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CharlesMerriam2

297 karma · joined February 20, 2014

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CharlesMerriam2··on Ask HN: Where and how do you find your early adoptors?
I'm sorry. Could you include a bit less information so we could speculate more wildly?
CharlesMerriam2··on Mozilla and Google Objections Overruled on “Decentralized Identifiers” by W3C
And so it is as clear as is the Summer's sun.
CharlesMerriam2··on Ask HN: What would you do with $1 million tax free, no strings attached?
Feed the maw that is a contract law justice system project.
CharlesMerriam2··on Syntropy Stack – The Future of Programmable Networking
I do wish there were a "this is what it actually is" comment.
CharlesMerriam2··on Double Blind Passwords a.k.a. Horcruxing
This can be a useful idea, requiring a checkbox on password managers, e.g., "[ ] Pause for additional input".

No one ever answers how often security breaks are from: passwords being guessed, brute forced, or shared; client side compromise from malware, keyloggers, and first-hop IP session takeover; or server side compromise from poor custom code and poor infrastructure choices. Anecdotally, the chart leans to the server side security breaches.

In the absence of knowledge, we get two security talks repeated over and over. This is the first: do a better job with passwords. The second is "You are irrovacably insecure because of [some issue], but update your passwords regularly."

Security has not developed a reputation for being a craft or science.

CharlesMerriam2··on Ask HN: What can a technologist do about climate change?
Bill Gates has a podcast recently talking about this: https://www.gatesnotes.com/Podcast/Is-it-too-late-to-stop-cl...

Also, the book "Ministry For The Future" is an SF take pulling together ideas people have on climate change. The actual prose may make you throw the book at the wall.

You can, if you wish, push information forward. For example, having free interfaces to solar panels, cheap sun following controls, software to control car charging for cheap times, software to use a car as a 'peak load' battery, data modelling to show Hawaii why tourism is better with only electrics, software to create micro cargo ships with solar power, cleaning up the automated kite power generators that were open sourced, and the like.

You have more power than you expect.

CharlesMerriam2··on Please – A cross-language build system
Why are landing pages so incredibly uninformative?

In practice, I spend under two minutes to click around and see if can 'get' it. What does it do especially well? What's the syntax look like? If you are brave, what doesn't work well?

No idea why this exists or why I would use it. Bad website. No cookie.

CharlesMerriam2··on The Nintendo Switch uses my open source code
Hmmm....

Someone more passionate about open source usage could put up a brag site where products using open source and profiles of the authors of the open source are tracked. It would be of some benefit to the authors.

CharlesMerriam2··on Show HN: Personal CRM: Note taking, the way it should be
Hey! Not done! Won't hit commits! Awesome to know!
CharlesMerriam2··on Show HN: Personal CRM: Note taking, the way it should be
I wonder what this is? My very first impression is a standard boot screen. No details. No screenshots. No idea what makes it special outside of "it works". On the first click, it wants access to my calendar.

No. Mine.

This is flirting. Show me why I should be interested before I bare my soul.

CharlesMerriam2··on Why I stopped reading HN (2010)
Stories need to be good, and that's a problem. Right now, the HN community is voting up more "pop science" to drive people to paywalls. I don't know if its a troll farm or a side revenue, but the number of nytimes.com, businessinsider.com, etc. stories keeps rising.
CharlesMerriam2··on DigitalOcean's Hacktoberfest Is Hurting Open Source
Everyone's a critic. Not all changes are one hundred percent good, but just saying "no. stop." isn't the correct answer.
CharlesMerriam2··on Makie.jl High level plotting on the GPU
This might be a good story, but the github ReadMe manages not to say what the package does, why its unique, or why its cool. I'm sure it says something much later in the manual.
CharlesMerriam2··on Show HN: Phrase shop: make secure and memorable passphrases
Nice start.

1. Make a single button for common sentences, e.g., "8 characters with one or more digits and one or more punctuation."

2. Grab your vocabulary from a selected corpus, e.g., StarWars, Shakespeare, Victorian Romance, Software Buzzwords.

CharlesMerriam2··on Ask HN: Could software driven direct democracy work for Lebanon?
At the risk of being too traditional: coin and courts.

