Hacker News: owen_griffiths

New comment by owen_griffiths in "Your Brain on Poverty: Why Poor People Seem to Make Bad Decisions (2013)"

owen_griffiths — Mon, 30 Nov 2015 00:19:38 +0000

This is more than outliers. There are way more middle / high income people over-extended to call them outliers. Also, there are pretty much whole countries of people who we would consider to have "poor" incomes who manage their money prudently.

New comment by owen_griffiths in "Could the U.S. Ever Adopt a Six-Hour Workday?"

owen_griffiths — Mon, 28 Sep 2015 05:35:43 +0000

but the example in this article required more workers hired, so output per worker clearly wasn't maintained.

New comment by owen_griffiths in "Drug Goes from $13.50 a Tablet to $750, Overnight"

owen_griffiths — Mon, 21 Sep 2015 21:51:41 +0000

right, so the drug that was getting sales of 600k per year was probably not worth the hassle of maintaining a compliant manufacturing line. does that not suggest a price rise was valid?

New comment by owen_griffiths in "The Night They Drove the Price of Electricity Down"

owen_griffiths — Sun, 20 Sep 2015 07:02:16 +0000

no wind is not a requirement, but the variability wind adds is so strong this may never happen in practice without wind power.

if there was a general move to lower power use, the market would adjust to the lower level. it is the unpredictable variability that causes the negative prices.

New comment by owen_griffiths in "14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to School"

owen_griffiths — Wed, 16 Sep 2015 15:16:47 +0000

And those guys learning to fly the planes without the landing, why can't that just be an interest! With terrorism, if you want to avoid false negatives, you are going to have a lot of false positives.

NB I totally agree it would be a douche move to charge this kid with some BS, but investigating unusual behavior is much more understandable.

New comment by owen_griffiths in "14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to School"

owen_griffiths — Wed, 16 Sep 2015 15:10:11 +0000

This was my 'favourite'

http://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/2015/03/06/6-year-old-finge...

New comment by owen_griffiths in "Travelling to work 'is work', European court rules"

owen_griffiths — Fri, 11 Sep 2015 05:21:44 +0000

That example makes sense, but if you want to impose a rule you have to worry about the cases where it doesn't make sense. What about a plumbing business which dispatches jobs within a 5 mile radius. If the employee moves 2 hours away, suddenly the company has to pay 4 hours a day of commuting.

The net result of this could easily be workers being required to travel to and from a central location as a workaround, when they could have better outcomes travelling straight from home - hurting the people you are supposedly want to help.

New comment by owen_griffiths in "Japan split over restart of first nuclear reactor since Fukushima disaster"

owen_griffiths — Tue, 11 Aug 2015 03:37:25 +0000

Japan's CO2 emissions are up 11% relative to 1990, when they are supposedly planning to go down 21% by 2030.

“They’re aware that Japan has fared perfectly well without nuclear power for almost two years.” is not really accurate CO2 into account.

New comment by owen_griffiths in "Kicked out of the US: 33 hours of hell"

owen_griffiths — Mon, 10 Aug 2015 06:40:05 +0000

"one country's overreaction of 9/11"

There is not any evidence that 9/11 has anything to do with this - this sounds more like a regular limitation of work rights issue. Hacker news regularly has stories about the difficulty of navigating the US work rights regime.

New comment by owen_griffiths in "California Has a Plan to End the Auto Industry as We Know It"

owen_griffiths — Tue, 04 Aug 2015 05:22:09 +0000

He is definitely not serious - the reason they sell the car at 32k is that is the best price to get the required sales. If people don't buy at that price, they'll have to go even lower, and lose more money.

New comment by owen_griffiths in "California Has a Plan to End the Auto Industry as We Know It"

owen_griffiths — Tue, 04 Aug 2015 05:04:44 +0000

Nissan leaf has 24 KWhr pack, so a 5 KW solar system getting 5 hours of sun could charge it.

However, the cost of having 2 full batteries (ie panel - powerwall - car battery) would be massive in today's world, where batteries are already a huge cost.

New comment by owen_griffiths in "Think women in tech is just a pipeline problem?"

owen_griffiths — Tue, 28 Jul 2015 06:20:21 +0000

"almost all of them said they liked the work itself, but cited discriminatory environments as their main reason for leaving"

If the work environment is not to women' liking and has no bearing on outcome, where are all the successful companies formed by women who want a more friendly environment?

"This is a huge, unnecessary, and expensive loss of talent in a field facing a supposed talent shortage."

Again, if true, some enterprising person should have found a way to tap all the amazing talent.

New comment by owen_griffiths in "No, I Am Not Lost – A Black Woman's Experience in the Stanford CS Major"

owen_griffiths — Wed, 22 Jul 2015 01:55:45 +0000

The incessantly being asked if you are lost is the most unrealistic part of this story. My wife and I were looking for a room in Stanford last year - we really were lost. No-one gave a s..t.

New comment by owen_griffiths in "Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but..."

owen_griffiths — Wed, 10 Jun 2015 23:48:53 +0000

Google doesn't hire for specific projects like this - they want people who can work all over the company.

New comment by owen_griffiths in "30 Years Ago They Retired at 35: An Update"

owen_griffiths — Sat, 23 May 2015 14:11:36 +0000

but the rules don't work with people working for 10 years, and retiring for 60. of course this is not illegal, but such a life style choice would not be scalable.

New comment by owen_griffiths in "Riots are destructive, but can lead to social reforms"

owen_griffiths — Fri, 01 May 2015 09:18:18 +0000

I'm left puzzled after reading this. So riots can be effective, but the response to the last riots sowed the seeds that led to these riots. Doesn't that imply rioting is indeed a bad way of making positive change?

New comment by owen_griffiths in "American students head to Germany for free college"

owen_griffiths — Thu, 02 Apr 2015 09:52:55 +0000

"Germany has vastly expanded their economy since 1970, while adding zero additional people"

It's a different kettle of fish when more of the people are retired and living on generous tax-payer pensions, and less are working.

New comment by owen_griffiths in "The decline in unionization has fed the rise in incomes at the top"

owen_griffiths — Sun, 22 Mar 2015 21:32:16 +0000

"are sustainable due to taxation that is closer to the rates that the US had during its economic rise"

European taxation takes far more from low income people than taxes in the US. The US gets the highest proportion of it's take revenues from the top 10% in the OECD.

New comment by owen_griffiths in "New solar installs beat wind and coal two years in a row"

owen_griffiths — Thu, 12 Mar 2015 00:51:34 +0000

"Negative rates are a signal, and effect all base load (coal, nuclear, hydro, etc) equally. I don't see how sending proper market signals are a bad thing."

But those market signals are not sent to the solar installations. i.e. if you produce a lot of power when it is sunny and there is a glut, the owner of the panel typically still get the same rebate.

If we sent proper market signals to renewable energy providers it would indeed be a good thing.

New comment by owen_griffiths in "Why We Killed Off Code Reviews"

owen_griffiths — Wed, 25 Feb 2015 20:40:27 +0000

This is about a team of 4 people, so pair programming is 50% of the team writing all code. I don't think there is a problem with visibility.

Whether this has many lessons for teams 10x the size is another matter of course.