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mtsr

921 karma · joined July 2, 2015

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mtsr··on Resetting Xbox
Pretty normal margin in some kinds of businesses, like supermarkets. Then again, supermarkets aren’t likely to see all their customers leave at the drop of a hat.
mtsr··on Nobody understands the point of hybrid cars [video]
This is why there have been Prius taxis that were in service for 1 million km.
mtsr··on US SEC preparing to scrap quarterly reporting requirement
Extracting value from the market as they do it and leaving everyone operating at normal time/capital scales with less. Or isn’t that what you meant?
mtsr··on We're no longer attracting top talent: the brain drain killing American science
You are forgetting that tenured researchers often need lots of PhD students to actually do their research. So that ratio of 8 PhDs to a tenured researchers could actually be pretty good.
mtsr··on America's future could hinge on whether AI slightly disappoints
I know it’s not popular to bring politics into things on HN, but… From the outside at least, White House policy sounds like at least as much of a black swan event as COVID.
mtsr··on A German ISP changed their DNS to block my website
I realize very well the problems of following this line of thought. But clearly populism combined with propaganda isn’t working out either in a number of countries. Should we just stop thinking about causes and what could be done about it, because it’s uncomfortable to think about it?
mtsr··on A German ISP changed their DNS to block my website
Some people mainly come to political positions for emotional reasons rather than substantive ones. These people are generally easy to reach for populists and propagandists.

Many of the real problems in society, unfortunately, have no easy solutions and require very substantive evaluation, weighing expert opinions, etc. In the current environment it has become very hard to get a lot of people to even consider these or, if they want, elect someone to do it in their stead.

TLDR: populism + propaganda causes significant dysfunction in democracies, especially ones that aren’t winner-takes-all.

mtsr··on A German ISP changed their DNS to block my website
It’s just not as black-and-white as you say. Propaganda is doing a lot of harm to democracy and freedom in my country and the EU on a daily basis. Should we invest in education (that is generally already reasonably good, IIUC)? Should we leave it to commercial journalism, even the best of which are moving to clickbait headlines? Should we do nothing?
mtsr··on A German ISP changed their DNS to block my website
Interesting point. There’s wide acceptance of commercial censorship, but censorship for the common good (rightfully) feels like a slippery slope. But are they actually so different? Couldn’t the latter be done in a way just as purposeful? Or does it always lead to loss of freedom disproportional to its goals?
mtsr··on A German ISP changed their DNS to block my website
I’m against propaganda that seeks to actively undermine freedom and democracy in my country and the rest of the EU. Is that so strange?
mtsr··on A German ISP changed their DNS to block my website
I would be in favor of limiting these channels, because I agree with you it seems necessary. But it’s also something to be quite careful with, I feel.

I think the current shift in acceptance of blocking social media for children is a start and allows us to consider it’s positive and negative effects.

mtsr··on A German ISP changed their DNS to block my website
Because it’s turning out that too many people are susceptible to (this specific, but also other) propaganda.
mtsr··on A German ISP changed their DNS to block my website
You’re right. I guess I am. I’m pretty happy RT is blocked.
mtsr··on A German ISP changed their DNS to block my website
[flagged]
mtsr··on Lenovo Legion Go S: Windows 11 vs. SteamOS Performance, and General Availability
Anything touching disk, such as reading a bunch of source files is just so much slower on windows right now. From what I hear it improves a little if you actually go through the Linux subsystem, but it just can’t touch native Linux performance.

Just switching OS will seriously improve your DX because of the faster compiles.

mtsr··on Game publishers respond to Stop Killing Games claim it curtails developer choice
Honestly? I think we can do without these predatory practices even at the cost of some games.

And I somehow doubt there’s revenue to make off these single player games being online dependent, because the most probable ways simply wouldn’t fly in Europe due to consumer protections.

