Viewing profile — eloff

That matters little. The point is people on HN missed the potential of Dropbox because for them it was a problem they already had a half solution for. For regular people who don’t …

I stand corrected!

There's a important lesson about using nuclear power as an energy source in there. Contrast that with Germany which is shuttering their nuclear power plants in favor of renewables.…

Don't be pedantic. From Oxford dictionary: "advance or development toward a better, more complete, or more modern condition"

Then you get a revolution and the whole system is torn down and rebuilt in a different form. That's highly undesirable, and as I mentioned, is a real tail risk to consider.

"progress is inevitable": It's not actually. Progress is only made if people take the risk and effort to advance progress. That does require rewarding them appropriately for the ri…

How that is handled really comes down to how your society has agreed to establish a social safety net. In Northern Europe it’s handled quite well. In the U.S. it’s handled with a “…

I agree, I said as much about winners and losers being created. It’s still a good thing for society - the alternative is halting or slowing progress.

That cycle has gone on since the start of the Industrial Revolution. Jobs are destroyed, people complain and protest, new jobs are created and the total economic pie and the absolu…

It’s both really if you look at IQ tests. It’s part of the reason immigrants will often score lower, they lack the culture or language specific knowledge being tested. IQ is a prox…

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Is there something like this for the command line in general? I'd love to have a ? command that takes an optional prompt and feeds my current shell history to chat gpt and gets a r…

I use gbd so rarely that I often forget the commands between sessions. Then I use print debugging when it’s not the best tool just because I don’t want to lookup the commands. I co…

Even the plants are trying to kill you in Australia. That continent seems to have a bonanza of deadly critters. Still, when you look at the statistics, any urban area in the U.S. i…

I’m just a computer guy, but I also see that as likely. When it comes down to it there’s less than 100 elements, made of a handful of forces and subatomic particles that make up th…

That’s a fair point, but of the over twenty programming languages I’ve used in my career, only C uses null terminated strings. All the others store the length. There’s good reasons…

Ah you mean why is it on HN, not why was the study performed. That's fair. HN is wider than just technical things of course, and often includes major breaking news as well as some …

Would it be better to stock your head in the sand? I’m honestly baffled by your comment.

We have a clear understanding of why the difference matters here, see my other comment in this thread.

Two main things. One is that women are smaller and body mass matters a lot to alcohol metabolism. The second thing is many women lack an enzyme that helps metabolize alcohol, which…

Thanks, that makes sense now.

Yes, but the point is the danger from the warming contribution is less than the danger from an ozone hole, so why focus on the warming? Unless the ozone depletion is below the reco…

If they’re that incompetent that they need to fake their database and think it’s a good idea, there’s little surprise that they’re also too incompetent to realize that task is only…

He doesn’t give any numbers there. I may well be completely out to lunch, but that source doesn’t modify my opinion. Here's the results of the first large randomized clinical trial…

The free version is still on 3.5. I still use it, it’s faster and I can’t use the plus version that my company pays for for personal stuff.