The the requirements for food stamp eligibility should be changed?
If Amazon is actually taking advantage of the food stamp programme rules, how can changing the rules have any other effect than making people starve ?
Readit Newsmickronome commented on Thousands of Amazon workers receive food stamps washingtonpost.com/busine... · Posted by u/0xmohit
Totally agree on 2. "Learn a language a year" they said. "Learning new languages expands your thinking" they said. What they didn't say was that once you use ADTs to model data, Maybe/Option types to avoid null, exhaustive pattern matching, etc, you want those features in all the languages you use.
I don't ask for much. I just want a GC'd Rust (one of the few modern languages that has option types in the std lib) or an F# that isn't tied to the .NET standard lib. Please?
I actually stopped learning new languages with these features because I started to get so frustrated they weren't available. Or I implemented then am everyone got weirded out by their 'strangeness'
mickronome commented on The Utter Failure of Fictional Time Travel blogs.scientificamerican.... · Posted by u/draenei
From a narrative point of view, the spatial problem as stated is a quite decent post hoc argument for why time travel is usually fraught with danger, even after the science is known, as predicting the exact parameters needed would be nigh impossible.
One could easily argue that big whiteboards laden to the brim with integrals and capital sigma (summation) rich equations indicate a data rich problem rather than a theory heavy one, and that the inevitable squashed, disappeared, or exploded melon fits very well into this framework.
Shooting a water melon at several million miles per hour so it hits a small time travel device correctly in all N>3 dimensions is obviously going to make a royal mess quite a few times, as evidenced in many movies!
mickronome commented on Always-on Alibaba office app fuels backlash among Chinese workers businessinsider.com/r-din... · Posted by u/lnguyen
If it works, it works. I remember standing at the base of the new Tencent double tower, when it was being constructed. They were almost done with the concrete skeleton and the beams looked all crooked standing there looking up at the structure - each column on each floor was slightly misplaced compared to the previous one. I am no construction engineer, but I believe they should have been placed in a straight line, but maybe I am wrong..
Maybe not the case if they looked crooked, but having irregular placement of construction elements is a valid way to decrease tendency for self resonance through different vibration modes being dampened by the mismatched distances.
An irregular structure can be useful for improving earthquake resistance, or sway/vibrations in high wind situations.
mickronome commented on How we spent $30k in Firebase in less than 72 hours hackernoon.com/how-we-spe... · Posted by u/slyall
Product Manager for Cloud Firestore here. It's worth noting we do have the ability to set hard daily caps, as well as budgets that can have alerts tied to them. It's something we also looking at ways to improve it.
I would very much like to have something like Google authenticator, but for billing. With the ability so set it as alarms on my phone (and coworkers), preferably with some smarts to detect short usage spikes.
In essence, settings and updating amount, rate and velocity ( speed of rate change ) caps on the fly.
Then I can set whatever tight limit I want to, and not worry about burning through too much cash because of some simple coding, or config error.
A bug almost cost us several tens of thousands of BigQuery costs when a dev accidentally repeated a big query every 5 seconds in an automated script, and while we still had budget warnings, it still cost us a fair bit of money. Even after this, I found it tricky to set/catch budgets for single services. I think I had to use stackdriver to be able to get any kind of warning.
It was in the ’blinking lights and sirens’- territory fast!
Being frustrated with burned top, and undercooked bottom I figured out that using the broiler together with a couple 2-3 mm thick pre-heated aluminium sheet that I placed the pizza on produced pretty good results. Not that I was aiming for a particular style of pizza though, ymmv.
The sheet itself was placed on an ordinary oven rack somewhere below the middle of the oven.
It seems to align somewhat with their findings. Since the aluminium sheet is only heated by the air, the bottom doesn't get burned, but the slight extra boost of initial heat cooks the bottom about right compared to the top. At least for a bit thicker pizzas as the one I made.
You probably would want maybe an even thicker plate to get a really short cooking times, like the 2min in the article. In any case, you will have to wait for a little bit between each pizza for the plate to reach the appropriate temperature.
> Based on a subset of the HEVC open video compression standard
Is it patent encumbered then? And can it replace JPEG in such case?
I don't know anything about how the licencing works, and what parts are covered, but the patents reported to ITU for H.265/HEVC as a whole is substantial, see: https://www.itu.int/itu-t/recommendations/related_ps.aspx?id...
mickronome commented on Ask HN: What would you work on, if you had enough free time? · Posted by u/manx
Honestly? Pretty much everything. And thus in effect I get nothing done in my current level of free time as I'm jumping back and forth between dozens of fun projects.
I'm aware this may not be a satisfying answer, but it's the truth, for better or for worse.
It's satisfying for me, it's an honest answer, and as good as any other.
With enough free time there wouldn't be much need for a direction. And after a while I would probably figure out something I liked doing more than other things.
Only issue is that in my eyes, enough is probably pretty close to immortality. Largely because I would like to understand the breathd of the human condition, and how language makes us think differently. That probably requires getting to native speaking ability in maybe 100’s of languages, and also the patience to wait for the likely needed cognitive augmentation to be able to do that.
I would also very much like to visit a few stars and nebulae, which could take a while.
If I only had a couple of decades or so, I might take a stab at building tools to make programming the job it should be, but isn't now.
mickronome commented on Urine, Not Chlorine, Causes Red Eyes in Pools (2015) smithsonianmag.com/smart-... · Posted by u/briantailor
The headline is a bit clickbaity. The third paragraph starts with "In fact, chlorine is still a culprit." A more accurate title could be "Urine and Chlorine Cause Red Eyes in Pools."
Actually, it's chloramine alone that is the culprit for both the smell and the red eyes according to the actual report. Which isn't reporting any new finding, as far as I know this has been well known since many years.
The short version is; A pool that smells strongly of 'clorine' ( chloramine(s) ) is a pool with a high load of contaminants, and whether or not the chlorine concentration is kept at levels enough to cope with the load can't afaik easily be determined, but it's reasonable to a assume a higher load implies a higher risk for insufficient levels.
Or as the report states: >What you smell are actually chemicals that form when chlorine mixes with pee, poop, sweat, and dirt from swimmers’ bodies. Yuck! >These chemicals—not chlorine—can cause your eyes to get red and sting, make your nose run, and make you cough. >Healthy pools, waterparks, hot tubs, splash pads, and spray parks don’t have a strong chemical smell.
And how does a judge seriously decide to retroactively apply an arbitrarion agreement when none existed at the time of the transaction? Is the argument that the new ToS were accepted when Lord participated in the bug test? The article seems to be missing that detail if there even is some logic that was used in the ruling (as I assume there was, beyond not wanting to have two rulings).
It seems the argument could be that since he didn't object to the new ToS when they were changed, and kept using parts of their service, the clause forbidding arbitration towards RSI is/was still binding.
One oddity, except the usual insanity that click-through agreements should be valid for anything above, lets say $100, is that it appears the newer ToS explicitly states it doesn't apply retroactively. However, since the arbitration would always occur in the future from the later ToS, it might be a moot point.
If all of this is true, and the law correctly applied. Doesn't it create a situation where any ToS for a service - at least those you actually depend upon - are essentially worthless?
Seems like if a change the ToS to include an arbitration clause is applied this way, your only option would be immediately stop using the service, or the provider would be able to do whatever they wanted hereonafter, even completely ignore the rest of the contract/ToS?