mysterypie

> retirement in 1986

He retired in 1996.

Are there any long-term effects on hearing or health caused by listening to white noise while sleeping? Or from the hum of an air conditioner, humidifier, or dehumidifier?

I never heard of that. Could you talk more about how that works, what's it's officially called, and what the intended use is?

Would it literally delete the SMS as you're looking at it? On any kind of cellphone?

> there is a "private review" portion

What can a host do about low ceilings for example? It's something that matters greatly to tall people or people that feel claustrophobic. But this is the kind of thing that practically no one will mention in a public review and it might not be discerned from the photos. It's not about humilating anybody. It's candidly stating the positives and negatives so you can make better choices.

The problem with the Airbnb review system is that very few people are willing to leave a candid review because (1) it seems like bad manners when renting from an individual (as opposed to a large corporation like Hilton), (2) future Airbnb hosts can see your reviews and they might decide that you're a troublemaker and not want to rent to you, (3) the host might leave a response to your review that makes you look petty, or demanding, or exaggerating, or just silly.

So what you get is a hundred 5-star reviews where "everything was lovely" and one 5-star review that sheepishly says that "everything was lovely though it was a little noisy at night but I brought my earplugs so it was no problem after all".

But as an upside, I think it's much harder to game or manipulate Airbnb reviews than Amazon reviews. It's just that hardly anyone will list all the negatives; every property has some negatives even if you loved your stay. Many negatives won't even matter to other renters: some might care about low ceilings, cluttered cabinets, low water pressure, or too few electrical outlets. Others couldn't care less. But at least you could make selections based on things that would matter to you.

I don't know what solution to propose. Maybe if Airbnb had unannounced professional reviewers stay a night at every property and do very comprehensive critiques? (I know, this would be costly.)

When these fake name/number sites first appeared about 5-8 years ago, they didn't have any ads or even outgoing links. (I looked without an ad blocker.) Ads might be the explanation for many of them today, but I don't think it's the original or sole reason. Though I suppose it may have begun as a proof of concept without ads to gauge the traffic, then ads got added years later.

I've read speculation that they were started by telephone spammers to poison the utility of those who-called-me websites that highlighted spammers' phone numbers. I don't think that's the real reason either. It sounds too cute and clever for spammers. (As an aside: nowadays those services are useless since spammers can so easily fake the caller-ID.)

I'm still thinking that there is an interesting story for the original purpose.

Does anyone know the purpose served by those reverse phone number search sites that list hundreds of thousands of fake names and fake addresses?

> I peel the >2yr off and shred it

Oh how I wish I had the courage to shred paperwork older than 2 years. Here are a few true examples where I'm glad I didn't shred too early:

- lifetime warranty claim on an appliance required the original receipt from 12 years ago

- needed to verify details on a lawyer's bill that arrived 4 years after the service was done

- parents' tax return from 30(!) years ago that had critical info about a capital gains issue

And let's not forget that tax records might be needed up to 3 years after filing in case of an audit (and some sources say 7 years).

I keep hearing that there have been significant breakthroughs in the areas of AI / ML / LLM / Transformer Models between 2012 and present. Can summarize what the breakthroughs were, who was principally responsible, and which papers specifically?

This timeline has something like 60 papers and many papers have 8-30 authors. Are the breakthroughs spread out like that? Or are there one or two super important works? Sort of like Einstein's "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies"?

> we had to store 11 million copies on disc

The reason you were allowed to store 11 million copies is because the U.S. Supreme Court ruled[1] in 1984 that you were permitted to make copies of TV shows to watch later on your VCR. And this was reputedly because some of the supreme court judges had VCRs — which had been spreading lightning fast at the time — and understood the concept and wanted to find or create a legal argument to permit such copying.

Just imagine if VCR adoption had been slower, and that the judges had not yet tried out that newfangled invention for home recording, and they had ruled that personal copies weren't allowed. Then today, you'd have been making 11 million illegal copies. It's amusing to think about whether making a single copy available to 11 million users would have been much less legal risk in that scenario.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Unive....

> Intense public scrutiny on Zantac started in 2019, when an online pharmacy found high levels of a likely carcinogen in the drug and its generics.

And the linked article says:

> Valisure discovered the link of Zantac and its generics to the carcinogen NDMA during its routine testing of every batch of every medication, and first notified the FDA of its initial findings in June of 2019. On September 13th, Valisure filed a detailed petition with the Food and Drug Administration asking the agency to recall all products containing ranitidine.

How in the world is it profitable for an online pharmacy to do this? It's great, but honestly who would pay extra to an online pharmacy to do this testing? Would most people even believe an online pharmacy that said that they did such testing? I'd love to know how they survive.

> One way you might design a CPU is to have the CPU do all of the work for one instruction, then move on to the next instruction, do all of the work for the next instruction, and so on.

If a modern CPU did no branch prediction, how much slower would it be? Just curious to know a ballpark figure, like 5x slower or 100x slower?

> make hundreds per day, which is definitely not true

I'm surprised by that stat, but how do you know it's not true?

> what percentage of my life is already gone by

It's even worse when you consider your perception[1] of how much of your life has gone by. At age 20, you perceive that 50% of your life has gone by. That is, you feel like time passes equally slowly (or equally fast) between 0-20 as between 20-75. At age 40, you perceive that 75% of your life has been lived.

[1] I don't recall the source, but it was a psychology or neurology article. I don't claim that the study is flawless, but it does feel to me like there is merit to the argument that a decade in your youth seems like a long time but a decade as an adult passes quickly.

> prior generations emphasized savings and prudence

Even though I'm a native English speaker, I discovered right now that I didn't know what prudence meant. I knew the word prude so I naturally assumed that prudence meant being concerned with morality and sexual behavior.