For coin, you start with Estonia's electronic signature infrastructure. You have the government work to maintain the sanctity of signature chains, the flow of money, and the visibility of the flow of money, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_signature_in_Estonia or the use of RSS feeds in the TARP-2 bailout fund.

For court, you want to have speedy trials, heavy on the jury. I mean trials like the 1920s where people sue each other over almost everything and most trials are concluded the day after they are filed. You should probably consider mandatory jury duty (or significant fines) streamed to cell phones. Let locals shape and enforce the law.

The goal of coin laws is to create a single system. The goal of jury trials is to have everyone buy into the system. I did not put justice as a goal.

CharlesMerriam2··on Bleeding-edge tech will kill your startup
Sometimes I need to echo things back to understand.

1. Start-up decides to scrap their current, unhappy business to pivot into a totally different area for which they have no long passion.

2. Start-up develops a product for a small, small niche: companies making design systems that also drive product development decisions based on actual, as opposed to requested, client usage. And said development company cannot use log analytics, roll their own, nor existing companies like Teleric.

3. They create a solution to said possible problem, without a planned first customer nor existing application.

4. They are surprised when sales is difficult.

I still don't understand.

CharlesMerriam2··on UC Berkeley inappropriately admitted students as favors to donors
Have a rule.

Our republic, and the California state government, is based on rule of law. One group makes the laws, another enforces it, and a third interprets the conflicts. This works. What we have here is a 'no rules' set of actions.

How about rules that say "we will take any student for $200K/year". This is enough money to supply extra supervision and also give a full scholarship to another student.

CharlesMerriam2··on Project Oberon
This has been done with hardware. The OLPC was a clean sheet implementation of a computer. It created ideas such as only having a few sizes of screws, shipping extra screws in the case, separating the light bar from the LED screen, innovative use of polarization, new mesh networking, and a low price tag.

About half of the innovations were picked up by other manufacturers within a couple years.

This was done with a programming language. Ada was designed through an iterative sequence of trials for a clean sheet implementation of a development language. It created, or popularized, ideas such as explicit module exports, tying directory and file names to classes, separate "to end of line" comments, and more.

About half of the innovations were picked up by other language vendors within a couple years.

Oberon gets mentioned on HackerNews every couple years. It is hard to say its really a clean sheet.

CharlesMerriam2··on Freiburg: Germany's futuristic city set in a forest
Well, yeah. Good luck with that. -- California
CharlesMerriam2··on Apple Terminates Epic Games' Developer Account
History is interesting here.

Capitalism, according to Wealth of Nations, has some problems with corporations becoming monopolies. When Teddy Roosevelt was sidelined into the Vice President position, it was partly to sideline the movement towards regulation and trust-busting. That period, due an assassination, broke up large companies.

We now have Apple, and a host of other players, using monopoly powers to extract value from any who would play. Epic may have done that math and found the tax was too high to be profitable, or that upsetting the monopoly was worthwhile. History may turn again, and monopolies may face more scrutiny.

The uncertainty of changes are one of the joys of a government system that is organized mob rule.

CharlesMerriam2··on Uber and Lyft shutdown in California averted as judge grants emergency stay
Recognize that more reasonable solutions exist, for example, modifying AB5 exempting anyone pulling in >$50K ($25/hour for any hour available or logging into the app).

Propositions, being like an unchangeable binary library, are 'take-it-or-leave-it' laws.

CharlesMerriam2··on Rideshare operations are being suspended in California
There are rights in the United States: life, liberty, safe working environments.

But there is no right to a business model.

Lyft is a business model that found a loophole in a previously regulated business and was able to combine a technology upgrade with a way to pay substandard compensation. That legislators closed this loophole is not a surprise. The exact legislation will never be perfect, and will probably not be changed if it is "good enough".

CharlesMerriam2··on The Death of Corporate Research Labs
This type of article comes up from time to time, and is generally wrong on many points.

