Hacker News: howlgarnish

New comment by howlgarnish in "Ways to make flying less miserable"

howlgarnish — Thu, 21 Jan 2021 13:40:23 +0000

Anxiety is complicated. For example, having airline crew on Ebola-grade hazmat suits emblazoned with biohazard logos would probably reduce COVID transmission by some fraction of a percent, but it would also increase anxiety for most of us. If you take the LA Blue Line (which goes through some of the worst neighborhoods in the city), the constant announcements about your safety being important and occasional patrols by jackbooted commandos are the opposite of reassuring.

Basically, it's difficult to show you care about a problem without making the problem appear worse.

New comment by howlgarnish in "Color or Fruit? On the Unlikely Etymology of “Orange” (2018)"

howlgarnish — Thu, 21 Jan 2021 06:45:04 +0000

I can't claim to be an expert, but this is likely correct. The native Japanese words for color (shiro, kuro, aka, ao, midori etc) don't use the -色/iro suffix.

New comment by howlgarnish in "Periodical cicada Brood X will emerge in 15 states in 2021"

howlgarnish — Thu, 21 Jan 2021 04:35:39 +0000

Australia has joined the chat

https://time.com/3882445/raining-spiders-australia/

New comment by howlgarnish in "Color or Fruit? On the Unlikely Etymology of “Orange” (2018)"

howlgarnish — Thu, 21 Jan 2021 03:47:35 +0000

Interesting. Now that I think about it, /səˈrinj/ sounds quite American to me, while /ˈsirinj/ is more English?

Also, you characterize the 2nd vowel in "orange" as a schwa, but to many people it's /i/:

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/orange#Pronunciation

New comment by howlgarnish in "Color or Fruit? On the Unlikely Etymology of “Orange” (2018)"

howlgarnish — Thu, 21 Jan 2021 03:35:30 +0000

In many languages the distinction is quite blurred. In Japanese, most color words like 茶色 chairo (brown), 灰色 hairo (gray), 黄色 kiiro (yellow), 紅色 beniiro (crimson/red) incorporate the word "iro" (color), but while the first two are tea-color and ash-color, ki 黄 and beni 紅 now just mean "yellow" and "red" respectively.

New comment by howlgarnish in "Color or Fruit? On the Unlikely Etymology of “Orange” (2018)"

howlgarnish — Thu, 21 Jan 2021 03:29:04 +0000

"Orange" is actually pronounced /oringe/, so "syringe" and "door hinge" sound like true rhymes to me?

New comment by howlgarnish in "Color or Fruit? On the Unlikely Etymology of “Orange” (2018)"

howlgarnish — Thu, 21 Jan 2021 01:59:48 +0000

But does anything rhyme with orange? Oh yes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPcR5RVXHMg

Putin's Palace: The story of the world's largest bribe

howlgarnish — Wed, 20 Jan 2021 13:42:21 +0000

Article URL: https://palace.navalny.com/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25846290

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

New comment by howlgarnish in "Jack Ma makes first live appearance in three months in online meet"

howlgarnish — Wed, 20 Jan 2021 09:04:48 +0000

No, we're not in agreement on that. It's clear that Ma's dress & appearance in the video was distinctly at odds with his own usual profile, no need for any stereotypes or comparisons to other people.

New comment by howlgarnish in "Jack Ma makes first live appearance in three months in online meet"

howlgarnish — Wed, 20 Jan 2021 07:21:07 +0000

With all due respect, you are presumably also not the multibillionaire CEO of one of the world's largest Internet companies.

If I saw Zuck, Satya or Sundar do a video conference looking like they're chained to the radiator in somebody's basement, I'd also be kinda concerned. (At least for the latter two. Zuck, maybe not so much.)

New comment by howlgarnish in "Jack Ma makes first live appearance in three months in online meet"

howlgarnish — Wed, 20 Jan 2021 07:18:52 +0000

The odd outbreak aside (and Shijiazhuang is nowhere near Hangzhou), lockdowns are long over in China, there's no need for Ma to cower in a basement.

That said, I actually agree with you that the "hurr durr CCP torture cell" comments are overblown. It's entirely plausible that he's keeping a low profile for a while, if likely in response to some rather heavy-handed advice.

