Hacker News: ProxCoques

New comment by ProxCoques in "The Fannie and Freddie trade is back"

ProxCoques — Sun, 12 Jan 2025 09:34:33 +0000

> In a crisis, state intervention works, actually.

There, fixed that for you. Stop calling literally anything that isn't 100% raw free market capitalism "socialism".

New comment by ProxCoques in "Why America's economy is soaring ahead of its rivals"

ProxCoques — Thu, 05 Dec 2024 07:43:17 +0000

Also by the Fed: 4 in 10 Americans lack enough money to cover a $400 emergency expense:

https://fortune.com/2023/05/23/inflation-economy-consumer-fi...

New comment by ProxCoques in "Why America's economy is soaring ahead of its rivals"

ProxCoques — Wed, 04 Dec 2024 20:18:29 +0000

Capitalists as in capitalist governments centrally organising commercial legislation and regulations, subsidies, tariffs, standards, etc.

New comment by ProxCoques in "Why America's economy is soaring ahead of its rivals"

ProxCoques — Wed, 04 Dec 2024 10:07:43 +0000

All "capitalist" economies have very large amounts of central planning for them to function (not to mention state subsidies and other protections from failing to make money), and use taxation and the national debt for that. Socialism plans centrally to the same extent that capitalist economies do, but also has the state owning the infrastructure that the economy relies upon. So it doesn't need to tax for that purpose. Socialism in that sense has never actually been practiced historically though, in the same way as there has never been "capitalism" in the sense of no central planning or regulation. Luckily.

New comment by ProxCoques in ".an, the TLD that ceased to exist"

ProxCoques — Wed, 27 Nov 2024 18:44:46 +0000

Didn't somebody register dot.com and had an email address of dot.dot@dot.com? You could have dot.dot@dotsucks.com

New comment by ProxCoques in "The price of shutting down coal power, and what would be gained"

ProxCoques — Sat, 16 Nov 2024 08:30:10 +0000

My understanding on China's coal plants is that it's not the number of them, it's whether they're running that counts. Coal-fired generation is currently cheaper than storage for backing up wind and solar generation and their plants are typically running about 50% of the time right now, expected to run less often as storage and more renewables come online. So China’s coal use could fall despite it adding more capacity.

https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/china-coal-plants

New comment by ProxCoques in "(UK) Government crackdown on single-use vapes"

ProxCoques — Thu, 24 Oct 2024 17:02:50 +0000

If (and it's a big if) the human race survives to deal with the effects of climate change, the next great battle will be to prevent waste from becoming the existential problem.

New comment by ProxCoques in "The racist AI deepfake that fooled and divided a community"

ProxCoques — Sat, 05 Oct 2024 07:55:23 +0000

I used to naively think that some kind of PKI/trust network for online media would have to rise up to thwart misinformation.

But anger is the real the reason why people want to believe obviously fake info about how Mexicans are manipulating the weather. We live in a society that tells you that you are free: freedom to work hard, treat people right and do the right thing. Then health, wealth and happiness will be yours.

But what if you do all those things and see the opposite happening to you and those around you? You want reasons. 5G brain control, Bill Gates and the Deep State all look like great explanations because long arcs of neoliberal monetarism and deregulated economics is, well, boring and quite hard to understand. So who cares about some AI fakery when that's going on?

New comment by ProxCoques in "Please Don't Make Me Download Another App"

ProxCoques — Fri, 04 Oct 2024 07:29:19 +0000

Not downloaded that app, but does it deliver exactly the same features as the web app but just look a bit different? If so, I wonder whether anyone working in the respective web and app departments sometimes wonders why their company maintains two separate apps that do the same thing. I know I did.

Edit: Oh, offline mode. Towering profits?

New comment by ProxCoques in "Please Don't Make Me Download Another App"

ProxCoques — Fri, 04 Oct 2024 07:14:34 +0000

The weird thing is that companies will pay for entirely separate engineering, product and marketing departments for their apps which duplicate their web apps in every way (or usually a bit less), not to mention being under the thumb of the app stores - all for the sake of notifications.

