Hacker News: hjk05

New comment by hjk05 in "What Swimming Taught Me About Happiness"

hjk05 — Thu, 01 Aug 2019 11:04:46 +0000

I’m confused as to what you are suggesting here? Normally you swim right side of the lane and turn going back on the “left side”, with room to pass on the inside unless the lane is filled with two many people. What does using two lanes add, except ruining your turns?

New comment by hjk05 in "28% of Europeans Can't Afford a 1 Week Annual Holiday"

hjk05 — Wed, 31 Jul 2019 16:54:56 +0000

I’m from Europe and would similarly call bs. Literally everyone I know can afford a one week vacation. And that includes a couple on social services one friend who’s on long term sick leave and a homeless friend.... but I live in a bubble on the far right hand of the chart; Denmark, not in Romania or Greece, so my personal experience isn’t that telling. That said I do think they are artificially pushing the numbers higher by including 16 year olds. For jobless teens it’s obvious they “couldn’t afford” vacation, but again every teen I know travels with their parents paying. I think 10% being unable to travel in Denmark is extremely overshooting it. It’s more likely less than 2% in the extreme scenario. As I said I know unemployed and homeless people who still have enough to travel.

New comment by hjk05 in "Why Hypercard Had to Die (2011)"

hjk05 — Sun, 28 Jul 2019 23:10:05 +0000

Because newer copies don’t include the nostalgia that’s one of the primary drivers for people’s admiration.

New comment by hjk05 in "What Swimming Taught Me About Happiness"

hjk05 — Sun, 28 Jul 2019 00:09:35 +0000

They exist and they are very annoying compared to regular old 50m lanes. You end up having to constantly overcompensate to one side (obviously) but also you suddenly have to either burn in a constant bias to your technique (bad) or be constantly aware of the boundaries, which ruins the normal flow of pool swimming. They are fun for families and kids who only ever do one or a half round, but if you like swimming just stick to traditional pools.

New comment by hjk05 in "Pioneer manipulates scores to pick winners"

hjk05 — Fri, 26 Jul 2019 19:04:05 +0000

Do experts take into account previous performance and overcompensate current score to ensure previous top players are pushed out the top 10?

Data seems to suggest this, which is going to extreme lengths beyond “expert votes”. And is more akin to changing the rules at the last minute to avoid living up to the promises put out by the platform.

If this is not the case then perhaps you can release more data to illuminate the oddities highlighted by the article?

New comment by hjk05 in "The dockless scooter industry is going after a repossessor and a bike shop owner"

hjk05 — Thu, 25 Jul 2019 10:32:43 +0000

The scooters have GPS, have the companies required by law to send out representatives to clean up any scooter on private property that hasn't explicitly given permission for them to be there, and allow the city to mark of any public area they want as forbidden as well.

New comment by hjk05 in "How Banksy Authenticates His Work"

hjk05 — Thu, 25 Jul 2019 10:10:46 +0000

There’s nothing cryptographic about this. It’s a central authority that either says “yes it’s real” or not. The system revolves around trust in that central authority. Everyone can easily fake a certificate which cannot be independently falsified without asking that central authority, who will be more likely to check their books than to do anything related to the actual certificate.

New comment by hjk05 in "GitLab – A $1B business where all employees work remotely"

hjk05 — Mon, 22 Jul 2019 15:30:07 +0000

Salary is a market value. Your arguments read like “if a BigMac costs half a Dollar in a developing country then the BigMac is inherently worth half a dollar and should cost the same in the US”

New comment by hjk05 in "Saving the World from Spreadsheets [video]"

hjk05 — Sun, 21 Jul 2019 16:31:03 +0000

Seems that bootstrapping and outlier detection is the way to go independent of what language of “editor”(Eg notebook use) you are using.

The really cool thing here is that they parse the excel formula in order to automatically “figure out” how they can perform the bootstrapping.

New comment by hjk05 in "Tell HN: Pluralsight and the dark-pattern of auto-renewals"

hjk05 — Thu, 18 Jul 2019 12:00:42 +0000

If you buy a subscription you have that subscription until you cancel it. It wasn’t “renewed”, they just charged you the yearly cost. Imagine if your gym membership was forced to ask you every month if you still want the subscription and would have to cancel it if you didn’t respond.

That said, if you want to now cancel it get in touch with their costumer service they’ll likely help you.

New comment by hjk05 in "In Denmark's Train Dream, the Next Big City Is Only an Hour Away"

hjk05 — Thu, 18 Jul 2019 11:53:26 +0000

Shaving 20minutes off of a trip that takes more than an hour is not comparable to going from horses to cars. Current routes and travel times are perfectly fine when you ask the consumers, they just want it affordable. No one wants to take the train when flying costs almost the same.

