MRD85 (u/MRD85) - Readit News

MRD85 commented on Consumer Trends That Destroyed Media’s Business Model mondaynote.com/the-consum... · Posted by u/djug

factotvm · 6 years ago

I don’t want to pay for all the meals I eat, a large number of them are terrible... So I don’t go back. But you have to pay for what you eat.

MRD85 · 6 years ago

I doesn't physically cost any practical amount of money to read an article, a tiny amount of processing power and data transfer. A physical meal costs orders of magnitude more.

I understand why we should pay for articles but if you enforce payment then you'll see a flood of poorly written click bait and a race to the bottom.

MRD85 commented on TV networks vowed to cut back on commercials but stuffed in more latimes.com/business/stor... · Posted by u/MBCook

MRD85 · 6 years ago

When I was young I remember pay TV being marketed in Australia as "TV with no ads". It's slowly shifted to a premium content with ads model that I find hard to justify when I have access to ad free online services.

As a parent this is doubly so. I know everything my children watch and I don't want them exposed to excessive advertising. I also don't let them watch content on YouTube that has excessive advertising in the show itself. I'll gladly pay money for ad free content that is designed to both entertain and educate.

MRD85 commented on Almost half of Europe’s soil is dryer than normal vis4.net/drought-in-europ... · Posted by u/tobr

colechristensen · 6 years ago

The headline is a meaningless tautology.

In a "perfectly normal" year half of soil would be drier than normal, half would be wetter than normal, and none would be exactly normal.

The most reasonable way to interpret the headline would be to say soil is slightly wetter than normal, which is obviously not the intended message.

MRD85 · 6 years ago

Normal could be defined as a range if you use the English usage of normal.

MRD85 commented on Anyone who looks at this code instantly becomes insane github.com/raxod502/Terra... · Posted by u/rhema

bazooka_penguin · 6 years ago

Honestly what would you do if you need to switch hundreds of distinct cases? Hundreds of classes implementing an interface?

MRD85 · 6 years ago

The way I'm reading this code is that the cases aren't that distinct. Look at lines 4367 to 4390 and you see 23 distinct cases that could be handled by a range and Mod 3.

MRD85 commented on Anyone who looks at this code instantly becomes insane github.com/raxod502/Terra... · Posted by u/rhema

rococode · 6 years ago

https://github.com/raxod502/TerrariaClone/blob/master/src/Te...

You may not like it, but this is peak programming. A level of perfection attainable only by undergoing the rite of writing a single if statement with 100+ conditions.

MRD85 · 6 years ago

I'm a second-year CS student that is still learning in this realm. Is there a general way that most developers would rewrite lines 5261-5284? My assumption is I would look to find some rules I can apply to simplify the code but I'm also aware a CS course is a bit of a bubble and what I've learnt so far might not be the way things are handled in industry.

For example, line 5284 has a 8 inequality operators checking every 4th element (140. 144, 148,...). A single "blocks[1][y][x] % 4 != 0" would remove them all. There also appears to be 3 main segments in that huge block of code (111-118, 119-126, 137-168) which would allow it to be simplified.

A second question: Why is there no comments? Is this common?

MRD85 commented on National Australia Bank compromises thousands of customer details secalerts.co/article/one-... · Posted by u/GiulioS

MRD85 · 6 years ago

Name, date of birth and contact details (phone and address) are often enough data for a fraudster to commit some serious damage. If I call up my phone company or bank that's probably going to cover the questions they ask me to prove identity. Someone transferring my phone can then get past any 2FA I hold.

At what point do we hold NAB liable for the potential damage they have caused?

MRD85 commented on Entrepreneurs don’t have a gene for risk–they come from families with money qz.com/455109/entrepreneu... · Posted by u/doener

augstein · 6 years ago

I often think about this. If my parents (solid middle class) hadn‘t paid for my studies and if they wouldn’t have had the means to support me for the time after that, when I started a company which took about two years to sustain itself (and me), I would probably still crunch out code somewhere as a low level dev.

Thanks mom and dad!

MRD85 · 6 years ago

Neither of my parents finished high school and didn't value education but they did value hard work and they encouraged me to get a trade. I joined the military, got a trade there, and now in my early/mid 30's I'm completing a CS degree.

Working for others isn't such a bad life if you have the drive to establish a life that you want for yourself.

MRD85 commented on Meal timing strategies appear to lower appetite, improve fat burning sciencedaily.com/releases... · Posted by u/lxm

namuol · 6 years ago

> For the study, researchers enrolled 11 adult men and women who had excess weight.

It's amazing how low our standard for news is when it comes to things like weight loss.

MRD85 · 6 years ago

Depending on the size of the effect, 11 participants can be very valid in an experiment. For example, assume you have 11 participants having a hormone measured after an experiment. If normal readings are 300 with a SD of 30, and at the end of the experiment their mean is 520 with a SD of 40, then you've just shown a strong, significant effect.

MRD85 commented on Giant batteries and cheap solar power are shoving fossil fuels off the grid sciencemag.org/news/2019/... · Posted by u/rchaudhary

rmuesi · 6 years ago

I’ve always wondered about something, yet have never found anyone discussing it online. So maybe some smart people can help me out:

a lot of people install solar on their rooftops. Much of the time this is done with the assumption that it will pay off financially because energy prices are currently at a certain rate and will continue to rise.

But here’s my question: If its financially advantageous to install solar on your roof, wouldn’t it be greatly more financially advantageous (given the main cost for solar installation is the labor) for energy companies to install solar at scale? And if that’s the case, wouldn’t the energy companies eventually do this, which, given macro market laws of supply and demand, would eventually cause the price of electricity to go dramatically down for their end consumer, thus eliminating the financial benefit of privately installed roof top solar for homeowners?

I live in the southwest, and based on online calculators it “makes sense” from a 10 year outlook to pay the money now and install solar on my home, but that’s only if the energy prices don’t fall. But nobody seems to even think that’s a possibility.

MRD85 · 6 years ago

A decent amount of your electricity bill is related to supply. Modern countries have a lot of rules around the reliability of their energy supply so companies spend a lot of money to guarantee that infrastructure is up to scratch. You're not paying for just the energy but for the transport of that energy.

A home system that uses its own electricity has the advantage of reducing the demand on the grid. A commercial system doesn't.

MRD85 commented on No limit: AI poker bot is first to beat professionals at multiplayer game nature.com/articles/d4158... · Posted by u/Anon84

amelius · 6 years ago

So will this be the end of online poker?

MRD85 · 6 years ago

I'm sitting here considering the possibility of making my own bot to play low stakes online poker ($1.50 sit n go). Run it on 6 tables at once and I imagine it would be facing really poor opponents and would have a steady flow of cash.