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Kaius's comments

Kaius | 4 years ago | on: Actuarial Life Table

Roughly 50% make it to age 80.

Roughly 20% make it to 90.

And around 1% make it to 100.

The road curves steeply at the end!

Kaius | 4 years ago | on: The most impressive linguistic feat I’ve ever seen 

  Ok so I get that it could be quiet
  difficult to write sentences which
  must be of a fixed length. However
  hyperbolically calling it the most
  scarily/stunningly linguistic feat
  is ridiculous in the extreme. I am
  certain that a person sufficiently
  motivated, could produce a similar
  document. Comparing something like
  this to the work of Mozart is just
  nonsense. I mean, I couldn't write 
  a piece of music like Mozart if my
  life depended on it.

Kaius | 5 years ago | on: New slats make the Golden Gate Bridge sound like a David Lynch movie

I don't live in SF but have visited a few times. I would be incredibly angry if someone arbitrarily decided to add a whole bunch of noise into my environment for no good reason. However "interesting" the noise may be to some people, having to deal with it in my daily life would be awful! I cannot comprehend how a person or group could be allowed do something like that.

Kaius | 6 years ago | on: Monobloc chair

Its a question of tolerances, if they break when someone stands on them they there is a decent chance they will break when you sit on them, or sit down too fast, or sit on them on uneven ground that distributes slightly too much weight to one leg, or they have been in the sun too long and have become brittle.

I'm a relatively tall guy and am wary sitting on these, standing on them would be certain failure. They are essentially cheap trash that will spend ~12 months looking like a chair and 500 years looking like a broken chair in a landfill.

Kaius | 6 years ago | on: Edward Snowden on The Joe Rogan Experience [video]

Completely agree, he rambles all over the place with no clear narrative arch. And he completely failed to build any rapport by making weird comments about the shows logo and his lack of engagement with Joe at the start. Given he knew he was going to have 2+ hours to make his points, and the audience was going to be several million, he should have considered his approach far better.

It was an interesting discussion however.

Kaius | 6 years ago | on: Consume less, create more

>>"Corín Tellado was a Spanish author who wrote over 5,000 books in her 81-year lifespan. That’s over sixty books a year, assuming she came out of the womb fully literate. She claimed she could write a book in two days, and I’m inclined to believe her."

Crazy. I was going to mention that her time would have been better spent writing 1 good book rather than 5000 that (I assume because I have never heard of her name before) were mediocre. Quality over Quantity.

Then I thought, perhaps writing brought her joy regardless of how well received the final book is, so she spent her time well by making herself happy doing what she loved. Be happy in your work.

Then I though, jesus 60 books a year, that sounds like she was manically driven to write almost non-stop for her entire life, which is awful. Work will set you free.

Kaius | 7 years ago | on: How Venice Works [video]

I visited Venice last week and this video was a good explanation for some of the things we noticed (bricks being eroded etc). Very interesting.

Kaius | 7 years ago | on: Ask HN: What was the best decision you made in your career?

I'm also based in Ireland, would you mind giving a range for what you consider 'silly' money? My impression is that Contracting works well at lower salaries but once you move into the higher tax bracket (40%) then the the disadvantages of contracting start to outweigh the benefits as most of the additional income is eaten up by tax.

Kaius | 10 years ago | on: Cleartext: A text editor that only allows the 1,000 most common words in English

Exactly! There is a phrase in Thing Explainer where Randall is trying to say that a part of a space shuttle or something is made in Japan, instead of using 'Japan' he has to say something like "the land where the sun comes up" or close to it (I don't think he could use 'rising' but may be not be recalling correctly). It breaks down as soon as you try to convey something beyond base level understanding.

So yes, it sounds like using the most common 1K words would aid readability but you probably need to raise that to 2.5K or more. Low enough to avoid the use of complex words while also freeing the author from awkward phrasings.

Kaius | 10 years ago | on: Why Did Ancient Europeans Just Disappear 14,500 Years Ago?

Its peculiar that a group with a specific DNA marker would be wiped out so completely by climate change while another group was not (or at least prospered at a later time in the same region).

Could this more easily be explained by an aggressive disease or plague that wiped out anyone it contacted and the separation of the 2 groups (N and M) in different locations protected enough of the N group for it to prosper. Also isolated pockets of M carriers who had migrated beyond the infected area survived.

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