mytherin

32 ms·

211.
by mytherin 7y ago
Sorry but you are dead wrong. AirBnBs have a significant negative effect on the neighborhood, especially in highly touristic cities. People renting AirBnBs are much likely to be louder and less respecting than long-term neighbors because th
212.
by mytherin 7y ago
This sounds like a horrible way of running a society. This is like the government intentionally keeping the tax code complicated and making filing taxes difficult so companies can exist that then fix that problem. You are forcing the govern
213.
by mytherin 7y ago
> It isn't a good idea to have rogue government departments "competing" with privately funded alternatives at public expense on their own initiative. Why not? Does every minor thing that any government funded organisatio
214.
by mytherin 7y ago
Isn't that why people call it late capitalism, because it is in its final phases? Pure, unfettered capitalism has been dwindling for a long time, mostly because of issues like slavery, severe exploitation of workers and forced child
215.
by mytherin 7y ago
This argument can be made against anything the government does. * Should the government not build roads because it might hurt the profits of toll road companies? * Should government workers not be able to open source their code or data beca
216.
by mytherin 7y ago
That makes a lot more sense, but if it is just input then why not do the conversion of the string "71" to the efficient byte representation of 1971 when it is moved into the storage. If the computer can do a mapping of "71&qu
217.
by mytherin 7y ago
If you are fighting for bytes then storing dates as "DD-MM-YY" strings is very inefficient, as you are wasting a factor 4X on storage compared to just storing the days since 1900 as a 2-byte integer. I understand that storage used
218.
by mytherin 7y ago
Perhaps you could expand on this as I was not involved in Y2K myself. Storing dates with 2 digit years doesn't seem to make much sense as a storage saving mechanism for me. If you want to store only the year, why not store the years si
219.
by mytherin 7y ago
Not necessarily. Excess panic can easily create more destruction than the disease ever would have. Look at the hospital that was burned down in Iran because of misinformation about the coronavirus.
220.
by mytherin 7y ago
Or because there are no competitors. Allocating parking slots based only on bidding has the potential for one company to become a monopoly by purchasing all the slots, allowing them to charge ridiculous prices while providing bad service.
221.
by mytherin 7y ago
In the long term supply and demand solves the problem, yes, but in the current situation that is not necessarily true. Raising prices incentivises people to hoard masks, buy up all masks they can from retail for lower prices, steal masks, e
222.
by mytherin 7y ago
I would argue the exact opposite. Taxes substantially favor two smaller incomes over one bigger one because of tax brackets. Two people earning 30k before taxes will get a lot more money after taxes than one person earning 60k. Because of t
223.
by mytherin 7y ago
Forgot to multiply by 20, it's actually around $0.15 per request. Still high but certainly not as crazy.
224.
by mytherin 7y ago
It is still speculated to be more contagious than the flu, and the flu itself is no joke. Many people will die if the coronavirus gets out of control. However, it is certainly not the end of the world others are claiming either. Being aware
225.
by mytherin 7y ago
While unhealthy individuals cost the health care system more early on in their life, healthy individuals tend to cost more in the long run because individuals live longer and thus require more treatment [1, 2]. In fact, one could argue unhe
226.
by mytherin 7y ago
The 2% mortality rate of the coronavirus is likely greatly overestimated [1]. Early mortality rates of diseases are generally estimated to be too high because only severe cases are tested. The exact same happened with H1N1 (Swine Flu): init
227.
by mytherin 7y ago
The true death rate is unknown, the currently measured case fatality rate is 20X higher than the flu. This should be taken with a big grain of salt, because early case fatality rates are generally highly overestimated due to mostly testing
228.
by mytherin 7y ago
Monopoly is about land, and monopoly teaches people a correct view of land: land is a zero-sum game. It is striking how much real-life has mirrored monopoly: when the game starts and there is plenty of land to go around, there are no proble
229.
by mytherin 7y ago
Prisoner's dilemma. A single wealthy person giving up their wealth will not have a large enough effect on society to actually change anything. It will only make them worse off (as they now have less wealth). From the perspective of a s
230.
by mytherin 7y ago
When bots have human names and human profile pictures they are most certainly pretending to be human. But even if they do not have these, by not explicitly mentioning they are bots on social networking sites (including sites like reddit) th
231.
by mytherin 7y ago
The difference is that the bot is pretending to be a person. People are herd animals, they are easily manipulated to follow views that the herd sees as "correct". Having bots that are pretending to be people expressing their view
232.
by mytherin 7y ago
I think Java's flavor of exceptions are especially horrible, as you mentioned a string->int parse failing is typically not exceptional at all but rather expected. However, I do think there is a place for exceptions: exceptional situ
233.
by mytherin 7y ago
Stronger in what sense? Eradicating other cultures/people? Brainwashing/controlling people not to change their beliefs and stick to their culture? Are these properties you think are desirable in a culture?
234.
by mytherin 7y ago
Both primary and high school are mostly glorified baby sitting facilities. The reason kids stay at school from 9-5 is so the parents can go to work in the meantime. Traditional schools are very inefficient as a means of teaching kids.
235.
by mytherin 7y ago
Main author of DuckDB here, I did not expect to see this mentioned here. DuckDB is a relational DBMS geared towards efficiently handling large analytical-style workloads locally. It is similar to SQLite in the sense that it operates locally
236.
by mytherin 7y ago
As a user of VSCode, I use it in spite of it being based on Electron because there are no other good alternatives. It is noticeably very slow on many tasks, and has a large startup time. I recently had it basically become unusable when open
237.
by mytherin 7y ago
Couldn't that also be explained by the fact that more women attending college than men is a relatively new development, and most administrative/leadership/professor positions are held by older people, hence the gender ratio w
238.
by mytherin 7y ago
I live in Amsterdam and I would argue the exact opposite. There are tons of crappy restaurants, bars and night clubs here, primarily in the more touristic places. These places serve shitty food and have shitty service. They get away with it
239.
by mytherin 7y ago
Part of the SQLite test cases are open source (the logic tests), but indeed unfortunately the biggest part are not. You can purchase a license for these tests though, so saying nobody has seen them is likely incorrect. Either way, the fact
240.
by mytherin 7y ago
How would the need of an army disappear for a country that would use bitcoin as its national currency? I really see no relation between the two. The currency that is in use has no effects on an invading force. This xkcd seems relevant as we

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