Hacker News: Forlien

New comment by Forlien in "CEO pay and stock buybacks have soared at the largest low-wage corporations"

Forlien — Thu, 21 Aug 2025 23:31:04 +0000

You might be interested in https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/giving-people-money-helped-... which talks about the studies showing low effects for just giving money to Americans. It seems like just giving people money is still unproven to have impacts to make people healthier, happier (beyond the year they start giving money), get them better jobs, or improve their children’s intellectual development. There's still hope for targeted programs, but it changed my view on blanket payments.

New comment by Forlien in "Altman's Ambition"

Forlien — Sun, 18 Feb 2024 02:50:13 +0000

> what's the point to change the platform

Money. From https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/i10p4m/surv..., Substack gave him a "very very generous offer in terms of how the monetization would work".

New comment by Forlien in "Notice of termination of Twitter merger agreement"

Forlien — Sat, 09 Jul 2022 03:06:33 +0000

Not the OP, but when an investor acquires more than 5% of a stock, they have a limited time to disclose it. Elon disclosed his Twitter stock acquisition too late (20 days after instead of 10) and using the wrong form (Schedule 13G instead of Schedule 13D), painting him as a passive investor rather than an activist.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-04-06/elon-m... talks about it.

New comment by Forlien in "Prosecutor won't charge reporter who uncovered database flaw"

Forlien — Sun, 13 Feb 2022 08:23:11 +0000

Even if it became illegal, qualified immunity would protect the offical who made the threats, so officials will likely never be personally impacted by breaking the law and so it'll keep being broken.

New comment by Forlien in "Roblox October Outage Postmortem"

Forlien — Fri, 21 Jan 2022 03:01:48 +0000

Western society says that some decisions are only able to be made by people who are old enough. If you think about other decisions like gambling at a casino, joining the army or purchasing alcohol, then it might help you understand where they're coming from.

New comment by Forlien in "Omicron variant was 73% of U.S. covid cases last week"

Forlien — Tue, 21 Dec 2021 05:59:10 +0000

Per https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/long-covid-much-more-t..., it sounds like long term physical and mental impacts can stay with people who get hospitalized by the flu. Why are you more worried about long COVID than persistent effects of diseases that have been around longer like the flu?

New comment by Forlien in "A $10k poker win changed how I think"

Forlien — Tue, 07 Sep 2021 00:01:26 +0000

The best I can find is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluribus_(poker_bot), but it sounds like it was limited to a few demonstrations.

New comment by Forlien in "Nevada cops use civil forfeiture to steal a veterans life savings"

Forlien — Mon, 06 Sep 2021 18:04:28 +0000

Forgive me if this is a dumb question, since I'm not that well educated about this. Why can't they sue the police department or some similar body instead of the individuals? My understanding is that QI protects the individuals, but not the government itself from being sued; however, I don't see any discussion of that route when this defense is brought up.

New comment by Forlien in "I Am Deleting the Blog"

Forlien — Tue, 23 Jun 2020 09:08:10 +0000

According to posters on the subreddit for the blog, he emailed people who had been to in-person meetups for the blog. https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/hbk52q/psa_...

New comment by Forlien in "Facebook ordered to delete illegally collected data by Belgian court"

Forlien — Sat, 17 Feb 2018 02:58:18 +0000

From their page when you click apply:

> NB! Please be aware that e-Residency does not confer citizenship, tax residency, residence or right of entry to Estonia or to the European Union. It is not a visa or residence permit.

Too bad. It looks like this can't make you a citizen of the EU.

New comment by Forlien in "Call of Duty gaming community points to ‘swatting’ in Wichita police shooting"

Forlien — Fri, 29 Dec 2017 23:42:20 +0000

I've heard that some minor internet celebrities will call their police department when moving to a new area to warn about potential swatting calls. You could try to do the same, but it's probably hit-or-miss.

New comment by Forlien in "To Understand Rising Inequality, Consider Janitors"

Forlien — Sun, 03 Sep 2017 19:58:20 +0000

IQ might be a better predictor, but the linked paper says it's not a far better one:

"The results demonstrate that intelligence is a powerful predictor of success but, on the whole, not an overwhelmingly better predictor than parental SES or grades."

New comment by Forlien in "Canada's top court backs order for Google to remove firm's website from searches"

Forlien — Thu, 29 Jun 2017 03:52:14 +0000

Hmm, do you think there are some things you can say that would classify as an action you could be arrested for rather than an idea?

For example, yelling "Fire!" in a crowded building, offering a bribe, and threatening someone all seem like actions you could be arrested for in the USA where the only evidence is your speech (or a recording of it). Would these qualify as thought crimes to you and if so do you think there is a developed nation with free speech where they are accepted?

New comment by Forlien in "Carbonated beverages induce increased food consumption in rats"

Forlien — Wed, 17 May 2017 03:28:08 +0000

http://www.businessinsider.com/americans-are-drinking-less-s... says 41 gallons per capita in 2014. Converted, it's 0.4252 liters per day, so a liter per day is more than double the average.

New comment by Forlien in "Haskell Concepts in One Sentence"

Forlien — Sun, 26 Mar 2017 08:20:35 +0000

I feel a bit dumb asking this, but your explanation doesn't make it clear to me why you can't think of a bind on Maybe as a flatMap on a List with 0 (Nothing) or 1 (Just) elements. Could you elaborate further on how thinking of a bind on Maybe as null propagation eliminates it also being interpreted as a flatMap on a restricted-size list?

New comment by Forlien in "VS Code uses 13% CPU when idle due to blinking cursor rendering"

Forlien — Thu, 23 Mar 2017 17:35:52 +0000

Is this a case of a more specialized tool (with fewer but more focused features)? For example, you can view email in vim, and I'm sure you'd get better performance than Gmail for large emails but very few developers I know use vim for that.

New comment by Forlien in "Firefox 52 released"

Forlien — Tue, 07 Mar 2017 17:35:44 +0000

This seems strange. If you view page source on this comments page while logged in to Hacker News, does the source show you as not logged in? When I do that, my source contains the link to my profile (user?id=Forlien) at the top so I know it's giving me the logged-in version.

New comment by Forlien in "What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)"

Forlien — Mon, 06 Feb 2017 05:54:29 +0000

Where do you draw the line for how much you can cut costs and sacrifice a little bit of productivity or retraining? For example, I often see programmers talk about having proper tools to do their job, whether that be high quality keyboards, faster computers with more memory, or subscription IDEs like Intellij. Should government programmers be denied these things because it is possible to program quite well without them?

New comment by Forlien in "What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)"

Forlien — Mon, 06 Feb 2017 05:46:55 +0000

For what it's worth, I have a counter anecdote. I go to a university where for some computer science courses, your labs are on computers with a Linux desktop environment. Other students seem to do fine in these labs. Even so, when I look around the classroom during lectures, almost all the open laptops are Windows or Mac. Perhaps these students don't get enough exposure over the couple of courses or don't get shown enough of the reasons to switch to Linux.

New comment by Forlien in "Let's start using DuckDuckGo more often"

Forlien — Fri, 30 Dec 2016 17:34:03 +0000

You can add these shortcuts into your browser. On firefox, you can right click on a search box and specify some character(s). I'm sure there's a similar process on chrome too.