It turns out that the words are unrelated. Prudence means the ability to govern and discipline oneself by the use of reason. So unlike prude, prudence is actually a positive trait.

Though I'll add that "in modern English, the word prudence has become increasingly synonymous with cautiousness; in this sense, prudence names a reluctance to take risks." (Wikipedia)

Let me add back the newline that seems to have been removed:

  As you are, so I once was
  As I am, so you will be

> Since it was likely on autopilot

Why do you think that's likely? Because it was a long flight (to wherever it crashed), and pilots tend to use autopilot on long flights? Or is there some other reason?

Would the pilot be able to breathe at the altitude he was flying at? I presume he wouldn't have enough emergency oxygen for the entire time it takes to get to the presumed crash area.

Given the debris that has washed up on various coastlines, would you assume it was a soft landing or hard crash?

What's your take on theory that the plane had a fire and the pilot maneuvered the plane to a high altitude to snuff out the fire, then away from populated areas, then he himself passed away and the plane drifted on its deep ocean course until it crashed?

In same vein some e-commerce sites and payment processors secretly distrust commercial email services and don't tell you that they've blacklisted your email provider.

You go to make a car or flight reservation, enter all kinds of info including your credit card, and then bam, it says "Oops, something went wrong, try again later". Or an e-commerce site asks you to enter your email and they'll send you a confirmation code, but the confirmation email never comes.

I've determined by experiment--using a different IP but a Gmail email address--that a frequent cause is a secret bias against commercial email services. It's particularly infuriating because I think a commercial email user with a paid account is a much lower fraud risk than a free Gmail user.

> long suspected that google would rank sites with Adsense higher than a website without

Google says that they don't do that. I don't believe Google based on personal experience and it's interesting to see that you had some experimental confirmation.

The earliest Apple camera that I'm aware of was the external iSight webcam which had both an LED to tell you when it was on and an iris that physically blocked the lens by twisting the camera head:

https://images.techhive.com/images/article/2015/12/isight-02...

That was good privacy-first design.

> Benjamin Franklin was bemoaning the plight of his fellow Philadelphians: “Wood, our common Fewel, which within these 100 Years might be had at every Man’s Door, must now be fetch’d near 100 Miles to some towns, and makes a very considerable Article in the Expence of Families,” he wrote.

Unrelated to the main topic, but why does old English writing often have seemingly arbitrary capitalization of words -- like Years, Miles, Fewel (Fuel), Article, Expence, and Families? Ben Franklin was a newspaper editor and printer so I assume he knows what he's doing, but what's the rhyme or reason for it?

Wow, I like the data format specification you devised. Especially that you insist on "no optional features or extensions" -- something that makes other standards so difficult to rely on.

Is there anyone using it? It's always great to have extra ammunition to make a strong case that we should use this instead of, say, XML.

Comparing today to the early 1980s makes today's situation look even weirder.

Today:

- short-term savings account rate is ~1%

- long-term mortgage rate is ~6%

- the ratio is 1:6

Early 1980s:

- short-term savings account rate was ~8%

- mortgage rate was ~16%

- the ratio was 1:2

What was different in the early '80s when mortgage rates were sky high, but savings account rates seemed to keep pace?

I don't think I'd make that security tradeoff. From best to worst, I'd rank the options is this order:

(1) signed open source

(2) unsigned open source

(3) signed proprietary

(4) unsigned proprietary

In some cases I might rank #3 as the worst option if it prevents me from editing the firmware binary (to fix a security bug myself or to remove tracking info like a serial number), reverse engineering the firmware to verify it (because signed code is often encrypted as well), or installing alternate firmware that might be more secure.

You can choose between American Megatrends and coreboot. They have a FAQ with the pros and cons[1]. But I have a hard time seeing why anyone would choose the proprietary American Megatrends firmware, especially since the laptop is targeted towards Linux users. Are they offering the choice for their older customers who are used to the American Megatrends UI? Or maybe to not anger the supplier (American Megatrends) that they've been working with for years?

[1] https://support.starlabs.systems/kb/faqs/ami-aptio-v-vs-core...

> not necessarily meant to replace exercise

I'm hoping someone can answer a question to which I've never heard a really satisfactory answer: Why does human health benefit from exercise whereas any kind of simple machine wears out with exercise? For example, doing a hundred stretches per day improves my health whereas stretching an elastic band 100 times per day will cause it to lose elasticity and soon destroy it. So what's the low-level mechanism by which exercise improves health in people but not in simple machines?

I was wondering why the star has 6 crisp points and found an explanation here (a 3 minute video):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVAKFJ8VVp4

The most interesting part of the video explains why even your naked eye viewing the sky at night will cause this effect -- it's due to imperfections in the lens of your eye.

Security question: Is a web extension safe if it is installed but if you're not using it at the moment? For example, if I were logged into my bank's website and I did not click the SingleFile button in the extension toolbar, could it still theoretically collect info from my bank's webpage or do other actions?

I'd like to use SingleFile and have no reason at all to distrust it, but I'd like to understand the security impact of installing lots of web extensions. How do people handle security risks like that? Do you run a separate vanilla browser with no extensions for sensitive tasks?

What a great headline: only 8 words, explains the article perfectly, proper English, but playful. It must require a special talent because I absolutely could not have come up with those 8 words.

Nostalgia aside, there is one item that is at risk of disappearing within a decade or two for which society will be much worse off: that is cash. I mean physical money that is accepted by almost everybody, available to everybody, anonymous, and not tied to some corporation like every other payment system. Cash disappearing would be like freedom of speech disappearing. Many people would not notice but I think society would lose a lot of liberty.

Well, I suppose cryptocurrencies in theory could replace the role of cash but they are immensely far away from being "accepted by almost everybody".