Hacker News: thowfaraway

New comment by thowfaraway in "America Is Sliding Toward Illiteracy"

thowfaraway — Tue, 14 Oct 2025 22:19:28 +0000

This is one the lesson plans that was a trigger at the time. It is a typical constructivist pedagogy.

https://web.archive.org/web/20141023181930/https://api.ning....

Fixed beliefs are things like America is a good nation. You should teach the whole of history, good, bad and ugly, but stop trying to make kids reinterpret everything through modern political lenses

New comment by thowfaraway in "Retailers will soon have only about 7 weeks of full inventories left"

thowfaraway — Wed, 30 Apr 2025 19:31:43 +0000

I'm just saying having a majority doesn't mean fully controlling congress. It has nothing to do with whether one is a lame duck.

Also, posting limits are annoying as fuck.

New comment by thowfaraway in "Ask HN: How did you get rid of your performance anxiety?"

thowfaraway — Wed, 11 Oct 2023 03:13:07 +0000

Get Propranolol - miracle drug. Totally takes the anxiety out of presentations. I used it a couple times at large presentations, and it was really helpful. Since then I don't need it. Once you go through presentations a few times successfully, you learn it isn't that big a deal.

You feel 99% normal when you take it; it is not a sedative. It is just that the fear doesn't arise, the wave of panic never comes.

https://www.drugs.com/comments/propranolol/for-performance-a...

New comment by thowfaraway in "Where did the Carter White House's solar panels go? (2010)"

thowfaraway — Sat, 16 Sep 2023 03:20:55 +0000

Falsehoods like that are 100x worse than the price of insulin. 90-95% of diabetes in the US is Type 2, and it is crap diet that causes it.

https://www.cdc.gov/diabetes/basics/type2.html

And if you want cheap insulin, you can buy it for $25 at Walmart.

New comment by thowfaraway in "Unity is offering a runtime fee waiver if you switch to LevelPlay"

thowfaraway — Fri, 15 Sep 2023 04:02:33 +0000

They can probably track accurately enough to identify that 90% of games aren't worth billing. Then once they are working with the top 10%, they can negotiate something that makes sense, like submit your monthly sales number, and Unity will use that as a limit on install count.

I agree what they are saying isn't workable, but that idea of install based fee could work, and would be better than a royalty for many.

New comment by thowfaraway in "Video-Game Company Unity Closes Offices Following Death Threat"

thowfaraway — Fri, 15 Sep 2023 03:22:08 +0000

They are providing a game engine to make the game. If that's not worth it, switch. They don't own your C# code or assets, so they can be moved. For a lot of devs, it provides a lot of value. I understand for F2P, low ARPU games this pricing scheme doesn't work and people should complain until Unity fixes it.

Unity has ~7,000 employees, and is losing money. They need to a way to monetize, and they are clumsily trying to target their most successful users to pay more. Price increase aren't rent seeking.

New comment by thowfaraway in "Unity is offering a runtime fee waiver if you switch to LevelPlay"

thowfaraway — Fri, 15 Sep 2023 03:17:10 +0000

Those are exactly the types of games that would be much worse off under an Unreal style royalty.

Cult of the Lamb is $24.99 on Steam

Unreal royalty is 5%, so $1.25 per sale

Unity is $0.20

So royalty is ~6x more

If there was a reasonable way to count installs (I don't think it is technically possible), install fee is much better than royalty for most devs who are not F2P apps.

New comment by thowfaraway in "Unity is offering a runtime fee waiver if you switch to LevelPlay"

thowfaraway — Fri, 15 Sep 2023 03:12:28 +0000

That's not what Unity is saying - they are saying reinstalls do not count. From their faq:

Does a reinstall of an app on the same device count towards the Unity Runtime Fee?

No, we are not going to charge a fee for reinstalls.

https://unity.com/pricing-updates

New comment by thowfaraway in "Unity has seemingly silently removed its GitHub repo that tracks ToS changes"

thowfaraway — Fri, 15 Sep 2023 02:22:29 +0000

They can't force you to pay. The only leverage or legal claim they have is if you want to update your title after Jan 2024, then they can ask you to get up to date on your account.

New comment by thowfaraway in "Unity has seemingly silently removed its GitHub repo that tracks ToS changes"

thowfaraway — Fri, 15 Sep 2023 02:15:02 +0000

Riccitiello has been CEO since 2014. There were some good times at the beginning, but things seem to be falling apart.