New comment by howlgarnish in "Jack Ma makes first live appearance in three months in online meet"

howlgarnish — Wed, 20 Jan 2021 07:05:17 +0000

Compared to Jack Ma's usual public image (see below), a frumpy pullover and a dingy room does seem rather odd.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=jack+ma&iax=images&ia=images

New comment by howlgarnish in "China wants to build an open source ecosystem to rival GitHub"

howlgarnish — Wed, 20 Jan 2021 04:15:10 +0000

Mainland China's growth has been much slower because the madness of Mao's misrule set the country back by several decades. If you compare the country's growth since Deng Xiaoping took over and started reforming in the early 1980s, it compares much more favorably.

New comment by howlgarnish in "China wants to build an open source ecosystem to rival GitHub"

howlgarnish — Wed, 20 Jan 2021 04:12:22 +0000

Yes, China punches under its weight in software, and yes, China's services are not particularly visible in the US, but I assure you they're already making a huge impact, particularly in the developing world, and that impact is only going to growing in the next 5-10 years.

Alibaba/Aliexpress are massive for consumer online shopping, particularly in Russia & Eastern Europe. Alipay payments are increasingly accepted across SE Asia. JD.com (which nobody ever hears about, but is considerably larger than Ali) operates directly and indirectly in many SE Asian countries.

Tencent Games owns and operates a huge slew of globally popular games, including Fortnite, League of Legends, the Supercell suite (Brawl Stars, Clash of Clans etc). Yes, most of these games are still produced primarily in the West, but for long?

Trip.com has been run out of China since 2017 since it was acquired by Ctrip. Meituan/Dianping dominate food delivery in China and are started to branch out to other markets like Australia and Singapore.

New comment by howlgarnish in "China wants to build an open source ecosystem to rival GitHub"

howlgarnish — Wed, 20 Jan 2021 03:45:47 +0000

That's not going to help a user in mainland China, because Singapore is a separate country and on the wrong side of the Great Firewall.

New comment by howlgarnish in "Storming Reddit's Moat"

howlgarnish — Wed, 20 Jan 2021 01:11:28 +0000

Is this meaningfully different from the user's point of view than just subscribing to a set of different subreddits? What does the user or the host get out of using federated servers?

From my POV this seems to be the same issue that has prevented federated social networks or chat services from taking off: there's no meaningful, concrete advantage to it.

New comment by howlgarnish in "This Anime Does Not Exist"

howlgarnish — Tue, 19 Jan 2021 23:22:25 +0000

The AI-generated characters remind me of hentaigana, which are the obsolete variant forms of kana used before 1900: they're clearly Japanese writing, but weird and basically illegible to the modern reader.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hentaigana#Gallery

(That's hentai as in 変体 "variant form", not hentai as in 変態 "sexual perversion".)

New comment by howlgarnish in "I wasted $40k on a fantastic startup idea"

howlgarnish — Tue, 19 Jan 2021 08:52:57 +0000

"Of course I always have the best interests of my patients in mind, but, you know, it's not like they'll pay more if I prescribe Lexapro instead of Zoloft. They won't come back more often or refer more friends. So I'd sorta just be, like, donating this money if I paid you for this thing, right?"

But you know who would pay more if they prescribe Lexapro? The manufacturer of Lexapro, and that's who he should have pitched this to. And they have the marketing muscle needed to make it scale.

That said, there's all sorts of conflict of interest/slippery slope issues going down that path, and I'm not sure they would buy this either, but they'd still have been his best bet.

New comment by howlgarnish in "Man found 'living in airport for three months' over Covid fears"

howlgarnish — Mon, 18 Jan 2021 13:15:30 +0000

But what's the risk to having someone live for three months in an airport? He's gone through the same TSA security as everybody else.

New comment by howlgarnish in "Parler's home page is back online, but app still not in stores"

howlgarnish — Mon, 18 Jan 2021 08:46:58 +0000

They're running Wordpress, which is famous for scaling badly to the extent that there are large companies like WPEngine.com devoted to doing nothing except working around that.