MassPikeMike

7 ms·

31.
by MassPikeMike 2y ago
Perhaps not. But you could still imagine a for-profit matchmaking service that would do a better job of aligning its interests with those of its clients. For example, it could collect only a small fee upfront with an agreement that if you
32.
by MassPikeMike 2y ago
If you can't get photons from the future, just get a hold of some thiotimoline, a compound invented by SF master Isaac Asimov that dissolves slightly before it is added to water. After first describing it in a spoof chemistry paper, he
33.
by MassPikeMike 2y ago
I have seen references to using uv for Python package management before and been thoroughly confused. I never realized it was not the same thing as the very nice asynchronous cross-platform library libuv ( https://libuv.org/
34.
by MassPikeMike 2y ago
I maintain a moderately complex site for a nonprofit, with an e-commerce back end and a searchable full-text database. The budget is a shoestring (there's, like, one e-commerce purchase a week) and I don't have the time to keep a
35.
by MassPikeMike 2y ago
Apple Vision and its wrappers provide bounding boxes for each line of text. That's slightly less convenient than Tesseract which can give you a bounding box for each word, but more than compensated by Apple Vision's better accurac
36.
by MassPikeMike 2y ago
I maintain a searchable archive of historical documents for a nonprofit, OCR'd with Tesseract over several years. Tesseract 4 was a big improvement over previous versions, but since then its accuracy has not improved at the same rate a
37.
by MassPikeMike 2y ago
The only nontrivial thing I use a word processor for is "mail merge" with a spreadsheet to create mailing labels. I used to have to keep a Windows VM around to do that in Microsoft Office. But a couple of years ago, I tried LibreO
38.
by MassPikeMike 2y ago
Certainly people contain multitudes, but in Heinlein's case some of the diversity of viewpoint was intentional. The happy universalism of "Stranger in a Strange Land", the libertarianism of "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress&
39.
by MassPikeMike 2y ago
From the article: "if hackers gained access to service providers’ core routers, it would leave them in a powerful position to steal information..." Sorry for the newbie question, but isn't most internet traffic end-to-end en
40.
by MassPikeMike 2y ago
In theory you are right that stock splits have no bearing on returns, but in practice it is well documented (see e.g. [1]) that "stock splits and reverse splits often result in short-term abnormal returns even though such split events
41.
by MassPikeMike 2y ago
Choosing labor as the value is worse than arbitrary, because labor is far less fungible than (say) commodities. The value of labor depends on whose labor it is for the job. Half an hour's labor by one person can turn apples, flour, but
42.
by MassPikeMike 2y ago
There was an article a while back about a guy who ingested poison oak in order to develop tolerance for the irritant. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40399224 I discussed that article with an old-timer here in New Engl
43.
by MassPikeMike 2y ago
But for that kind of thing it would seem to be much easier and probably cheaper just to mail order the drug from overseas, or even book an inexpensive flight and buy some. For example, bromhexine and ambroxol are cold remedies that many peo
44.
by MassPikeMike 2y ago
Thanks for making me aware of X-Accel-Redirect! The write-up discusses X-Accel-Redirect's functionality in the context of qbix. For me, the two were rather hard to tease apart in that context. So for others who feel that way, I would r
45.
by MassPikeMike 2y ago
The parent's pointer is to "MH-E", the emacs package, which is a great interface to MH for folks who use emacs to read their email. For folks who don't, I wanted to clarify that MH also works great outside of emacs. Its
46.
by MassPikeMike 3y ago
What do you call the Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act? https://www.fcc.gov/calea
47.
by MassPikeMike 3y ago
One very interesting project built on OpenPOWER, but with unique vector extensions, is LibreSOC, https://libre-soc.org/ . It promises to be fully open hardware as well.
48.
by MassPikeMike 3y ago
Great article that captures some of what made BBN a special place. And to some extent still does: although the company was acquired by defense giant Raytheon over a decade ago and www.bbn.com (the second-oldest .com domain name!) now redire
49.
by MassPikeMike 3y ago
I think it's in here: https://archive.org/stream/MerrilEdTheYearsBestSF05/Merril_e...
50.
by MassPikeMike 3y ago
No HN discussion of voluntary finger amputation would be complete without mentioning that it was central to a superb science fiction short story: Richard McKenna’s "Mine Own Ways", which appeared in the 1961 "Year's Best
51.
by MassPikeMike 3y ago
Once you have 700 units in the field, one failure per 700 days is no longer quite so rare.
52.
by MassPikeMike 3y ago
I'm on an Android phone in the US and got Chinese. I do have a Chinese keyboard installed, maybe that could have something to do with it.
53.
by MassPikeMike 3y ago
Suburban versions of restaurants in town are never really the same, but you might enjoy the Border Cafe in Burlington more than you expect. I haven't found anything like the East Coast Grill, though.
54.
by MassPikeMike 3y ago
"Most people no longer use gold as a store of value" may be true wherever you are, but not universally. The Times of India, for example, estimates than Indian households hold gold estimated at about 40% of annual GDP, and half of
55.
by MassPikeMike 4y ago
Burning plastics isn't great because of all the awful combustion products. Plasma gasification sounds like a good alternative. The molecular bonds in the plastics are broken and you end up with mostly carbon monoxide plus hydrogen gas,
56.
by MassPikeMike 4y ago
Topical acyclovir is indeed OTC in Taiwan. A largish tube costs about 7 USD. In the US I needed a prescription for it and that same size tube was a couple of hundred bucks.
57.
by MassPikeMike 4y ago
The newer, 3.0 inch XS12 from the same manufacturer has 4G LTE and Android 9.0. It's in the $80 range. http://www.cwell-hk.com/products/SOYES_XS12.aspx