JoelBennett

The more fingers in the pie, the higher the cost. At least that's my guess. I imagine more expensive labour and tighter regulations also greatly increase costs.

Funny thing is, most waste water treatment plants I've seen - the water coming out of the waste treatment plant is cleaner than the water removed from the river for drinking (which is then treated).

Wait until people learn that they air they breathe has likely already been breathed by someone else...

It's almost too bad there isn't some way of manufacturing all 18 varieties of hemagglutinin, and wrapping them all into a single vaccine.

I dunno... North Korea might say differently.

As someone who currently has a Samsung stove, I can wholeheartedly say I hate the thing. The interface is one of the worst I've seen - touch "buttons" on a stove. It does't work half the time if your hands are the slightest bit wet - which they often are after washing hands. It's incredibly frustrating, and has completely thrown me off about buying any sort of Samsung appliance.

Samsung has such potential, but it's untested things make me wonder about their long-term value.

Agreed. I've got an MSc, and the only contact I've ever had was a practically spam message for an Amazon recruiter (who contacted half the province I live in, as near as I can figure).

For Android (and for Windows Phone) it requires permissions to pretty much everything. It's pretty evil in that regard.

I'm curious - I still haven't seen any details on how these are installed. How are things wired - does the wiring run under the shingles themselves? Also, how does it work with odd sized/shaped roofs - e.g.: something that isn't exactly a multiple of 1/2 a shingle?

I'm always baffled by this as well. "Let's make something cool, get money from investors, then figure out how to make money off it!"

In other words, cash in and leave before people find out there actually isn't money in it or cram the service full of advertising and watch the users flock to the next upcoming thing as your service tanks like a flaming dumpster rolling down a San Francisco hill.

Do we know why they removed the MagSafe power cord?

I always thought it was a smart design. It seems kind of silly to remove it.

By chance was your friend non-Caucasian?

Oh man, so true.

That's what I wonder about as well. I suppose with some smarts, it might be possible to ignore touches along the edge when it is held a certain way, but why unnecessarily complicate things? Even a 4 mm bezel would be fine.

There'd be something ironic about a manufacturer's website being made unavailable because of a DDoS caused by their own poorly secured devices.

It getting hot just sitting there would be more a sign of some background process that is running the CPU at full tilt. I've had the same thing happen to a Blackberry and a Nokia Windows Phone.

Either way, it's a crummy situation to deal with. Sometimes rebooting helps.

It seems like they've been having financial difficulties for the last 10-20 years. It's almost like they are the Radio Shack of trains/plains/snowmobiles.

I was curious to know how it worked for Python. I might have to give it a serious go...

How does OpenBSD save us from poorly written software?

This seems almost the exact opposite of what I've heard of Facebook (i.e.: they have a massive repository).

In that regard, I've been kind of curious to know how Hacker News deals with comments. It seems like there's only a single upvote button (no downvoting), and you can't see how much something has been upvoted. It kind of kills the popularity contest part of things.

The whole psychology of online commenting and having groups rate things is quite interesting.

Worse yet - go to Calgary where they've named all the roads in a given neighborhood with the same name. E.g.: Eversyde Blvd, Eversyde Cir, Eversyde Manor, Eversyde St. It's insanity.

(Lived in Edmonton, Calgary, and now Lethbridge. Always fun to see another Albertan on here. :P )

I'm glad I'm not the only one.

Pretty easy to sum this up: people don't take sick days because:

- They aren't given that many

- Medical expenses are HUGE

- There's societal pressure to not take them

- It's easier to fall behind in work (and get fired if you do)

I really should count my blessings - I rarely feel sick enough to take a sick day - maybe at most once a year. I understand that other people aren't like that, and I'm fine with that. As long as everyone is doing their part, and we're all pulling together, it's all good.

A special deal with LG, because they are the one making the packs? I suspect LG gave them a discount because they contracted LG to take care of a bunch of other stuff in the car. A bit like a lost-leader sale. You lose a bit on one thing, but you gain it back on something else.

That makes me wonder if there's potential there for the medical industry: print a temporary barcode on a person, rather than tracking them with charts. I suppose an RFID bracelet could serve the same purpose, though.

Neat write-up. I had no idea screen space reflections were a thing.

There are a few places that charge 1% up here in Canada, but they are more the exception than the rule. It's still insane, and given how little effort some realtors put in, it's quite shameful. Even giving someone $3,000 (1% of a $300,000 house) seems like a huge amount of money for the little amount of work they do.

But how well do cameras work through walls?

Like Bart Simpson said "No one suspects the butterfly." In this case, no one would suspect their router to be watching where they physically are. Imagine a SWAT team being able to detect where people are within a room before they enter the place - all by snooping through a router.

I'm really curious - I've heard no one mention the concept of "hell-banning". Basically, instead of outright banning destructive users, you make all of their content only visible to themselves. It reminds me of the phrase "in space, no one can hear you scream". Eventually, after a while they stop posting. If they don't notice this for a while, they waste efforts posting content that no one will ever see. It's a bit like an automatic cold shoulder from the community.

Just out of curiosity, have you looked at F#?

(I use Python at my day job, and C# on my own side projects at home. F# seems... interesting).