morley

Is there any research into causing flat surfaces to simulate a bump while still remaining flat? I think I've read about interfaces that can raise or lower some parts for buttons, but it would be a lot more convenient to have a glass display where you can "feel" the outline of a button electro-chemically without it actually being there.

Ological is his personal site!

The article has every right to be this good: the writer is John Teti, who used to be editor in chief of the AV Club (and hosted its short-lived tv show). If you've never read his football column Block and Tackle, it's great: and I haven't followed football since the mid-90s! https://www.avclub.com/tv/sports

It's easy enough to start with an uncooked chicken, or better yet, wings for the high collagen content. When you start with a rotisserie chicken, you've a lost a lot of the chicken's flavor to the roaster's drip pan.

I think you're anchoring to the idea that Apple produces Veblen goods, and trying to work backwards from there.

The more straightforward explanation is that Apple just wants to make it easy to buy on credit.

I disagree that Apple products are Veblen goods in the same way that, say, Prada products are.

I rely on SeafoodWatch.org to advise on fish sustainability, and it doesn't look good for sardines: https://www.seafoodwatch.org/recommendations/search?query=%3...

I wish there were more literature about film directors as managers, as opposed to visionaries. A lot of film workers talk about their favorite directors as "knowing exactly what they want" or "having a clear vision," but it's harder to know how they get what they want, or how they express their vision, or how they navigate situations where their vision is wrong or conflicts with someone else's. Or simply how they do that at 4am at the end of a 14-hour work day. I like the stories about how Tarantino will make everyone say "because we love making movies" as a rallying cry. I wish there were more stories like that.

I like his observation about unsupervised tinkering with dangerous chemicals as a childhood gateway into the sciences, but I don't know what to do with it. How do you _effectively_ convince your community that the gain in scientific curiosity is worth the small potential for disaster?

The think that stucks out to me about trying idea after idea is how many of them are abject failures. If you get a run of bad beats, it can seem like you're just headed in the wrong direction, even if on average you'd make winning ideas. Having the fortitude to make a bunch of smart bets AND to not be results-oriented if they don't break your way is such a strong, difficult-to-identify skill.

Are we looking at the same map? When I click on a station, I see a list of trains with their ETA, in minutes, next to them.

This is addressed in the article: federal programs promoting infrastructure growth provided the funds. Building new infrastructure generates lots of short-term income to a city in the form of sales tax, permit fees, etc. It's harder to plan for the ongoing maintenance for these projects.

Of course we should build less of it, but we can't unbuild what's already been built, and we can't account for city managers who aren't aware of this future problem.

If someone can solve the problem of the future being here, but being unevenly distributed...

I think tech is other people. Tech doesn't suck because technology is bad: it sucks because life is complicated, and other people are prone to mistakes, or prioritizes that don't align with yours, or have limited attention.

Case in point: I don't particularly like the design of this site, as I find it difficult to look at (even if I abstractly can see how the color choice is bold). The night mode toggle seems even harder to read; an uncharitable interpretation is the author thumbing their nose at people who want night mode. A charitable read is that it's a funny joke.

The author / designer of the blog has different priorities than I do. An uncharitable way of putting this is that the blog design is "bad," but I really dislike that outlook. I'd much rather that people look at things charitably, and try to understand what other people are going for, and be willing to say "this isn't for me." I think the article doesn't quite do this.

The divorce rate was going up long before online dating, and have actually been going down since the onset of online dating. Though I'm skeptical they're directly related.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/06/23/144-y...

Your point is addressed earlier in the article:

It's not about banning new words, killing off long words or promoting completely perfect grammar. Nor is it about letting grammar slip.

A good complement to this article is Orwell's "Politics and the English Language," which talks about how people might use long, complex words (like those in the Words to Avoid list) to seem more important. That's the other side of the "variety" coin. The reality is that a skilled writer can walk that fine line, but most people are better off keeping their word choice simple and direct.

Is it that odd? Some countries force you to partner with a local firm to enter their market. A great many use import taxes to give their home businesses a leg up in the industry. It's not fair, but it's not odd either.

Stratechery offers an RSS feed for subscribers; I subscribe to both because I normally feel the way you do, but I find I read the email more.

I'm not sure I understand your reference to Andrew Yang. Every presidential candidate I've seen in the late 20th and 21st century has gone overboard in showing their American-ness. What makes Andrew Yang stand out?

