Hacker News Reader

tolstoshevon New study suggests handwriting engages the brain more than typing

I'd be curious to find out if these children and young adults had learned to write or type first. Perhaps this is an artifact of learning writing first, rather than anything inherently beneficial about writing over typing.

tolstoshevon Neurotoxic peptides isolated from venom of giant Australian stinging tree

Great news for torturers across the globe! /s

tolstoshevon 2020 Pulitzer Prize Winners

Same. It re-opened the case and got it all the way to the Supreme Court, so that's pretty huge.

tolstoshevon Covid-19 Superspreader Events in 28 Countries: Critical Patterns and Lessons

Survivor bias. You're not seeing the dead ones.

tolstoshevon YouTube bans coronavirus-related content that directly contradicts WHO advice

Their decisions aren't completely free. For example malls got designated as public spaces in the 90s and that could happen online too at some point: https://law.justia.com/cases/colorado/supreme-court/1991/90s...

tolstoshevon Cloudflare silently deleted my DNS records

That often ends up being the defacto job of a online community manager, if they have one.

tolstoshevon Every Google result now looks like an ad

also the habit of putting "missing: <search term>" and showing you stuff that isn't as targeted as what you were actually looking for.

tolstoshevon Scaring People into Supporting Backdoors

I make a similar argument about the age of transparency hurting the elite more than it hurts common folk. If you make all my data public, I'll be at most embarrassed. If you make the elite's data public, that includes the location of dead bodies.

tolstoshevon Facebook Pledges $130M to Fund “Supreme Court” for Content

They're just trying to avoid a ruling like this one: https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/583/pruneyard-s...

for social media platforms.

tolstoshevon Drivers Refuse to Put Down Their Phones. People Keep Dying

The hypothesis of why local conversations are safer is that when traffic gets complex, the passenger will see that as well and pause the conversation. The person on the phone doesn't have that awareness. However some jurisdictions have restrictions on passengers for younger/provisional drivers, for just that reason.

tolstoshevon Drivers Refuse to Put Down Their Phones. People Keep Dying

It's not the hands that are the problem, it's the cognitive load. Hands free is no safer than hands on, when it comes to talking on the phone.

https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/national/2014/04/15/32...

tolstoshevon FDA bowed to industry for decades as alarms were sounded over talc

"Eleven days later, the company announced that tests by labs it hired had determined that there was no asbestos–other than some contamination it said came from an air conditioner – in samples from the one bottle tested by the FDA and the batch it came from."

Why the hell is there an AC system that is spewing out asbestos particles?

tolstoshevon Twitter to ban political advertising

They're still gonna pay for reach, just with botnets instead of ads.

tolstoshevon The WeWork debacle should be an indictment of modern finance

Isn't this a textbook definition of predatory pricing and illegal in the US?

WeWork’s strategy wasn’t simply to fulfil a practical need: its aim was market domination, to be achieved by undercutting its competitors in a race to the bottom, using investor capital as oxygen to sustain losses while other serviced office-space providers ran out of breath and expired. The idea was then to leverage its reach to name its terms and prices.

tolstoshevon AirPods Pro

Have they fixed the stuttering issue when connecting to a MacBook Pro? My current gen ones work fine with everything except the Mac.

tolstoshevon Mailgun Acquires Mailjet

This makes no sense - guns function completely differently from jets. What were they thinking?

tolstoshevon New universe of miniproteins is upending cell biology and genetics

I'm starting to wonder if there are physical limits to cognition and if we've already hit them. Maybe it's impossible for the physical universe to understand its own complexity.

tolstoshevon Twitter exec for Middle East is also part-time British army 'psyops' officer

It's called the Department of Defense, not Offense :)

tolstoshevon DoorDash confirms data breach affected 4.9M customers, workers and merchants

DoorDash probably forgot to tip the “third-party service provider”

tolstoshevon Amazon has proven unable or unwilling to effectively police third-party sellers

And here we are laughing at the fall of the Roman empire because of lead poisoning.

tolstoshevon A Boeing Code Leak Exposes Security Flaws Deep in a 787's Guts

The real reason more code isn't open source is because it would severely embarrass a lot of companies, because of how bad their code is.

tolstoshevon Hospital checklists are meant to save lives, so why do they often fail?

Spectacles, testicles, wallet, watch! :)

tolstoshevon Don’t Put Your Work Email on Your Personal Phone

"I plead the fifth" or "I'd like a lawyer" or silence.

tolstoshevon DoorDash Changes Tipping Model After Uproar

Glad they changed it, but it's pretty damning that this was the model in the first place.

tolstoshevon Art's sale value? Zero. The tax bill? $29M

They should have just sent the piece to the IRS as payment.

tolstoshevon Rising US Inequality: How We Got Here, Where We're Going

College is just a proxy for IQ. Shoving more people into college isn't going to make them smarter, if they don't have the mental horsepower. Basically you've got two levers, genetics and environment, and practically you can only change the latter by early intervention. Nutrition, enriching environment, and good education.

tolstoshevon When Everything That Counts Can’t Be Counted

He's describing Whuffie - https://www.amazon.com/Down-Magic-Kingdom-Cory-Doctorow/dp/0...

tolstoshevon With His Job Gone, an Autoworker Wonders, ‘What Am I as a Man?’

I think this guy is Gen X, not Boomer.

tolstoshevon Study Finds Ultra-Processed Foods Drive Weight Gain

I suspect emulsifiers are playing a bigger role than people realize. They wash away your gut mucus layer so that bacteria can't live there. This study didn't get much attention when it came out, but I think it will prove to be prophetic: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5940336/