I'm no bean-counter, but that seems very odd to me.

New comment by ProxCoques in "Evolving GitHub Issues"

ProxCoques — Wed, 02 Oct 2024 07:57:02 +0000

Issues are a mess because they get used like bulletin boards for any random brain fart anyone has, despite Issue Templates trying to plead otherwise.

IMO the way to fix this is to gestate all issues in Discussions. Then, when a clear and agreed resolution is hammered out there, a maintainer creates an Issue (or just does a PR) referencing that Discussion. This would have the side effect of encouraging people to contribute to projects more when they can clearly see what needs picking up.

New comment by ProxCoques in "Evolving GitHub Issues"

ProxCoques — Wed, 02 Oct 2024 06:35:17 +0000

Element is a great example with well over 3,000 open issues, most of which would be far better worked out in Discussions from which the maintainers could raise issues or PRs from whatever the outcome of the conversation was (if any). But they don't have Discussions because...

New comment by ProxCoques in "96% of climate policy since 1998 failed"

ProxCoques — Tue, 01 Oct 2024 19:24:54 +0000

Literally on the day you posted that comment:

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/sep/30/end-of-an-e...

New comment by ProxCoques in "Evolving GitHub Issues"

ProxCoques — Tue, 01 Oct 2024 19:20:49 +0000

Yes, we've got that and it does help a bit. But we're often forced to be heavy-handed and just close junk issues with a comment asking the poster to open a Discussions thread. I feel bad about doing that though as it's hard not to come across as unfriendly.

New comment by ProxCoques in "Evolving GitHub Issues"

ProxCoques — Tue, 01 Oct 2024 14:36:29 +0000

If Issues could be restricted to repo maintainers (with everyone else using Discussions), it would make contributing to F/LOSS projects far easier because you could easily see what the team was "thinking" (PR lists aren't like that).

As it is, most Issues are polluted by random support requests, suggestions and open-ended chat which obscures the focus so much that sometimes I just can't tell what they need help with, so I don't bother offering.

I have no interest in the Jirafication of Issue though. None at all.

New comment by ProxCoques in "96% of climate policy since 1998 failed"

ProxCoques — Mon, 30 Sep 2024 09:23:50 +0000

I have a theory called "marginal cost pricing" that will blow his mind.

New comment by ProxCoques in "96% of climate policy since 1998 failed"

ProxCoques — Mon, 30 Sep 2024 09:09:16 +0000

> That changed this year and they're now building some very large battery farms and i invasive their coal builds will drop.

This is an under-considered point: just because energy sources like coal or solar, etc. are being installed NOW doesn't mean they will be there forever. Here in the UK, there is often a lot of opposition to solar and wind farms. But I would expect those eventually to be phased out in the same way as coal once better/cheaper forms of generation come along.

New comment by ProxCoques in "The Architecture of London Pubs (1966)"

ProxCoques — Sat, 28 Sep 2024 14:26:13 +0000

I see - I got the impression that the 70-80's was a sort of dark age for beer in the UK, with mass-produced low-quality stuff from the likes of Watneys and Carslberg etc. taking over, which CAMRA was a reaction against.

New comment by ProxCoques in "Ceefax and the Birth of Interactive TV"

ProxCoques — Fri, 27 Sep 2024 20:52:23 +0000

When was this? I was up in TVC (and later in that newer building up the road from it) in 1996 prototyping the BBC News Online publishing system with Fujitsu ICL. Didn't meet anyone from the Ceefax team though.

New comment by ProxCoques in "The Architecture of London Pubs (1966)"

ProxCoques — Fri, 27 Sep 2024 20:42:26 +0000

> The great brewers – Watneys, Whitbreads and so on—are disposing of all that rubbish: that’s out now, finished with, they say.

So was this the start of the great decline in the quality of brewing in the UK during the 70's that led to CAMRA and eventually to the microbrewery renaissance we had in the late 90's to 00's?