Recent submissions

Comment · 3 months ago
Tolkien's Earendil was definitely a reference to the morning star, but outside his legendarium I don't know of anyone spelling it "dil" instead of "del". If it was supposed to be a non-Tolkien reference I would've expected them to spell it accordingly.
Comment · 3 months ago
The fact that they're spelling this Earendil, not Earendel, makes me think this is a direct reference to Tolkien's work. It's pretty weird for dystopian industrial initiatives to be named after characters in a work whose most unambiguous message was that rampant industrialization was ruining the world.
Comment · 8 months ago
This comment made a lot more sense to me once I realized we weren't talking about an aggressively marketed weight loss drug.
Comment · 10 months ago
I don't think you're understanding what OP actually said. They didn't cite the Libya example as an example of bad behaviour; there wasn't any value statement on it at all. They were saying the fact that they intervened in Libya but not elsewhere was an example of the US intervening when it suits them.

I'm not an expert in US foreign policy so I'll refrain from entering the debate itself, I just think you're not arguing against what the OP is actually saying.

Comment · 1 year ago
Yeah Taskmaster (which I adore) came to my mind too. I think it's more common when the food in question is an animal product, but still it just seems a bit contrived when behind the scenes the catering company is probably chucking tons of food the talent didn't feel like eating on a given day anyway.

It's entertainment, it has an environmental cost, sometimes a big cost. I don't think you need to signal that it's unacceptable for that cost to be paid solely for entertainment's sake. What's the difference between some food waste and burning fuel to drive a boulder out of town for a laugh.

Comment · 1 year ago
Yeah I was going to say, the ACC is basically connected to Union already, you don't need some complex system of tunnels to get from one to the other.
Comment · 1 year ago
The article itself has the title:

> The FBI Seized Her $40,000 Without Explaining Why. She Fought Back Against That Practice—and Lost

I think it's decent, but still a bit ambiguous. Less ambiguous than if it just said "She Fought Back and Lost". My initial assumption formed by the title was still that she didn't get her money back.

Comment · 1 year ago
Yeah and I think that's the core of the issue here. In a lot of hiring markets, the cost of letting in a bad hire is higher than the cost of filtering out a good hire.
Comment · 1 year ago
Hmm I'll take your word for it that that's true, but I would say the examples are very different. Independence Day is a title/holiday retroactively created to commemorate the event (which apparently might not have even happened on July 4).

Whereas D-Day was something soldiers used to describe that specific day even before it happened. And you would hear things like "D-Day plus 23" to describe points in time, you wouldn't have to specify the year

So to me the Independence Day analogy is a little weak.

Comment · 1 year ago
> Passports please! British paratroopers met by French customs after D-Day airdrop

Err, D-Day anniversary airdrop. That headline has only one correct literal interpretation, and it's wrong (not ambiguous, wrong).

Comment · 1 year ago
> The moment that people ascribe properties such as "consciousness" or "ethics" or "values" or "morals" to these learnt mappings is where I tend to get lost. We are speaking about a big recurrence equation that produces a new word, and that stops producing words if we don't crank the shaft.

If that's the argument, then in my mind the more pertinent question is should you be anthropomorphizing humans, Larry Ellison or not.

Comment · 1 year ago
Yeah that's a very bad idea.
Comment · 1 year ago
Oops disregard this, by "has to be identical" I thought you were objecting to the non uniformity of the surface, not the incongruity of the sides' shapes, so that's where my comment was coming from.

The incongruity of the sides certainly makes it not a Platonic Solid, though the article doesn't actually assert that it is. It just uses some terrible phrasing that's bound to mislead. Their words with my clarification for how it could be parsed in a factually accurate way: "A tetrahedron is the simplest Platonic solid (when it's a regular tetrahedron). Mathematicians have now made one (a tetrahedron, not a Platonic solid)...".

It's a dumb phrasing, it's like saying "Tesla makes the world's fastest accelerating sports car. I bought one" and then revealing that the "one" refers to a Tesla Model 3, not the fastest accelerating sports car.

Comment · 1 year ago
It's a meaningless distinction. A solid is defined by a 3D shape enclosed by a surface. It doesn't require uniform density. Just imagine that the sides of this surface are infinitesimally thin so as to be invisible and porous to air, and you've filled the definition. Don't like this answer, then just imagine the same thing but with an actual thin shell like mylar. It makes no difference.
Comment · 1 year ago
In some ways it's a shame because I love the finesse game as a counterbalance to the focus on power that seemed to peak around the time Brad Jacob's crew was dominating the scene. I don't follow curling quite enough to know what the impact will be on the meta game though. More guards? Fewer? More takeout attempts? It's interesting because finesse and power both have critical roles in both scoring and defending so it's not obvious to me where the negative/positive impacts to the game will be.

Live from the official Hacker News API

A modern reader for Hacker News · SvelteKit + Skeleton