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throwaway4891aon How Does Your Kindergarten Classroom Affect Your Earnings?

Also, middle-/upper-oriented people are more likely peer-pressured to placing in the "best" kindergartens, whereas lower-oriented people may skip it (much like skipping parental-school involvement). And, I suspect both nature and nurture aspects are self-amplifying: smarter/more competitive kids may make more money and attempt to seek similar mates to have improved offspring and try really hard to inculcate successful attitudes. Plus, having more money helps reinforce getting into selective kindergartens and making more childhood friends of future powerful people, leading to better social access to higher quality mates (better genes), more money and hopefully better lifestyle-choices.

throwaway4891aon Lame showers, dishwashers that don't work, and dirty clothes

Some people have to rationalize their stuck-in-the-1950's, environmentally-destructive, post-truth lifestyles with gusto somehow. How else to explain expanded fossil fuel consumption/exploitation, anthropogenic methane output (ie fossil fuel industry, flooded rice cultivation, animal agriculture/CAFOs), palm oil plantation rainforest burning, microplastic pollution/gyre garbage patches and other similar ecological-destructive behaviors? Oh but, let's bitch about not wasting as much water because a few cheap, low-flow toilets were purchased without evaluating better alternatives because it's all conservation's fault. (Sarcasm.) Yeah.

http://www.eci.ox.ac.uk/research/energy/downloads/methaneuk/...

throwaway4891aon Moving sofa problem

Interesting. Oddly enough, I used to have this massive custom sofa which was a real PITA to move... could only fit in storage unit if stood up on a roller dolly and so on. I bet there'll soon be an app using CV/ML to figure out if a sofa will fit/which way to move it. ;)

throwaway4891aon 100% of US Warming Is Due to NOAA Data Tampering

Alt-right gonna keep shoveling billionaire propaganda and/or InfoWars/Unabomber beliefs onto every and any memetic channel, because shouting lies loud/often enough is sadly rewarded by changing sentiment in low-fact environments. (Doesn't really work so well on HN because of pervasive motivation for fact-challenging and argumentativeness.)

throwaway4891aon The World of Fake Vacation Destinations

Recall, recall, recall.

throwaway4891aon Show HN: Learn how to build electronics with monthly kits

HeathKit partically-reinvented themselves: https://shop.heathkit.com/shop

I remember changing the channel on a color HeathKit TV at my grandparents by shaking house keys because the ultrasonic remote sensor circuit interpreted it as channel down. (It had a diagnostic and circuit diagram on a fold-down panel IIRC.)

Also my father and grandfather both made multiple technology generations of oscilloscopes from kits. And, my father opened an electrical automotive shop in Santa Clara, thanks in part to learning from HeathKit and other study-at-home electronics courses.

throwaway4891aon Female founders who've had a great 2016

TC rarely covers non-tech fields unless there's a tech aspect.

Plus, we're talking about TC.

throwaway4891aon Female founders who've had a great 2016

There's a happier, less-dramatic sane-area leaving out overt misogyny and social-justice warrior cry-bully behavior. Also, in hiring there needs to be process removal of as many cognitive biases (ie blinding resume names/personal details) as possible to foster as fair of a messy ordeal as humanly possible.

Another issue is the promulgation and veneration of taboo, protected groups as being automatically special proportional to an university-proscribed, identity/attribute(s) neoliberal caste system. Bollocks.

I think such lists come from a positive intention for there to be less arbitrary discrimination and to motive likely-targeted/underrepresented individuals to succeed. I'm not sure how a special list helps motivate people with fundamental confidence, but instead may temporarily confer false confidence based on non-skill attribute(s) except by an inkling of almost getting on a generic list.

throwaway4891aon HandBrake 1.0.0 Released

I'm not using 1.0.0+ until it's codesigned and/or dmg gpg verifiable with a known-good signature.

Do not install untrusted, unverifiable apps is security 101.

throwaway4891aon HandBrake 1.0.0 Released

Apple's codesign ensures end-to-end chain-of-custody integrity with nonrepudiation, tied to a specific, named signer and likely also a credit-card.

