Recent submissions

Comment · 2 months ago
There is an option on the top view plane where you can switch from "Multiple choice" to "Type the answer".
Comment · 3 months ago
Comment · 10 months ago
> Interesting, but It doesn't answer why a bank would hold a completely vacant building for 15 years.

I had the exact same question before I fully read the article.

This is answered in the article in the "Extend and Pretend" section.

> "And so long as the operator can afford to keep losing $140k per year on the building… they can!"

> [...]

> "The only sticking point here is that the building operator is still losing $140k per year. But remember that, if he gives up, he loses the $4 million he’s already put into the building. Even if he ended up paying $140k per year for 10 years before things turned around, losing $1.4 million is still better than losing $4 million."

Extending the article's example to a scenario where the building was vacant for 15 years, it means the operator was willing to lose $140K per year. In the 15 year scenario, the operator lost $2.1 million ($140K * 15 years) which is still better than losing the $4 million if the operator walked away from the investment.

> Anything that makes owning an empty building a bad investment in all circumstances.

In the final section "This Sucks, What Could We Do About It?", it mentions how adding a vacant store font tax would end up creating more foreclosures. This is the side effect of the financialization of real estate.

Comment · 1 year ago
Comment · 2 years ago
Comment · 3 years ago
Water boils at 100C. The article states the water temperature is 100F / ~37.8C
Comment · 3 years ago
tptacek could be referring to the following video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsEjV8DdSbs

This video does a good job at explaining how the "UFO" is probably an infrared glare, hiding the hot object behind it, and rotating only because the camera rotates when tracking the target from left to right.

Comment · 3 years ago
Do you not feel this is an unreasonable expectation? I wouldn’t think we would ever get to the point where phones are only charged once a year. This assumes that power consumption would not increase over time.
Comment · 3 years ago
> due to `pip install --extra-index-url` apparently ignoring the user-specified registry if the package exists on PyPI

I thought this was the expected behavior of --extra-index-url

To force pip to use a user-specified registry, you would use --index-url instead of --extra-index-url

Comment · 5 years ago
Comment · 6 years ago
The Vice article that is cited by sdiw doesn't mention that the virus came from "bats being eaten.[1]" The article does state "new report points to the original animal source: bats" but nothing about bats being eaten. Maybe I missed something, please let me know. :)

The National Geographic article states the following:

> "[T]he highest prevalence of coronaviruses tend to be extruded by animals through feces, or guano in the case of bats. Coronaviruses not only spread via the air and the respiratory tract, but also if fecal matter comes in contact with another creature’s mouth. Bats aren’t exactly clean, so if one nibbles on a fruit, the food may get contaminated with fecal matter. If the fruit drops to the ground, then it can serve as a viral crossover point for farmed animals like civets." [2]

It seems more likely the virus jumped from the bat to another animal that ate something contaminated with bat guano infected with the virus. That animal was then traded at this market where the virus somehow spread to humans.

This lead me to find the following Wikipedia article on Civets[3]. This mentions how Civets are farmed and fed coffee cherries then the partly digested coffee beans are harvested from the Civets fecal matter. This is purely speculation, but this could be one way that the virus could have spread to humans. A Civet ate a coffee cherry that an infected horseshoe bat had contaminated with guano infected with the virus. The Civet was traded at this market and the virus spread to humans. Once again, this is pure speculation on my part but it shows how there are other mechanisms in which the virus could spread to humans without someone 'eating bats'.

[1] https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/xgqy3n/scientists-now-thi...

[2] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/01/new-coron...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civet#Coffee

Comment · 6 years ago
Comment · 7 years ago

Live from the official Hacker News API

A modern reader for Hacker News · SvelteKit + Skeleton