Hacker News: jcriddle4

New comment by jcriddle4 in "Facebook is banning leftwing users like me"

jcriddle4 — Fri, 29 Jan 2021 15:43:23 +0000

It is interesting that when Facebook and Twitter are confronted over some censorship they will often talk about needing to be more transparent over and over and over and over...

New comment by jcriddle4 in "Pirate Bay founder thinks Parler’s inability to stay online is 'embarrassing'"

jcriddle4 — Thu, 14 Jan 2021 04:23:58 +0000

It isn't just getting kicked off the platform that you should worry about. You have zero control of long term pricing. Developers sometimes even develop without doing any math on what the services they are using cost in year one. Ask people how often they have already had to go back and rework code and shutdown servers because the bills coming in were out of control. The myth that you can just migrate if costs go crazy is completely nuts.

New comment by jcriddle4 in "The fraying of the U.S. global currency reserve system"

jcriddle4 — Sun, 13 Dec 2020 23:51:23 +0000

The link below is on historical gas prices. Also include a link on US dollar to Euro. Depending on the state we are currently at about 2.50 and have been over 3.50. The dollar menu going to 5 because of a 10% or 20% drop in currency doesn't seem likely. We, and also other countries, can have fairly big currency changes without much internal inflation or deflation(can depend on country size). A number of countries have actually deliberately devalued their currency in order to encourage growth. The question that is more interesting is can we lose high productively jobs(manufacturing...) and still keep high standards of living. The data indicates we cannot.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/204740/retail-price-of-g...

https://www.macrotrends.net/2548/euro-dollar-exchange-rate-h...

New comment by jcriddle4 in "The fraying of the U.S. global currency reserve system"

jcriddle4 — Sun, 13 Dec 2020 21:10:45 +0000

A 10% drop in currency would in your example, assuming no cost of shipping oil, US would go from 3.00 to 3.30 at 20% drop would mean 3.60 and even a US currency drop of 40% only gets you to $4.20. The data on trade indicates that countries that cheat on trade have epic growth rates and countries that do the "free trade" have close to zero growth or even declines. The data indicates local manufacturing has synergistic effects that massively outweigh the additional costs to consumers. See economist Ha-Joon Chang.

New comment by jcriddle4 in "The fraying of the U.S. global currency reserve system"

jcriddle4 — Sun, 13 Dec 2020 19:45:14 +0000

Point taken but the oil example isn't the best example on imports as we have since about 2010 really dropped imports with Obama's "All of the above" energy strategy which included opening the Arctic to drilling twice. Here is an example article on the subject: ...U.S. Exports More Petroleum Than It Imports In September and October https://www.forbes.com/sites/arielcohen/2019/11/26/making-hi...

New comment by jcriddle4 in "The fraying of the U.S. global currency reserve system"

jcriddle4 — Sun, 13 Dec 2020 17:49:35 +0000

The US would benefit from a weaker dollar as it would protect what remains of our manufacturing base and also act as an export subsidy. Currency valuation, and in particular currency manipulation, is equivalent to a tariff or an export subsidy depending on which side of it you are on. Yes people like to pretend that if something goes up in cost 20 percent because of currency change that is somehow normal but slap a 10 percent tariff on something and that is completely different.

New comment by jcriddle4 in "Babelfish: SQL Server-to-Postgres Translation Layer"

jcriddle4 — Thu, 03 Dec 2020 01:52:05 +0000

If you have several thousand stored procs and triggers then having to not rewrite all of that is actually likely over a million in savings.

New comment by jcriddle4 in "Parler 'free speech' app tops charts in wake of Trump defeat"

jcriddle4 — Tue, 10 Nov 2020 12:42:29 +0000

So given 68 million USA twitter users, if this rate continues, it wouldn't take long to get half the USA switched over. I am assuming most of the new users are USA. I suspect a fair number will use both systems for awhile. There could also be events like say a famous person moving over or being forced to move over that could result in even higher switching rates.

