I moved from west Los Angeles (Mar Vista near Culver City) to Dublin and my rent is significantly higher in Dublin (renting a new-ish build 2br 800 sq ft near the Canal, city center). Dublin's a lovely city -- but it's a lovely city of half a million people in a country of 5 million, less than half greater Los Angeles county. London, Tokyo, New York, Los Angeles are major cities of the world. Dublin is a regional city. It's absurd. I never thought I'd live somewhere _more_ expensive than LA.
Readit Newsnotafraudster commented on Street Votes: A proposed response to Ireland's housing crisis thefitzwilliam.com/p/a-si... · Posted by u/MajesticFrogBoy
notafraudster commented on Mark Twain's two-week stint as a Confederate soldier historynet.com/mark-twain... · Posted by u/bookofjoe
It's an 800 word article on a magazine publisher's website, how formal do you expect the language to be?
It’s less the formality and more the hypermodern idioms that feel out of place (what’s the opposite of anachronistic?) in talking about a historical subject. Like, yes Mark Twain had the rizz and the Confedussies took the L but that’s probably not how I’d discuss it.
We are talking about America. We decided everybody should get electricity and they got it with rural electrification. Should everyone lose the right to have
electricity connections because you think it's too hard? Somehow other countries can do this with the US can't? We could decide just like we did for electricity that everyone should have 100 meg internet to their house.
Unfortunately there seems to be a bipartisan political consensus against the most profitable and useful elements of the New Deal (WPA, TVA, REA, CWA) which would be almost mandatory to go whole hog on this kind of infrastructure proposal, and as we've learned over the last 40 years public-private partnerships are thin gruel as a replacement.
notafraudster commented on Disney begins laying off 7k employees cnn.com/2023/03/27/media/... · Posted by u/mska
> It's got nothing on Turning Red [1], though. $20M on a $175M budget. Whoof.
Turning Red was surely a hit on Disney+. Hard to see from the consumer side what the impact was, but disney+ is a money machine and the can easily double the price.
Crucially, Turning Red was _not_ released in theatres in most countries due to COVID-19. It may or may not have been a money loser, but there's very little reason to believe executives think it's anything about the movie that made it that way.
notafraudster commented on Launch HN: Play.ht (YC W23) – Generate and clone voices from 20 seconds of audio · Posted by u/hammadh
I'm with you on this. I can't honestly think a good use case for the average user to generate audio this way. Maybe some niche use case in like movie or tv production where you can generate a missing line without flying in an actor or something. Or maybe for generating dialogues for videogames. But those are business use cases, not things for the genral public.
My Dad died before my kids were born. When he got cancer, he recorded himself reading "The Night Before Christmas", which is about enough audio for the high quality version of this technology. Is it ghoulish on my part to want to hear his voice again or for my kids to hear it? Maybe. Do I really care what you think (or really what _I_ think) about that? No.
Fungal spores spread almost entirely through airflow.
COVID 19 also spread almost entirely through airflow.
I think we have an airflow problem in our hospitals (and other public places)
Luckily, that's quite cheap to fix. HEPA filtration is sufficient for both problems (no need to bring outdoor air in).
We should probably be:
* Mandating that all hospitals filter all air every 10 minutes. That could be simply a matter of buying bedside standalone air filters for every bed. They aren't medical devices, so will probably cost <$20 per bed, available from Amazon tomorrow.
* Start a study of air refreshes per hour Vs infection rate for various airborne pathogens. These studies typically can't be done for ethics reasons today - it wouldn't meet ethics standards to deliberately infect someone with something harmful. However this is happening hundreds of millions of times per year already, so I think it is in everyone's best interests to do the science to understand it so we can prevent disease spread.
A little crazy that more wasn't done towards this end in summer 2020 when there was massive amounts of cash available to the hospital system, comparatively very low occupancy such that retrofitting would be less disruptive (lower respiratory disease burden generally inclusive both of COVID and non-COVID due to lockdown measures), and the social will to solve it wasn't politicized in the US or attached to other hot button stuff. I don't really know enough about HVAC to know what it would take to improve the modal old hospital's ventilation so maybe this is an orders of magnitude tougher problem than I expect or something.
notafraudster commented on Ask HN: Why do many CS graduates lack foundational knowledge? · Posted by u/platzhirsch
I did a CS degree 20 years ago. Databases, concurrent programming, and network programming were all 4th year electives (I took network, AI, and image processing personally). But something not being included in a core curriculum doesn't mean someone can't learn it.
My curriculum was: Year 1: Intro Comp Sci / Year 2: 2 courses in Logic, 2 courses in data structures and algorithms / Year 3: 2 courses in processor design, 1 course in finite state automata, 1 course in parsers / Year 4: a course in ethics, a course in team programming (which covered UML and version control), and two electives.
I believe a major was 14 courses so I'm missing one, or it may have been it was three electives. I didn't take databases because I was already a paid sysadmin before I started college and mostly at the time database courses were just ten tedious weeks of normalization crap.
Also, treat your interns better. The reason to hire interns is because you plan to devote some of your resources to help them in their professional development. Stop asking what you can get out of your interns and start asking how you can best give something to them.
notafraudster commented on Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Last Act theatlantic.com/magazine/... · Posted by u/samclemens
His politics and the Atlantic's are at odds.
