Hacker News: Kurtose

New comment by Kurtose in "Mercedes-Benz commits to bringing back physical buttons"

Kurtose — Mon, 04 May 2026 03:12:16 +0000

Not a hater, just an example from today’s HN front page: Ableton from Berlin. World class UX/UI leading the DAW market for 25 years and counting. Not “Top 100” enough for validation? Just ask Thomas Bangalter. He’s taken it around the world to get lucky.

New comment by Kurtose in "German Navy blasts out Darth Vader theme on Thames"

Kurtose — Thu, 22 Aug 2024 13:16:51 +0000

Helicopters over Berlin blaring Ride of the Valkyries. https://youtu.be/VE03Lqm3nbI

New comment by Kurtose in "Why I program in Erlang (2012)"

Kurtose — Tue, 01 Nov 2022 20:26:49 +0000

Great writer & engineer. Worth a re-read every couple of years before heading back to your blub codebase.

New comment by Kurtose in "Philips Cuts 4,000 Employees"

Kurtose — Tue, 25 Oct 2022 20:03:39 +0000

Philips had 412,000 employees in 1974. Huge in its heyday. Currently 78,000. Sadly mismanaged into irrelevance for decades.

New comment by Kurtose in "Richard Li owns a personal top level domain"

Kurtose — Tue, 06 Sep 2022 05:59:12 +0000

The more relevant question is if US would agree to sell their TLDs in exchange for Liechtenstein paying for administration of _their_ governmental domains. Look up Liechtenstein GDP & wealth per capita.

New comment by Kurtose in "Why Does the U.S. Have the Best Research Universities? (2020)"

Kurtose — Thu, 25 Aug 2022 18:49:53 +0000

Why does the Premier League have the best football players?

Ranking universities by operating revenue will result in a rather good approximation of the Times Higher Education World University Ranking.

New comment by Kurtose in "Face masks effectively limit the probability of SARS-CoV-2 transmission"

Kurtose — Fri, 21 May 2021 08:50:23 +0000

Anecdata from a _very_ frequent flyer: Naomi Campbell’s Airport Routine (2019). Makes sense to me.

https://youtu.be/b-U_jT9qWvs

New comment by Kurtose in "Brendan Eich on the Lex Fridman Podcast [video]"

Kurtose — Mon, 15 Feb 2021 01:10:44 +0000

Three hours well spent. Never a dull moment in the browser business. From downward—funargs and twinkies to browser wars and bitcoin.

New comment by Kurtose in "Stripe raises $600M at nearly $36B valuation"

Kurtose — Thu, 16 Apr 2020 17:08:04 +0000

Stripe seems to have understood Sequoia's Black Swan memo well.

New comment by Kurtose in "GlobalFoundries sues TSMC, wants U.S. import ban on some products"

Kurtose — Tue, 27 Aug 2019 13:06:46 +0000

Why would Taiwan not have high tech factories? It has similar or higher level of development than - as a non-random example - France.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Development_Index

New comment by Kurtose in "How the Kleiner Perkins Empire Fell"

Kurtose — Wed, 24 Apr 2019 07:49:08 +0000

Spot-on.

New comment by Kurtose in "The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences (1960) [pdf]"

Kurtose — Sat, 06 Apr 2019 06:41:45 +0000

S = k. log W

New comment by Kurtose in "2018 was a terrible year for Swiss glaciers"

Kurtose — Wed, 07 Nov 2018 07:50:47 +0000

As a long distance ice skater I know that snow has a detrimental effect on ice growth due to its insulating effect.

Moreover the spring and summer of 2018 were warm [1] and sunny [2] in Europe. The comparison picture in the article of this tiny glacier after a cold [3] and cloudy [4] spring and summer of 2006 is not a solid basis for drawing conclusions.

[1] https://www.meteoschweiz.admin.ch/product/output/climate-dat...

[2] https://www.meteoschweiz.admin.ch/product/output/climate-dat...

[3] https://www.meteoschweiz.admin.ch/product/output/climate-dat...

[4] https://www.meteoschweiz.admin.ch/product/output/climate-dat...

New comment by Kurtose in "Elon Musk Settles SEC Fraud Charges"

Kurtose — Sun, 30 Sep 2018 03:46:30 +0000

Fun fact. Eric Schmidt was 45 when he was ‘the adult’ who joined Google’s board of directors as chairman in March 2001. Elon Musk is 47.

New comment by Kurtose in "The Sex Life of Samuel Pepys (2016)"

Kurtose — Thu, 09 Aug 2018 22:14:43 +0000

Pepys’ old house on Buckingham Street in London was my office for a couple of years. It was nice but he seems to have had more fun there. I did encounter fellow cyclist and similarly adulterous Boris Johnson on his bike around there before he became world famous bumbling Brexiteer and Foreign Secretary.

New comment by Kurtose in "google.com/humans.txt"

Kurtose — Thu, 14 Apr 2016 17:56:41 +0000

Human after all. http://www.ycombinator.com/humans.txt