New comment by thowfaraway in "China Bans iPhone Use for Government Officials at Work"

thowfaraway — Wed, 06 Sep 2023 17:32:12 +0000

The p60 pro is released this year and available:

https://www.newegg.com/p/23B-001M-007X6

New comment by thowfaraway in "A global addiction to plastic is turning into an environmental disaster"

thowfaraway — Tue, 21 Feb 2023 04:47:23 +0000

"Meat and dairy comes in plastic wrap or bottles."

I kind feel like if your butcher doesn't use butcher paper, you aren't really going to a butcher but a meat department at a grocery store.

New comment by thowfaraway in "Incoming potentially catastrophic storm for SF area"

thowfaraway — Tue, 03 Jan 2023 03:15:36 +0000

It's no fun to drive in the rain, so either pick a nice place to stay for Wed/Thu during the storm, or postpone the trip. If you need to get south, just drive the 5, it shouldn't enough rain to flood it. The central valley flood alerts you are seeing are for rivers and small roads with stream crossings. Forecast there is only 1.5".

New comment by thowfaraway in "Seoul's full cafes, Apple store lines show mass testing success"

thowfaraway — Sun, 19 Apr 2020 17:39:03 +0000

There are many controlled studies on other respiratory disease like the flu, and some on other corona viruses like SARS the show high efficacy of masks. If you doubt the science, fall back on common sense. A respiratory barrier is going to have some value in diminishing the ability of a respiratory virus to spread.

https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/202004.0203/v1

The reason government and medical signaling on the subject has been so mixed is that it isn’t apparent they are very effective

The reason signaling has been mixed is because they were trying to preserve supply for medical professionals. The reason that medical professionals need them is because they work.

New comment by thowfaraway in "Slavery in Early Austin: The Stringer’s Hotel and Urban Slavery"

thowfaraway — Fri, 21 Feb 2020 03:04:08 +0000

It is a bullshit citationless list.

New comment by thowfaraway in "Slavery in Early Austin: The Stringer’s Hotel and Urban Slavery"

thowfaraway — Fri, 21 Feb 2020 03:01:53 +0000

Lincoln was not an Abolitionist hero as popularly lionized, but a status quo "moderate,' reluctant to rock the boat. Even though he knew it to be wrong, he did nothing in the affirmative until Secession.

Lincoln's election triggered secession by the south. Maybe the Southerner's had a better sense of Lincoln's abolitionist credentials than you?

Secession started after Lincoln was elected, but before he took office, what actions could he have taken? His abolitionist rhetoric was enough to trigger a civil war. That's a pretty big boat rock.

New comment by thowfaraway in "Stripe refunds: fees from the original charge are not returned"

thowfaraway — Thu, 20 Feb 2020 06:38:30 +0000

PayPal does not look so bad. Their API and documentation has also become pretty good.

Documentation has gone form terrible to bad. API has gone from always terrible to appearing OK but will periodically destroy your happiness and productivity for a week. I would never voluntarily work with PayPal tech.

New comment by thowfaraway in "Kotlin becomes second most popular language on the JVM"

thowfaraway — Thu, 06 Feb 2020 22:26:05 +0000

Those are great features of a great language to program with, but when you are talking about adoption, you want good, easy tooling to expose the good stuff. When the first two chapter of the oft recommended Clojure for the Brave and True are just about setup and and long Emacs tutorial, you are putting up a barrier to using the language.

New comment by thowfaraway in "Kotlin becomes second most popular language on the JVM"

thowfaraway — Thu, 06 Feb 2020 15:37:59 +0000

It is probably net positive for advanced users who have niche needs that the different editors address, but I'm saying it is bad for beginners/learners. More specifically, I'm saying emacs/cider is bad for beginners/learners, and the more traditional IDE options aren't so solid.

New comment by thowfaraway in "Kotlin becomes second most popular language on the JVM"

thowfaraway — Thu, 06 Feb 2020 07:49:03 +0000

Telling someone new to a language to start with emacs & cider is a disaster. They are rock solid amazing tools for 2% of programmers. I like emacs, but it is harder to learn than Clojure, and trying to teach someone both at the same time is tough. Plus there is no real community unity in editor choice, so you have the community split over emacs, Cursive, VS Code/Calva, Atom. Plus a bunch of dead ends like Light Table or Nightcode.