p51-remorse

I kind of get why we don’t like this in email, but for SMS and Slack I’ve thoroughly enjoyed reactions. They’re a way to say “I received this and have a positive reaction to it, with no further communication necessary”.

Replaces a lot of useless typing I had to do to sound polite when saying “fine, no further comment”. And then getting a notification from the other party acknowledging my acknowledgment… yuck.

For three months? Maybe not. Getting right of way to run power lines is no joke.

Premise challenge: I’ve plugged my EV charger in… three times, maybe? The high cycle part is the connection to the car. The connection to the outlet stays plugged in for literally years at a time.

Probably some people have abnormal use patterns that have them moving a 220v charger around all the time, but I’d bet it’s highly unusual amongst EV owners who charge at home regularly.

I can’t believe WIRED is more or less romanticizing this story. This woman:

1. Came here illegally.

2. Committed mass, mechanized identity theft.

3. Put many rideshare users in danger.

4. Had a sham marriage

… and then was surprised that anyone cared!

It sure feels like our systems are _not_ hardened enough to deal with people from cultures like this. Big https://xkcd.com/1499/ energy.

I’ve had the same car, in the US, for 5+ years now. They’re amazing as an around-town car, and virtually free to drive. I can go to the next town over twice in a day, which is more than I want to. I just charge it overnight on a plain old 110v plug.

I think every family with 3+ cars should consider replacing one with a used Leaf - chances are you don’t really need more than 70 miles of range on more than 1-2 vehicles.

I don’t care at all about the environmental stuff, only about not going to gas stations and never doing any maintenance. And, as OP notes… they are surprisingly fun to drive.

> Stealing a car is already a high risk crime.

Not in SF, according to my several friends who have had cars stolen there recently. The cops don’t even care.

1000 cars could probably be had, new, for $30M. Not much for a large city or state. San Francisco’s city budget is in excess of 14B this year: https://www.kqed.org/news/11957640/budget-deep-dive-san-fran.... Seems like a trivial investment to reduce the #1 crime people have come to associate with your city.

The guaranteed return is citizens not having their cars broken into. Better tourism, better economic opportunities (you can do a lot more business when you’re not worried about a degenerate breaking your windows).

And anyway, you probably need closer to 10 cars. You don’t need very many high profile prosecutions before the average person gets the message.

Re entrapment, see discussion on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40916066 - I’m reasonably sure this can be done in a way that isn’t entrapment.

(Though whether the 9th circuit redefines it would be a different question)

I thought entrapment had an element of the state convincing you to commit a crime. My understanding is if the state just leaves an Acura somewhere, and you break into it, it’s fair game.

… but we can throw them in jail for stealing cars.

One thing I really don’t understand: why isn’t this trivially solvable with policing?

Just make car theft / break-ins a bad play game-theory wise: a few cars on the street are left with the police ready to pounce. You break in to a bait car, you get 2 years in jail.

Would take not that many resources, for not that long. Word would spread fast that breaking into cars is not “free” anymore.

Seems like this is what we do with every other crime: you don’t avoid speeding because you _know_ you’ll get caught, you avoid speeding because there’s a 1% chance of getting caught and being fined 1000x the benefit you derived from it.

It’s safe to stop reading any article at the point they say something like this:

> Year 4 of a pandemic

Easy trick: Every time you get a spam call, answer it. Talk to them until _they_ hang up. String them along. Put them on speakerphone and keep working. Feed them fake credit card numbers (there are generators out there that create numbers that checksum correctly, so they type them into whatever they're using to bill numbers. Hopefully this helps flag them as a bad actor to the processors, idk).

It sounds like a lot of work, but when I started doing this about two years ago it took about two weeks for the calls to just... stop. Now I get a spam call maybe once a month. It's glorious.

My theory is this is the only route to get put on the _real_ do-not-call lists - the ones that spam companies in India have labelled "unprofitable numbers.txt". Seems like once you're on those, you're good.

Every minute they're listening to you use them for rubber-duck debugging is a minute they're not scamming Granny out of her 401k. Be prepared to get called bad names in foreign languages. Bonus points if you learn some phrases in their language to really get under their skin.

Radially might be the wrong word; I thought for a while about it. You’re correct, your goal is to present a target that is moving from the perspective of the shooter. Ideally not moving at a constant angular velocity.

I’m only going to engage with you once, because I think you’re being deliberately obtuse in your comments. The following is in case you’re being genuine, and for other’s benefit:

There are several orders of magnitude difference between a 9mm handgun and a small artillery round. The difference is in terms of concussive force.