* Corporate Labs are not for primary research, at least in the United States. In the U.S., any primary research is done at universities, developed from research to prototype and patent at NASA, and then licensed to a U.S. company to go to product. For non-primary research, prototypes are developed by corporations via grants from government agencies.

* Bell Labs, before AT&T monopoloy breakup, was a special business case. Its funding existed in a game of legislation maneuvering. It is not an exemplar.

* Think of labs as "tier 5 tech support, when the engineers are stumped".

Most labs are holding areas for smart people to solve sudden business problems. For those who read the famous analysis of criticality accidents in non-military settings, you need some smart folk hanging around to prevent disasters.

For example, Sun Labs had people working (forever) on some hopeful breakthrough. Howard Davidson, a failure engineer, was pulled off task when server boxes started breaking (paper washers being glued in manufacturing) or card connections started failing (silver substituted for gold). These were high impact problems not solvable by line engineers.

Similarly Ricoh Labs had a day when everyone was pulled off to disassemble a large machine and figure out a feeding problem that had a hard solution. Intel keeps materials PhDs in the fab areas just in case something comes up that would slow throughput.

* Many labs have reputations no longer deserved. I worked at PARC and found some teams made magic and others made bloat. Look at the short term results, meaning the past decade, to rate a lab.

CharlesMerriam2··on Threat to kill wild boar that stole nude bather's laptop prompts outcry
Could we stop posting headlines from Markov generators?

"Go home 2020. You're drunk." -- r.t.

CharlesMerriam2··on Graphical Linear Algebra
Meh. Sorry.

Start with [Essence of Linear Algebra](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZHQObOWTQDPD3MizzM2x...) by [3 Blue 1 Brown](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYO_jab_esuFRV4b17AJtAw) for an intuitive overview of all the major concepts.

While working through a full Linear Algebra course, it is important to develop your own software to do things. That is, some sort of command tool to enter matrices and run operations on them. As you go through a course, you will keep adding operations.

You should work on some of the most common tricks, like using 4 by 4 matrices for computer graphics and understanding what a PCA does.

CharlesMerriam2··on Show HN: A bookmarking tool designed to help synthesize your web research
FYI... Chrome only; no Firefox.
CharlesMerriam2··on Universal Basic Income is Capitalism 2.0
How about Universal Basic Employment? Drop minimum wage to $5/hour, and everyone gets and extra $20 x 30 hours a week if they hit minimum employment.

This would aim at efficient production, and have the side effect of efficient consumption.

1. Better Service - economics keep pushing the service quality bar lower as humans are an expensive way to satisfy customers. We do better with a human bagging your groceries than having you bag your own groceries and pay for an idle human.

2. Experience Ladders - people being interested in their own careers leads to more experienced people. For example, a corner store might hire someone to create a promotion if its cheap enough. The person hired might become good at it.

3. Crazy Startups - with survival being possible, people can start a company at high risk, hiring their friends at a cut rate. If it fails, they can give up and work for their friends.

CharlesMerriam2··on Every year I fill out this survey from Apple, for Apple developers
I buy an app on my iPhone once every couple months. I simply cannot find anything. I cannot buy.

The 'freemium' games hide.

I want:

- games that offer a single purchase, or a one time upgrade for full features without ads. Yes, some people will buy the 'bucket of coffee beans' upgrade. I won't. I don't want to search through twenty games that offer it.

- productivity tools that do something useful. My phone is stuck in 2001. Universal menu ordering? Teach me in two minutes? Manage my contacts to call people I haven't talked to in a while? Anything?

- privacy. Why does the Peet's Application in the background still get updated location services, draining my battery? When is the microphone on? Who is really calling me?

Seriously. A business model based on "the other players aren't doing well either" seems excessively fragile.

CharlesMerriam2··on Reading habits that changed my life
Yes. Medium. There's a comment above on this: private tab or delete the cookies.
CharlesMerriam2··on Reading habits that changed my life
"Love is the Killer App" is great book on reading.

It discusses how to take notes in books, review them quickly, retain information, choose books and so on.

Like all great business books, it has a wrong and misleading title. It has nothing to do with apps.

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