pjlegato

48 ms·

241.
by pjlegato 7y ago
If most people operated rationally, it would be correct to disregard slippery slope arguments as fallacies when analyzing the spread of ideas in society. However, most people do not operate rationally most of the time -- they use rough heur
242.
by pjlegato 7y ago
SRO does not necessarily imply squalor; middle and upper class SROs used to be common until they were zoned out of existence in the mid 20th century: https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft6j49...
243.
by pjlegato 7y ago
Most historic small roomed dwellings were not dismal "never again" tenements. Until zoned into illegality in the mid 20th century, tiny room SRO hotels and boardinghouses for middle and upper class people were common: https:&#x2F
244.
by pjlegato 7y ago
They did make a place called "New Amsterdam" that turned out pretty well.
245.
by pjlegato 7y ago
It's the other way around: US counties have any legal authority only at the pleasure of their state government, as expressed in its constitution or by statute. They are only immune from state government overrides of their authority to
246.
by pjlegato 8y ago
How about Olympics style scoring -- a panel of interviewers rate each candidate, then the highest and lowest individual scores are removed before averaging?
247.
by pjlegato 8y ago
Making that assessment is a part of the surgeon's job. Perhaps they realized at some point that many patients are enthusiastic for the procedure before it's done, but most grow to hate it afterwards -- and blame the surgeon for ha
248.
by pjlegato 8y ago
If you're optimizing purely for maximum ROI, then that's the correct product decision. Whoever achieves maximum ROI attracts the most additional capital investment, which enables them to lower unit costs and continue improving tha
249.
by pjlegato 8y ago
The article (and most of HN) refer to the local Silicon Valley jargon definiton of the word "startup": a company that is meant to grow extremely fast through the use of new technology. It's not a synonym for any entreprenuria
250.
by pjlegato 8y ago
It's not some sort of goal-oriented nefarious plot to keep poor people out of the rich people's club by alienating them through language choice. It's a realist description of how early stage startups actually work empirically
251.
by pjlegato 8y ago
There should be a name for this pattern, so we can easily refer to it in the future. As you say, it's quite common in business. The Diluted Insight Effect?
252.
by pjlegato 8y ago
Fairchild Semiconductor, or Intel?
253.
by pjlegato 8y ago
This seems to work well for Sinagpore. Competent people actually want to work in government. There's another key element: government officials are also required to open their personal finances to public inspection. This goes a long w
254.
by pjlegato 8y ago
I have personally used Linux on the desktop and the server for many years. I know many other engineers who have also done this, and we've compared notes extensively on the topic. Sadly, this anecdote is not an anomaly, but a fully typi
255.
by pjlegato 8y ago
This is exactly why Linux isn't more widely used: most business and professional users regard "switching to a different window manager in order to work around repeated graphics glitches" as a dealbreaker-level problem in a to
256.
by pjlegato 8y ago
This, right here, is an excellent case-in-point illustration of the reason Linux isn't widely used on laptops: even on expensive, high end hardware with excellent Linux support, and the most popular distribution, very basic functionali
257.
by pjlegato 9y ago
It's not free. The price is agreeing to allow your private data to be mined forever. You're the product, not the customer.
258.
by pjlegato 9y ago
This isn't just a technology problem. Most humans are also really, really bad at distinguishing causation from correlation. The very notion that these are even different things is utterly alien to most people. An AI that was even sli
259.
by pjlegato 9y ago
VCs by definition are looking for the Next Big Thing, not to finance someone's lifestyle business. The returns are too low to justify the huge risk. There are many other lower risk ways to get lifestyle-business sized returns for an in
260.
by pjlegato 9y ago
I'm from Pittsburgh, too. Not only do I find the term "rust belt" perfectly acceptable, I find your scolding strangers on the internet about its use to be pompously absurd. You are not "our" spokesman invested with
261.
by pjlegato 10y ago
The proposition that there is no such thing as objective truth is itself a proposition of a supposed objective truth. Postmodernism is therefore paradoxical and logically invalid, in a broad and categorical sense. Adhering to it is therefor
262.
by pjlegato 10y ago
This is rather naive. All countries in the world assert similar rights to search you and your devices at their borders. This is not by any means unique to the US. This is also very rare at the US border, as it says in the article. Most coun
263.
by pjlegato 10y ago
> the common reply I see to "this country does bad stuff" reduces to "well this country does bad stuff too!" It's not pedantic if you care about being rational. This act is a common logical fallacy called the &
264.
by pjlegato 10y ago
It's inaccurate to say that nearly every culture is against "drugs" -- nicotine and caffeine are both relatively powerful drugs, and are widely accepted by most cultures on Earth, freely sold in vending machines and at corner
265.
by pjlegato 10y ago
Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim has a similar plan - he says we should all work just three 11 hour days per week (and change the retirement age to 75). I think that, at least for jobs that require significant context-building spinup time at
266.
by pjlegato 10y ago
The CC0 licensing assertion is simple ass-covering by the museum's lawyers. Images that are exact replicas of works of artists who have been dead for 70 years or more are in fact public domain under US copyright law no matter what lice
267.
by pjlegato 10y ago
Yes, these images were already in the public domain. It was, however, not easy to find high resolution digital images of them online. This move is about making those images easily available on their website.
268.
by pjlegato 10y ago
The intractable problem is that what constitutes "more just" is highly subjective, highly debatable, and always will be. All historic societies believed they were being "more just" in some sense.
269.
by pjlegato 10y ago
Amazing tasting tomatoes are still common in North America, too. They're called "heirloom tomatoes" and are widely available at farmers' markets, as well as high end and organic grocery stores.
270.
by pjlegato 10y ago
How do you get enough people to want to go into the giant Faraday cage event space to make it economically viable to operate?

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