most other countries jail would have been imminent out of disrespect.

Is this part accurate? In the (admittedly few) countries where I have spent a lot of time and have gained any real experience dealing with the police, they have proven to have a relatively genial and pro-community outlook, aiming more to help people and prevent harm, rather than browbeating and abusing people.

My impression is that the so-called offence of "contempt of cop" (i.e. being arrested for being a smart-ass or upsetting a cop's feelings, rather than any genuine breach of the law or peace) is a bit of a North American phenomenon, but no doubt my perception is being affected by sampling bias there, having been exposed to American media etc.

In my (non-American) experience, you must push things incredibly far to get anything more than a sarcastic laugh or eye-roll or "move along, mate" from a cop.

Very impressive! I must say, writing an entire accounting/bookkeeping package seems like a lot of work, especially as a side project. Can I ask what domain-specific knowledge you had before you decided to embark on it? For example, did you already have experience in small business financials to guide you? Did you have someone like a Chartered Accountant or Tax Lawyer advise you?

Also, just FYI -- your FAQ contains an outdated reference: API currently in beta, but will be available by mid November 2017

I agree with you - from a theoretical perspective, it seems pretty crazy to be taking pills that alter the brain chemistry when we don't fully understand the effects those changes might have.

But the strange fact is that SSRI therapy does seem to help with depression in many people, just as lithium seems to help with mood even though we don't completely understand why.

With the example of serotonin, even though the SSRI effects serotonin levels almost immediately, it can take several weeks for depressive symptoms to improve. Therefore it is unlikely that inhibiting serotonin transport alone accounts for the anti-depressive effect. It has more recently been theorised that the strong anti-inflammatory effect of SSRIs may be involved, as depression is increasingly known to be related to chronic inflammation.

Lastly I'm pretty skeptical about "imbalances" altogether (though I took it for granted at the time). For example, when I and others have been prescribed SSRIs, there have generally been no medical tests given first which might detect or confirm any such imbalance. In fact I'm not even sure such a test is possible. Instead, they give the pills out solely on the basis of a personal report from the patient, which the physician interprets to indicate depression.

>The root cause of depression is chemical

I wonder if you were speaking generally here, or if you were referring specifically to the Chemical Imbalance theory of depression/anxiety.

Often espoused by the marketing departments of Big Pharma, and by now firmly lodged in the public consciousness, the idea that abnormal monoamine levels (e.g. serotonin, noradrenaline) in the brain causes depression, is (to say the least) highly controversial. Some might even call it "debunked". Or, more charitably perhaps, just a highly persistent meme that's never really had much to do with science from the get-go.

BTW, I say this as someone who saw successful results using SSRIs (Citalopram) as a treatment for depression some years ago. Given that the relationship between serotonin and depression seems subtle, indirect, and poorly understood at best, I don't pretend to be able to explain why SSRI treatment "worked" for me! Placebo? Coincidence? Genuine effect which empirically exists but we do not yet understand the mechanism (a bit like lithium)?

In addition to echoing all the dev-related stories in this thread, I have very fond memories from my childhood of playing a 1988 HyperCard-based game called The Manhole (on our SE/30, and later Power Mac 8100).

It was an immersive and extensive visual world, where the main point was just to explore. It was implemented as a series of linked HyperCard stacks, each sized to fit on a floppy disk. You'd come to remember the exact points of the game that would throw up a modal dialog prompting the insertion of the next required disk.

And, it happens to have been made by the brothers Rand and Robyn Miller, who later went on to create Myst (which itself is very reminiscent of The Manhole).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Manhole https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyOTq1EpV5o

Unrelatedly, I wonder if anyone in this thread remembers SuperCard, a third-party knock-off of HyperCard that offered such amazing innovations as color graphics. (I also seem to recall some kind of hack where you could use ResEdit to get colour images into HyperCard stacks even though it wasn't officially supported, but the details are fuzzy).

For those interested in more info on this, it's called Temperature Lag. There's also the related phenomenon of Seasonal Lag, which is where the hottest part of the year comes somewhat after the period of maximum solar radiation, not during it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diurnal_temperature_variation#...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seasonal_lag

The spiral arms are not fixed masses. If they were, they would quickly wind themselves up tighter and tighter, as the inner areas are orbiting faster than the outer parts. Within a short time the spiral arms would be dispersed.

Instead, you can think of the spiral arms as being like the highest-density part of a traffic jam. In a traffic jam, cars are slowing down and bunching onto the back of the queue, while other cars are finally trickling off the front of the queue and speeding back up. In this way the traffic jam itself stays in a stable position, while individual cars constantly move through it.

In other words, it isn't the same stars that make up the spiral arms over time. As stars orbit the galactic center, they move in and out of the spiral arms.

Less weird when you take into consideration the rest of the sentence: "I met the Samsung team ... at TC Disrupt". So "team" in that context would be the folks that Samsung were sending to TC, not the whole company-wide team.

I second this. In NZ most washers are top-loading, and I've never seen one that locks during operation. Instead, if you lift the lid while it is spinning, it engages some kind of emergency-brake and that spinner grinds to a halt in a fraction of a second.

> Each dollar that goes horizontally between the "lower class" gets to work one step harder within the "lower class" to go before being sucked away by the wealthy

This is an interesting point, and reminds me in a way of the Bristol Pound (and other "community currencies") which are essentially the same as regular Pounds Sterling, but are only accepted by locally-owned businesses within a local geographical area (more specifically: anyone can accept them, but only locals can ever exchange them back to Pounds Sterling, at a pegged 1:1 rate). Local branches of mutli-national corporations, and public (listed) companies, cannot participate.

Local residents can open an account in Bristol Pounds, and pay their local taxes in them. Some locals can be paid their salary in them.

The stated goal (and this has apparently worked quite well) is a localised economic stimulus, by encouraging residents to spend at local small businesses, and those businesses in turn to seek local suppliers, etc. This sees the money doing a few more rounds locally before being sucked away to a multinational.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/jun/07/the-innovat...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bristol_Pound

>How long something has been around is often a good way to determine how much longer it will be around in the future

This mode of (purely statistical) longevity argument is the "Doomsday Argument". The classic version is about predicting how much longer human civilization might endure. The crux of it is that there's only a 5% chance that we're currently in the first 5% of humanity's total timeline, and a 95% chance that we're in the last 95% of it.

If we assume that 60 billion humans have been born so far, it can be estimated that there is a 95% chance that the total number of humans ever will be less than 20 × 60 billion = 1.2 trillion. Assuming that the world population stabilizes at 10 billion and a life expectancy of 80 years, it can be estimated that the remaining 1,140 billion humans will be born in 9,120 years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_argument

I think both. Don't take away the need to be a public figure and to verify your identity. Just make them pay in addition to these things.

If you're a big enough public figure to want/need the blue tick, you're arguably making commercial use of twitter already, so you probably have a marketing budget that can sink a thousand bucks a year into maintaining your verified status with Twitter (in addition to proving your identity in usual ways).

If some famous person doesn't want to pay, that's fine: either quit using twitter's platform to market yourself, or continue but live without the tick.

Last week Github hosted a meeting of tech industry heads to explore such an action, so this may have fallen out of that. News coverage seems to imply that Github invited chosen companies to participate.

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-immigration-tech...