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ddoran

Re:Grandpa’s Basement House on Sunday May 22, 2022 @05:27PM (#31472969)
A basement house featured on Zillow Gone Wild this week [1] . According to the same account it went sale pending after 1 day on the market.

[1] - https://twitter.com/zillowgonewild/status/152662553013669478...

Re:Moving House on Wednesday May 11, 2022 @05:30PM (#31346085)
The Shipping news [1] (Pulitzer and National Book Award winner) featured a house being moved over ice and Oscar and Lucinda [2] (Booker Award winner) featured a glass church being moved on water, as did their respective movies.

[1] - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7354.The_Shipping_News [2] - https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/316496.Oscar_and_Luci...

Re:Lessons from Owning a Bookstore on Thursday March 31, 2022 @02:13PM (#30870444)
Rough Draft in Kingston, NY is another one. It's definitely my favorite bookshop right now. It helps to have a great coffee bar and booze bar and a cool historical building, but most of all it helps to be in a city to which hipsters have been migrating in droves in recent years. To be fair Rough Draft are as much a driver of that recent migration (along with other new similar businesses) as it is a beneficiary. They do a great job in curating their book selection, unfortunately the crowds and morning coffee queues keep me away more than I would like.

https://www.roughdraftny.com

Re:No news is good news on Monday March 28, 2022 @12:13PM (#30832069)
> Fake news is a term to describe news that is merely untrue

In my experience it is more commonly used to describe news which the speaker does not like.

Or that translators are paid. But ideally a combination of paid and volunteers - just like most other roles in charity/relief work.
A driver won't just chose profitable over unprofitable, but also more profitable over less profitable, and this ends up hurting some passengers on less profitable / less desirable routes.

If you wanted a cab to Brooklyn from Manhattan 20+ years ago, you had to get in the back of the car before telling the driver where you wanted to go. Otherwise the driver would just drive off without you. The ride was definitely profitable, but they knew they'd pick up another Manhattan ride on the next block and so on - a more profitable option that to risk not having a fare back from Brooklyn. Many drivers wised up and wouldn't let you into the cab until you told them where you were going. It was a major PitA.

As someone who moved from Europe to the US, the pervasiveness of the military in televised professional and college football game is incredibly jarring to me yet is so normalized to Americans. Count the number of times there is a reference to the military, a cutaway to uniformed people in the stands or by the touchline, a clip of troops watching the game while deployed overseas, flyovers etc. Still, after 10 years, my reaction is "what has that got to do with sport?".

I've always assumed this to be a very deliberate strategy to build an implicit association between the "nobility" of sport and war, to boost recruitment and win over the hearts and minds of the American public for past, current and future military action.

Now count how many times you've seen any sign of the military at a sports event in Europe - rare to never. It's not normal and it's sad to me that it is so normalized in the US.

Re:Jerrycan on Tuesday January 04, 2022 @11:59AM (#29796973)
Related article and discussion from 11 years ago: "The Wehrmachtkanister, a/k/a Jerrycan: Astonishingly good industrial design from the 1930s" [1]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2692840

Re:Computer History Museum curator picks for holiday reads on Tuesday December 14, 2021 @09:10AM (#29551621)
On the topic of computer history museums, I strongly recommend a visit to the American Computer & Robotics Museum in Bozeman, MT if you're in the area [1]. It's a small space born from a personal collection, which Edward O. Wilson describes as "inch for inch, the best museum in the world". An original cuneiform tablet, Principia Mathematica, Enigma machine, NASA artifacts, early Apple computers - All here and much, much more. Run, don't walk.

[1] - https://acrmuseum.org

Re:Billions and Billions to Be Wasted on Monday November 15, 2021 @09:48PM (#29236141)
Caveat lector. If you are looking for a non-partisan review of the pros and cons of the bill, this is not the article to read. The author of the article has been a long term advocate for defunding rail[1] and it is published by The Cato Institute, which is " libertarian in its political philosophy, and advocates a limited role for government in domestic and foreign affairs"[2] and has been funded in no small part by the oil industry.

I'm not saying the article is without merit, but it is utterly partisan, and like so much online and traditional publications in the US, it is critical to know the lens through which it has been written.

