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cwmma

Re:OccupySaaS on Monday November 02, 2026 @09:52AM (#50337618)
The expectation isn't that nobody will ever be laid off, it's that THESE layoffs are not only unnecessary but downright hypocritical when you look at the companies bottom line, executive compensation and previous hiring sprees.

Also these are SAAS products, the kind that have predictable patterns of development, not one off software consultancies, so you're not actually making a good comparison.

perusing his blog posts, basically if a calculation is at all within expected values, this is evidence of MOND, but for something to be evidence of dark matter it has to jump through quite a few hoops in his opinion.

He also seems to have the same problem that many MOND proponents have which is arguing for MOND in blog posts instead of in papers, though he doesn't seem to be as bad as others in this regard.

> DF2 has consistently been portrayed as fatal for MOND despite consistently being shown not to be a problem. I’ve given up writing formal papers showing this, as nobody cares. They just hear what they want to hear, which is that MOND is wrong. Indeed, after the 2018& incident I swore off doing so.

This should set off crank alarms when you read it.

Re:T. Rex Had a Body Temperature of 97 Degrees on Thursday September 17, 2026 @02:46PM (#49744879)
If it was environmental then you'd expect it to fluctuate over time, but they also checked it against an animal they knew to be cold blooded, if it was environmental you'd expect them to be the same, but that animal was calculated by the same method to be colder.
Re:Biggest dark matter detector spots a single weird particle on Thursday September 03, 2026 @12:35PM (#49552816)
I don't actually think Xenon-124 being radioactive was a surprise. All the publicity related to observing the decay for the first time is phrased around 'hey we observed something that's very rare' not 'hey this thing happened we didn't expect to happen'.

Which seems to point even more towards, scientists have a pretty good handle on which ones are radioactive.

Re:Biggest dark matter detector spots a single weird particle on Wednesday September 02, 2026 @03:34PM (#49541254)
Probably not, they have a pretty good handle on why atoms decay, to the point they can predict some to be radioactive before it's actually observed to be (like Bismuth-209).

Also even if something is REALLY REALLY long lasting, you can still check for the halflife by observing enough of it, they've been able to rule out proton halflives under 10^34 years (the universe is on the order of 10^10 years old) but by observing enough protons (like say 50,000 tons of water) you would expect at least some to decay.

Re:The hardest working font in Manhattan (2025) on Wednesday August 12, 2026 @09:46AM (#49272370)
Ironically, most of the metal stuff doesn't survive from antiquary. For instance most statues were in bronze not marble, but since metal can be easily recycled the only metal statues that survived are from ship wrecks.
A lot of libertarian dogma is based on classic homo economicus 'lets pretend people act perfectly rationally' type theories that just really break down when confronted with how humans actually act.
Iceland did it a year later, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-dagurinn, but since there was less then 200k people living there it was a much less dramatic change
Re:Latest Airbus Single Aisle Aircraft Innovations on Friday July 24, 2026 @12:32PM (#49038038)
Is there a term for a product which is really only really for a minority of it's users?

Air travel seems like this as most airlines and manufacturers seem to bend over backwards for their wealthy and high margin passengers and basically treat economy class as "fine I guess we'll throw the rest of you in the back"

Mobile games seem the apotheosis of this as a lot of games are really about finding whales and any enjoyment anyone else has is really an accidental side effect.

Re:Patreon laying off 20% of staff on Friday July 24, 2026 @09:49AM (#49035608)
They might not have a choice is the problem, there has been a pretty successful campaign to get credit card companies to cut off payments to anyone even remotely connected to this kind of stuff.
Re:OpenNode – Bitcoin Payment Processor on Wednesday July 22, 2026 @11:22AM (#49008268)
they just lost a case in Europe about being trademarked
Re:Why Are There No Empires in Age of Empires? (2019) on Tuesday July 21, 2026 @01:57PM (#48995784)
> That makes me curious if military tactics of the time also had regional variation and if the relative strengths of various regions came from their awareness of certain tools being effective. Bringing in a foreign army with its foreign techniques might have been like bringing small pox to a population- they’d have no defense the first time around so if you’re fast you get them all.

I highly recommend...the author's blog for very in depth articles about this subject including

- this one on mounted warrior cultures and how they often dominated https://acoup.blog/2020/02/28/collections-the-fremen-mirage-... - this long series on why the legion ended up dominating the phalanx https://acoup.blog/2024/01/19/collections-phalanxs-twilight-...

