Hacker News Reader

lurgburgon Oil sector is lobbying for inefficient hydrogen cars to delay electrification

Wasn't Germany's WWII "synthetic fuel" just coal derived gasoline?

lurgburgon Alex Jones told to pay $965M damages to Sandy Hook victims' families

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/stochastic_terrorism

He could have anticipated his actions would lead to these outcomes.

lurgburgon What You Can't Say (2004)

Presumably we're banning braces as well then.

lurgburgon When was the last time 98% of scientists got something important wrong?

An interesting thing about the linked quora question is that they do show a few examples of times scientists were generally wrong about something. If you look at them, they seem to have certain commonalities: they involve some deeply perplexing observation (either practical or theoretical), generally made by those with a deep experience of related subjects.

By contrast, the instances where scientists were all wrong do not, it turns out, look like wildly simplistic, obvious ideas conjured by those who apparently never even skimmed the wikipedia article on the subject.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change#Solar_and_volca...

lurgburgon How much do construction costs matter to the price of housing?

Writing in context of preceding comment, which seemed to be predicated on them having a special capacity to raise prices in response to land taxes.

I did wonder briefly if a land tax might decrease competition => higher prices, but then I recalled that the supply of land is fixed.

lurgburgon How much do construction costs matter to the price of housing?

Writing in the context of preceding comment. Landlords increase prices as much as they're able, they don't decline to increase when they could to maintain some fixed margin. I'm not saying they're generally unable to rise prices in general, but that they have no special additional capacity to raise prices in response to land taxes.

lurgburgon How much do construction costs matter to the price of housing?

LVT is generally conceptualised as proportional to the value of the land, not it's area.

lurgburgon How much do construction costs matter to the price of housing?

> they all increased their rent

Why would they not have done this before, if they could? Landlords aren't trying to maintain some fixed margin, they want as much as possible, always.

lurgburgon GPT-3 implicitly favor text written by authors from powerful social positions

"Better" is just presupposing the conclusion: that there is something inherently superior about certain styles. That thinking is precisely the "language ideology" the authors are concerned about!

Better for who? For what purpose?

lurgburgon Dutch cities want to ban property investors in all neighborhoods

> It let me buy a property which I wouldn't be able to without HTB

Possibly you're taking the wrong counterfactual here?

"If I hadn't HTB but everyone else did" vs "If no-one had HTB".

It's possible you're quite right about the first, but it tells us little about the second. Possibly in the presence of HTB, prices just rise again until they reach their equilibrium of just-barely-affordable.

lurgburgon China has forbidden under-18s from playing games for more than three hours/week

OTOH an individual parent has to expend a lot more effort to create controls than a government. An individual parent can't mandate technology companies install controls that automatically regulate their child's play; they have to manually monitor+manage it at some cost of time+effort to themselves.

A wonkish trick would be for the government to mandate controls with sensible defaults but allow parents to tune them I guess?

lurgburgon Ivermectin: * Must show pic of you and your horse *

You have, say, 10 different drugs you might use along with Ivermectin in a "multi-drug regime". From these 10 drugs, you can generate 10-choose-4 = 5040 different 4-drug regimes. As many as you please, effectively.

Assuming Ivermectin is useless, and your study is p95, how many false positives do you expect to get?

lurgburgon Your Lifestyle Has Already Been Designed (2010)

Perhaps the world has changed somewhat in the last 10000 years.

lurgburgon CIA director says he is escalating efforts to solve 'Havana Syndrome'

Because directly blaming Cuba would be all downside, no upside. If they directly and straightforwardly blamed Cuba, Serious Readers might actually wonder about their basis for doing so (as there isn't one), and might actually think critically about what they're reading. But if they blare "HAVANA SYNDROME" at the top, the majority take the intended message, and the Serious Readers say "well it's all very complex, there's a lot we don't know, who can say?"

lurgburgon CIA director says he is escalating efforts to solve 'Havana Syndrome'

Do you think that the majority of people read the full article?

Do you think the CIA thinks the majority of people read the full article?

Do you think the CIA engages honestly with the press to simply provide information to the public?

