Viewing profile — john_b

I've been to Vienna and I have a lot of positive things to say about the city, but trying to adapt their model 1:1 to the US is not realistic for many reasons. You're right that pu…

Public housing has income restrictions associated with it. This article talks about how even people with stable, well-paying jobs struggle to find housing. Public housing isn't the…

It really is a currency, however. It's not a matter of perception but rather of how Bitcoin functions. The biggest difference between a commodity and currency is that a commodity i…

If your bear case is a 10-year recovery to 40 from 20 that's a CAGR of 7.18%, about the same as the long-term average CAGR of the S&P. The difference is that the S&P doesn't have b…

> "They however do control access to the account. This means there's a point where they get all sorts of data on me, and while I personally don't mind, I must admit I felt a bit sa…

What failure mode would you want, if not off? Having a failed sensor+controller control temperature in any way isn't what I'd want. One could have a backup thermostat as a fallback…

If you are in SF, this is partially due to how the tech industry distorts the sex ratio there: http://pics.city-data.com/agegraph/2455.png (This is for residents of SF only, so it …

One of the best and simplest changes I ever made was to have my phone on airplane mode by default. Originally, the change was just to maximize the life of a dying battery, but even…

> "At the very least, I like the notion that a person should be able to have some level of control over what companies are allowed to access about them" Yes, but how do the EU regu…

"Closed loop" simply implies feedback from the outputs to the next inputs. It doesn't mean the system is "closed".

It's really interesting to me how most people can easily spot propaganda in other cultures and rightfully mock it, but not only fail to notice even the most blatant propaganda in t…

There was a post on HN last week where the author provided a reasonable answer (or at least I think so) to this question. The gist is that people who are willing to pay a subscript…

Chrome wasn't released 10 years ago.

True, though now that it's public they may start accounting for the potential cost of lawsuits within the next year.

Why stop with the implementors? Why not also blame the janitors that clean the office they work in? Why not blame the project managers to oversee the project? Or the politicians wh…

Except that shooting someone is generally illegal, whereas having an affair is not. Allocate your sympathy as you wish, but don't pretend that a person deserves to be the victim of…

> "Secondly, surveillance is an essential tool in fighting crime." This is a very dubious assertion. I'm not aware of any evidence that mass surveillance deters or prevents crime a…

> "Instead of writing Xi, they should really write X[i]; because Xi is ambiguous. I find that dealing with all the ambiguity in syntax can be rather frustrating." This is a feature…

Nobody wants to see abusive speech being used. The question is whether or not the law should "protect" people from it. I'm not talking about making credible threats, because the cr…

I think it's relatively easy to distinguish "speech" from "speech plus other action," such as protesting. Even someone who supported free speech and a person's right to protest wou…

> "market expectations are primarily built on faith in the future, which is an entirely irrational basis for economic decision-making" Faith in some version of future events is the…

> "Realistically, any form of power generation could be used in space. It's really only a question of whether it's financially and practically feasible." Are you referring only to …

Yet presumably you recognize them for the natural, if tragic, events that they are? One's support for or opposition to a force of nature is rather irrelevant.

"Degrees of freedom" is an oversimplified way of putting it. What the parent seems to be getting at is that the rocket, when landing, has 10 state variables while only having 5 con…

> "I'm not sure I can muster any indignation that hunters can't hunt as much" Once a rural area with an overabundance of deer becomes re-zoned as a "residential area" the hunters o…