Recent submissions

Comment · 6 years ago
You don't need to be a high level executive to not want to broadcast your location and identity in realtime for anyone to see.

This isn't about your choices with mobile devices, this is mandated by the government, and the broadcasted data is literally open to anyone.

Comment · 6 years ago
And the founder of whatsapp is bitter about what Facebook did to it, and is funding signal now. And Moxie is no fan of Facebook either. These aren't some random kids and a VC.
Comment · 6 years ago
That does not seem to account for most political and social issues that you can't do much for alone, but millions of people together can bring positive change with little individual effort.
Comment · 6 years ago
If we really want higher prices, how about we at least get more features for it. Such as built-in privacy protection.

Or how about we restructure the whole relationship so that wildly excessive amounts of money don't end up in either Verisign or ICANN regardless of what the price is.

Comment · 6 years ago
The current situation is sustained by a small minority of users generating the majority of the clicks. That was true before adblock became a thing too. As long as adblock is not pre-installed with any major browser, it won't reach 90% penetration, and these people will by and large continue generating clicks.

So, the effects might be less dramatic than we'd expect. The industry will adapt one way or another, not the first time a technological shift like this happens. Who knows, maybe we'll even get functional micropayments out of this. One thing that will definitely happen that you didn't mention is disguising advertisements as organic content. It's already happening with instagram influencers and even newspapers publishing sponsored content.

Comment · 6 years ago
> What part of ruby or java has anything morally or technically even approaching the concept, use case, or meaning of implicits?

Dependency injection for implicit params, for one? Also, you can almost see implicit conversions as one take on type safe dynamic typing. Almost.

But of course Scala also brings functional programming and its own ideas to the mix.

Comment · 7 years ago
Scala's version is epoch.major.minor, not major.minor.patch. I though 2.12.(x+1) is generally binary compatible with 2.12.x. Or at least I personally never ran into that issue with Scala itself.
Comment · 7 years ago
Is there an equivalent to "small claims court" in Colombia where you don't need a lawyer if you're willing to do your own research? Maybe threaten to take them to that court for disclosing private information without permission, and also for libel if they accompanied the photo with untruthful badmouthing. And then take them to that court if they ignore you? IANAL though, and I know nothing about what's legal or not in Colombia.

One other thing you can try is get more people to report that post. Maybe there's a threshold at which they will look into this more seriously.

Comment · 7 years ago
Hey, nice! What kind of components are you using? Engine, batteries, etc.? Did you pick those yourself, or borrow the design from an existing system like the e-help for hang gliders?
Comment · 7 years ago
FPTP might be the worst, but IRV is a close second. Just like FPTP it gives significant artificial advantage to a certain kind of party. Specifically, IRV tends to elect a party that is most people's second-choice party.

You might think that's good because such a party will have to be more centrist than what FPTP is likely to elect, but centrist doesn't necessarily mean good. If there is no competitive pressure for a party to be good, it will not be good, centrist or not. It will be centrist but will become just as corrupt as the parties we have today, if not more.

That's because this centrist party will not actually face the higher level of political competition you'd expect from a non-FPTP system. It will get second-choice votes it needs for a win very reliably, because both right wing and left wing voters would rather take this centrist party they don't like than allow the other wing that they hate to win.

So with IRV you can easily end up with the same centrist party winning the election over and over and over again.

---

Since we just had elections in Canada, fun fact: the last time around our future prime minister, leader of a centrist party, promised an election reform if elected. After his party was elected, he revealed that he only wanted IRV, and would not have anything else. Now you know why.

Comment · 7 years ago
I would say ram-air inflation of parafoil wings is very different – it's dynamic, not static like a bladder pre-inflated with a pump.

This Inflatoplane is more of a precursor to modern "tensairity" designs (e.g. some of Prospective Concepts designs). While certainly interesting, pressurized bladders in aircraft have so far been a dead end due to practical limitations (catastrophic modes of failure, wear, altitude pressure differences IIRC). The only flying wings where inflatable bladders are successfully used are kitesurfing kites. But those don't normally carry people up high.

Parafoil based designs on the other hand are now everywhere. Paragliders, parachutes, parafoil kitesurfing kites, even parafoil sails (SkySails).

Comment · 7 years ago
Powered paragliders fit the bill, but still require infrastructure like some open space for launching / landing.

Live from the official Hacker News API

A modern reader for Hacker News · SvelteKit + Skeleton