Hacker News: dwills

New comment by dwills in "A deadly gut infection may come down to a sugar in ice cream"

dwills — Sun, 14 Jan 2018 23:56:21 +0000

A missing piece of information is that trehalose is a rather new additive. It was very expensive to manufacture until about 20 years ago when a new cheaper process to make it was found. And voilà, because it appears safe and is somewhat useful, it starts showing up in all sorts of products without any labeling indication. And the fallout is just now being noticed. One of the commenters used the phrase "food science" ... hah! We're the guinea pigs!

New comment by dwills in "Is Facebook a Structural Threat to Free Society?"

dwills — Tue, 14 Mar 2017 15:02:06 +0000

Yes.

New comment by dwills in "Preschool can provide a boost, but the gains can fade surprisingly fast"

dwills — Sat, 18 Feb 2017 05:06:52 +0000

Grade level schools, adopted in the USA in the middle of the 19th century, essentially dumb down those who are a bit more advanced at an early age. It takes a few grades to destroy the good work of parents preparing their preschoolers, but the playing field has pretty much been leveled by 3rd grade. :(

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussian_education_system#USA

New comment by dwills in "Whither Swift?"

dwills — Thu, 16 Feb 2017 04:51:55 +0000

The Swift support on Linux is the bare minimum required to say "Swift supports Linux". I seriously doubt that Swift will ever be any more "portable" than Objective-C. That is, Swift, like Objective-C, is portable in theory, but nobody uses it for anything except to write programs for Apple's iOS/macOS platform.

New comment by dwills in "Stroustrup's Rule and Layering Over Time in Rust"

dwills — Sat, 17 Dec 2016 03:43:00 +0000

No you are not the only programmer who thinks that languages are going in the wrong direction. For example, the lambda operator of Java 8. All it does is hide the (very useful) name of the method being called. I'm forever having to look up the definition of some arcane single method interface to ascertain the method name so I can have a clue as to what the -> operator is doing/calling. :(

New comment by dwills in "Tesla reports first quarterly profit in more than three years"

dwills — Wed, 26 Oct 2016 23:10:06 +0000

Another take on the Tesla financial story:

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-10-26/tesla-earnings-smas...

New comment by dwills in "Orbit – Distributed, serverless, peer-to-peer chat application on IPFS"

dwills — Sun, 16 Oct 2016 18:09:11 +0000

Another false headline. "serverless"? Nope. A redis server must be running.

New comment by dwills in "Walmart Paid Its People More to Get Cleaner Stores and Higher Sales"

dwills — Sat, 15 Oct 2016 15:05:39 +0000

The headline is false. Far down in the article, find this nuggest:

"The profit landscape is less sunny. Operating income for Walmart’s United States stores was down 6 percent in the most recent quarter, reflecting higher labor costs and other new investments."

And while employee headcount from 2008 is mentioned, there is no mention of the number of employees who have been let go to allow for paying high wages to the remaining workers.

This article is yet another example of how the NY Times is a well-disguised propaganda arm of the Democratic Party.