Hacker News Reader

in urban environments an RPG could definitely be coming down from above.

vpribishon Christopher Alexander has died

Soft Ware Engineer. it's a crappy TLA.

working for me

vpribishon America produces enough oil to meet its needs, so why do we import crude?

that's not it at all because A) we produce it and export it and B) we will never, ever, EVER, run out of oil - we will however stop using it - so C) the incentive it to pump as fast as possible while it still has value.

vpribishon Is the U.S. Descending into Recession?

Forbes is garbage. It should be banned from HN

vpribishon Furiosa's Cat Feeder (2016)

that was a roller coaster since first I thought it was Top Gear, then it added Mythbusters, and then X-Files - then I got it.

vpribishon Nuclear startup Oklo gets thumbs-down from regulators

got a link?

vpribishon Ask HN: News site that provides world updates only when relevant?

isn't that the Chemtrails guy? yep

https://www.worldaffairsbrief.com/keytopics/Chemtrails.html

vpribishon The untold story of the world’s biggest nuclear bomb

it's like an idiom, man.

vpribishon America is substantially reducing poverty among children

in the current context of this experiment rent dropped by 30% in SF while this was going on. Sure some of that was people fleeing dense urban areas to escape lockdowns, but also some was people decamping because the economic pressure to work in a city was lifted. UBI might be a terrible threat to landlords' incomes as people redistribute.

vpribishon Renaissance executives agree to pay around $7B to settle dispute with IRS

dated info here, but they've always said the fund is capacity-limited so has to throw off billions in profits per year, it does not get to stay and compound.

vpribishon Is that ship still stuck?

the stern is stuck already in the other bank

vpribishon How to Destroy the Earth (2006)

he had me going until "...that made us a species with amnesia and wiped out almost all traces of a former high civilisation of prehistoric antiquity"

This summarizes the evidence nicely: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas_impact_hypothesi...

vpribishon AMC, GameStop Give Hedge Fund Mudrick Capital $200M in Gains

hear, hear. I've been flagging and downvoting till I'm just disgusted. the HN community overall appears to be as credulous and naive as any other. If we don't take out the trash this place is going to stink.

vpribishon “WSB veterans know that they're making a suicide charge for the memes”

shorting gives incentive to uncover companies which are overpriced - this is good for uncovering frauds, debunking pumpers, and for simply getting the fundamentals in the open so the market can price it more accurately.

vpribishon GameStop Is Rage Against the Financial Machine

yeah - this is just a squeeze. they happen. any sophisticated player in the market will recognize this as a normal (though not common) thing.

the weird and new part is that the people cornering the market are a horde of retail traders who are colluding in the open, but in a way regulators probably don't have tools to address.

vpribishon GameStop Is Rage Against the Financial Machine

yes for hedge funds. some market-making entities are legitimately allowed to be short without borrowing, but is it absolutely not just any random hedge fund!

vpribishon GameStop Is Rage Against the Financial Machine

Alice lends a share to Bob. Carol buys the share from Bob. Carol lends the share to Doug. Ellen buys the share from Doug.

The share has been lent twice.

There is one share, and Ellen owns it for real.

Everyone else has these agreements involving collateral and promises to get/give a share back.

vpribishon Google Finance Finally Updated

at a point in time and within a country/region, mostly yes. It works fine for humans, but is really messy when you try to make it rigorous enough for software.

vpribishon Low parental income in childhood linked to increased risk of mental disorders

flame on, brother. They could have done some work that advances the world a little but did not. Instead they just threw keyword-bait into sciencey echo chamber.

vpribishon $1 hearing aid could treat millions with hearing loss

here's a more detailed write-up including pictures of the device:

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

It's a crude, bulky, ugly, and fragile thing and the $1 price is not realistic - but it would be less than $10. It seems like a decent product for the poorest places - which is their goal.

The hearing aid biz in the US is glaringly inefficient and obviously ripe for disruption - but this product will not do it here. There's definitely a demand for hearing aids in the couple-of-hundred dollar range that doesn't require audiologist visits and insurance hassle - but the entrenched interests will not help bring it about.

vpribishon αcτµαlly pδrταblε εxεcµταblε

cute title; but not searchable, machine translatable, or screen-reader friendly.

vpribishon Science Fiction Books I’ve Read (2018)

wholeheartedly agree. A female friend wanted me to recommend some classic sci-fi since it had influenced me so much. I knew they were going to have aged badly on social issues but, my god, they are unreadably awful. Even Bradbury whom I considered a good writer, not just a creative thinker - and it's the same problem. Same issue finding classic video games - pervasive, unavoidable, and utterly unnecessary biases that ruin the works.

vpribishon Hackers use an ordinary light bulb to spy on conversations 80 feet away

already submitted here, from the real source not the lousy forbes article : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23498185

vpribishon Manned fighter to face autonomous drone next year

shouldn't this have happened about 20 years ago?

vpribishon The Power of Prolog

has anyone here ever used prolog in production - like real world, making money, production? How about in real world research where it produced no-kidding actual value? From what I can tell it is only useful these days as a academic example of an alternative type of language. Is there something else that has carried the torch forward?

vpribishon Federal Reserve slashes interest rates to zero

https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/pressreleases/mone...

last item, heading is "Reserve Requirements"

"... the Board has reduced reserve requirement ratios to zero percent effective on March 26"

vpribishon Beware of criminals pretending to be WHO

paranoid much? this is a super-easy, helpful thing to be aware of and you're just here to disparage? why did you even bother commenting? go for a walk or something because this is not a healthy way to act

vpribishon The spine of San Francisco is now car-free

point and speak?

vpribishon Httpx: A next-generation HTTP client for Python

fwiw:

I've moved to Trio over asyncio (I did plain old async for a couple years and Trio makes a ton of sense)

Quart-trio over Flask (just to get a Trio-friendly flask-a-like server) - plain old aiohttp worked really well too. It takes a bit more roll-your-own work, but you get exactly what you want.

peewee over SQLAlchemy (less committed to this change, but peewee has been fine so far and is much more streamlined) I'm mostly just using SQLite. the async version of the ORM looks pretty new, i'm not using it yet.