New comment by jcriddle4 in "Oracle vs. PostgreSQL – A Comment"

jcriddle4 — Sat, 30 May 2020 15:46:09 +0000

Obviously you don't have experience with Oracle or you would have written hundreds of thousands of dollars in license fees... /s

New comment by jcriddle4 in "Japan's PM to ask all schools to temporarily close"

jcriddle4 — Thu, 27 Feb 2020 19:35:49 +0000

I suspect it is more company/occupation specific. High paying white collar workers are probably much more likely to be able to stay home. Low pay workers, likely have much less vacation benefits and all and must come to work. Me specifically I have over enough PTO with no prior vacation commitments that a week off it not a problem.

New comment by jcriddle4 in "CDC declined to test new coronavirus patient for days, California hospital says"

jcriddle4 — Thu, 27 Feb 2020 16:43:28 +0000

Well I am glad nobody is going to lie. /S

New comment by jcriddle4 in "Open-plan offices decrease face-to-face collaboration: study"

jcriddle4 — Thu, 06 Feb 2020 15:58:28 +0000

Until companies start to drop open office plans I hope to see articles like this fairly often.

New comment by jcriddle4 in "The Spherical Solution"

jcriddle4 — Wed, 29 Jan 2020 20:42:57 +0000

Pictures of the actual building on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sydney_Opera_House

New comment by jcriddle4 in "Wuhan scientists: What it’s like to be on lockdown"

jcriddle4 — Sun, 26 Jan 2020 05:30:31 +0000

Are you asking if there is a phase of the disease where the body temporarily wins most of the battle but the virus continues to inhabit the host? Sort of like hiv? Maybe even a phase where the immune system keeps the virus count so low only fluid transmission? Given the way the virus progresses this seems unlikely but new viruses can have new behavior...too early to tell.

New comment by jcriddle4 in "Boeing docs show staffers discussing ways to manipulate regulators on 737 Max"

jcriddle4 — Fri, 10 Jan 2020 16:20:12 +0000

Isn't this the point of every third or forth Dilbert cartoon? This seems pretty universal. Humans are very flawed. There are those who accept that reality and those who like to believe in some fairy tale that for really "important" things that somehow we can put some management and twenty point processes in place, some motivational posters, a big team building group hug and then we will walk on water(NOT).

New comment by jcriddle4 in "Ignore Sunk Costs (2009)"

jcriddle4 — Sun, 05 Jan 2020 05:55:23 +0000

If the ticket is fully refundable then it is also not a sunk cost. The land example also has potentially the same issue if the land can be sold for the purchase price. If the land can be sold but at a 20% discount then the sunk cost is only the 20%.

New comment by jcriddle4 in "YouTube channel owners: Is your content directed to children?"

jcriddle4 — Sun, 24 Nov 2019 03:44:31 +0000

You might have been joking but yes that type of question is being asked because a child friendly channel, if so classified, may see huge revenue cuts depending on how the regulations finally fall out.

New comment by jcriddle4 in "YouTube channel owners: Is your content directed to children?"

jcriddle4 — Sun, 24 Nov 2019 03:40:19 +0000

The proposed new rules might mean an over 50% cut in revenue to a channel possibly driving the smaller players out. Very interesting side effects of regulations.

New comment by jcriddle4 in "Censorship is bad even when it’s done by private companies"

jcriddle4 — Wed, 06 Nov 2019 14:48:57 +0000

Reddit has an option to sort on controversial on a group and also on comments. I suspect the algorithm is probably looking for things with a combination of upvotes and downvotes. Take a look at any reddit group or the comments and sort on controversial if you want to see what it looks like. If you defined controversial as any thing that has a 15% to 55% down vote ratio that would be fairly specific. Maybe over 60% downvote it may be off topic or spam? It would be an interesting experiment, for a few days, to change the default from "hot" to "controversial".

New comment by jcriddle4 in "Censorship is bad even when it’s done by private companies"

jcriddle4 — Wed, 06 Nov 2019 13:34:14 +0000

"Companies want the flamebait...." The moderation system on reddit seems to heavily promote group think. Actually promoting controversial comments as a default would be interesting.