There's the old saying that if you know nothing about it, the Civil War was about slavery; if you know a little about it, it was about state's rights; and if you know a lot about it, it was about slavery.

The "states rights" trope was a deliberate attempt of a few Southern, revisionist historians to blunt their racist past. The truth is that the South seceded because their states wanted the right to hold slaves.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Cause_of_the_Confederacy

> Govt. SF health + planning made our lives hell. They didn't like our innovations.

What innovations did they make that the health department didn't like?

It seems so bizarre that so much flour is being consumed now. Are people hoarding it, or would this demand otherwise have been met from restaurants?

For me, the Foursquare of today is a more accurate, more up-to-date Yelp. I find it more useful now than when it was first released as a check-in app. Not all pivots are net negatives.

I'm a little confused. Maybe I'm interpreting this news or other commenter reactions incorrectly? They seem to be saying that the price of gold is on the rise, but the price of the gold ETF has gone DOWN in the last few days:

https://spdrgoldshares.com/#home

And the futures markets are down too:

https://www.investing.com/commodities/gold

Are other commenters only speculating that the price is going to go way up, and that the price is a good deal right now? If so, that doesn't seem to be supported by financial indicators, and the speculation around it doesn't seem much better than, say, saying that Bitcoin is going to go up in any given environment. I'm surprised to see this discussion on HN. I hope I'm grokking things wrong.

It's ironic that this publication is ostensibly anti-censorship. One of the few things I know about this subreddit is how quick they were to delete posts and ban commenters that didn't fit in with their worldview.

This is directly addressed in the article: it estimates 66% right thumb, 33% left thumb use, and app screenshots are shown with left- and right-handed "reachability" heat maps.

I've heard the word "heuristics" more recently, but I think I learned (and later forgot) both terms when I was a kid.

One interesting thing about heuristics is that it's important to learn when they _don't_ apply. If a heuristic is true 80% of the time, it's also untrue 20% of the time.

And the obverse to that thought is that you shouldn't let that 20% fail rate discourage you from using the heuristic the other 80% of times.

> From what I see many techies are now aware and upset, and hardly anyone seems to want to defend Google anymore.

To me, the explanation is simpler: people don't want to defend Google on HN because they'll get downvoted or shouted down because of it.

To answer your first question: the benefit of derivatives, of which CDOs are a type, are that they theoretically allow people to _reduce_ risk.

The classic example is a put option. If you think a stock will go down in a future, you could short that stock; but if instead the stock goes _up_, you could be on the hook for an infinite amount of money. Instead, you can buy a put option and get a similar payout if the stock goes down, but if it goes up, you've only lost the money you spent on the option.

Another example is purchasing futures: if you're an airline and you think fuel prices are going to go up, you can buy up a messload of fuel futures, and you'll effectively pay the same price for fuel while everyone else is paying more (which I think JetBlue did in the 00s).

In this case, a CDO theoretically reduces risk by spreading your risk across a huge number of mortgage holders. If you sell someone one mortgage and they default, then whoops! You just lost a ton of money. But if you instead sell 100 different mortgages, you're "diversifying" your risk. Most people don't have billions of dollars to sell thousands of mortgages to make this sort of investment, so CDOs package the mortgages into purchaseable portions.

(Of course, what happened during the housing crisis was that there was a huge, systemic issue that would cause huge swatches of mortgages to default. That part sucked, and the contributors to that catastrophe definitely deserve the ire on them.)

[Disclaimer: I'm relying on my memory of finance classes I took 15 years ago, I'm probably wrong about some details.]

Your comment illustrates what I found so frustrating about The Big Short, and people who cite it whenever CDOs are brought up: the filmmakers made no effort in understanding the theory behind CDOs, nor did they attempt to explain the potential benefits.

Now... it's possible that the way human nature works, CDOs will always result in companies engage in collective delusion that results in a similar meltdown. I think The Big Short would have been more interesting if it made that argument, rather than merely "CDOs are evil."

EDIT: I was reacting to the movie adaptation; I haven't read Michael Lewis's book.

Anyone care to make an educated guess how much this thing costs? Is an 8'x10' display going to be six figures, or seven?

Another tangential question I've been struggling with is: is there a human limit to a power density we'll tolerate? Any sufficiently powerful battery is a defect or bad actor away from becoming a weapon. We already see defects in lithium batteries shaping airline policy, and the devices we're talking about are peanuts if we want to enable all our sci-fi dreams.