mbateman

Yes, divorce demography is complicated!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divorce_demography

But I was just being illustrative; my point applies even if it's 20% or 80%.

Yes, this is like telling a newlywed that s/he has a 50% chance to eventually get divorced. True for the population, irrelevant for the individual. When one has a more direct knowledge of the relevant factors, it's crazy to make a decision based solely on into what demographics one falls.

I don't see any statistics in the document you cited that are directly relevant to "the idea that people disable their smoke detectors permanently over nuisance alarms", in one way or another.

Indirectly (on p. 8 of the first document), it looks like 8% of fatal residential fires had smoke alarms that definitively "failed to operate". A much higher percentage are ambiguous, with it being unclear if the alarm operated or if there even was one in the first place. That is certainly compatible with the notion that people disable their smoke detectors because of the nuisance.

> We turned to KnowEm.com, a website I often rely on to search for usernames, even though the site is primarily intended as a brand registration service. We certainly had a front-runner for her name, but we would have chosen something different if the KnowEm results produced limited availability or if we found negative content associated with our selection.

> With her name decided, we spent several hours registering her URL and a vast array of social media sites. All of that tied back to a single email account, which would act as a primary access key. We listed my permanent email address as a secondary -- just as you'd fill out financial paperwork for a minor at a bank. We built a password management system for her to store all of her login information.

> On the day of her birth, our daughter already had accounts at Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and even Github. And to this day, we’ve never posted any content.

While I can definitely understand the sentiment and have thought about doing similar things, seeing it all laid out like this seems very strange.

1) Is your twitter/gmail username really that important? Is this sort of personal pre-SEO really that much of an issue? And if it is, won't that just put enormous pressure on new services every generation as people want the slate (username and searchability) wiped clean for themselves?

2) Shouldn't setting all of this up be something your kid eventually does (or that you help them do)? Isn't the presumption that your kid wants a Facebook and Github account a pretty specific one?

Overdraft fees are absurd, but so is complaining about them. Just go to your bank and ask them to disable overdraft. If you don't have the money and overdraft is disabled, the transaction will simply be declined. If you want to spend money you don't have yet, you can do it the normal way, by borrowing.

(Also, flagging the article.)

Those tests get false positives all the time. I failed an explosives test once in Denver. The TSA agent guessed correctly that I had been rock climbing. Apparently this happens a lot, no idea why. They let me go after 5 seconds of chatting.

Estate design in the colonial and antebellum Southeast, where malaria was a huge problem until the 20th century, was arguably designed to maximize breezes and drafts: be on hilltops, surrounded by mostly open lawns without much shade, with tall, open windows.

This whole thing is such a farce. Ecuador doesn't care about human rights, and the US doesn't care that its enemies know that it's spying on them. It's diplomacy in the service of directing embarrassment.

What exactly is it supposed to mean that the NSA intercepts only data with one "foreign end"? That it intercepts all data that crosses e.g. a transatlantic cable? Or that it scans the IP header of absolutely everything and grabs anything with a non-US IP as either source or destination? Or something else?

Ecuador has an very poor human rights record. One of my colleagues is a former Ecuadorian journalist who was blacklisted for criticizing the government and had to flee the country. Strange choice for Snowden, given that.

Didn't Nixon get pardoned before he was tried?

The paper: http://www.andrewoswald.com/docs/finalmayHomeOwnershipUnemBl...

Burnout is accompanied by a drop in ambition. But not all drops in ambition indicate burnout.

Strongly agree. Equally tenuous is the converse idea: that if we did detect some features of the physical world that were also apparent in a simulated lattice, that the best explanation for this is that we exist in a simulation.

How is this the top voted comment?

Anyway, working on software that takes abstract input to a camera as an interface is awesome, no matter what particular bits of functionality they start off with.

I have to ask, what was the song? Can we have a link?

I don't really know or care about the relevance of these results, and I don't know why it's at all relevant to Hacker News, but damn, Google consumer surveys look really nice.

You may have to parse HTML email, but you don't have to send it.

Well, I upvoted you. People who criticize the obviously beneficial actions of others on the grounds that they can't be classified as their favored form of (purportedly) good deed are... well, I'll stop there to keep things civil. You see this kind of nonsense all the time, even on HN.

Yep. Reading the article I was a little put off by how banal the hypothesis really is. Inflammation, including neuroinflammation, is involved in many pathologies. Whether it is a cause or a symptom is unclear, partially because it is unclear what is going on in neurons exposed to stressors that causes their dendrites to recede. If inflammation is the main cause and best treatment vector for autism, autism is in the same boat as Alzheimer's and other difficult-to-treat inflammation-related neurological conditions.

I'm certainly not trying to imply any policy prescriptions. I'm strongly in favor of nuclear power. But if there's risk we should know what it is so it can be distributed/compensated for.

I'm not saying it's not worth the cost (or even trying to discuss things in those terms), but I'm not convinced this outcome is insignificant. If this article is right, many of these people will die N years sooner than they would have otherwise. How high does N have to be before it gets worth discussing?

Maybe I was being ridiculously optimistic, but ~200 projected additional cases of cancer seems pretty bad.

ATMs don't scan a deposited check or cash. They wait for someone in the bank to open it and determine whether it is legit, then the account is credited. But after a while your account becomes "trustworthy" and any deposits are credited to the account before it is checked.

You would have demonstrated that moral authority is on the side of the student who was wronged. It doesn't matter whether or not they change their policy, what matters is that you went along with excluding a student for no reason.

EDIT: Sorry, this came off a bit too personally. I'm a teacher too and I got angry when I read this story. I'll just say more generically that it is easily possible (and justifiable) for a student to feel alienated after a situation like this, especially if they feel like their educator didn't stand up for them. Whether or not "standing up for them" involves canceling the entire trip is a contextual issue, and I really don't know if it would have been a good idea in this case.

If you bought one of the updated models from June 2012, don't forget you can get the upgrade for free: http://www.apple.com/osx/uptodate/

Yeah, I was. Since I'm getting quite a few down votes I'll just add that I felt the sarcasm was warranted because I don't understand why this question even needs to be asked. What would ever make someone think that they had some sort of ethical obligation to start some project just because their employer asked them to? And even if the thought did occur to you, the implications are obviously absurd.

Of course it is unethical. Regardless of anything your contract might state and regardless of your other options, if your employer needs you, you are bound by duty to stay. You have an ethical obligation to make things as easy as possible for your colleagues, no matter what hardships or long-term commitments this requires that you take on. Having collaborated on a project with others gives the collaboraters an unlimited moral claim on your future time and energy.

Is this really that big a deal? Not all administrative details should be a matter of public debate. I hope this thread gets killed too.

I do remember MS of the mid 90s and it's aura of invincibility, but in retrospect it sure looks like that aura was illusory (or highly temporary, which is really the same thing). Even apart from the antitrust suits it seems clear in hindsight, partly due to the examples that you mention, that the market was widening beyond MS's reach.

A more positive way to see this is that Apple has become so profitable that they can continue funneling huge amounts of cash into everything that they want, and still have lots left over.

But I agree with your sentiment. It's a bit sad that Apple seems to have maxed out their ability to use money on themselves.