News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

wiremaus

Re:Prices and wages in Medieval England (2014) on Tuesday January 11, 2022 @12:35PM (#29894682)
It completely changed the balance of power between landholders and peasants. Peasants started being able to actually negotiate on wages (to a degree that was revolutionary at the time), which also drove a market for capital and artisan goods. The merchant class exploded.

Landlords also started dumping money into development of labor-saving tools, which happens when most of your supply of free bonded labor suddenly dies off.

Pretty huge multi-faceted impacts.

Re:Things I Won't Work With: Dioxygen Difluoride (2010) on Sunday January 02, 2022 @11:02PM (#29777199)
They don't work with it though.

The insult was for abusing that catalogue and falsely claiming they could commercially produce and ship something that they could not, and I think it was fairly deserved. I don't really see any sort of racial dogwhistles or subtext here, this reads like a small snipe over questionable business practices.

Re:Safest mushrooms to forage and eat on Saturday January 01, 2022 @08:22PM (#29764761)
The visual AI identification apps are neat, but can and will make dangerous misidentifications. They cannot be used for foraging.
Re:Why thieves love to steal catalytic converters on Sunday November 21, 2021 @02:26PM (#29298937)
Be fascinating to hear more about how that actually works; or is it a fabrication by police or drug manufacturers? What mechanism of action would a bunch of metal and exhaust particulate possibly have to produce drug-like effects?
Re:2022 Ford F-150 Lightning on Friday May 21, 2021 @01:26PM (#27237071)
It's arguably not a strawman argument in the slightest.

There have been changes made to these trucks that do a great job of looking aesthetically "tough and mean" and selling trucks, while also making them more dangerous to other road users: not just to pedestrians, but to other cars via the bumper overlap issue.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-11/the-dange...

Re:Highest resolution photos ever taken of snowflakes on Saturday January 30, 2021 @01:11AM (#25966692)
This truly isn't new; I've seen coffee table books from the 80s that used similar techniques for the photographs. This is a strangely credulous article.
Re:Having 170 competitors in not an obstacle on Saturday November 14, 2020 @03:17PM (#25095285)
Nearly all the tech giants of today were not the the first in their niches; they just executed better.
Re:How does a gas pump know to shut itself off? (1981) on Saturday October 10, 2020 @08:44PM (#24743013)
85 is functional at elevation, but definitely still not preferable at elevation.

Works best with carbureted engines, which are obviously few and far between these days. You shouldn't put 85 octane in a modern fuel injected engine period.

Re:Kapton: Miracle Material with a Tragic History on Sunday August 16, 2020 @01:25PM (#24179502)
Unfortunately I don't think TDR would help here: the issue isn't gross damage to the metal of the wires, it's subtle damage to the insulation.
Re:Hacking Portable Air Conditioners on Monday August 03, 2020 @03:34PM (#24042303)
That's accurate: they're the standard in much of the rest of the world due to their lower operating costs.

I was using "Euro" only to help people picture the things, it's a common way I've heard them described.

Re:Live HDR+ and Dual Exposure Controls on Pixel 4 and 4a on Monday August 03, 2020 @03:33PM (#24042282)
Good concept. Well implemented HDR is a great way to get phones to reproduce more "true to life" images.

Interestingly, the final rendering in the Pixel 3 looks better to my eyes.

Re:Hacking Portable Air Conditioners on Saturday August 01, 2020 @07:57PM (#24025026)
The magic product the writer is looking for does exist — somewhat. It's those Euro style mini-split heat pumps, that pump coolant through an external unit.

Up front cost is higher, but the efficiency gains are huge, and they can cool/heat much faster.

That's big money for a lot of Americans, even ones using Google calendar. It's effective bait.
Re:A Typology of Dumplings (2019) on Friday July 10, 2020 @11:00PM (#23799093)
To steal mercilessly from Wikipedia:

The most important difference between pelmeni, varenyky, and pierogi is the thickness of the dough shell—in pelmeni and vareniki this is as thin as possible, and the proportion of filling to dough is usually higher. Pelmeni are never served with a sweet filling, which distinguishes them from vareniki and Polish pierogi, which sometimes are. Also, the fillings in pelmeni are usually raw, while the fillings of vareniki and pierogi are typically precooked.

Those distinctions seem about right in my experience, and I eat all three fairly often, since I go to a lot of cultural festivals.

Re:PlantNet – App that helps identify plants from pictures on Saturday April 25, 2020 @02:25PM (#22980096)
Been using PlantNet for a few years, rather surprised to see it up here.

It's probably the best of its kind, as long as your photos are sharp and well lit.

For scientific identification you still absolutely want to verify with a dichotomous key, but it's really good for quickly getting genus.

Out in nature, you can cross-check with something like https://wildflowersearch.org/ to help verify that you have the correct species.

Re:PlantNet – App that helps identify plants from pictures on Saturday April 25, 2020 @02:18PM (#22980009)
Myco-nerd here: absolutely never rely on the image recognition apps for fungi ID.

There are fungi in entire different genera that are VERY morphologically similar, and the apps are just not there yet — likely won't be for a few dozen years.

An app can make a lethal mistake much easier than a human.

A bond also loses you the personal/medical liability protection of auto insurance. Very few people who do have enough money would drive with only a bond, as the risks are pretty extreme.
Re:Let's Encrypt has turned on stricter validation requirements on Wednesday February 19, 2020 @10:04PM (#22372353)
Same here. I had them running for a small informational website, and they took the site down for several days via surprise cert problems. I may switch to a paid provider.
Re:New COVID-19 cases reported across Japan on Tuesday February 18, 2020 @12:45PM (#22358116)
What's your basis for that statement? Japanese social norms are quite communitarian, especially around contagious diseases.
That would be Giffen good, which may not exist at all.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giffen_good

Neonicotinoid pesticides are the likely culprit. Companies that produce them have been sinking large sums of money into studies that search for alternative explanations, and responses that don't simply consist of eliminating neonics.

https://theintercept.com/2020/01/18/bees-insecticides-pestic...

Re:I Survived the “Destroying Angel” (2006) on Friday October 18, 2019 @02:18AM (#21289085)
Quite a few delicious and safe Amanita spp. out there. It's a genus to be careful in, but there are a number of species that can be eaten with a little experience. Amanita calyptroderma and A. vaginata for instance.
I read here that loneliness is a significant problem for people in general within the modern world, and somewhat moreso for men. Headline seems a bit clickbaity, as the issue is clearly not exclusive, and the percentage difference relatively small.
It would, with setup to replicate the environment.

It might well be a miserable buggy experience compared to just using the original hardware.

'Chinaman' is generally considered quite offensive and dated. I'd switch up the noun there.
Re:Oregon passed sweeping housing crisis laws on Saturday July 20, 2019 @09:15AM (#20485543)
A tiered system much like you describe is exactly what Oregon passed. New developments are largely unrestricted.
Re:Uber will start deactivating riders with low ratings on Wednesday May 29, 2019 @05:13PM (#20045557)
Or you positively know rhat the light has been physically disabled, which is trivial on most cars.

Regardless, it seems an incredibly insensitive thing to give a poor rating over.

Re:WeWork Files for IPO on Monday April 29, 2019 @05:13PM (#19782672)
What about the tax advantage? I'm not convinced that the co-working spaces are worth their cost, but I assume it's a lot easier to write off a co-working space over a coffee shop order.
Here's some possible evidence that they're alive and well.

https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=zh-CN&u=http...

Not necessarily. Some of these might be universally hated.

I bet all of them are pretty interesting, however.

Older »