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kirkbackus

495 karma · joined October 14, 2013

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kirkbackus··on Supreme Court upholds TikTok ban, but Trump might offer lifeline
In this case, the necessity of this law is proof that American companies are incapable of producing an app that can compete with Tiktok.
kirkbackus··on Italy approves 40% windfall tax on banks for 2023 as profits soar
The "your parents" are only harmed if the public benefit from taxes don't offset the benefit that is received directly in the funding of the 401k or other relevant investment accounts.

In America anyway, the wealthiest 1% own 53% of the stock market. I highly doubt that the "your parents" would benefit more from funding of their investment accounts than they would benefit from the tax revenue generated. Of course my assumption is highly dependent on public policy.

kirkbackus··on Goldman is looking for a way out of its partnership with Apple
In the attached article

> After hovering around record lows for much of the pandemic, consumer delinquencies are rising across the industry.

> It lost slightly more than $1 billion in 2021 and $783 million in 2020, after accounting for operating expenses and money set aside to cover possible losses on loans

That seems like an enormous amount of money to support buy now and pay later

kirkbackus··on The NIH has poured $1B into long Covid research, with little to show for it
Before I got hit with long covid, I was in the best shape of my life, and was doing all of those things on that list. I was running 1.5 miles and exercising several days a week.

It absolutely didn't prevent me from experiencing long covid.

kirkbackus··on Launch HN: Play.ht (YC W23) – Generate and clone voices from 20 seconds of audio
Not for everybody, also it would be great to consume textual content in a variety of voices, or even my own.
kirkbackus··on ElonJet Is Now Suspended
Flight information provided to the FAA is considered public information. This is funded with taxpayer money, and is not privy to privacy.
kirkbackus··on Nest, the company, died at Google I/O 2019
I've got a few smart switches that adjust the lights at a specific time in the evening. It really helps my children transition into the evening routine. It also helps me not lose track of time so I can keep that evening routine.
kirkbackus··on Scientists discover new type of magnet
Referenced article https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-08497-3
kirkbackus··on Browserball
I made a project in college like this that utilized the Windows API to enumerate the rectangles of the windows and you could create shapes and other things that you can throw around your desktop

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38qWXZ0hDv4

kirkbackus··on Avoid NULL
In the last example, wouldn't a Singleton to represent a null student be more effective since you could do a check for the null student by reference?
kirkbackus··on Traffic Jam, a program that helps track prostitution rings by using public data
Why are you saying this? There is literally no mention of social media in this article. The data (at least from the original project) is mined from publicly available data, which could be social media data, but that data has to be made public in the first place.

It is possible that the "Research Grade" version of the program does use that data, but there is no evidence of that here.

kirkbackus··on Bootstrap 4 alpha
They only provide one type of license: http://themes.getbootstrap.com/pages/our-license

It is comparable to the "Multiple Applications License" provided by WrapBootstrap. Still relatively expensive since most Multiple Applications Licenses are under $99.

kirkbackus··on Apple Removes American Civil War Games from the App Store
It's quite ironic that Apple is setting a precedent for the intolerance of any symbol of slavery while they are knowingly supporting manufacturing which utilizes child labor, which is often forced labor. The epitome of hypocrisy which hopefully leads Apple to change.
kirkbackus··on Google's common Java, C++ and Javascript library for phone numbers
Google also made a library for handling mailing addresses: https://github.com/googlei18n/libaddressinput
kirkbackus··on MetricsGraphics.js – D3-based library optimized for visualizing time-series data
You are correct. It does that for the multi-line graphs as well.

Multi-Line Graph https://github.com/mozilla/metrics-graphics/blob/master/js/m...

Point Graph (Scatterplot) https://github.com/mozilla/metrics-graphics/blob/master/js/m...

kirkbackus··on Show HN: Incoin.io – Bitcoin and Distributed Payroll
According to their faqs: http://blog.incoin.io/incoin-faqs/ Those are all problems that they have yet to solve.

They only support salaried employees (no hourly employees). Taxes should be done in 1.5 - 2 months, and bonuses are in their roadmap, but there is no timeline for that feature.

kirkbackus··on Earth’s Water Is Older Than the Sun
Careful. Don't miss the precedent to the "every planet could have a drink". It all hinges on "if the solar system’s formation was typical", which is a question that has not been answered.

Also, why don't they address the implications if the solar system's formation was not typical?

kirkbackus··on Metaballs and Marching Squares
Something really cool about this approach is the marching squares algorithm is highly parallelizable which would make this a good candidate for GPU acceleration provided that there is enough memory.
kirkbackus··on Ribbon BIN API – Find out how your customers are paying
Can I store a BIN and associate it to a customer without breaking PCI compliance?
kirkbackus··on Bitucket is down (again)
We've got the same problem here, if our system goes down, we won't be able to deploy.
kirkbackus··on Getting to work on diversity at Google
That's more of an ideal, not really an achievable goal. How does Google measure the diversity of its users? How does Google measure the quality of their service to each people group? Does this mean Google's ideal workforce would be a near 1:1 mapping of employees to the general user population?
kirkbackus··on Getting to work on diversity at Google
They don't have the software engineers specifically, but they have the breakdown of the "Tech" people http://www.google.com/diversity/at-google.html#tab=tech
kirkbackus··on How Apple Cheats
Agreed, it is like comparing apples and oranges.
kirkbackus··on Mozilla Moving Forward
You are confusing "accepting" with "respecting". These are not the same thing. For example: I can accept a view I don't respect. To avoid a straw man, you should state your phrases unequivocally.
kirkbackus··on Why not to use infinite scroll on your website
This really should be, 10 reasons illustrating the need for a more robust infinite scroll. Most of these issues seem to be solvable. Except maybe the footer thing, that's just dumb.
kirkbackus··on Brendan Eich Steps Down as Mozilla CEO
This is a red herring for I was not talking specifically. My main point was "a person and lifestyle are NOT the same thing" regarding the negative attitudes in the wikipedia definition of "homophobia".
kirkbackus··on Brendan Eich Steps Down as Mozilla CEO
The problem with the word "homophobia" is that it tells us almost nothing about a person. Not only does it include people who have negative attitudes toward the people, it also includes people who have a negative attitude towards homosexuality. There is a major difference here: a person and lifestyle are NOT the same thing.

Someone who does not like homosexuality can have a positive attitude toward homosexuals. The Wikipedia definition of "homophobia" is just a straw man fallacy waiting to happen.

kirkbackus··on Detecting duplicate images with Python
While this algorithm could suffer from a large false positive problem, that issue could also work to his advantage when implemented as a "find similar images to this", which was addressed later in the article.
kirkbackus··on OkCupid Doesn’t Care How You Find Love, As Long As You Never Ever Use Firefox
Well now, if you really want to stick it to him, you should just disable JavaScript altogether! Brendan Eich created it after all.
kirkbackus··on Evil.js: A JavaScript library for thwarting hot-linkers
The non-minified source is pretty self-explanatory. It modifies a lot of the standard javascript functions. My favorite is the document.write(element) is modified to surround the element with <marquee> and <blink> tags and then write that to the DOM.
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