I find it increasingly difficult and tiring trying to find genuinely balanced/non-partisan analysis about important topics such as this, the spending of vast sums of our tax dollars.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38510332-romance-of-the-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cato_Institute

I'm sticking with the show but as a huge Foundation fan, it's bitterly disappointing so far. For me the reason comes clear in the accompanying (official) podcasts. The writers are so enamored with their own smarts, that the story takes second place to literary navel gazing. Rock bottom for me was when Brother Day - a supposedly omnipotent figure - travels across the galaxy to quell a religious uprising but just stands silent as a new leader takes up the mantle with an overwrought speech, one of many in the show. The taking of terminus was another example of characters that speak with great intelligence and then act dumb. Ugh. I'm only hoping the writers take the feedback from Season 1 and change course.
Re:When will the new MacBook Pro be refurbished? on Monday November 01, 2021 @01:10PM (#29069699)
No, you misspelt forager as forger in the URL :)
Re:The Curious, Astounding Collection of the Magician Ricky Jay on Thursday October 21, 2021 @11:05AM (#28945495)
Directed by David Mamet and exec produced by Joel Silver. I didn't see that coming!
I enjoyed "The Cargo Ship Diaries" [1] by Niall Doherty about his time traveling as a paid passenger on merchant ships.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21868783-the-cargo-ship-...

Re:Houses in Japan are going for as little as $500 on Sunday August 22, 2021 @05:51PM (#28270005)
Correct me if I'm wrong, but Japan does not allow dual citizenship ... rather your children are young enough that they have not had to declare their ultimate citizenship?

My wife and I are naturalized US citizens. My country of origin allows me to retain dual citizenship, as does the US, but my wife was obliged to renounce her Japanese citizenship when she became a US citizen. It's annoying and unfortunate that she had to do so.

I wish the English (and others following their lead) would stop using the phrase "British Isles" to include Ireland. Many Irish people find it highly offensive; at best it is simply inaccurate.

"In Ireland, the term "British Isles" is controversial, and there are objections to its usage. The Government of Ireland does not officially recognize the term, and its embassy in London discourages its use. Britain and Ireland is used as an alternative description" [1]

Ireland has not been a British Isle in more than a hundred years when 84% of the island re-gained its independence.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Isles

Same issue for me. Just emailed you. Thx
The "Troubles" in Northern Ireland may be over but there is still tension and violence in Northern Ireland between a subset of Catholics and Protestants. The sectarian violence still happens but does not get reported internationally because the scale is so much lower than it was up to 2010, but to say Inter-Christian conflict has been non-existent for a generation (25 years?) is wishful thinking at best.
Re:Ask HN: How do we build the new remote education system on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @08:08AM (#25761487)
Kudos for stating your position but also presenting an opposing view. HN, heck the world, needs more of that.
Re:Global circulation of influenza viruses in 2020 on Friday October 30, 2020 @11:12AM (#24943053)
I was about to post the same but both horizontal and vertical axes are different scales.
Re:JPMorgan to pay nearly $1B for metals market manipulation on Tuesday September 29, 2020 @01:55PM (#24630907)
The shareholders of JP Morgan are paying the fine. Not the bad actors behind the market abuse.
For anyone looking to dig deeper into the allegations of corruption on the islands and how it may have contributed to the murder of the couple in 2014, this is a good place to start:

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/nov/23/briton-thail...

Re:Diary of a Fire Lookout (2008) on Monday September 14, 2020 @12:56PM (#24472377)
The author wrote a book "Fire Season" about his period in a tower.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9341909-fire-season

This is Manchester, UK, not Manchester, NH nor Manchester, VT.
I strongly recommend Billion Dollar Whale [1]. The relative ease with which Jho Low could get away with this, and the number of people/institutions willing to be complicit (by action or omission) was breathtaking.

[1] - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38743564-billion-dollar-...

Your response refers to the mission of the CDC. That's a misdirect. No one said that the mission has changed. What the article states is that "the Trump administration axed the executive branch team responsible for coordinating a response to a pandemic and did not replace it"

Also, every budget that Trump has proposed has cut CDC funding and the current proposal is to cut it by 16%. Fortunately Congress has interceded every time.

These are verifiable facts, not opinions.

The term "fake news" used to annoy me, until I realize that it always means "a truth disliked by Trump / his minions". (Minion: "a follower or underling of a powerful person, especially a servile or unimportant one"). I've been at peace with the phrase ever since, having a better understanding of the person who used the phrase and why they used it.

While you're at it, take a contrasting tour at the Merchant's House Museum just a few blocks away:

http://merchantshouse.org

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