brownbat

70 ms·

601.
by brownbat 8y ago
It's weird the reaction on cryptocurrency prices today has been so correlated, you'd expect a flight from smaller more vulnerable coins into the larger market caps. Then again maybe everyone is just freaking out about the tether e
602.
by brownbat 8y ago
Fair warning, this is a bit of a comment trap, insofar as the post is less about lead per se, and more about a class of decision-making problems involving the allocation of scarce resources and massive uncertainty. But incidentally, public
603.
by brownbat 8y ago
> GDPR has caused some panic that's unnecessary. Maybe some companies have overreacted, but dismissing them feels a bit like blaming the user for bad UX. Couldn't you argue that a law that causes a panicked overreaction was a p
604.
by brownbat 8y ago
> Credit and debit cards are just a way of shifting dollars around A credit card is shifting a line of credit, an intangible promise to pay, a form of trust, that happens to be denominated in dollars. We can pretend it's just a bala
605.
by brownbat 8y ago
I was struck by the family that moved back in the article. They had a good job in the new location. What they didn't have was extended family or a community. The pure financial impact of extended family childcare can easily eat away a
606.
by brownbat 8y ago
That's like saying you can't buy anything with a VISA. Sure, transactions are intermediated through some consensus denomination for exchange. So? He still lost bitcoin and gained tacos. Just as someone else might lose a portion of
607.
by brownbat 8y ago
> The cat is out of the bag... Vigilant Solutions has been running this for years. Not just cops but tow trucks, bounty hunters, all kinds of private enterprising individuals have been building a collaborative commercially accessible dat
608.
by brownbat 8y ago
I don't know, EU members seem perfectly willing to toe literal rules for perverse outcomes in some areas. Open market gamesmanship, for one, such as the proliferation of national standards as a way to exclude 'single' market
609.
by brownbat 8y ago
> Uh, that's mostly not what judges spend their professional careers doing or what lawyers spend their academic careers doing. I disagree, based on my academic experience preparing to be a lawyer and my nerdy conversations with my f
610.
by brownbat 8y ago
That's more candid and balanced, and consequently more moving, than maybe anything else I've read about him.
611.
by brownbat 8y ago
Some have proposed even a token renewal fee to fund a registry, or even a postcard registry, which would eliminate the orphaned works problem while limiting the impact on publishers. Mostly this doesn't work because of the Berne Conven
612.
by brownbat 8y ago
> with the legislature so weakened it can exercise control over national policies > You can always interpret any SCOTUS decision in terms of ... immediate outcomes [but generally shouldn't] > This isn't such a case. The c
613.
by brownbat 8y ago
You can always interpret any SCOTUS decision in terms of the specific and immediate outcomes, but it takes you to somewhat odd conclusions. Like that a group of people who spent their entire academic and professional careers studying how su
614.
by brownbat 8y ago
That's actually a great example of what troubles me. If you click through to read the underlying research you get a massive jumble of conflicted studies, including several meta-analyses that fail to find any significant results. This g
615.
by brownbat 8y ago
That's fascinating and good info. I'm a little biased. We got a lot of information pushing us not to supplement from health professionals and organizations, and nothing on the risks of failure to thrive or the case for supplementa
616.
by brownbat 8y ago
> breastfed... is ideal whenever possible The AAP and WHO both endorse this position, and I can't find a reputable leading health org that argues otherwise. The more I read about the basis of the claim though the more confused I get
617.
by brownbat 8y ago
Clever social engineering is really customized, but social engineering that works "often enough" is mostly reducible to a flow chart. If you can automate it, your response rate only needs to be, what, like people clicking on spam?
618.
by brownbat 8y ago
Call me a sucker, but I do think electrification, AI, and space tech have a nonzero chance of improving humanity's future. Gil Scott Heron's right that rockets don't put food on the table though. So for more immediate problem
619.
by brownbat 8y ago
I'm sort of terrified about the opportunity cost to humanity when billionaires want to settle an idle theory about markets and start devoting cycles to that. If Buffett knew he was throwing down a gauntlet, I'd hope he would have
620.
by brownbat 8y ago
> HN does not, ceteris paribus, do a good job of upvoting the authoritative comments over the superficial riffing. Top comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16982493 Seems... fine? Our comments were useful enough
621.
by brownbat 8y ago
I think that's an interesting approach. For the record, I absolutely share your healthy suspicion that health sciences need a bit (much) more hand holding than some (most) other disciplines. To needle you slightly further, though, I&#x
622.
by brownbat 8y ago
As to the dots, I enjoyed this variation from xkcd, where I first encountered it: https://xkcd.com/blue_eyes.html It massively improved our play at Hanabi: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/98778&#x2F
623.
by brownbat 8y ago
We've had adblockers for fifteen years. It was reasonable to speculate that they might kill online publishing in the early 2010s maybe. But now? Print doesn't have easy adblocking, it's just you and a pair of scissors. Which
624.
by brownbat 8y ago
Double blind is not quite the only way to acquire knowledge. Even Karl Popper believed in astronomy.
625.
by brownbat 8y ago
I just hope they break out from the NPR One model, which is like a podcast app from a universe where NPR is the only group allowed to make podcasts.
626.
by brownbat 8y ago
> Having it seem like a bug would be an effective way to block it intentionally. Just like how only the true messiah denies his divinity, it doesn't give innocent bugs much of a chance. In fact, now we can show that all bugs are sus
627.
by brownbat 8y ago
I'd just like to see a voice interface that has any attempt at natural error correction. We do this in a hundred ways in English, emphasis, meta-words, too many to fold into a system. But with a little user prodding, I think you could
628.
by brownbat 8y ago
I find that theory really compelling... but if I look around for businesses sorted by margins, I find several counterexamples. Oil and gas as a sector has pretty mediocre margins. Energy generally, even when it's not a utility with gov
629.
by brownbat 8y ago
To several commenters: You're right, phone numbers aren't fixed. I went too far slipping that one in. My apologies. However... I generally don't remap remote phone numbers on my own equipment at home. I'm sure I could ru
630.
by brownbat 8y ago
The weird thing about this to me is that phone numbers always take you to the same phone, but domain names just involve me trusting some table I use to look things up. The internet is deeply democratic, maybe anarchic -- whatever rules I wa

More ›