Hacker News Reader

sujNansnamon Oakland shows how to expand housing supply: tell developers they can build homes

Higher density construction makes more room for low density everywhere else.

sujNansnamon Oakland shows how to expand housing supply: tell developers they can build homes

If a company is spending some revenue as wages, they aren’t paying taxes on that revenue at all.

sujNansnamon The Great American Eye Exam Scam

So there’s some need to take a vision test periodically. You actually don’t need a professional for this, you can print an eye chart off the internet.

Even so, the need to get your vision tested is often not related to the need to replace your glasses because they broke or you lost them.

sujNansnamon It’s not a zero-sum game for Apple TV+, Netflix, and Disney+

The mistake you’re making is thinking there is a such a thing as “50 cents a month” of content. HBO was never going to sell you Game of Thrones for 50 cents. Netflix was never going to sell you House of Cards for 50 cents. They are selling you [your favorite show] for $10 and throwing in the rest of the catalog. Digital content has zero marginal cost. That means that a provider would rather sell you every show in their catalog for $11 then just the one show you want for $10. Turns out most consumers prefer that option too. If they don’t, they can still buy the individual unbundled seasons.

sujNansnamon Shibboleths that get you past the initial script stage

You may feel this way, but the society you live in does not.

http://www.glottopedia.org/index.php/Gricean_maxims

I find it unlikely that you really abide by this stated disregard of implicit assumptions - it would make communication impossible. The amount of information required to convey even basic facts is encyclopedic if you and your conversational partner don’t make use of assumptions about what the other already knows.

sujNansnamon The Great American Eye Exam Scam

Somebody tested you in the past and you got a pair that works fine. You still have the numbers from last time and you want another pair.

sujNansnamon The Great American Eye Exam Scam

It’s easy to get glasses without a prescription.

sujNansnamon Go master Lee Se-dol says he quits, unable to win over AI Go players

What your comment suggests to me is that good composition requires an agent with a world model and generalized task-solving ability, along with a personality. I think developing the world model and task-solving will be the hard part, and if we can do it, it won’t be that hard to make it have a personality too. That’s just another task.

sujNansnamon The Real Class War

If you want a high end old tech TV you can easily get one for free on Craigslist - demand for these is so low you can’t give them away.

sujNansnamon The Real Class War

Can you elaborate on the second point? I don’t understand how banning gay marriage controls reproduction.

sujNansnamon Big Tech's Big Defector: Roger McNamee

> There is no database of PR spending, but it’s telling that a study conducted by Edelman, the worlds largest PR firm, found Tech to be the most trustworthy sector. A cynic might say they are pandering to an important client base.

Survey showing that people trust tech is evidence that tech is corrupting our politics. Jeez, talk about confirmation bias. A PR firm could also use a negative trust score to sell a firm on how they need more PR.

sujNansnamon Simple-twitter: A bare-bones Twitter clone implemented in a single file

I set up auto scaling for a kube cluster and it didn’t feel like switching on a feature that was included, it felt more like building a semi-custom solution out of some publicly available parts.

sujNansnamon Google Kills Cloud Print

Google pays their engineers a lot and they’d need to recruit a lot more of them if they were going to keep running everything they ever killed. That, or stop launching so many new products.

sujNansnamon Neural correlates of the DMT experience assessed with multivariate EEG

Do you have any pointers to those studies? I’ve been taking a lower dose of methylphenidate (10 mg of 8-hour extended release) to try to avoid risks of tolerance and addiction, in addition to skipping it entirely for tolerance breaks. I figured lower was better from a risk standpoint so I’m interested if that’s not that case.

sujNansnamon Basic Social Skills Guide (2012)

Communication and technical implementation are skills that exist on two separate axes. You might find that many of the best implementers are not also the best communicators, and vice versa. It seems to me that the whole software industry is designed around solving this problem. Make the good implementers your engineers. Get the good communicators who can figure out what these engineers are talking about to be your project managers. The unicorns who can communicate and implement should be able to get a gig managing all these people/projects and keeping everyone honest.

This is an idealized version of the system and a million things can go wrong, but it seems like the only way that makes any sense.

sujNansnamon The Firefox UI Is Now Built with Web Components

It’s one of those things where you’re only going to notice it as a user when it’s broken.

sujNansnamon How NBA executive Jeff David stole $13M from the Sacramento Kings

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_bribery

TLDR: it’s a felony in most states. There’s no federal law prohibiting it explicitly but it often falls under mail or wire fraud.

sujNansnamon We ‘may’ have discovered a potential remedy for tinnitus

I don’t think the head pressure feeling is something the brain automatically adds to silence. I get that feeling from noise-canceling headphones but I don’t get it from a sensory deprivation tank.

sujNansnamon The cognitive costs of air pollution

If you have central air, you can put a good filter in your air return. If you don’t, you can buy a standalone air purifier.

sujNansnamon Amazon is sending me packages I didn't buy

Safari’s reader mode works well in this case.

sujNansnamon FedEx responds to The New York Times article from Nov. 17, 2019

It’s interesting that when Mitt Romney said 47% of Americans don’t pay income taxes, the Times pointed out this was misleading because many of those people do pay payroll and other taxes. It seems they are guilty of the same sort of deceptive rhetoric here.

sujNansnamon Ex-FDA Advisor Says of Lasik Eye Surgery: ‘It Should Have Never Been Approved’

I have halos after LASIK and they don’t bother me. I understand how they would have a negative association because you experience them at the same time as a migraine, but they don’t cause me any suffering. They’re just... things that in my visual field that I don’t pay much attention do. When I notice them, they are a gentle reminder of how fascinating brains and eyes are.