Hacker News: liability

New comment by liability in "Newfound brain structure explains why some birds are so smart"

liability — Sat, 26 Sep 2020 20:42:06 +0000

Cats supposedly fail the mirror test, but I think they're just disinterested. There are a lot of videos of cats being shown live video of themselves and their owners, with the owner's face modified to look like a cat. In many of these the startled cat immediately turns around to look at their owner, seemingly indicating an awareness that the video they were being shown contained themselves and that the weird cat-like human creature seen in the video was behind them.

Compilation of such reactions that was posted on HN a fee days ago: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Jto2peSOLac

New comment by liability in "This Company Wants to Help Your Boss Monitor Your Brainwaves at Work"

liability — Sat, 26 Sep 2020 18:43:36 +0000

Assuming I could keep my homicidal impulses in check, I think the rage would still surely impact my productivity.

New comment by liability in "Password-cracking theory against Assange unravels at extradition trial"

liability — Sat, 26 Sep 2020 18:37:31 +0000

It's a kangaroo court. America and the UK are both banana republics.

New comment by liability in "The fresh smell of ransomed coffee"

liability — Sat, 26 Sep 2020 17:35:59 +0000

Only when I can see it..

New comment by liability in "The fresh smell of ransomed coffee"

liability — Sat, 26 Sep 2020 17:34:15 +0000

I haven't tasted cola in years; back when I drank it I believed I could tell the difference but today I doubt I ever could. I can tell a pilsner apart from a stout. All whiskey tastes like whiskey, but whiskey doesn't taste like gin.

I don't believe I have an impaired sense of taste. I'm just highly skeptical of the objectivity of my sense of taste. Marketting and branding probably has more influence than anything else when comparing two drinks in the same category (wine-to-wine, coffee-to-coffee, etc.)

New comment by liability in "The fresh smell of ransomed coffee"

liability — Sat, 26 Sep 2020 17:22:29 +0000

Yeah. American homes do have 240V across a split phase but this is virtually always used only for heavy appliances like electric ovens. Split phase 240V for countertop appliances isn't a thing and NEMA 14 outlets aren't installed in locations that would accommodate such appliances.

New comment by liability in "The fresh smell of ransomed coffee"

liability — Sat, 26 Sep 2020 17:13:05 +0000

I did with my family using blindfolds and we all failed. Either seems to demonstrate that perception of wine has a strong visual component.

New comment by liability in "The fresh smell of ransomed coffee"

liability — Sat, 26 Sep 2020 16:52:55 +0000

Nope. Nor can I tell the difference in a blind taste test between white and red wine. Probably most wine snobs can't either, and probably most coffee snobs couldn't really tell the difference in a blind test.

New comment by liability in "The fresh smell of ransomed coffee"

liability — Sat, 26 Sep 2020 16:45:19 +0000

I don't think these devices save time at all. In the time it takes me to navigate the through the touch-screen UIs of these fancy toys I can microwave a cup of instant coffee and start drinking it before the fancy machine starts brewing anything. The results are indistinguishable.

New comment by liability in "This Company Wants to Help Your Boss Monitor Your Brainwaves at Work"

liability — Sat, 26 Sep 2020 16:29:49 +0000

If I were made to wear such a device, all it would have to report is the murderous intent I would have for the jackasses that made the device, and those that made me wear it.

I think most bosses are probably not stupid enough to think this is a good idea.

New comment by liability in "James Gosling: Java, JVM, Emacs, and Computing History [video]"

liability — Sat, 26 Sep 2020 16:24:59 +0000

Lex Fridman is to tech interviews what Reviewbrah is to cheeseburgers.

New comment by liability in "Toward a “modern” Emacs"

liability — Fri, 25 Sep 2020 22:52:44 +0000

True, though a noob wouldn't know how to invoke it like that.

New comment by liability in "Toward a “modern” Emacs"

liability — Fri, 25 Sep 2020 22:50:54 +0000

The P and V operations on semaphores are from Dutch. I find this difficult, "The V kind of looks like a down arrow.. but wait no that's increment. The P could mean plus.. wait no that's decrement..."

New comment by liability in "Toward a “modern” Emacs"

liability — Fri, 25 Sep 2020 21:51:19 +0000

Nov.el is my favorite ebook reader.

New comment by liability in "Toward a “modern” Emacs"

liability — Fri, 25 Sep 2020 21:44:15 +0000

Vim drops noobs straight into normal mode, meaning the moment they start trying to type they get confused. I know that's what happened to me. The arcane nature of Emacs doesn't make itself apparent nearly so fast.

New comment by liability in "Toward a “modern” Emacs"

liability — Fri, 25 Sep 2020 21:03:29 +0000

As an Emacs newbie (less than one year of usage) I could not disagree more. I disagree with basically everything you just said. If somebody wants notepad++, they should just use that instead of trying to turn Emacs into something it never was.

As an olive branch: Perhaps Emacs could prompt the user on first run what sort of control scheme they want. Emacs standard, Evil mode, or some notepad clone could be modes that ship with Emacs by default (evil already does.)

(I chose evil, because I came from vim. Maybe this is why Emacs was so easy for me to pick up. But by the same token, Vim is arcane compared to Notepad style editors but is quite popular, so I outright reject the hypothesis that Emacs has lower numbers because it's arcane. Rather, I think it has a marketting ''problem'' relative to Vim.)

New comment by liability in "Calibre 5.0"

liability — Fri, 25 Sep 2020 18:05:48 +0000

I can't say I'm a fan of the GUI (part of this is me not needing most of its many features, which are doubtlessly useful for others), but the Calibre command line tool `ebook-convert` is fantastic and handles conversions pandoc can't. I love Calibre for this.

New comment by liability in "Apple to let Facebook online events temporarily avoid 30% cut"

liability — Fri, 25 Sep 2020 17:47:39 +0000

Or just don't whitelist javascript on bloomberg, since the site works just fine without it.

New comment by liability in "Rat That Sniffs Out Land Mines Receives Award for Bravery"

liability — Fri, 25 Sep 2020 16:45:14 +0000

A cheese medallion seems like a fitting award for a rat.

New comment by liability in "US military increasingly using drone missile with flying blades in Syria"

liability — Fri, 25 Sep 2020 16:27:19 +0000

Rayiner, I wrote this response to you before you deleted your comment:

If the US were targeting the House of Saud then I might believe what you say, but those guys going untouched undermines claims that the US is combatting radicalization coming from the euphemistic "rich middle eastern countries with fundamentalist ideologies funding schools"