pjlegato

This is quite common in old buildings in cold areas such as northern Europe, the northern United States, and Canada. Two single pane windows are place a short distance apart. There are also "storm windows," a similar concept where a new window is retrofitted to the outside of an existing single window. Both windows are usually easily openable for summertime ventilation.

The outer window can acquire significant condensation, especially if it's fully sealed. This can drip down and rot the wood sill. The outer window is not supposed to be fully sealed. There's supposed to be an air gap at the bottom so that this doesn't happen, but some installers or homeowners are unaware of this and caulk all around.

All that stuff is actually _even worse_ under alternative economic systems. Spend a few hours talking with someone -- anyone -- who comes from a Communist country and ask them about this.

It's like having Cotton Mather as your research assistant: brilliant, but constantly interjecting unsolicited preachy meta-sermons scolding the framing of your question, and all the while pretending this framing is well known and widely accepted objective fact instead of a controversial moral opinion.

It's only a matter of time before the AI starts burning witches.

There was another step: Leibniz' pre-limits formulation of calculus used hyperreal numbers: infinite and infinitesimals (small-delta) numbers. This version is conceptually simpler and for many people more intuitive than the limits-based explanation. It was the standard approach for many years.

Infinitesimal calculus was discarded in late 19th century pedagogy in favor of limits as no rigorous proofs yet existed of its general correctness, whereas such proofs had been formulated for the limits version. It was suspected that while infinitesimals were a nice intuition, they lacked rigor which might lead to unknown errors.

It was eventually rigorously proven in the 1960s that the infinitesimals approach is indeed as complete and correct as the limits version, but by then standard pedagogy had become entrenched in limits.

More on this at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elementary_Calculus:_An_Infini... , the modern textbook that re-introduced infinitesimals.

That's correct. US zoning laws have banned the construction of dense urban neighborhoods and required car-centric suburban neighborhood plans since about World War II. Mandatory density limits and setbacks and numbers of parking spaces and square feet per occupant and other zoning regulations make it illegal to build anything other than low density suburbs.

Many people still want to live in a dense, walkable neighborhood, though; supply is just fixed at ~1940 levels forever. The few prewar walkable cities that still function such as New York and San Francisco are very expensive as a result. Housing that was built for and occupied by working class people for generations is now too pricey for all but the rich.

In the United States, there is case law[1] establishing that an exact replica of artwork that is itself in public domain is not eligible for copyright protection, because "originality" is a necessary element for copyright protection to exist. Works that lack any originality are therefore public domain even if they require effort or technical skill to produce, such as photographing a public domain painting, or presumably scanning a public domain bust.

Is there any similar law or regulation in Germany?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Corel....

At a broader level, TCP/IP was just one of many competing networking technologies. Nobody master planned which one would win. That emerged organically through gradual decentralized convergence as many individual actors concluded TCP/IP was in some sense "better" than the alternatives.

Hume uses the example of the sun rising: though the sun has (so far) always risen in the east, there is no logical reason to assume that it will _necessarily_ do the same tomorrow tomorrow. Though we can reasonably plan for this as the most likely scenario based on available evidence, it is not _necessarily_ going to happen.

There is, likewise, no logically necessary reason to assume that that causal process of metabolism will continue to work tomorrow as it always has in the past, though it is indeed reasonable to prepare for that outcome as the most likely outcome.

As David Hume points out, you don't actually know you'll be hungry tomorrow. You assume you will be based on induction from similar past events, but this is not certain. (He does concede that it's reasonable to plan as if it were a certainty in such cases, in the absence of any falsifying evidence.)

The famous counterexample metaphor is farmyard turkeys. For months, for their entire lives, the turkeys observe the diligent farmer bringing food and water, providing for their every need so that they don't have to do anything. On the day before Thanksgiving, a turkey philosopher confidently declares that, based on this prior evidence, we can conclude that the farmer, their great benefactor, exists only to serve and further the interests of turkeydom.

Ticketmaster works "well enough" that venues have no compelling reason to switch.

A startup may offer a "10% better" set of features, but that's not enough for the venue to justify the large switching costs and large risk that would be involved in trying out a competing product.

For such a switch to be justified, the alternative product's feature set would have to be 100x better -- a "gamechanger" that fundamentally alters the way the venue does business, not merely offers minor improvements.

OP said they are disgusted with politics and bureaucracy. Non-profits are (if possible) EVEN WORSE on those axes than commercial businesses.

Since there is no profit-driven forcing function, ALL operations devolve into pure politics and bureaucracy.

All real family trees are not tree-shaped but diamond-shaped due to inbreeding (often very distant), a phenomenon geneaologists call "pedigree collapse":

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

San Francisco was very much a late night city at least into the 1940s -- check out the historic posters hanging at the Fairmont Hotel advertising various live shows that _started_ at midnight.