Most likely it’s just “anti-piracy” or something like that.

mtsr··on Valve conquered PC gaming – what comes next?
Sure, but it works on all pc platforms and the runtime is pretty light and can be pretty easily circumvented from what I’ve heard.

Of course it will never be as easy as having a single storefront for all your content, but as we can see from the streaming market, that’s not something that will happen either way.

mtsr··on Lieferando.de has captured 5.7% of restaurant related domain names
They don't. They push you down the search results through SEO and link-farming on their giant web empire.
mtsr··on Brian Eno's Theory of Democracy
And there are actually more flavors of democracy that have been used to break this death spiral:

- ostracism, where the people voted to ban a person who was too mighty or dangerous from the city of Athens for a period of 10 years;

- random selection of (some kind of) representatives. This has predictable downsides, but ensures fair representation and prevents the existence of a political class.

mtsr··on Virginia passes law to enforce maximum vehicle speeds for repeat speeders
At 20mph in a well-designed street, there’s still a lot of opportunity for people to keep themselves safe. Not so much with guns.

On badly designed streets and with bad and/or speeding drivers, on the other hand.

And don’t get me started on the dangers of cars with high hoods. We’ve known for years that to keep pedestrians and cyclists safe, they need to go on top of the car, instead of under it.

mtsr··on Harvard's response to federal government letter demanding changes
Also called freedom from consequences. Free speech makes sense in a free society, freedom from consequences does not. Yet that's what they're calling for.
mtsr··on Moving away from US cloud services
And Australian law doesn't quite offer the same protections as GDPR. In fact, being a Five Eyes country, it's effectively the opposite.
mtsr··on Block YouTube ads on AppleTV by decrypting and stripping ads from Profobuf (2022)
I feel this, particularly as a parent. It's difficulty watching your kids get lost in the algorithm. We regularly discuss this with them and they agree with our perceived harm, but it's just too difficult to resist. Heck, even I get lured into (doom)scrolling every now and then.

I've setup ad-filtering using pihole, where possible, but I'd prefer not to block youtube as a whole. But I'm definitely considering that in the future, to protect my family.

mtsr··on Denmark will plant 1B trees and convert 10% of farmland into forest
Denmark has a population of 5.8 million and currently produces enough to feed 15 million. There’s no need for imports because of 15% less farmland. Besides, all this export only contributes about 1% of GDP. So it’s not economically important either.

One can even argue that the reduction in environmental and climate impact will create room for other industries that already are carbon-taxed.

mtsr··on Trivial REST server in various languages to compare
> also of note is to notice how many languages lack good support in standard library and therefore require much more code to be needed.

That’s fine for web oriented languages. But I sure hope others aren’t including a complete HTTP stack in the standard library.

mtsr··on OutRun: Open-source, privacy oriented, outdoor fitness tracker
Or feature complete?
mtsr··on The upstream cause of the youth mental health crisis is the loss of community
During the early days of the “sharing economy” trend, there was actually plenty focus on connecting people.

But at some point you need money to pay people working on these things. So you look at something that doesn’t replace the core social connection, but augments the experience. Like selling additional services such as insurance.

But it’s not easy to cover costs, especially in western countries where employees are expensive.

These days (I haven’t been part of it for a long time) I’ve noticed there are also subscriptions to be part some community, which works but of course also makes it harder to grow.

And investors who are looking for return on investment are also difficult in something that’s so sensitive to good will from users.

mtsr··on Recovery after HP tech support bricked my father's laptop
It’s a shame, their small form-factor business notebooks were once really good. Swappable batteries, worked well with Linux (apart from the touchpad drivers that were just bad for all brands back then).
mtsr··on My new PSU burns out – I fix it, and torture it by cracking water
Sunlight puts in a serious amount of energy. Roughly 1000 W/m2 at sea level as a global average according to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_irradiance
mtsr··on Show HN: Peanut Butter Spinner
You can get both kinds here, but the emulsified kind is more common. This has been slowly changing with additive-free food popularity and therefor 100% peanut-butter.
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