He's far from perfect, but what he's accomplished in the US as a kid from Austria . . . absolutely amazing. Over and over.
If the US Constitution didn't prevent it, he'd surely be President. (And I'm from his political antipode.)
So, basically nothing about this tracks. Arnold would have been best characterized as a right-liberal during his time in politics. He was a moderate Republican in a state that was already pretty left-leaning. Since then he's drifted a little left (focusing on criticizing Trump mostly on compassionate grounds, focusing on civic engagement, and focusing on environmental issues). I think he'd best be characterized in the global scale as something between a right-liberal and a left-liberal. The Atlantic has basically Washington Consensus politics, a little left on some issues, but basically market liberals. Maybe a more simplified way to put this: The Atlantic likely would have been closer to Clinton in the 2016 primaries than Sanders, and closer to Biden in 2020 primaries than Warren than Sanders. So it's true that they don't have identical politics, but it's not true that they're really at odds.
His life story is really inspirational, but his terms as governor sort of exposed he didn't have a great aptitude for elected politics. After he got whooped in his 2nd year midterm on the bond issues, he acknowledged that to be an effective governor he needed to get better at working with the legislature and making the case for his priorities. Then he served another six years with no major accomplishments; he never really felt like he was in the driver's seat after that midterm. He remained personally likeable, and it's true that Democrats put up only a token challenge to his second term election, but this maybe emphasizes the point: he was not in control of the issue agenda in the state, he wasn't a real threat. He didn't do a terrible job as governor, but he did do a very passive job. And in his second term when he did try to engage with the legislature, it didn't work, and mostly (as the article notes) his popularity eroded significantly. After leaving politics, he didn't really stay engaged in the party or build connections in the state, and indeed it's telling that Republicans have had a terrible record in California since.
He's never sought any federal office, and I have no idea why the article accepts the false premise that after being Governor, the only other option is to run for President. He could have, of course, ran as a Senator (Governors often do this!), ran for the house (Governors occasionally do this!), gotten involved in executive politics by taking any of a number of federal appointments that could have been open for him (or made a case for a cabinet position). He didn't. The article suggests he wouldn't mind being Secretary of State. If that were true, we'd expect him to have done... uh... literally anything connected to diplomacy in the 15 years since he left elected office?
And frankly a lot of his public engagement with politics over the last few years has been pretty surface level. He's talking directly to the public, mostly in (yes, well articulated) platitudes. I agree with him on all these issues and I'm glad he's using his bully pulpit to advocate for good things that I agree with. But mostly that's where the engagement stops. He's not day-to-day running civil society organizations, he's not building connections with politicians, he's just sort of weighing in in the same way a lot of people do on issues he cares about.
I do think there's a lot to admire in Arnold (his life story is amazing). and I don't have any hostility towards him. He's funny, he's using his platform for good, he's a sports hero, he's a unique and fun actor. I don't think he's great at doing electoral politics.
notafraudster commented on A SVB short seller explains red flags he saw months ago fortune.com/2023/03/10/si... · Posted by u/skmurphy
Could anyone in the know explain how "shorting" works?
When you buy a stock, you pay money and someone else gives you a stock. Once you have it, you can hold it for as long as you want. Its value can go up or down. When you sell, you get money, which might be less or more than what you paid. If the value goes to zero, you can no longer sell and you will never get any money.
When you short a stock, you are basically selling a stock you don't have. Thus you get money and owe someone else a stock (in practice what happens is someone else unknowingly gives you a stock for free and then you sell it, and they get an IOU for a share of the stock later; but let's not worry too much about the mechanics). Once you have this IOU, you can hold on. The value of the liability associated with the IOU can go up or down. If it goes down, then when you discharge that liability by buying the share you owe, you will pay less than you were paid for the short, thus making a profit. If it goes up, then you will pay more and thus lose money. One risk with a short is that your liability is unbounded. In a traditional stock purchase, the worst that can happen is that you lose the money you put in. In a short sale, you can lose many multiples of the money you put in if the stock does very well. Under a few circumstances, the IOU can be called, forcing you to prove that you have the money to buy a share; for instance, if you were to short $1,000,000 in shares and the share price triples, you owe $3,000,000.
To summarize: when you buy a stock, it's because you think it will be worth more later (again, let's set aside dividends and other things). When you short a stock, it's because you think it will be worth less later.
The reason shorting is permitted is because in general, there is a belief (mistaken or not), that additional liquidity -- more trading -- benefits everyone involved in a market by reducing the spread between prices for buying and selling; additionally, shorting makes it possible to hedge your exposure to a sector (i.e. to trade off some upside in a sector with some corresponding downside and vice versa).
notafraudster commented on Twitter’s $42k-per-month API prices out nearly everyone wired.com/story/twitter-d... · Posted by u/danso
Except if I want to buy some piece of academic research, they sell articles for as high at $60. Why aren’t academics complaining about the absurd costs for the public accessing their information?
They do? Every single academic in the country supports open-access, lobbies their institutions to pay for the costs of open access. Every researcher will send you a copy of their article if you are paywalled and want to read it. And you, like all academics, know about Sci-Hub, so you should do what most academics do and use Sci-Hub to pirate the article to begin with.