Exactly the opposite of this happened. Almost all content on the early-mid 90s web was user-generated. The bulk of it was personal "homepages" with low production values describing hobbies or technical interests.

Very few large corporations had even heard of this crazy new "Internet" thing in the 90s, and even fewer cared. Almost none had a corporate webpage even listing their address and phone number, much less produced any content at all.

Many had the .com domain name corresponding to their corporate brand registered by domain squatters they later had to buy it from. Some didn't even notice for years.

Many ads at the time still used a strategy of "reasoning with the reader": explaining the technical benefits of the product, and how using it would make your life better in some way.

Sometime around the 90s, most advertising gradually shifted to emotional manipulation, which is empirically more effective at scale. The famous iPod ads, for example, said nothing at all about the iPod's technical merits, or how you'd benefit by using an iPod instead of other MP3 players. They just showed some vaguely cool-looking person listening to an iPod.

The "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" ads depicted PCs as old, uncool dorks; while the Mac is fun and interesting and young. Not a word about any actual features or benefits of the Mac. Purely associative emotional branding.

This actually does work in terms of "selling more iPods at scale," though it is dissatisfying to that small segment of the population that cares about making informed and rational decisions. Most HN readers fall into this category, though there aren't enough of us in the world to carry mass advertising strategies.

Soundcard-like devices called "audio interfaces"[1] -- now usually USB breakout boxes -- are alive and well in the professional audio segment, targeted at musicians, recording studios, video editing shops, and similar applications.

They're not necessary for consumer apps. Consumer audio applications got "good enough" with mass produced builtin motherboard "soundcard on a chips" that basically replicated the function of the old soundcards at a much lower price point.

If you want to, say, connect 16 microphones at once and record to 16 seperate tracks, or you plan to apply a bunch of digital effects and therefore want a much higher sample rate than what your consumer audio chip can do, you can buy an audio interface.

[1] https://www.sweetwater.com/shop/studio-recording/audio-inter...

You're supposed to carry around a purpose-built business card holder case. After the meeting, you carefully place the cards into your case and take them with you for later reference.

If someone is not qualified as an expert on a given topic themselves, they have no rational basis for evaluating competing and mutually incompatible claims generated by two parties who are each qualified experts. The process devolves into mere sophistry.

This is called a "martingale" betting strategy. It's been extensively studied in probability theory. If you had infinite wealth and the casino would let you bet forever, it would work, but in real life neither of these conditions is true.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martingale_(betting_system)

Today's chat systems are far more accessible to people with minimal to no technical background. Install an app on your phone and you're good to go. Almost anyone can and does use them.

The level of technical knowledge required to connect to IRC or a BBS in the 80s was far higher, which meant that only a tiny fraction of people bothered.

This is pretty much the world we live in now. True aficionados who devote time to discovering, analyzing, and sharing actual quality -- not because they expect to make money from doing so, but simply because they like that category. Untold amounts of time have been spent on this exact thing over the past twenty years.

The problem is discoverability. Though there are more sites like this than ever before, it's hard to find any of them. Google has been thoroughly conquered by content marketing at this point -- if you search for any product category, the first dozens of pages are 100% long form commercial advertising now. They all have much larger budgets and way better SEO skills than the average aficionado.

Setting a timer yourself to remind you of some future important event is a very different proposition than what most people mean when they say "notifications": allowing an ever-growing constellation of commercially motivated ad sales companies to initiate pings on the phone they carry around 24 hours a day and grab at their attention at any time, for resale purposes.

"I am about 200 feet southeast of the large monument in the center of the park, wearing a red shirt"

"From the XYZ Street beach entrance, we're about 100 yards north, with a blue umbrella."

Using realtime GPS tracking for this sort of thing is fetishizing technology to overoptimize a problem that was trivially solved for millenia using verbal offsets from known landmarks, while at the same time introducing and normalizing grave privacy concerns in society.

Do people really need minutely updates on your bike ride? What value does it add to anyone's life to know what exact block you're on for the next 15 seconds?

Just tell them your final destination verbally, and you're done.

In this case, Apple's culture changed to match NeXT's.

Even if they are, that would be irrelevant, a "tu quoque fallacy": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque

It's worth noting that even people who have been spoiled still usually find it _extremely hard_ to beat NetHack.

Even if one happens to approve of the conditions under which personal data is being managed _right now_, even if one happens to approve of the current administrators and thinks they're entirely benevolent, there is no way to know who will be in charge of that data in the future, or what ends it will be used for. Once it's out there, it's out there forever.

This is because the people who want a Unix-like operating system that doesn't require manual following of guides after purchase to get basic features working all self-select out of your user pool and go buy a MacBook.

This is why most people just buy a MacBook: it should not be necessary for the user to read, do, or configure _anything_ to make suspend mode work properly and not drain 30% of your battery overnight.