Hacker News Reader

_5659on Ask HN: How long have you been on HN and have you learned a lot

I think I've been lurking for almost 8 years. I only recently started an account.

Hacker News has helped me learn to be a better programmer in mostly two ways:

1) Be enthusiastic and write honestly about what interests you. Keeping notes is helpful.

2) Hacker News is a community. The dialogue is mostly good for the topics I'm interested in. It is easier to do things and learn things when you listen to people.

_5659on How to buy gifts that people actually want

Gift giving advice: Only give gifts to people who will initially refuse them.

_5659on To What Extent Do We See with Mathematics?

I recently added a new antidepressant to my stack, it ended up giving me a bad case of serotonin poisoning.

The immediate consequence was an incredibly lurid case of hallucinations which involved dancing shapes everywhere. My visual perception of things was bombarded by platonic shapes being layered onto everything, coalescing into vague but animated silhouettes of faces and bodies. Rotating pink triangles, bouncing blue squares, pulsing green circles can make of the majority of most outlines surprisingly - you get the idea, linear transformations of basic shapes with random colors can approximate a good deal of objects at a distance. The "engine" here felt like a bunch of symmetric rotations (abstract algebra) coupled with linear transformations (linear algebra) through a stochastic process of selecting colors (stochastic clustering?). Brain's firing all on cylinders so I'm surprised to see not only one intensive heuristic at play, but that they're all subtly feeding into each other. If video game graphics can make up surprisingly realistic depictions using only triangle meshes, this is basically a strictly 2D representation that takes advantage of the fact that we have two cameras, and that circles can be approximated from points without having to compute anti-aliasing.

Not enough to be there, but enough to be perceived. Not very fun. Best way to describe it, I suspect my visual cortex processes information by layering geometric objects and softening them until it's able to perceive a kind of eigenrepresentation of the object, and overactive stimulation just amps up the process until maybe they're not so soft.

I ended up riding it out because it was more annoying than scary and my doctor prescribed me something different.

To draw attention to the content of the article:

Constructor theory is interesting. I've often wondered, okay sure there are these mathematical foundations of understanding the language of the universe. What at all allows them to interact with each other? Are they even separate at all? If you read about the history of math, you know that most of math is born from saying something's impossible, so then naturally how does the computational engine of the brain have these processes running around until we can eke out symbols to describe them?

Example: You can jump around in calculus to algebra to trigonometry and so on with a few identities and theorems, but to what extent is all of mathematics connected to each other, paradoxes aside. I suspect organisms and existences are living proofs, dynamic formal systems only capable of understanding what our foundations are capable of computing. Not only is life and reality necessary from a mathematical perspective, it went out of its way to prove it.

_5659on Eating Meat Was Banned in Japan for Centuries

Meat is considered separate from fish in the language.

For the most part, 肉 (niku: meat) refers to mostly land animals and in context, the ban was to discourage the consumption of domesticated animals and game which would invite pestilence and strain on limited space for agriculture. Eating meat in Japan is still kind of impractical, there just isn't that much space, and it pollutes a lot. Lookup how much water, alfalfa, acreage and methane output is required just to breed a single cow.

Fun fact, English and Latin is kind of similar in the meanings of 'meat' and 'carne' with regards to religious diet.

_5659on Eating Meat Was Banned in Japan for Centuries

They're missing an opportunity. We've had jackfruit for a while now and synthetic meat is nothing new in some sense. This is like policing the aesthetics of the Maillard reaction.

Framing the argument strictly in terms of consumption without inspecting the conditions of production also betrays a wider perspective on how we can achieve ethical or sustainable practices. And certainly it's inimical to the reality that there needs to be reform at the institutional and corporate tier of practice with higher priority rather than castigate individual and cultural consumption.

_5659on Eating Meat Was Banned in Japan for Centuries

Not even eventually, I prefer the taste of certain synthetic meat because it tastes more charbroiled and bloody than meat in some cases. Not only is it already good enough is what I'm saying, I think there's a preference in taste to have it overcome some of the disadvantages in freshness that meat poses.

_5659on Eating Meat Was Banned in Japan for Centuries

The ethnic untouchable caste burakumin who would work with cattle and leather were discriminated by almost every Buddhist sect.

I don't think most of the spirit of the religion comes from India directly. There's plenty of Sanskrit in the language but most ideas matriculated through Korean and Chinese schools of thought is my understanding.

