ProblemFactory's comments

What did you see as the central claim of the article?

To me it was that personal finance and budgeting is being marketed to low-income people as a way of getting out of poverty and becoming rich (doctor, lawyer or software engineer rich, not billionaire rich). And it is both misleading in ways that could actually happen and labels them "irresponsible" if they fail to budget their life from $15/hr to European cars and vacations.

I don't know how widespread this marketing is, but the article is clearly written in response to something. Maybe we on HN just don't notice it, because sensible budgeting and investing on a software engineer's salary actually does make you "software engineer rich".

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The comparison to dieting is probably more familiar and insightful for us.

Eat smaller portions, avoid sugary drinks and beer, maybe even eat healthy and exercise. Make that your lifestyle not a temporary hack and you will be fit. That works and realistic advice follows it.

But there is clearly a lot of fad diet, gadget and pill advertising out there. Just yesterday I saw an ad for an electric mattress that promised to give you a beach body in 3 months on the highway home. Marketing is selling fat people that they just have to suffer for a few months, after which they will have made it, and can go back to enjoying life (pizzas) of their dreams.

It seems that this article was written because there is a lot of personal finance content just like that out there.

I think we could reduce the litres / km (volume / distance) units to just square meters (area).

For example, 7 litres / 100km = 0.07 mm^2

It's the cross-section of a noodle of fuel laid out along the road that the car needs without a gas tank.

Combined Heat and Power in Finland is very common, much more so than in rest of Europe. 80% of the fossil fuel power plants output both electricity and heated water. Compared to (quick googling) 8% in the US and 11% in EU.

And broken CSV files.

In some European locales Excel switches from importing/exporting Comma Separated Values to Semicolon Separated Values with comma acting as the decimal point.

According to https://nltimes.nl/2022/02/02/rotterdam-bridge-taken-apart-l... the shipbuilder will pay for it. It will take a week to take the bridge apart and another week to put it back together.

Which is no big deal compared to the alternatives of a) missing out on a $500m contract for the local shipbuilding industry or b) moving the entire shipyard downriver.

> superchargers in some locations/routes being at insane capacity that this will only make things worse

If that happens, Tesla should set a price for other EVs which makes it profitable for them, and then just build as many charging locations as there is demand for. Everyone wins.

> Take FB as an example. FB have 60k employees, 12X the 2012 IPO number. It also costs 12X to run facebook today. They don't do that much more today than in 2012.

They do.

In 2012, their advertising revenue was $5B. In 2020, it was $86B. They are "doing" 17x more now.

I don't mean that from your perspective of revenue leading to wasteful spending, but from an advertising product perspective. If you're making $86B in advertising revenue, then every junior data scientist whose entire job might be to optimise ad click-throughs for cat food in Mongolia by 3% is a net win for the company. If they are getting better at cat food ads, they are doing more.

> they also don't have the tech that powers Uber/Lyft which allows anyone to hail a ride from their smartphone

Sure they do, as long as they just get an app built by a contractor and don't employ 5000 engineers building cool open-source infrastructure projects and unnecessary "growth" features.

Multiple taxi companies with ~200 cars in my city each have their own smartphone apps with all the features you actually need: ordering or scheduling a ride, GPS tracking, payment with credit card or business invoice.

Looks like these apps were last updated in mid & late 2020, but if it works you don't need a permanent tech team to keep the taxi business going.

It's understandable. Science journalism exaggerates results, even if the original researchers and their paper did not. And even the most promising scientific results can take decades to be applied in the industry and become available to consumers.

But at the same time, this is Hacker News, not Mature Consumer Product News. Here is the best place to discuss what tech in 2030 might look like, not what we can buy today.

> PG argues that the crazy idea should be taken seriously predicated on the person having deep domain expertise

Depending on what you mean by "seriously". It's not that a crazy idea by a domain expert is certainly the future - but they might be right 1 out of 10 times, compared to a crazy idea by a nobody who might be right 1/1000. Given the potential large return of crazy ideas, it's worth the time to investigate in more detail.

Putting the version in a header looks "elegant" at first, as it keeps one URL for one resource. But in reality it adds accidental annoyance with no benefits over having the version somewhere in the URL.

* Have to set up response headers and caching carefully to make sure different versions are cached separately.

* A bit of extra complexity to set up load balancing.

* A bit of extra complexity to set up web framework routing to controllers.

* A bit of extra complexity for logging to track which endpoints were called.

* Calling the URL without specifying a version gets you some undefined version...

* ... or if you require a version header, can't preview GET endpoints in a standard browser.

* If different parts of the API have different latest versions, you can't encode it in an URL and therefore can't return URLs for linking between resources.

* On major version changes you might be removing, renaming or moving URLs, so why keep them pure and versionless in the first place.

There doesn't have to be a way.

Kernel maintainers are volunteering their time and effort to make Linux better, not to be entertaining test subjects for the researchers.

Even if there is no ethical violation, they are justified to be annoyed at having their time wasted, and taking measures to discourage and prevent such malicious behaviour in the future.

I wish I had a dogecoin for every HN comment where a study is rejected because of a possible confounding variable that the researchers did control for and reported.

From the news article:

> The disorders were significantly more common in COVID-19 patients than in comparison groups of people who recovered from flu or other respiratory infections over the same time period

They controlled for the world situation, lockdown and even being sick with another illness. Of course the knowledge that you have covid could be stressful in itself, but that's also a result of covid.

There is no need to limit personal freedoms - anyone should be free to get the training if they wish to. But they don't have to remain employed as police afterwards.

A radio play is also tens of thousands of listeners. Compared to that, Spotify pays many orders of magnitude more than radio.

The classical news terminology is to use the name of the capital city to refer to the government of a country.

Washington donated fidget spinners, Damascus invited experts from Moscow to inspect the latest advances in ball bearing technology.

> businesses like AWS that exploit FOSS to repackage it for profit

Exploit is questionable.

A true open-source project like PostgreSQL only benefits from Amazon and Google offering it as a paid, hosted solution. It makes it easier to adopt, sell to decision-makers, and gain more user and developer mindshare over alternatives.

If you are concerned with "competitors" offering your open-source project to more users, then perhaps being open source was just a poorly chosen marketing tactic that backfired.

If the developer can get permission to build 3-5 story apartments on the lot, then their land suddenly becomes way more valuable than the single home ever was. Most retirees will gladly sell and live in luxury elsewhere. If a few don't, it won't make a difference.

I'd expect Estonia to be very surprised and alarmed if it was on their side, given that there are no nuclear power stations or weapons in Estonia.

> old Chernobyl-like pressure water reactors in Tallin or St Petersburg

You must be confusing Tallinn with some other city - Estonia does not and has not had any nuclear power plants.

The map covers Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Russia. Estonia and Latvia have no nuclear power or weapons programs, and the first four are EU countries where staying silent about an incident would be very unlikely. That leaves Russia.

Interestingly enough the possible source area includes the Arkhangelsk naval base, where the Russian nuclear submarine fleet is stationed. An incident there may explain the lack of information.