rlucas

37 ms·

271.
by rlucas 12y ago
This. Good comment highlighting a super important insight: freshman Ec 10 thinking does not universally apply across all kinds of economic actors. In trying to apprehend reality as closely as feasible, it will not do to make assumptions li
272.
by rlucas 12y ago
No. You are trading uncertain gains of tax avoidance (to cast it in the nicest possible terms) for the certain cost of complications and distraction. You will certainly incur several thousand dollars in immediate costs for legal advice, fi
273.
by rlucas 12y ago
That's a particularly poor example (plans for a nuclear bomb) if you're trying to make the case that, at least in the US, there's "no such thing[]" as free speech. In fact, it was a form of plan for an atomic bomb t
274.
by rlucas 12y ago
That would be an exceedingly weird financial term. In effect, it would commit the investors to fronting cash, but give the managers an option as to whether and when to accept the cash at the agreed price (and deliver shares) or to reject s
275.
by rlucas 12y ago
That's not really true, especially as regards aluminum. The aluminum industry has some weird physical constraints. Alcoa has put out some engineering-heavy white papers on what actually happens and how the price and availability of pow
276.
by rlucas 12y ago
That should read culturally inferior, not morally.
277.
by rlucas 12y ago
Easy, bud. You're risking seeming uptight ;) The alien thing is a reference to "Unfunky UFO," by Parliament. I recommend you listen to it. And don't clap on the 2s and 4s.
278.
by rlucas 12y ago
Perl's "magic" variables like "$?" were not named to optimize keystrokes. Most of Perl 5's syntax comes from well established (for perhaps a decade) UNIX culture, from shell, awk, sed, and C syntax conventions.
279.
by rlucas 12y ago
My circle of friends used to joke about the "Republican Test." You administer it like this: play the song "I Heard It Through the Grapevine," ideally the Marvin Gaye version, and ask the subject to "clap along with
280.
by rlucas 12y ago
This table strongly suggests that there's something like a "slice of pie" pricing scheme in the government's contract with the service provider. That's a very common arrangement where the per-subscriber pricing is v
281.
by rlucas 12y ago
No, super wrong. Underneath the hood there are all kinds of things that go on and result in system() or similar calls. Think about every module in CPAN / PyPI / whatever. Any non-trivial Web app has a high likelihood of eventua
282.
by rlucas 12y ago
No, you fundamentally and dangerously misunderstand the bug. Your "exec($SomeVar)" example is a standard, unsanitized-input-passed-to-command-line type bug. Shellshock does something fundamentally different. Everything on the act
283.
by rlucas 12y ago
Terrible, awful legal pseudo-advice about DMCA and "ownership." Do not fall for this, devs. There is a very strong chance that a payment dispute will legally be viewed as just that -- a matter to be solved by negotiation and perh
284.
by rlucas 12y ago
There are other mechanisms for price discovery here that can avoid some of the downsides you describe. It needn't be a offer/counter-offer process where both sides see the numbers.
285.
by rlucas 12y ago
You've twice cited "looting", but that's not something that's been relevant since Sunday night.
286.
by rlucas 12y ago
The only reports of looting and burning were from Sunday. The subsequent peaceful but heated protests, on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday nights (and, doubtless to be repeated tonight) involved no reports of looting and burning.
287.
by rlucas 12y ago
It's the "scalar fallacy." In a nutshell, the scalar fallacy is the false but pervasive assumption that real-world things (hotels, sandwiches, people, mutual funds, chemo drugs, whatever) have some single-dimension ordering o
288.
by rlucas 12y ago
Check your historical figures. There's no possible definition X of the major Allies (hint: USSR) for which you can support your claim that "Germany lost far more soldiers [or] civilians" than X. You're smoking crack by l
289.
by rlucas 12y ago
The "meat" of the article is PR hamburger for SoFi. (Not that SoFi aren't doing something genuinely interesting. But this is a straight-up advertisement. I'd bet a nickel that SoFi's agency even made the graphs fo
290.
by rlucas 12y ago
"why startups need to focus on comprehensive changes in owner's equity, not net income"
291.
by rlucas 13y ago
webwright's comments are almost alone in having any real wisdom here, IMO. The nerd brigade of HN (a brigade which I know and love) is failing all over itself. The truth is that equity in "startups" -- defined as that thing
292.
by rlucas 13y ago
Hey, you don't need to be a statistician to understand the "data mining" fallacy. If you look at 100 different null hypotheses, and you set p<.05 as your threshold for rejecting, then you're going to find ~ 5 ones yo
293.
by rlucas 13y ago
I recall some interesting '70s psuedomystical icons / labels on the keyboard during Ripley's self-destruct sequence. "Agaric," "yoni," and "lingam" among others. Will these start popping onto m
294.
by rlucas 13y ago
It wasn't "the Japanese" that didn't do it safely at Fukushima. It was GE, which is about as American as you get, along with Toshiba and Hitachi. Also it was the 1960s, which is the age of the technology deployed in th
295.
by rlucas 13y ago
It's important to remember that in most states, sentences of under one year are served in county jails, not state prisons. The state prison numbers you describe are likely significantly to understate both absolute numbers and relative
296.
by rlucas 13y ago
No, you're missing that the original GET requests can be performed in some cases over HTTP, either by forgery or by surreptitiously spoofing the user's own browser into doing it. No need to have compromised the SSL/TLS.
297.
by rlucas 14y ago
It's incorrect to say that grandparent's quote "not effective" is the same as your phrase "no effect whatsoever." The suggestion, following Irving Kirsch's book, that the SSRIs are broadly "not effective," is a statement about the distribut
298.
by rlucas 14y ago
Thanks, very helpful. The only thing I'd add is that the long rescission period is applicable only to consumer ACHs; if you make sure to stick with the "Corporate Credit and Debit" (CCD) transaction type, I believe the limit is a workable
299.
by rlucas 14y ago
Terrible, shortsighted comment. You're really judging the value of an informational API on absolute price per dip?? I know of a guy who has a database for which he charges $5000 per lookup. Is that not a "reasonable price?" Well, turns
300.
by rlucas 14y ago
Worse than even the expected "Cringely level" of analysis. Bubbles (despite appearances) aren't pushed by inputs; they're pulled by expectation of outputs. That's why, roughly, the pace of VC dollar inputs is a lagged dependent variable o

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