New comment by hjk05 in "What's Coming in Python 3.8"

hjk05 — Thu, 18 Jul 2019 10:35:22 +0000

They could... but then they wouldn’t return the interpolated string, and they’d be just like using format, just saving the characters “.format” which ruins the exact thing people like about them.

New comment by hjk05 in "A Government Guide to Keeping Insulin Unaffordable"

hjk05 — Fri, 12 Jul 2019 17:04:06 +0000

> I’m guessing because pharmas want to milk their golden cow

It’s a wired definition of milking a product to lower your take home year after year. The PBMs have rebates close to 70% they are literally making more on the drugs than both the companies producing them and the companies providing them through insurance. List prices are high because the people who own the consumer side of the market don’t care how high the prices go as long as they can set up rebates that increase their own profits.

New comment by hjk05 in "I was wrong about spreadsheets (2017)"

hjk05 — Fri, 12 Jul 2019 15:33:38 +0000

Your strengt is your weakness is your strength. Spreadsheets excel at ad-hoc things because they aren’t systems, they don’t have restrictions and limitations on what data you can pull in or where you store it or what you calculate. They are horrible for all the same reasons, people end up spending tons of time semi manually joining up data from different sheets and copy pasting numbers from emails into calculations. The sheets take on a life of their own as they are emailed around between people, and errors like crop up: “oh, I think you have the version of the sheet that doesn’t work in October[real example], that’s got fixed in a version that was sent to Peter, check the mail stream to see who the original was sent to..” And they grow over time without any obvious way of optimizing old dependent calculations so you end up with sheets that do company wide economic calculations but take 10min just to open, so IT ends up setting up batchjobs to open it everyday, copy in new data and generate PDF of results[also real example].

Of cause you can just put systems and rules around your spreadsheet practices and start adding passwords and accompanying documentation of “what you must do when using this document”. But When you get into these situations it’s almost always a better decision to set up an actual system to handle your data.

New comment by hjk05 in "A Government Guide to Keeping Insulin Unaffordable"

hjk05 — Mon, 08 Jul 2019 06:23:32 +0000

It really boggles my mind that every article on insulin goes through this cycle: “the producers are scammers it the same product put out a hundred years ago but they have new patents!!!” “It’s cheaply available in the old form” “but that’s not the same product!!”

You can’t have it both ways. Cheap alternatives are available. But yes newer main brand products are better in tons of ways, which is not surprising as they are culmination of decades of research. You can’t both claim there are no differences and than want those differences in the cheaper generics.

New comment by hjk05 in "A Government Guide to Keeping Insulin Unaffordable"

hjk05 — Mon, 08 Jul 2019 06:18:51 +0000

Changing the release profile of a drug from once daily to once weekly isn’t a minor thing, and no one is forcing customers to pick the once weekly over the once daily. Now with respect to the original claim, are you saying that once there was a new version of tamsulosin the company issued a statement claiming the old version was unsafe? Do you have a reference for that?

New comment by hjk05 in "A Government Guide to Keeping Insulin Unaffordable"

hjk05 — Sun, 07 Jul 2019 18:19:15 +0000

Do you have references for that claim? If a company goes out with a claim their old product is unsafe it’s not like it’s rocket science to test the claim. And if their lying and you could literally corner a billion dollar industry by testing the claim I’d expect every producer of generics to do so. On the other hand if the product is actually unsafe that opens up liability claims from costumers.

New comment by hjk05 in "A Government Guide to Keeping Insulin Unaffordable"

hjk05 — Sun, 07 Jul 2019 18:14:23 +0000

There isn’t a monopoly. It doesn’t take decades to get a generic on the market. Insulin is available in wallmart for 25$ per vial.

There is a definite problem in the US with drug pricing, and middlemen gauging the market, but it’s a straw man to claim new insulin products don’t bring any change. If you ask the patients there’s a world of difference between the cheap genetics and the main brand products, which is why they want the newer products and not the generics. But of cause patients also want the newer products at the same price as the generics which will never happen, even if the government fixes the drug pricing market.

New comment by hjk05 in "Dhall: A Non-Repetitive Alternative to YAML"

hjk05 — Fri, 05 Jul 2019 15:27:32 +0000

Which is odd because tons of applications in the wild already have this amazing capability of directly consuming python and Haskell without first converting to yaml. But of cause you still have the ability to both produce and consume yaml if that’s needed for some reason.

New comment by hjk05 in "Ice cream truck makes Instagram 'stars' pay double"

hjk05 — Fri, 05 Jul 2019 15:18:20 +0000

Most guitar players are shit. That doesn’t mean that concerts are a scam. As I wrote it depends on the talent. And advertisement through established influencers with a real following is cheaper than going through magazines was back in the day.