lkrubner

61 ms·

601.
by lkrubner 5y ago
Back in 2010, I was invited to a party in a building down at the south end of Manhattan. We were 4 blocks from Wall Street. It was a new building, my friend had just moved in. The building was for the "$400,000 a year working stiffs&qu
602.
by lkrubner 5y ago
Stanislaw Lem had a genius for dissecting a certain kind of bureaucratic paranoia, and so I very much wish Lem was around to write something about the very bad intelligence that convinced Putin that the invasion of Ukraine would be easy. In
603.
Ask HN: Can anything make Git as popular as Subversion?
11 points by lkrubner 5y ago|16 comments
604.
by lkrubner 5y ago
"It gets harder to keep friends as you get older." I find that curious. When I was in my 20s we all bounced around, and there were no social networks, so there was no easy way to stay in touch. A lot of people were my best friends
605.
by lkrubner 5y ago
I feel like the whole of the 1990s was devoted to this. How to serialize an object and then what network protocol should be used? But increasingly over time, between 2000 to 2005, developers found it was easier to simply tunnel over port 80
606.
by lkrubner 5y ago
On the one hand, I've previously suggested that managers should be quicker to fire underperforming workers, but on the other hand, it's absolutely true that some disappointments from workers are because of my own lapses in communi
607.
by lkrubner 5y ago
Again, several economists, such as Paul Krugman, have pointed out that Bitcoin is a bit like gold in that it will be attractive when real interest rates are rock bottom, but it will be a laggard in an environment of rising interest rates. T
608.
by lkrubner 5y ago
Why is baybal’s comment dead? I believe it is correct.
609.
by lkrubner 5y ago
Neither part of that is true. If you sell French fries which cost you $1, and you sell them for $2, your profit is $1. If you can raise the price to $3 then you’ve doubled your profits. But your customers know that French fries are bad for
610.
by lkrubner 5y ago
Also, cast iron pans leach iron into food, and are therefore an effective way to treat anemia. Any one who needs a small, steady dose of iron can benefit from cast iron pans.
611.
by lkrubner 5y ago
"if we impose our values on everyone" When a country signs a treaty, it is agreeing to something, presumably because it sees some benefit in it. It is entering into a kind of contract, from which there are presumably multiple bene
612.
by lkrubner 5y ago
There is no hostile military alliance against Russia. There is no alliance in the world that has sought a military conflict with Russia.
613.
Ask HN: Is the war in Ukraine the end of freedom for cryptocurrencies?
6 points by lkrubner 5y ago|11 comments
614.
by lkrubner 5y ago
No, you have to count children because the definition of "children" changes over time. In 1788 most USA states had adulthood start at age 25. Now it is age 18. How would you track that change over time, except by counting the whol
615.
by lkrubner 5y ago
I think, for the sake of precision, we should just go with the percentage of the population that could vote. For dead democracies, we can reference their peak, so: Ancient Athens, 400s BC, 10% Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth, 1500s, 10% Brit
616.
by lkrubner 5y ago
I like this very much: "In reality, process is not my problem. It’s what discussions around new processes often preview within a company. Lack of focus. Peacetime thinking. Complacency." I recently wrote a small book for small sta
617.
by lkrubner 5y ago
Just to be sure we are talking about the same thing, you want a nice GUI interface for the NVD API? In other words, this: curl --verbose " https://services.nvd.nist.gov/rest/json/cve/1.0/CVE-2020-068.
618.
by lkrubner 5y ago
I'll take the whiskey.
619.
by lkrubner 5y ago
I just got done reading Sarah Chayes's excellent book Thieves Of State. She spent significant time working with the USA military in Afghanistan and she devotes substantial time to the idea that the CIA is a rogue agency that often unde
620.
by lkrubner 5y ago
Possibly that means "test positive" like when the CDC says "1/3rd of all Americans test positive for spinal meningitis" a surprising but true statistic. But spinal meningitis is asymptomatic in the overwhelming majo
621.
by lkrubner 5y ago
That already exists. I work on one version of that. Unless I've misunderstood you.
622.
by lkrubner 5y ago
I've mentioned this a few times on Hacker News, and I've gotten some great turnout, so I'll mention this again: I host a once-a-month party in New York City, mostly tech people, especially during the warmer months. See photos
623.
by lkrubner 5y ago
Are you suggesting that every nation on Earth follows the same business cycle? That is not even remotely correct. East Asia followed a counter-Western-cyclical cycle for most of the last 60 years. Even if you narrow the conversation to just
624.
by lkrubner 5y ago
Under a system of fiat currency, new currency is created when a bank makes a loan, typically under restrictions set by a central bank and within a price band that is loosely set by that central bank. There are 212 countries and hundreds of
625.
by lkrubner 5y ago
We are both wrong. I was thinking "Island south of Japan" and I said Taiwan, but I should have said Okinawa, which was conquered by Japan and part of the Japanese empire in the 1890s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki&
626.
by lkrubner 5y ago
I remember when I was in high school, I had some friends who studied karate, and they were like, "I finally made it to black belt." Meaning, they were a master now. They were 16 years old, and had maybe 3 years experience. In Taiw
627.
by lkrubner 5y ago
For my part, I've tried to be as overstated as possible, as you can tell from the title "Object Oriented Programming Is An Expensive Disaster Which Must End." Written in 2014, and discussed several times here on Hacker News,
628.
by lkrubner 5y ago
I think of all the famous brands that were once deeply loved by their customers: Coke-a-Cola in the 1920s, and later Cadillac in the 1940s and 1950s Boeing warcraft during WW II, and commercial planes afterwards, much loved by pilots The So
629.
Meta’s threat to close Facebook in Europe backfires as EU leaders agree(cityam.com)
5 points by lkrubner 5y ago|3 comments
630.
by lkrubner 5y ago
We know this much from planet Earth, and therefore this should be our starting point when considering life elsewhere: The Earth is 4.5 billion years old. Life existed by roughly 3.5 billion years ago, possibly earlier. Multicellar life only

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