HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

schemy

-7 karma · joined August 2, 2020

submissionscomments
schemy··on Google: Open Letter to Australians
Which is what's happening right now.

The only difference would be that you don't need to do industrial espionage on google to see what works first, so the cost of the seo would drop.

schemy··on Write Your Own Virtual Machine
A mathematician, physicist, and engineer are taking a math test. One question asks "Are all odd numbers prime?"

The mathematician thinks, "3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is not prime -- nope, not all odd numbers are prime."

The physicist thinks, " 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is not prime -- that could be experimental error -- 11 is prime, 13 is prime, yes, they're all prime."

The engineer thinks, " 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is prime, 11 is prime, ..."

https://users.cs.northwestern.edu/~riesbeck/mathphyseng.html

schemy··on Parents are 5X as Worried about Infection and School than Work and Paying Bills
New Zealand has just had to quarantine 1/3 of their population, again, because of 4 cases. Until the virus is contained everywhere you will yo-yo between closing everything and opening it.

Unless we build a wall around every developing country this will be going on for years.

The economy can bounce back from one quarantine, can it bounce back from 12?

schemy··on Older men charged more for using Tinder's premium service
It's an American term and like usual cultural imperialism means everyone else must use it too.
schemy··on Uber and Lyft ordered by California judge to classify drivers as employees
Yes and?

If I owned slaves and called them unpaid indefinite interns the law would rightly disagree. You can call the relationship whatever you like, but the law is there to keep the playing field level for everyone. That it's taken Uber so long to play by the same rules as everyone else is a travesty and should take a billion dollar law suit or two for damages to sort out.

schemy··on C will never stop you from making mistakes
Rust is the future and always will be.
schemy··on Why Software Should Be Free (2002)
> Last I checked Red Hat was a for profit company not a commune.

Last I checked Red Hat was bought by IBM and everyone with half a brain was bailing out.

schemy··on Why Software Should Be Free (2002)
Freedom zero should be only for people.
schemy··on Interview with Bill Gates on Covid, social media
I'm not interested in digging up the information on this because it was over 10 years ago, so take it with a huge grain of salt.

He had this huge presentation about a laser zapping mosquitoes. The patent was fed to a patent troll, the whole board was stacked with his friends, the company produced nothing and was set up to sue anyone who did try and produce anything. 10 years later they still haven't produced more than the one prototype. The 'charitable' donations were literally just tax write offs that paid for his friends salary.

Since then I really don't take him seriously at all. His charities are just a way to reduce his tax bill and look like he cares, while he's just paying his friends to work on projects they find interesting regardless of the chance of success.

In short: hubris, corruption, white collar rico and tax evasion.

schemy··on All these companies were a lot smarter than us. What we had was luck (1984)
I was expecting something about Morse code. I too was disappointed.
schemy··on Wheat yield potential in controlled-environment vertical farms
In the same way that it's more efficient for me to drink high octane fuel rather than eat food.
schemy··on Wheat yield potential in controlled-environment vertical farms
It doesn't.

The sun provides about 300W/m^2 on average at temperate climates, that's 7.2kwh per day. Wheat takes about 4 months to grow and nuclear power costs 0.77c/kwh.

That's 665.28$/m^2 at wholesale.

[0] https://ag.tennessee.edu/solar/Pages/What%20Is%20Solar%20Ene....

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_pricing#Price_comp...

schemy··on A Swedish doctor's perspective on Covid
It means that people who have no idea what science is like to pretend they have a deeper reason for their biases other than their innate preferences. They do not like that pointed out to them and will violently react to anyone who does.

You can't have a scientific response to the virus when you don't know what the asymptomatic transmission rate is, or what the true death rate is. As can be seen here it does not go well when they are made to even consider that they don't have all the information needed for a scientific response: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24077233

schemy··on A Swedish doctor's perspective on Covid
https://www.google.com/search?q=sweden+covid+deathrate&oq=sw...

Sweden's death rate is down to zero today and has been trending down since mid April. Summer Holidays did not start until late May where deaths were already half of what they were in mid April. This post isn't aging, it's already aged.

schemy··on Immunology Is Where Intuition Goes to Die
>This evidence completely invalidates the premise of your first point regarding r0.

You do realize that it's exactly the opposite right?

If asymptomatic r0 is high a quarantine without a lock down is pointless. If it's low no lock down is required and a quarantine is enough?

schemy··on Crush: A command line shell that is also a powerful modern programming language
The problem, as always, is that a table isn't the natural output for a computer. It's either serialized text, or a graph. Unix tools work ok-ish for serialized text and you need general recursive functions to deal with graphs. Something that all shell like languages are extremely bad at.
schemy··on Immunology Is Where Intuition Goes to Die
Please provide the doi.
schemy··on Immunology Is Where Intuition Goes to Die
>We already know that it is bigger than 1.

Do we? Do you have a study?

schemy··on Immunology Is Where Intuition Goes to Die
Australia is looking at up to 40% of all households with mortgages to be foreclosed on within the next 3 years:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-06-04/covid-recession-mortg...

schemy··on Immunology Is Where Intuition Goes to Die
>Why not just look at other countries, see which have had the best outcomes, and copy them?

