Hacker News Reader

moocowduckquackon America’s labour market has suffered permanent harm

Not only is it horrible, but it is also mean, wrong and stupid. Well done, you nearly have the full set.

moocowduckquackon Is the shared economy racist?

Was the place run by Uncle Ruckus?

moocowduckquackon NASA Evidence Reveals Possible Water on Mars

We have detected a lot of ice, but we haven't confirmed flowing liquid water yet, and while water can be used to mean the chemical in any phase, it is more commonly used to mean the liquid phase of H2O.

moocowduckquackon NASA Evidence Reveals Possible Water on Mars

To be fair, we know there is sometimes liquid water on mars, at least it is incredibly unlikely that there would be none at all, comets crash into it occaisionally, for instance.

Evidence of liquid water regularly occuring near the surface is very exciting though. This isn't cool because they might find H2O, we know that there is H2O, this is cool because having liquid water near the surface increases the chance of finding life.

moocowduckquackon Facebook Fraud [video]

So given that, to see significant ROI you need to find genuine experts in how to use each form of media.

So, even if it is technically possible to do well in a given media, if it is really hard to identify who is a genuine expert in that media due to it being new and full of snake-oil merchants, then you are likely to do better in a more established field.

moocowduckquackon Facebook Fraud [video]

google display network advertising is equally useless/fraudulent

It is very good at giving me pictures of the more expensive things that I have recently bought, should I suddenly need two.

moocowduckquackon Empiricism Is Not a Matter of Faith (2008) [pdf]

Depends if you take absolute or probablistic logic to be the more fundamental. Absolute logic has held sway for a very long time, because it is obvious that either something is there, or it is not. Since the birth of quantum mechanics however, it is looking as though probability might be a little more fundamental to reality itself than we had previously assumed. Look at the classic "Cogito ergo sum". With an absolute perspective on logic, you cannot get much further, however if looked at probalistically, you can start looking at options and start assigning them weights. Now this doesn't get you any closer to the concept of what is absolutely true beyond the initial statement, however I am not sure that it is a given that reality itself is absolute for all parameters, so the trap might be that many of what we percieve as flaws in induction are actually meaningless questions until they are reformulated probabalistically.

Alternatively I might be talking bollocks, I did first think of this while pretty drunk.

moocowduckquackon Empiricism Is Not a Matter of Faith (2008) [pdf]

Given there are experiments run to explicitly check for stuff like that (http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10619127.2010.506...), I think you are possibly wrong.

I'd put it as "All empiricists have faith that there is not much point in being an empiricist if there is a comedy god fiddling the numbers on purpose, purely to screw with the notion of empiricism, so therefore they cheerfully discount that notion as otherwise they wouldn't get much done."

moocowduckquackon An open letter to Dong Nguyen, creator of Flappy Bird

An open letter comparing him to Dave Chapelle is probably not a good plan, given his statement:

Press people are overrating the success of my games. It is something I never want. Please give me peace.

moocowduckquackon World’s First Carbon Fiber 3D Printer Announced

I suspect it might if you doped the graphite oxide with something to muck up the sheets a little and allow vertical bonds, perhaps a bit of boron.

moocowduckquackon China’s Huge 3D Printers, Soon Able to Print Automobile-Sized Metal Objects

swarf

moocowduckquackon China’s Huge 3D Printers, Soon Able to Print Automobile-Sized Metal Objects

You keep a stock of base materials and things like chips that you can't fabricate onsite.

Is the same as keeping stock for a normal shop, you keep track of what is being used and order more when it gets low.

moocowduckquackon China’s Huge 3D Printers, Soon Able to Print Automobile-Sized Metal Objects

I have seen what people are developing. Besides, cars do not need to have micro electronics.

http://reprap.org/wiki/MetalicaRap

http://medtechinsider.com/archives/24967

http://www.nthdegreetech.com/printed-semiconductors.php

That said, there will always be some things for which economies of scale win out against customisation, and I suspect that many electronics components are in that bracket. Luckily we have things like FPGAs, so you don't need to keep a huge stock of specialised chips to make a wide variety of devices.

moocowduckquackon China’s Huge 3D Printers, Soon Able to Print Automobile-Sized Metal Objects

NASA have put a 3d printed exhaust port on a rocket engine and test fired it successfully. - http://www.nasa.gov/exploration/systems/sls/j2x/3d_print.htm...

Besides, as long as you know what you are doing it is just another material to select from and you just calculate critical dimensions based on measured properties.

moocowduckquackon China’s Huge 3D Printers, Soon Able to Print Automobile-Sized Metal Objects

I thought about this a couple of years back and as far as I can make out, we are approaching the situation where you could just about fit a digitised general engineering factory and materials store into a high street shop unit. At that point you could robotically fabricate a car to order and just drive it out the front onto the street when it is finished.

moocowduckquackon Google refuses to pay French privacy fine in a battle of company versus country

So they are perfectly happy to admit liability and pay up, as long as they aren't forced to publicise that admission to the people that the court case itself was on behalf of.

moocowduckquackon FBI Checks Wrong Box, Places Student on No-Fly List

Sometimes shuffle will play two consecutive songs from the same album consecutively

only if it is coded badly

moocowduckquackon Mt.Gox Withdrawals

It's a good rule of thumb to assume incompetence instead of malice.

I would generally agree, but the calculus changes slightly for banking.

moocowduckquackon Is Math a Young Man's Game? (2003)

it's VERY VERY hard to believe that there's some sort of international century long conspiracy of white men that get's together and represses women in every industry, career,country,time frame and scientific field EVER.

Looking about there are many and varied ones and they seem to have been going a lot longer than that, not all of them are run by light skinned folk though.

Quite often their leaders wear elaborate hats, you must have seen them on the telly. Is not all they do, but it does seem to be a theme.

You must have seen them, they have loads of pointy buildings everywhere, with slightly different styles to show which team they are on.

And each team has a book. You know.

moocowduckquackon New Evidence: There is No Science-Education Crisis

Depends, if a skill gap develops, you can then have a corresponding drop in productivity which can depress wages.

moocowduckquackon After Tyrone Hayes said that a chemical was harmful, its maker pursued him

In EU it was banned not because of toxicity, but because it degrades slowly in ground waters.

You are making little sense. It they were not worried about toxicity, then they would not care how long it takes to degrade.

moocowduckquackon After Tyrone Hayes said that a chemical was harmful, its maker pursued him

I tend to lean the other way, I hate the trend for shorter articles.

Usually, there isn't enough room in a short article, unless it is about something really simple and minor, to actually look at something properly, so you just end up with a woolly impression of the subject, that has often been rendered totally inaccurate by the requirements of brevity.

moocowduckquackon Is Math a Young Man's Game? (2003)

I haven't said much here, barring taking the piss out of the magic man (he's crap at magic) and posting about Freeman Dyson doing his thing with the prisoners dilemma. There are always many perspectives you can take, to insist on binary debates is just forcing false choices. Calling me a cunt won't really change that.

As for why I asked you to stop being a tosser in the first place, I asked a question and immediately had you telling me what I supposedly think. That said, I really shouldn't have bothered asking you to stop, as to do that does seem to be something that is far wide of your abilities, given the evidence available here.

moocowduckquackon Is Math a Young Man's Game? (2003)

No, that wasn't it at all. You obviously aren't a very good magician.

moocowduckquackon Turn It Off: NSA's Achilles' Heel

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moocowduckquackon Turn It Off: NSA's Achilles' Heel

Continuously broadcast "The Archers" on all available frequencies.