GP's analysis is correct: the CIA knows that people will read vaguely and shallowly and take away a confused anti-cuban sentiment, and this is their intended outcome. "Heavily suggested" doesn't mean "actually, if you read the full article, they didn't say that", it means they're heavily trying to suggest this.

lurgburgon Delta Variant

Immunocompromised might not be able to get a vaccine because the mechanism for vaccines is the immune system, which tends not be be working so great in the immunocompromised.

lurgburgon Twitch will ban users for 'severe misconduct' that occurs away from its site

Cursory googling:

CHAZ/CHOP: 2 deaths Capital Hill Riot: 5 deaths

lurgburgon Report: Tesla is building a giant 100 MW battery in Texas

Are you just generally writing about green energy, or about the Telsa battery (the subject of this discussion)? As the ancestor comment noted, the battery saved money, and saving money doesn't increase costs.

lurgburgon Beyond Meat signs global supply deals with McDonald’s, KFC and Pizza Hut

A somewhat surprising corollary: if you have methane and you can burn it, it's better to do that than vent it directly.

(Of course, better still to leave it in the ground, if that's where your methane is coming from...)

lurgburgon Nvidia Limits RTX 3060 Hash Rate

Perhaps a simple ban on converting fiat -> to bitcoin would go a long way? It wouldn't be absolute, black markets are a thing, but there are costs to participate in a black market, which costs will rise over time as good old physical cash declines.

lurgburgon Please do not put IP addresses into DNS MX records

> You physically can’t put an IP address into an MX DNS record

Per TFA,

> some mail servers do configure an IP address. Many mail servers are lenient when it comes to this misconfiguration and will deliver mails nevertheless

I.E. people can and do put IP addresses into these things. And any actual example is a complete rebuttal of claims of impossibility.

Standards don't have any cosmic significance. If people use a thing in a manner, then it's also that thing.

lurgburgon YouTube bans Stefan Molyneux, David Duke, Richard Spencer for hate speech

This policy ("send a picture of your black skin") sounds like what they found they needed to do prevent black voices from being drowned out on a site so overwhelming white as reddit. If they'd found white people were capable of recognising that maybe bpt wasn't about them I doubt they'd need that policy.

lurgburgon Australia fires: Misleading maps and pictures go viral

My argument was narrow: to counter "seems to be a new thing". The argument of "the scale of these fires is unusual, but if there is an unusual cause, it's an unusual amount of arson, not unusual climate conditions".

If a single act of Arson was the only fire started then it still wouldn't make sense to attribute the fires to arson alone, because arson can start a fire but for it to grow it needs dry fuel. Which is created by drought. Which is linked to climate change.

And of course arson trails behind legal and illegal burning off and lightning as starter of fires anyway [1].

I mean like sure if we were able to somehow eliminate arson and burning off we would probably have less bushfires.

That doesn't change that the scale of these fires is straightforwardly linked to climate change. Fixating on these miscellaneous factors distracts from the broader, more critical issue.

[1] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ENuS0AHUwAERccK?format=png&name=... (from https://www.parliament.nsw.gov.au/lcdocs/other/12533/Answers...)

lurgburgon Better protecting kids’ privacy on YouTube

I guessing that judging and shaming a corporation's contribution to "poorly behaved offspring" is right out though

lurgburgon Australia fires: Misleading maps and pictures go viral

https://www.crimestatistics.vic.gov.au/sites/default/files/e...

lurgburgon Australia fires: Misleading maps and pictures go viral

There is a breakdown of which incidents relate to bushfires yes.

lurgburgon Australia fires: Misleading maps and pictures go viral

> people deliberately starting them seems to be (seems to be a new thing)

No?

https://www.crimestatistics.vic.gov.au/media-centrenews/arso... https://www.crimestatistics.vic.gov.au/crime-statisticshisto... https://www.crimestatistics.vic.gov.au/sites/default/files/e...

Arson is certainly a thing that happens but isn't suddenly drastically increasing for no reason.

What is increasing is the rate at which those acts become extensive bushfires. Which is caused by drought drying out the land (increasing fuel). Which is linked to ... yep, climate change.

lurgburgon Stupid Alexa Trick: Speaking French with a Horrible American Accent

And in the case of Japanese, the extra field seems to be utterly essential, because the same characters in Kanji might be pronounced in radically different ways.

http://www.localizingjapan.com/blog/2011/02/13/sorting-in-ja...

  There are four Japanese women whose names you have to sort: Junko, Atsuko, Kiyoko, and Akiko.
  This does not seem difficult, until they each show you how they write their names in kanji:

      淳子 (Junko)
      淳子 (Atsuko)
      淳子 (Kiyoko)
      淳子 (Akiko)