Because if the R0 value for asymptomatic cases is high enough you will need 2 week quarantine for all travelers and fortress boarders until the virus is eradicated everywhere.

Something New Zealand is currently doing after implementing the most draconian nation wide lock-down.

Do you support a barb wire wall around both the Canadian and Mexican border with lethal force counter measures if anyone tries to pass and forced isolation of all travelers?

schemy··on Immunology Is Where Intuition Goes to Die
>you seem to be suggesting the no lockdowns would have no impact on the economy.

No. I'm suggesting that acknowledging the cost of lockdowns is something that is not allowed to be discussed in liberal circles.

4: World war 3 caused by the economic collapse and radicalization of the population. You know, like the last time there was mass sustained unemployment.

schemy··on Immunology Is Where Intuition Goes to Die
You are far too optimistic with how wrong things can go.

The economy running smoothly is what keeps revolutions and wars from happening. The last time the wheels fell off as badly as they did over the last three months we had WWII happen within a decade. We are lucky that it is a sharp shock and it is probably recoverable, but the longer we keep this up the slower the recovery will be. And given how popular extremist ideas were even before a 25% unemployment wall it is not something I want to play with.

schemy··on Journalists’ Twitter use shows them talking within smaller bubbles
>My point is, it's not just a difference of opinion when a group of people promote racist, neo-Nazi views (alt-right), or peddle in conspiracy theories (Qanon).

    Opinion: A thought or belief about something or someone [0]
If racism and conspiracy theories aren't thoughts or beliefs about something or someone what do you think they are?

[0] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/opinion

schemy··on Immunology Is Where Intuition Goes to Die
The sheer hubris of your post is the problem I'm talking about. Banning cars saves lives. Forcing everyone to wear a helmet when walking saves lives. Banning sugar saves lives. The issue is how many lives and at what cost?

I'll wait to see how many millions end up homeless before I say that the lock downs saved lives anywhere where they were implemented.

schemy··on Immunology Is Where Intuition Goes to Die
>It's good to see a piece that shows how complex the science behind COVID is, in the middle of so many contradictory or over-simplified news.

It's rather unfortunate how politicized the whole issue is. I got banned from reddit for pointing out that without knowing what the r0 was for asymptomatic patients any type of lock down tells you more about the psychology of the person for or against it than about its effectiveness.

schemy··on Journalists’ Twitter use shows them talking within smaller bubbles
What's the difference? Offense is in the mind of the offendee not the offender. Liberals in NY and SF have taken being offended to an art form I hadn't seen since old church ladies got angry when you didn't say H-E-double hokey stick.
schemy··on Journalists’ Twitter use shows them talking within smaller bubbles
>However, the caveat to that is that journalists are on Twitter, pay a lot of attention to Twitter, and report it as reality. Getting dogpiled on Twitter may not matter, but having it reported in newspapers may make it matter.

And how many people read newspapers?

The only thing that matters to a business is when people show up with placards in front of the business, or the CEOs house. The cases where that happens are so few and far between that by ignoring everything a newspaper writes you improve your business's performance by the simple fact you're not paying someone to waste time. The rest of it can be summed up as "don't get caught putting babies in blenders".

schemy··on In spite of an increase in Internet speed, webpage speeds have not improved
>I've been spending close to a day trying to figure out how to respond to this statement. It's like you're saying [...]

No, it's like I'm saying: Software development is fad driven and shallow. The details change but those details are unimportant and ultimately pointless. Bad metaphors are exactly the type of shallow thinking I'm talking about.

A GUI is not a car, a duck, or a fish. It is a UI. That the web is being used as an interactive GUI is a travesty. Without knowing the history of why it was invented in the first place - extremely high latency and low bandwidth of the 90s internet - you will never understand why mutating it to a full GUI is a terrible idea. And why we should have used any of the dozen well engineered technologies that are not hypertext based but work with the internet (low latency high bandwidth) we have today.

It's gotten to the point where an X server in an Amazon data center and a VNC client on a phone is more responsive than facebook, twitter and reddit on mobile.

>As for "no new ideas in computing since the 70s," are you actually proposing that we go back to building websites like we did in the seventies? Um, sure. Brilliant.

Yes, using TeX would be an infinite improvement over the mess we have today. Imagine having one language for everything in a site, instead of the three (five? with markdown and js frameworks) you need today.

schemy··on Levandowski sentenced to 18 months in prison as new lawsuit against Uber filed
Sociopathy and narcissistic personality disorder on top of average skills.

My career took off when I had a particularly bad metal break where I exhibited both to a frightening degree. When I got over those I just retired with all the money I'd made.

Make no mistake, success is a mental illness.

schemy··on Order of magnitude estimate of Beirut explosion at 3 kilotons of TNT
Don't forget cars, they kill an average of 40k people a year since the 50s in the US.
Page 1 of 2Next →