GPG signing and releasing fingerprints of all released artifacts on an https://-served release notice would accomplish nearly the same thing, but requires more steps and causes a confusing `“HandBrake” can’t be opened because it is from an unidentified developer.` dialog.

It is a best-practice to both GPG sign all release artifacts and use vendor-specific code-signing / app stores, otherwise conversion will suffer with each additional hoop multiplied by the N of the entire user-base resulting in much more time-wasting.

End-to-end integrity also prevents entire classes of attacks such as hacked CDNs, hacked networks and so on.

throwaway4891aon What is it like to be a broke student at Stanford?

When I was there way-back-when, the dining account dept hooked us up with unlimited all-you-care-to-eat (non-packaged) dining, likely because it was cheaper in terms of productivity (a-la Google) to keep staff on-campus.

Back at uni (somewhere else), on-campus we had a block-purchased meal system which was managed and outsourced to Sodexho Marriott (it was greasy, boring shit).

Stanford Dining dining halls were usually better-than-average because they had/have respectably awesome executive chefs (mostly from high-volume commercial culinary backgrounds) usually hemmed in by over-zealous cheapskates in management) but with more freedom to meal plan outside of generic/corporate standards, source ingredients from managed vendors and generally more competition (esp. when the Dining Clubs were operational but still with other on-campus options like Treehouse and other non-RDE Tresidder; ie peanut-free Ricker). IIRC there was prime rib and king crab sometimes, and there were french fries which were knock-offs of McDonald's. Btw, Subway and Peet's (Clark Center) are/were RDE-managed franchises.

throwaway4891aon The hunt for dollars to build the $64B bullet train

I've been hearing about a bullet train for 30 years.

throwaway4891aon The hunt for dollars to build the $64B bullet train

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

http://bensommer.com/blog/big-dig-big-corruption/

There's a mix of ineptitude, poor/non-planning and some shady deals. With larger projects, more waste is essentially inevitable because of the number of moving parts and limited communication paths.

throwaway4891aon Eatsa: Quinoa-based fast food

Reminds me of the Bolivian public health issues of forgoing native consumption for cash crop export. https://intercontinentalcry.org/the-mother-grain/

And, also how many pounds of Costco quinoa I still have stockpiled that needs to be eaten.

throwaway4891aon 'All I wanted to do is build a house' (2010)

Building codes are not a one-sized-fits-all panacea, neither good nor bad inherently. They are both policy creation and enforcement to prevent as much harm as people can reasonably afford while balancing the tyrannies of the many and the few, the poor and the rich, the DIY and the commercial. Regulation isn't always bad such as preventing lowest bidders from building garment factories which collapse, using outdated/dangerous electrical technologies (ie, aluminum wiring, lead pipes) or lacking modern safety items to prevent classes of risks (ie hard-wired smoke detectors).

Certainly, people whom are more affluent could purchase additional safeguards (ie automatic external defibrillators, whole-house water-filtration) while those whom are elderly/poor will likely need assistance meeting minimum standards.

Also, clipboard auditing (timber stickers) shouldn't be a substitute for inspection common-sense.

throwaway4891aon What is it like to be a broke student at Stanford?

I used to work for R&DE as an FTE. Stanford campus is crazy expensive for mere mortals: parking permits are pricey, convenience foods (Tresidder) are movie theater prices. Treehouse and various bottom-of-med school bldgs have decent food fare that are slightly better / more reasonably-priced.

https://rde.stanford.edu/dining/caf%C3%A9%E2%80%99s-and-mark...

http://treehousestanford.com/

https://transportation.stanford.edu/parking/purchase-a-parki...

throwaway4891aon Register-based VMs have a higher performance than stack-based VMs

Yup. Stack-based is great for high-level language VM interface ease-of-use (ie JVM languages) but generally sucks at the hardware level because most CPUs are register-based: the mapping doesn't scale as well because of the extra overhead of optimal scheduling. A good register-based VM would have a large number of registers/(pseudo)variables and support sequence points to allow actual instructions to be more optimally-scheduled. Atomics are also nice in certain edge-cases, but being mostly immutable / lock-free / branch-free is typically a better strategy to avoid contention and pipeline stalls.