If you shoot a handgun with earplugs in, you hear a pop that sounds kind of like dropping a small ball bearing on a wood floor. You feel a shock in your wrists and a bit in your elbows, like high-fiving someone.

Now, you stand a few yards from artillery - and I’m talking Korean war artillery, not modern stuff. Also not talking about reenactment stuff; they usually just put a bit of black powder in there. I’m talking about small tow-behind artillery that you’d see at the Big Sandy Shoot (Google it).

You _feel_ the sound before you hear it. You’ll look for some shooting muffs to put on _over_ your earplugs. The concussive force comes through the ground, through the air, moves through your head and stimulates your eardrums from the backside. You feel your guts vibrate a bit. It feels like the ground moved under you, like you’re landing after jumping in the air.

And _that_ is an order of magnitude or so below what we’re talking about with SEALs here - those guys are placing explosive with a sticky backing on doors, and torching it off from not very far away. There’s stories from them of not being able to get physically “far enough” from a charge, and having to detonate it anyway because you’re in a freaking war zone. When a SEAL says “oh, this is going to fucking suck” before pushing a button, you know it’s real.

The gates exist to keep out people who don’t know how to do that. The people with that level of skill+motivation are _going_ to get in, and shorting some contacts is probably a less destructive way for them to do it.

Trust me - landlords have bigger things to worry about than details of the security stance of a guy who knows enough EE and SW to pull this off.

They mostly worry about the guy two doors down who thought Breaking Bad looked really cool and just bought a chemistry book.

I’m guessing there aren’t many studies on this, but as a young, fast runner I’d zigzag every time if they’re shooting _at_ me. At least run in a straight line that isn’t collinear with the shooter’s position. Obviously, if you can find cover, put it between you and them and cover distance.

It’s so, so hard for any amateur to hit a target that is moving radially in a polar coordinate system centered on them, at all. I’d bet your average shooter who makes the news can’t put 7/10 shots in a stationary silhouette at 10yd. It’s harder than you’d think.

If you ever get the chance, go shoot some small caliber weapons. I think everyone should at some point to have a baseline in their head for what guns are. Plus, I think it’d be good for people to know you can become really hard to hit by all but the best shooters by… walking away slowly in a zigzag. Near impossible if you run.

And then if you have a chance to be around some small artillery, do that too. It’s hard to describe the difference.

(“You” here is used to address HN in general, not you personally)

So, we’re all onboard for nuclear, right? And we’re all going to vote for anyone who will fast track building nuclear plants and cut through some regulatory crap?

If this is an emergency, and it looks like it is, let’s start treating it that way. Clean energy is a solved problem.

Wait, that seems backwards to me as a native English speaker. The superlative version feels more safe. Safest > Safe > (…)

As usual, the answer to a question in the headline can safely be assumed to be “no”.

So you’re saying that their current conclusion - that this is significant for heart events, but not in general - is valid statistically?

(Honest question)

> Karraker and her co-author did the analysis again, and found the results stand only when wives develop heart problems, not other illnesses.

This is p-hacking after-the-fact, right? Seems like the classic example: The broader hypothesis doesn’t hold, but if you look for ways to slice and dice the data you’re likely to find a (spurious?) correlation eventually.

If something is good for public health or safety, the best way to deploy it is to start selling it now.

Exponential growth of production rates means that every day, month, or year you delay is many thousands or millions of units not produced.

If you care about public safety and health, your best route is to find a way to align it with something profitable. That’s just the truth.

Confusing title; my initial impression was AT&T was literally hanging up on landline customers when they called support.

Article is just using “hang up” in a colloquial sense. Cute, but unnecessarily confusing.

The law, wisely, usually doesn’t do the butterfly effect thing. That way lies madness.

I’m curious, what kind of work do you do? Do your dreams have that kind of detail?

So for me I definitely visualized a ball on a table, but the color wasn’t resolved, if that makes sense. After hearing the question asked it kind of snaps out of superposition into a red color (but there was definitely a color-choosing step that happened after hearing the question).

Same thing happens if you ask “what surface is the table on” or “what country is this image in”. It’s layers I can add to the mental state, but if they’re not important they’re just not there.

I’d say the closest thing to what I was “seeing” before the color question is something like a wireframe, or maybe the gray color of a Blender model without colors/textures applied. Grey in the sense that you don’t really notice it’s grey, you just understand the grey color means color is absent.

(2015)