tszyn's comments

Apparently, "Copy To" no longer works on Windows 7 and higher. The button is greyed out for all user profiles except the "Default" profile. https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/e4cd5a0c-b...

Already in 2015, Emily Taylor warned [1] that ICANN could become the Internet's FIFA -- a small organization with great power that doesn't answer to any government. Here we are. A private company run by former ICANN people will be given the right to collect massive rent from a locked-in client base on a public resource.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/sep/21/icann-int...

Sign a letter to Internet Society here: https://savedotorg.org/

Write to news outlets. If this blows up in the mainstream media, public pressure may be too high for them to go ahead with this deal.

For my small wiki, refusing all submissions with external links eliminated virtually all spam. Yes, it's drastic, but in my case external links were not essential. I still use ReCaptcha to cut down on spam account signups.

I guess so, but when you use energy instead of pressure, and a linear scale rather than logarithmic, it makes the results look more impressive.

Agreed – looks like a fantastic product! Seconding the question about MySQL support. I use MySQL for everything. I don't want to add extra gigs of RAM to my VPS just to run an instance of PostgreSQL for Commento. Postgres is much slower than MySQL in simple applications and uses a lot more memory per connection. MySQL is also more popular and more people know how to use it and tune it properly. Postgres is probably more stable, but I don't care about that in a commenting app.

There's economic research that shows it's more efficient to regulate (in some sense, "blame") the lenders, because borrowers are often desperate. When you're desperate, you have reduced capacity to objectively judge the consequences of borrowing and are also less sensitive to "blaming", potential penalties for overborrowing, etc. From this perspective, putting all the blame on borrowers while exonerating the banks is exactly the opposite of what we should be doing as a society, if we want to avoid another debt bubble.

In your experience, can a tick attach to you if you just brush against it while moving fast (running or cycling)? They're rather slow-moving, so I thought they can't latch onto you that quickly.

My mom's pension is $400 / month (Eastern Europe). She browses the Internet on an old hand-me-down Thinkpad. I suppose she should just get off the Internet if she cannot afford to buy website subscriptions. Anything to make the online experience of wealthy IT professionals better.

Nice, simple, intuitive proofs. Very cool.

The US had had ballistic missiles (Redstone) in European airbases since 1958 -- Kennedy simply continued the existing policy of the US. Kennedy's poor judgment, arguably, consisted in aggressively defending the "rule" that it is acceptable for the US to have nuclear missiles near the Soviet border, but it is not acceptable for the USSR to have nuclear missiles near the US border. While JFK was driven by the need to appear tough, one has to give him credit for not following the advice of the "hawks" (Curtis LeMay) who advocated a preemptive invasion of Cuba, a move that would have almost certainly led to a nuclear exchange, given that the USSR had already placed (unbeknownst to the US intelligence) tactical nuclear weapons in Cuba.

They also fixed the 6-key block (the one with Home, End, etc.). The older version had a nonstandard layout.

On the minus side, it has a non-detachable numpad, so you'll have to reach further to use your mouse.

FWIW, I've done in-home trials of several chairs. Many dealers of high-end chairs will let you do that (at least here in Poland). Sometimes I've had to leave a deposit.

I'm amazed how often a chair that feels great in the store turns out to be a complete dud once you place it in your workspace and sit on it for 2 days.

I agree that sticking it out can sometimes help. The Embody is very punishing if you slouch (the hard sacral part will just dig into your spine), so the first step would be to make an effort to maintain correct posture. But if you're sitting straight AND still feel discomfort, I'd say the Embody is not for you.

About the reclining, yeah -- Herman Miller would probably say that the chair isn't meant for active reclining, but that's no defense. Sometimes I like to recline at more than 120° to relieve the pressure on my spine (for example, when I'm not typing but for example, watching a YouTube video). I prefer chairs that allow me to do that (e.g. Steelcase Think/Leap/Please, Humanscale Liberty). The fact that the absence of this feature was a design choice by Herman Miller doesn't really change my appraisal of the product.

