Viewing profile — throwway120385

Most of Dang's day is spent shuttling HN titles into the archives in a salt mine in Nevada in between moderation.

Some day you might need the welfare. Not everyone is infinitely healthy for their entire lives.

We could actually hold our elected officials accountable for gutting Social Security instead. Then we wouldn't have to add "stock exchange expert" to our ever-growing list of job t…

I think if we hadn't we would've figured it out anyway. Someone would have found them interesting enough to study.

Free trade isn't the issue, the issue is monopolies. When there were 60 or 80 companies all in the same industry but in different states or counties, the economy was much healthier…

> Can you blame them? Would you sue if the government suddenly decided your industry has to pay extra taxes, or they tried to restrict your advertising? No. I'd probably try to und…

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In the 50's you'd buy it in an 8-oz can. The sizes we're getting out of vending machines are pretty absurdly large for something that basically started out as a dessert you'd buy t…

"Heat" is really entropy gain, and so in order to do useful work you have to increase the entropy of the system to higher and higher quantities. If you want to move entropy from on…

We could easily create a duty at the state or local level if we wanted to. The US Constitution is pretty silent on a lot of issues that are remanded to the states.

Two egg rolls is also a meal by calorie content.

Maybe we could take a page from the SWEBOK here, which contains a lot of previous thinking on this topic.

Just putty over it and get a slightly matching high-gloss or semi-gloss enamel and nobody will notice it. I've put tons of holes in things in rentals over the years and basically n…

This is a killer use case, but you should also take a peek at the Human Factors Handbook -- it's got great information about how to architect buildings like homes that will help yo…

USB-C would suck. Part of the purpose of that proprietary plug is that it's very water resistant and very durable. Imagine getting mud or coarse sand in your USB plug and not being…

Because a vaccine is much easier for the doctor to administer and manage. My GP won't put condoms on me but they do have a list of shots I get basically once and then never again.

Which medications were they trying to get? Plan B or something that works later?

ApplePay doesn't communicate with Apple through your phone, it presents the card details as a contactless EMV transaction through the card reader, so it's pretty much spot on as an…

You can use pipe dope instead of PTFE if you want. It's just more expensive.

It's perfectly legal in the US. In fact it's legal to lean out your window and yell at them. It's protected speech here, and for good reason. Otherwise the cops could just say your…

It's hard to justify an iPhone Pro Max as a "cheap travel phone" though so you might actually need to buy a cheap travel phone.

What makes someone a monster in my book is their willingness to depersonalize other people to accomplish their goals. I haven't met Qiu and this is the only article I've read about…

I didn't read it as making the doctor a monster. What I saw in the story is an example of how the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

You really shouldn't apply statistics this way. Expected value is useful if you're an insurance company because you can price insurance products slightly above the expected value, …

Another fun fact is that it was impossible to deduce from any of Ben Franklin's experiments what material was transferred and what material remained in place to give rise to "charg…