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InspiredIdiot

94 karma · joined June 27, 2017

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InspiredIdiot··on Salesforce completes acquisition of Slack
I'm no Atlassian fanboy but Asana is only a replacement for Jira in specific use cases. I've used Jira Server successfully on large software projects. Not amazing but I've now used enough other products to say "pretty good". Jira Cloud... not great for that use case. Fewer features and every click seems to require a 300ms minimum REST call. Asana, even more limited functionality. After years there is still no way to automatically remove completed work from the board. But the UI and flow are pretty good and snappy so for certain use cases like smaller shorter-term projects it can be good.
InspiredIdiot··on Do patents kill innovation? The US patent office is asking
Escalating fees still seems like a great way to limit the damage to small investors while turning the screws on NPEs, though. If the owners of capital can form this monopsony hurting small investors in the escalating fees case wouldn't they be able to do the same in the constant fee case? Is the proposition that they would be able to keep the monopsony together better with a bigger incentive (avoiding potentially high patent fees once they escalate)?

It seems to me that yes it doesn't do much to reduce the use of patents by Big Tech that they are actually commercializing. It would be nice to solve all the problems but it seems like it solves some of the problems that almost everyone but NPEs can agree on in a neat way without too much collateral damage.

InspiredIdiot··on What really happened to Jack Ma?
That is a big problem but kindof a separate issue. He may have been targeted because he was critical of the government but it's really hard to argue that he didn't do anything against the law. Maybe he should have whistleblower protection but his case isn't as simple as persecution solely for being critical of the government which is what this thread seems to be about.
InspiredIdiot··on Single random bit flip causes error in certificate transparency log
Yes, and also contrary to Wikipedia it provides a solid use case for private blockchain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain#Disadvantages_of_pr...

I think it is instructive to ask "why doesn't this mention guarantee downvotes?" because I don't think it's just cargo-culting. I doubt that many of those objecting to blockchain are objecting to byzantine fault tolerance, DHT, etc. Very high resource usage in the cost function, the ledger being public and permanent (long term privacy risk), negative externalities related to its use in a currency... These are commonly the objections I have and hear. And they are inapplicable.

Extending what the Wikipedia article says, it's basically glorified database replication. But it also replicates and verifies the calculation to get to that data so it provides far greater fault tolerance. But since it is private you get to throw out the adversarial model (mostly the cost function) and assume failures are accidental, not malicious. It makes the problem simpler and lowers the stakes versus using blockchain for a global trustless digital currency so I don't think we should be surprised that it engenders less controversy.

InspiredIdiot··on GitHub Copilot
The whole point of that case begins with the admission "yes of course Google copied." They copied the API. The argument was that copying an API to enable interoperability was fair use. It went to the Supreme Court because no law explicitly said that was fair use and no previous case had settled the point definitively. And the reason Google could be confident they copied only the API is because they made sure the humans who did it understood both the difference and the importance of the difference between API and implementation. I don't think there is a credible argument that any AI existing today can make such a distinction.
InspiredIdiot··on [dead]
This is the third posting on McAfee's death. They are different articles, but do we need three postings on the same topic?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27608838 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27608964

InspiredIdiot··on Ripgrep 13.0
Yeah. It almost seems unfair but I'll just use both and be glad they are available.
InspiredIdiot··on The World’s Northernmost Town
Would you consider updating the site guidelines to explain this "just the diff" principle? It sounds like an important enough concept to be captured there. And it seems in some cases to supersede the "please use the original title" guideline so it's probably worth calling that out.

[Edit]

I wish I didn't have to continually edit myself but originally I used the term "editorialize" and I thought it had a more broad meaning of "exercise editorial discretion". While there is still an opinion involved in the edit. Something along the lines of "users of this site will already know X so it isn't part of the diff" I don't think it meets the stricter definition of editorializing. "Not part of the diff" is still cited as a justification for editing the title that I don't see covered in the current site guidelines.

InspiredIdiot··on The World’s Northernmost Town
I expect it is bad form to reply to yourself but I've changed my opinion and no longer object to the post title. I think this reply better reflects that than a mere edit...

Not to put words into anyone's mouth but if I imagine what dang or someone else with a similar position might think in response to my post above:

The goal with the title of a post isn't only to accurately convey what the linked content is, but also why it is interesting and belongs on Hacker News and do both of those concisely. And while both the title and content of the article might wander into cliché, framing everything in the context of change, some things that are just plain interesting are included and those are the main reason for it being posted here. I think it is easier for me to recognize that when the post title adds to or modifies the original, pointing at what makes it interesting rather than removing something. But I can see how in this case removing from the article title achieves the same goal so it seems in keeping with the goals of this site.

Oh, and finally I misunderstood the comment about "not part of the diff". I thought dang was pointing at a history of edits to the post title showing he merely chose not to alter the original post title which already differed from the article. I should have followed the link which I appreciate. Though it also makes me concerned about how we can fight the novelty bias it introduces which I think our society and the tech industry in particular suffers from.

InspiredIdiot··on The World’s Northernmost Town
All the content in the article is about how it this northern place is changing. If the contention is that the title is cliché for noting that things are changing, then the article is cliché for all the same reasons. So wouldn't we want a post title that reflects that (and also matches the article's title) so that readers can judge for themselves whether they want to click?

This is about accurate labeling. If we want cliché articles to have less prominence on this site, it is a matter of moderation, not editing.

[Edited because I got a little off-topic.]

InspiredIdiot··on The strangest time zones in the world (2015)
If I got to name that, I would call it a "time valley".
InspiredIdiot··on Nuclear lighthouses built by the Soviets in the Arctic [video]
I've never heard of thorium being used in smoke detectors. As far as I know it is always Americium, including in David Hahn's case.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americium-241

InspiredIdiot··on Why Is the NYPD So Powerful?
To clarify, this is in response to "Wild horses couldn't get me to do that job." It is no mystery. Joining a police force is a powerful tool of upward mobility in a country (ours) where pretty much all the others have been lost. I would hope that the people enjoying those advantages (possibly deserved but evidently rare) would want to preserve them. Sometimes that might result in the restraint you note. Other times the results might be quite different.
InspiredIdiot··on Why Is the NYPD So Powerful?
https://www1.nyc.gov/site/nypd/careers/police-officers/po-be... https://www1.nyc.gov/site/nypd/careers/police-officers/po-hi...
InspiredIdiot··on Amazon DocumentDB, with MongoDB compatibility
Also the aggregation pipeline is seriously hobbled with way more No-s than Yes-es over here https://docs.aws.amazon.com/documentdb/latest/developerguide...
InspiredIdiot··on After rising for 100 years, electricity demand is flat
Energy consumption of data centers as of 2016 shows they are a major component of total energy consumption and therefore worth watching. It doesn't imply how that will affect _growth_ in energy usage over time. You have to look at change over time taking into account demand, supply and efficiency together in an analysis like this http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2016/06/27/heres...
InspiredIdiot··on Zillow forces McMansion Hell to delete posts
It doesn't appear that Antoni Gaudí had anything to do with the etymology of the term "gaudy" as it was in use hundreds of years before he was born.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/gaudy https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gaudy

I couldn't help looking it up because the idea that a single artist could stand out so much to be singularly associated with that term was tempting. I expect that is why such a false association persists.

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