Funny you should say that the armests sit too far back. I had the opposite problem: they were always bumping on the edge of my desk, so I had to sit further from my desk than I would have liked. And I'm not the only person who had this complaint. I guess everybody is different.

I agree. The Embody is a great chair if you have pretty good posture. It is pretty rigid in the center (all the flexibility is on the sides), so that it forces your back into the 'proper' shape like a plastic mold. The problem is, it's a pretty hard chair, so if you have any 'irregularities', like, say, a bit of hunchback (thoracic hyperkyphosis), the hard plastic "pixels" will just dig into your back in all the places that stick out where they shouldn't.

There is a single adjustment knob for the back, but it adjusts the thoracic and the lumbar part at the same time. So if you have a rounded upper back, you'll adjust the knob to make the backrest a more deeply curved S shape to prevent the upper backrest from poking your shoulder blades. But then the lower part of the S gets deeper as well and it starts digging into your lumbar/sacral region. It's not easy to notice -- after 15 minutes in the store, I was in love with the Embody; after 1 hour at home, it felt like my lower back was covered in bruises from the hard plastic.

For this reason, I do not recommend the Embody to people with incorrect posture, or to people who don't like hard chairs.

Other things worth noting are the poor armrests (they have no back movement, so you can't move your chair close to your desk without lowering them) and the fact that you can't really recline very far in this chair because the back tension rises pretty fast after a certain point. Well, you can recline if you adjust the back tension, but it's a continuous knob, so it'll take you ages to go back your regular setting.

Depends on which is preferable to you:

- a smaller US economy that's 100% owned by Americans

- an economy that's larger (potentially more than 2x), but is 50% owned by foreigners

That's true, in his example he makes a point of stressing that the foreign value is consumed rather than invested. But it's not clear that that's what happens in real life. For example, if China sends an excess of resources to "the US", and in return "the US" gives China shares or bonds issued by US companies, then the extra resources are presumably used by these companies in a productive way. (When a company acquires capital on the market, it is usually to invest it.)

BTW, it seems to me that foreign investment is always caused by a trade deficit, not the other way around. If the Rest of the World (RoW) wants to invest in the US, it has to acquire dollars. The only way RoW can acquire dollars is to sell more stuff to the US than it buys from the US. In other words, it has to be in trade surplus with the US. So the US has to be in trade deficit.

That's a very well-written and clearly argued piece, but you could apply the same logic to argue that it's a business should not raise capital on the stock market because it amounts to "selling the farm to feed your family". But most businesspeople would say that it's quite OK if the money is invested productively. As the owner of the business, you probably shouldn't care if your equity shrinks to 10% of the company, as long as the outside financing helps you grow it to more than 10 x the original size. Similarly, it might not matter to Americans if eventually 90% of US-based assets are owned by foreigners, as long as the 10% that's owned by Americans is huge. So this whole "Our national wealth will soon be owned by foreigners" scenario is probably not as bad as it sounds.

The way Buffett phrases it also seems misleading on a language level. He talks about "foreign ownership of OUR assets". But how can you say they are YOUR assets if they were paid for by foreign investors? If a US company sells 50% of its shares to a German bank, and uses the money to build a plant, can you say "OMG, Germans own 50% of OUR plant"?

You seem to assume that there are only 2 kinds of software: "fun experiments" and made-to-order business software. What about mass-market software that's not so fun to write? Who's going to pay for the development effort if everyone can just download it from a torrent site? Or do you think that all mass-market software is inherently fun to write, be it an RDBMS, graphics editor, Web browser, backup software, etc.?

Making a work of art takes a lot of discipline and, often, drudgery. There are many tasks which are not enjoyable in the least bit. There's burnout, depression, writer's block. Many (most?) great works of art got completed only because their authors knew they had to complete them to make a living.

Furthermore, enjoyment that comes from creating art requires your more basic needs to be satisfied (food, shelter, sleep, health, etc.). We can't just pay artists nothing and expect them to enjoy their art they way they would if their basic needs were satisfied. How much art can you create if your stomach is empty, if you're worrying about being able to afford your child's healthcare, if you come back tired at 6 pm from your day job?