Hacker News Reader

stanferderon Crema Coffee in San Jose Closes Due to ADA Lawsuit

I think you're underestimating the size of 200. ADA compliance is a worthy cause, but at that level of effort I think it would make more sense to create an advocacy group and try to bring about compliance through public pressure than individual lawsuits.

Nevertheless, I don't have a lot of sympathy for the business owner in this case. If you open a business in a non-compliant site 17 years after the ADA went into effect, and 13 years later still can't build a ramp, it might be time for another business to occupy that site.

stanferderon Crema Coffee in San Jose Closes Due to ADA Lawsuit

When one person associated with the attorney is a plaintiff in 200 lawsuits, it does start to seem opportunistic.

Nevertheless, I can't understand why someone would open a cafe in 2007 at a site that wasn't compliant with a 1990 law without budgeting for bringing it into compliance.

stanferderon Taking back Mondays and Tuesdays (2019)

It's a safety color.

stanferderon Buffer overflow when pwfeedback is set in sudoers

> The prefix/postfix change is a red herring, that doesn't do anything

The prefix/postfix change does something to the reader. It's a distraction trying to figure out if that change was intended, whether the author knows it has no effect, or whether I'm wrong about the change having no effect.

I appreciate the author doing the hard work of fixing this, especially with the code in full view of the public, but if I were an official reviewer I'd ask to get all the unnecessary changes removed.

stanferderon New Finnish study confirms that BMW and Audi owners drive like idiots

Well you could be driving two Cadillacs at the same time

And one's going 45, and one's going 99

stanferderon Ask HN: What to avoid in life?

If these investments of yours were as much of a sure bet (or adequately sure bet) as you're suggesting, banks would simply cut out the middle-person (i.e. the borrower) and invest in these things directly.

stanferderon Safety Meeting

Smoking weed while wearing a hardhat seems out-of-whack.

stanferderon ACLU: ICE and CBP Are Secretly Tracking Us Using Stingrays. We’re Suing

I don't think it rises to the level of dishonesty, but I do think the writer should not have included something as unknowable and irrelevant as the possible hidden motives of these agencies.

Nevertheless, suing these agencies to prevent unwarranted surveillance is justified.

stanferderon Ask HN: How do we stop the polarization/toxicicity filling the web?

> [T]he other media encourages polarization and demonization of the other for dumb short term. That's a purely American phenomenon...

I don't think that's true. The tone of American political news nowadays doesn't seem that different than British newspapers in the 1990s. "It's the Sun wot won it" was an explicit boast about The Sun's polarizing influence... in 1992.

Of course both The Sun and Fox News in the US are part of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. But if anything this style of news seems like it arrived in the UK ten or twenty years before it was manifest in the US.

stanferderon California's housing bill SB 50 has died in the state Senate

Just because your economic situation is unsustainable where you are doesn't mean you'd be better off someplace else. If you arrive in a new city without a job and without connections, you're in trouble from the moment you get there.

stanferderon The Rust Compilation Model Calamity

Laptops can be carried to meetings, so you always have your whole setup with you, and they make it easier to do work someplace other than your desk.

stanferderon Young people are funneled into fields that don’t reward risk-taking

> the X'ers

The last generation to know freedom from planned activities during their school years.

stanferderon How to Find New Music

I really like Bandcamp's articles. They're hyping material on their own platform of course, but you can give it a quick listen on-the-spot, and if you like it, that's a win for you, the artist, and Bandcamp. If you don't like it, you can move on to the next article straightaway. Moreover it's often stuff that no algorithm would have recommended to you.

stanferderon iOS 13's Music App Sucks

Interesting, thanks for the pointer.

stanferderon iOS 13's Music App Sucks

That's what he's doing though. Change flows from discontent. Complaints are the fuel of improvement.

stanferderon Medallion Fund “Stretches Explanation to the Limit,” Professor Claims

I find it really hard to believe that the fund can be generating returns so consistently by pursuing a variety of different strategies over time.

It seems very unlikely that Renaissance/Medallion constantly finds these things, whereas other operations almost never do.

The conspiracy theorist in the back of my brain thinks that Renaissance/Medallion hires a lot of eggheads so they can plausibly claim to keep finding mathematical and operational edges, but the actual money-making strategy might be something else entirely.

stanferderon Banks to sell first post-crisis managed synthetic CDO

Written language can be used to overturn history as well as reinforce it.

In this case, the article mentions "meatier yields", and that two-word combination by itself is something I would bet on in a fight against any article-length analysis of the 2008 crisis.

stanferderon Being a Noob

A noob is simply someone who has found a new world to conquer. The result should be excitement!

stanferderon A 96 Bitcoin ransom payment ends up on Bitfinex

Governments are unlikely to give cryptocurrencies the same legal privileges as the currencies they issue.

As such, traceability will remain a risk for anyone receiving cryptocurrency payments. If a chain analysis reveals an illegal transaction as a precursor, it's going to be considered stolen goods, not money, as the article states.

stanferderon A 96 Bitcoin ransom payment ends up on Bitfinex

What if governments define every output to a mixer transaction to count as receiving stolen goods if any of the inputs are the result of criminal activity?

Apart from that, every option you suggested just hands the problem off to the next person. Eventually people won't want to transact at all because they don't want to receive tainted bitcoins.

stanferderon Congrats! Web scraping is legal! (US precedent)

I don't think the direction would ever be clear, even if the legality were clearly established. The arms race would intensify, and detecting/blocking/deceiving scrapers might become a lucrative field.

Companies want to provide some information to some people; but providing all information to all people is analogous to allowing customers to make a meal of free food samples, on a recurring basis.

stanferderon Harvard scientist is arrested, accused of lying about ties to China

> While no one figures it out, China wins.

Do they though? If China is hiring people who don't honestly fulfill their disclosure requirements, it may be the case that they're getting people who fake research results as well. They're actually selecting for low levels of integrity.

stanferderon Picardy Third

I just realized you can do a Picardy third with a millennial whoop over it!

stanferderon Picardy Third

It's like the opposite of a "millennial whoop", major-izing a minor chord instead of emphasizing the minor interval in a major chord, only more drastic because of the key change.

stanferderon How Popular Is “Sign in with Apple”?

I don't think I've seen it either. What I have seen are requests for my App Store password on occasion when I launch, say, Google Maps. It's infuriating because when I'm out in the world, I don't have access to my passwords and I don't remember them.

It's a sign in to Apple, if not a sign in with Apple, and it's weird because what I'm trying to use is Google's Maps application without signing into anything. What is going on with all of this?

stanferderon Why Do American Houses Have So Many Bathrooms?

Actually now that you mention it the bathrooms in Sweden when I visited were notably magical.

Maybe the author of the article should write about how many bathrooms Swedes have, installed in series every 10 years rather than in parallel when the house is built. A one bathroom house where the bathroom has been replaced 4 times in 40 years counts as 4 bathrooms.

stanferderon Why Do American Houses Have So Many Bathrooms?

American houses have too many square feet, and about enough bathrooms. I don't see how a three-bedroom 1-bathroom house is compatible with two people getting to work on time, especially with kids around throwing things off-schedule.

stanferderon Why Do American Houses Have So Many Bathrooms?

Why would you do all that? I've seen many 1950s-vintage houses where the sink and toilet have been replaced once, with no further changes, and they're fine. No on should hate brown tile so much that they spend so much money to tear the whole thing down.

stanferderon Sarcastic comments boost creativity, a study finds (2015)

I just interpret sarcasm as if it were sincere, treating every backhanded compliment as a forehanded one.