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jrm415

74 karma · joined April 21, 2015

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jrm415··on How economical is your local Taco Bell?
There is no price I would pay to eat Taco Bell before boarding a flight though.
jrm415··on What has a 1 in a million chance? (2010)
It’s not impossible to have sextuplets.

It’s probably impossible for a population to average that rate though.

jrm415··on Beware offers of “help” with your projects
Sometimes my 5 year old wants to build her block tower just the way she wants, and she says no thank you if someone offers to help. Other times she accepts help and then the tower takes a different form. Both ways are OK.
jrm415··on Impact of circulating SARS-CoV-2 variants on mRNA vaccine-induced immunity
What case is there to refuse a vaccine that is likely to add significantly more protection to the individual and community while remaining extremely unlikely to cause “other problems “?

It’s important to distinguish events that are likely from those which are unlikely. Otherwise you may mislead someone.

jrm415··on Building Self-Managed Teams: A Case Study from Riot Games
I think most HN readers are intelligent enough to be able to consider the quality of advice as something separate from its source. That is, a source need not be perfect to be worth listening to.

Riot's obviously far from perfect, but this advice seems reasonable to me. Do you think following it is likely to lead to problems similar to Riot's? If there's some sort of causal link between empowering teams and failing to build an inclusive culture, I'd really find that interesting.

jrm415··on Thanks HN: You helped save a company that now helps thousands make a living
Product idea: chatbot plugin that automatically replies to HN comments about your service.
jrm415··on Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?
> Do people really not use libraries in Germany any more?

I am really chuckling at the double meaning here.

> And I really should not have written my own HTML parser for it

jrm415··on On Apple's Piss-Poor Documentation
At least Combine is fairly easy to work with since its ideas are already familiar and Rx was so well documented.
jrm415··on Clean code won't save the planet
Actually, the "essential content" has on average gotten much worse as budget cuts mean much less original writing.
jrm415··on A proposal to roll back exclusionary zoning would make housing more affordable
Yes, it's good to be mindful of Chesterson's Fence [0]. We should understand the reasons for policies before changing them. In many cases, we understand the reasons for exclusionary zoning; they're repulsive, and they should be changed.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence

jrm415··on What Airbnb really does to a neighbourhood
That's a strange comparison to make. I highly doubt that the resident yields more revenue over that 1-2 week period than the tourist, or that the resident yields more revenue over a year than a year's worth of tourists.
jrm415··on Number of open faculty positions in CompSci exceeds candidates by a factor of 5
It _is_ a crisis if there are not enough faculty to handle the number of students. The solutions are simple (admit fewer students or hire more faculty) but not easy (students could go somewhere else so as to be admitted to their preferred major; it might be difficult to hire faculty at current pay rates).
jrm415··on Ask HN: What is your commute like?
I live and work in Redwood City, CA, USA. I live 1.2 miles from work. It's a 6-8 minute bike ride, which I prefer, but I usually drive my wife to the train station, which is a block from where I work, and then I drive the rest of the way to work, which takes me about 9 minutes total.
jrm415··on Does It Make Sense for Programmers to Move to the Bay Area?
CA taxes are marginal. My math was overly simplistic, because I only wanted to illustrate that you needed to pay CA taxes on your full salary.
jrm415··on Does It Make Sense for Programmers to Move to the Bay Area?
If you move to CA, you need to pay state tax on your entire earnings, not just your raise. 13.3% of 140k is more than 18k, which is certainly significant.
jrm415··on How thermometer and satellite data is adjusted and why it must be done
> So in the US, accounting for non-climatic factors ends up increasing the warming trend over the raw data—which we know is wrong.

I wish the author had been a bit more careful when writing this sentence. I think the intended meaning is "we know the raw data is wrong," but I read it at first as "we know [the increase] is wrong."

jrm415··on Are closed social networks inevitable? (2010)
Perhaps you meant that she is _really_ well articulated (rather than rarely)?