Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22595788

Points: 6

# Comments: 0

Of course, it's just a made-up graph, and his very first sentence implies the line is really trending downward in his opinion, but I'm always intrigued when an instance of the Ultimatum Game happens in real life:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimatum_game

Ironic that a so-called "expert in stereotyping" attributes successful research to "genius". Doubly so considering the content of the rest of the article.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1302884

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

That is one possible explanation, but I think it is really simpler than that: People like to talk about themselves, and they like to find out what other people are doing and talk about that too.

Of course, the $1 billion is revenue, not earnings, so that number is likely to be lower (or negative) and the ratio is likely (if history is any guide) to be higher due to that, so this kind of calculation is pretty pie-in-the-sky.

Dad used to get a shared hosting account for things like that, but now we have services that host content for free. They are much easier for Dad to use as well.

In this age of $20/mo VPSs and free content hosting, I'm honestly not sure how shared hosting survives. It's not as flexible as a VPS for hosting sites (and with more than two sites, isn't even as cheap), and it's not as easy to use (or as free) as Facebook.

http://www.facebook.com/friends/#!/friends/?filter=afp

I thought I'd try this out to see how it felt. Using only the criteria "do I care about what this person is doing today?" I managed to axe 122 people, and don't feel bad about it at all.

I see my "lucky 35" in real life quite often, and can tell them personal things in person, where it becomes a conversation. I'm not sure why I would ever need to share personal things online.

After all, the reason people become "online friends" to begin with is that you don't see that person enough in real life to maintain a friendship. If you really need to tell one of these pseudo-friends (or far-away family) something personal, there are many avenues for that, including email and the phone.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1268759

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

Ok. So let the developers go elsewhere.

The only party hurt here is Apple. If they want to shoot themselves in the foot, then let them do so. It's one thing to have an intervention for a friend that is an addict, quite another to save a company from itself.

As a friend put it, section 3.3.1 pisses off an extremely small subset of iPhone users... namely, the developers themselves. No one else cares. If they app ecosystem dies because of it, then people will jump to another smartphone. But until that actually happens (if ever), Apple can get away with whatever it wants, and trying to argue about it is not going to get you anywhere.

Although I'd also point out that even if it did run Emacs, I'm not sure how fun it would be to use Emacs' key combos with a software keyboard.

The company that comes up with a way to have the screen close to my face and the keyboard in my lap will win my vote. That is one reason that, while I use my netbook for hours on end to surf and read, I rarely use it for coding/writing. I like the freedom of having my (obnoxiously clicky) keyboard and screen in different physical locations.

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/25039

I realize that only helps if you have a browser with GM (like Firefox).

The community has grown, and these restrictions aren't "indexed to inflation" so to speak, so the bar is lower all the time. Also, while I personally agree that downvotes should only be used for trollish things (or really just done away with in favor of flagging), that has never been universally agreed upon (and I have seen this topic come up a lot).

A 1 megaton nuclear bomb detonated near the surface has a blast radius of about 1.7 miles. Pretty much nothing is left within this circle. Meaningful lethal damage only continues out to about 2.7 miles.

A 1.7 mile radius translates to roughly 9 mi^2. A 2.7 mile radius is roughly 23 mi^2. To carpet bomb New Hampshire, you'd need a lot of nukes. About 988 of them in fact.

Now 25 megatons is more interesting... you'd need about 68 of those to ensure <2% survival rate, or 25 of them if you are satisfied with <50% survival rate.

Of course, with good placement and strong winds, you could effectively kill 99% with only about 12-15 one megaton bombs. All that radioactive dust from the mushroom cloud comes down somewhere, and with a 15mph wind, that means a lethal dose within 90 miles of ground zero,

Source: http://www.nationalterroralert.com/nuclear/

Also, I agree with the implicit point I think you are making, which is that this reform really does nothing to address these issues. (Although I would also say that I'm fine paying for the drug development. We shouldn't stop doing something that benefits us just because others can take advantage.)

So yeah, I really don't have a rebuttal because I agree with you. I wanted much more out of reform, but at this point I'm happy with anything that might get us a bit closer, especially if it makes it easier to reform in the future (which may be wishful thinking).

That is a pretty big assumption to make. If you are saying that our understanding is limited at this point in time, then I'd agree. Barring loss of data/memory, our understanding will always be limited now compared to our understanding in the future.

But if you are claiming there is some fundamental upper bound to our understanding, and that a complete functional understanding of the human body is beyond that upper bound, then I have to ask what motivates that claim.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but that kind of thinking is what supports flawed pseudoscience like "intelligent design" (not claiming you support that, and really not trying to open that can of worms; just drawing a parallel). Sure, if you assume that our understanding is already at some kind of limit, and then show something we can't explain, it follows naturally that it must have supernatural origins. If, on the other hand, you realize that our inability to explain something is most likely just a function of time (eventually we'll learn enough that we will be able to explain it), then the argument seems absurd.

Was the plan hard to figure out for the media and other commentators? Probably, because they don't have access to the House rules people, nor do they think about procedural maneuvers all day.

In retrospect, passing two bills was a very elegant solution. By passing the Senate version straight up, they guarantee that at least some version of victory is achieved without having to deal with the 59 seat issue. Then sending an amendment package back to the Senate with only carefully chosen amendments that allow the reconciliation maneuver gives it a decent shot despite the loss of the supermajority. Had they tried to pass one bill that combined the original and the amendments, the filibuster could have killed it.