throwaway4891aon Happy 23rd Birthday, DOOM

In high school, I was an assistant manager at an Egghead in San Jose and got the employee discount on the id Anthology. It was pretty sweet. (Not to mention we borrowed nearly everything good in the store and re-shrinkwrapped it.) When the shop closed up in 1998, we were fireselling inventory to each other at "pick a number out of the ether" prices (Got Borland C/C++ 3.1 and a SCSI Zip Drive, the largest retail software package ever, for a song.)

http://doom.wikia.com/wiki/Id_Anthology

https://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/id-anthology

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

http://www.emsps.com/oldtools/photos/borland/c/c31afa.jpg

throwaway4891aon Ask HN: Large brand wants to buy my side project, what should I do?

I don't get out of bed for less than $100k unless it's $10k for a local gig for a week.

They're going to pester you endlessly for free labor post-sales if you let them, but consider offering a support contract on a per-incident / per-hour basis which could Lingchi-them, consulting-style.

throwaway4891aon UW engineers achieve Wi-Fi at 10,000 times lower power

Their best goto-market is probably licensing and embedding in various existing consumer devices: battery-less TV remotes, external temperature sensors, cyclometers, etc. Otherwise, distribution and advertising becomes an uphill climb to typical startup doom.

throwaway4891aon Imzy wants to be a kinder, gentler version of Reddit

37signals did research on this. For a respectful community, start with a difficult-to-attain, invite-only profile where a person has to show a real, verified profile pic and post their also verified name. More like ASW. Anonymous positing is useful for exposing misdeeds of power or be more honest than one would otherwise self-censor; anonymity is no panacea either.

"Safe-space" utopias never scale: there will be SJW bickering and whining and/or extreme self-censorship which will lead to an extremely boring (and irrelevant) platform. Plus, online platforms never have to guarantee free speech... they're businesses and organizations which can choose to do just about whatever they like within various, regional legal limits.

throwaway4891aon How my startup failed (1999)

That. is. hilarious.

(Business is like life, love and war: difficult)

throwaway4891aon Ransomware gives free decryption keys to victims who infect their friends

There's a niche field of malware economics, but it makes sense that for-profit malware is ultimately a business, albeit an usually illegal one, which has to optimize just like any other app:

https://cyber.harvard.edu/cybersecurity/Economics_of_Malware

https://www.coursera.org/learn/malsoftware

At some point, it would make sense anonymized malware (i2p, tor only) may go open source similar to commercial open source but instead because of scene cred / blackmarket consulting.

throwaway4891aon The Silent Anniversary: Fifteen Years Since Our Last Major Crash

Also: Air Crash Investigation / Mayday / Air Disasters is an interesting series if one is interested in real-world, root-cause engineering analysis.

throwaway4891aon Sears reports $748M net loss [pdf]

Shop smart, shop SMart.

throwaway4891aon Proposed CA law tells cities: Build more, or we’ll do it for you

Actual affordable housing means growing vertically and shrinking units to typical Hong Kong sizes.

throwaway4891aon Law Enforcement Uses Border Search Exception as Fourth Amendment Loophole

It's awful and shouldn't be normalized: which is the point of the ACLU's argument. If this guy, whom is also a US citizen I might add, is suspected of breaking the law, law enforcement needs to meet the burden of proof of obtaining a warrant and not just walk all over the Constitution.

throwaway4891aon Ask HN: Insultingly Bad Bonus, Bay Area, Cause for Concern?

Yup. Silence gives consent. Don't be a quiet slave.

throwaway4891aon Ask HN: Insultingly Bad Bonus, Bay Area, Cause for Concern?

Nothing spells "hubris" like a little success with a swollen ego.

throwaway4891aon Universal Basic Income Will Accelerate Innovation by Reducing Fears of Failure

As an FYI: an average single male in Santa Clara county ( largest component of Silicon Valley) can get about USD $150/mo in cash aid and $200/mo for food (4k/yr). State/Federal Social Security for permanent disability varies $650-1000/mo ($8-12k/yr). Self-sufficiency requires at least $2.5k/mo ($30k/yr) per adult.