First off business are taxed on profits not revenues, so a money losing business doesn't pay taxes.

Second if there is something that causes undesirable side effects (like a data center) you want to tax that activity specifically so the Corp with 8 data centers pays more then the Corp with 1.

If you can't tax the outputs you tax the input.

So force then to pay more for electricity or water either through direct taxes or by forcing them to subsidize other users.

Re:Japanese symbols that speak without words on Tuesday June 23, 2026 @09:30AM (#48644693)
If you write an article about Zabka stores and what's unique and interesting about them I'll probably read it.
Surprisingly this comes up more then you'd think, for instance in Ancient Rome, tomorrow is two days away so all the dates are off by one from what you'd think it was. They mainly count down and it goes, 5, 4, 3, day before, day.
Isn't a big problem with Linear A that there are so few symbols you can "solve" it relatively straightforwardly with no way to tell if you it's correct or not?
Re:Show HN: Voice Age Verification on Wednesday June 17, 2026 @10:00AM (#48570687)
What do you consider the appropriate false negative/fall positive rate for voices of people aged 16-20? Since you don't give a confidence rating to the determination it's on the service to figure out what it's comfortable with.
Re:Map Clustering Is Not My Favorite on Wednesday June 17, 2026 @09:54AM (#48570623)
As somebody who makes maps for a living, I think clusters are overrated (I have had, on multiple occasions, had to talk people out of it). The leaflet extension that gives you a preview of the area covered by the cluster and allows you to click to zoom to the extent of cluster I do feel is a good setup for situations where just putting all the dots down isn't going to give you good information. That being said doesn't work great on mobile.

Also pour one out to google fusion tables which back in the day was the amazing way to get tons of dots onto a map.

Re:Show HN: Voice Age Verification on Tuesday June 16, 2026 @11:32AM (#48556858)
post puberty boys have absolutely have overlap with over 18 adults, if for no other reason then kids can go through puberty at different ages, so some 18 years olds have voices that are just dropping while others have had their voice drop for 6+ years.

You aren't going to be able to find a set of signatures that keeps out a useful number of <18s that doesn't also flag >18s

Re:Show HN: Voice Age Verification on Tuesday June 16, 2026 @09:26AM (#48554968)
I (41 man with very deep voice) told it in a higher then normal voice that I was a kid, and it said I was under 18. I suspect if I was a kid that used a deep voice to say that I was an adult it would also fool it.

No offense but this is probably worthless is an adversarial environment.

Re:US-Canada border library gets new Quebec-only entrance on Thursday June 11, 2026 @12:16PM (#48492392)
It depends on the year, sometimes it's actually visa overstays.
Re:Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang on Thursday June 04, 2026 @11:54AM (#48400487)
Probably not, we're nowhere near the complexity of the human brain yet, there are also quantization limits to the human brain (i.e. molecules, quantum physics, etc) so to characterize them as having infinite detail is probably a bad modal.

If I'm going to be honest most of the people who advocate this type of thing tend to be, shall we say, crypto-duelists who really believe in a soul but not like intellectually but intuitively and keep trying to come up with excuse with it's not just meat. So like you can find philosophers advocating stuff like this but they tend to have a bit of an agenda.

besides zoning laws, the judge fairly explicitly states that one of the reasons he thinks it's fine is because corporations aren't doing these kinds of shenanigans, so if you were to do something like that he might revise the ruling.
I find myself defending this shitty ruling (which I honestly think is bad, but bad for completely other reasons) the ruling basically says, since corporations are not using this to dilute the vote it's fine, which basically means in other words, if corporations where to do the shenanigans you're suggesting, the judge is open to revising the ruling.
yeah so it sounds like if you did this IN THIS TOWN and didn't also live in the town you'd get a vote. I'm not sure if you'd get a vote if you owned the land directly but for all I know you might.
I don't think this is a good opinion or anything, but issues with vote dilution were expressly addressed in the opinion.
It's specifically about corporations that own property in a specific town voting. So no you can't just spin up a bunch of LLCs to rig an election, this is about the rights of absentee landlords.
It sounds like you it's only corporations that own property in the town that get to vote. So that's probably whats preventing you.

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