_5659on Eating Meat Was Banned in Japan for Centuries

There's this light fiction / short story by Kanagaki Robun called the Beefeater which I think is an appropriate companion piece to this article.

https://aboutjapan.japansociety.org/beefeater

There's also this urban myth that went around in the 1980s while Japan was negotiating beef exports with the Beef Caucus in the USA. Basically, Japan put forward the reasoning that their intestines are longer and therefore meat does not sit well with us, leading to colon cancer, and the line of thinking goes on and on. My Japanese mother even explained this to me as a child when I developed an appetite for eating ridiculously large In-N-Out burgers.

https://apnews.com/article/8fff51f61de3400636ec9af70a2680d8

I still see articles frequently suggesting that the Western diet is inherently bad for Asians and leads to colon cancer.

Red meat's one thing, but beef means more McDonalds and more McDonalds means more international relations. Beef export is the reason why razing rainforests and violating indigenous lands is profitable.

Every import of beef means extended trade relations with Australia or USA or whoever's selling it. I believe China is set up for the next 60 years to import beef from the USA.

_5659on Why Japanese web design is so different (2013)

I had to disable Adblock Plus for some reason to get the entire page to load.

Ditto on the point where Japan is stuck in the 1980s future. Everything's optimized for tiny cellphone screens optimized for text. If I recall correctly iPhone adoption was slow, and many people lacked a desktop to provide updates. I still find wifi to be incredibly scarce in Tokyo. If people want a desktop, they go to a cafe. If they want a mobile connection, it's faster to just use your telecom plan.

That seems to have changed under COVID.

_5659on My chatbot is dead – Why yours should probably be too

They basically just force you to work within the pipeline of one-reply-per-person when following up on a customer in their CRM. Simple as that.

_5659on Report on Investigation of Twitter’s July 15, 2020 Cybersecurity Incident

"That doesn't seem to fit together" is what I have been feeling for 4 years.

_5659on My chatbot is dead – Why yours should probably be too

My favorite chatbot experience lately has been support directing me to the chatbot, which then informs me that I am capable of resolving the issue of cancelling/refunding or making changes to my transaction. It just happens to be the case, that I ordered the wrong thing. Simple as that.

As I travel to the appropriate link, there is none such ability or option. I relay the appropriate message to their customer service. Fast forward a day later, they were unable to reply to my message in time, they have already processed the order, and are actually begging me to accept the purchase because as a small company they are incapable of managing their customer service department.

All in all, I felt bad that they would have lost a substantial amount on my cancellation or refund. But I can't help but feel the entire situation could have been avoided if they had eschewed the "benefit" of "automating" their customer service.

I think a good reason Salesforce has been so successful is that they force users to abide by the one-reply system of following up on customers.

_5659on Report on Investigation of Twitter’s July 15, 2020 Cybersecurity Incident

Respectfully, I don't think I'm spending too much time online to be cognizant of the fact that we have an administration that is very much capable of doing so.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/sep/10/trump-almost...

_5659on Report on Investigation of Twitter’s July 15, 2020 Cybersecurity Incident

I literally felt the hand of the Doomsday Clock move closer to midnight, and all these hackers were interested in was making a bunch of traceable transactions to a few accounts linked to Gmail.

For shame, we need to be teaching our youth better dystopian hacker ethics.

_5659on Foxconn’s empty buildings, empty factories, and empty promises in Wisconsin

"The Last Graveyard"

Hopefully they incorporate poetry by Xu Lizhi: https://libcom.org/blog/xulizhi-foxconn-suicide-poetry

_5659on Show HN: A tiny portable MIDI looper

Absolutely. If it helps you garner more attention on kickstarter, I'd be happy to provide you asset mockups for product design.

_5659on A case for using punctuation in Slack

For myself.

General chat: Proper punctuation. Keep sentences terse. Reply promptly. Leave no room for ambiguity.

Direct message: Often if a matter takes place outside of a public channel, it is because a duty or responsibility is being delegated to you or a sensitive subject is involved. One should take extra precaution to speak forthrightly to ease the recipient, but also take measures to be prompt and present.

Makes a world of difference.

The most important thing I've learned about online tone is that it's less about what you say and more about how you tell others to speak to you.

_5659on A Brief Introduction to the Basics of Game Theory

Ditto on this. Game theory is what people put into practice through play. Any rules more complex than being turn-by-turn decisions or game-length strategy tend to not find their way into interesting models.

_5659on Show HN: A tiny portable MIDI looper

Oh this looks rad!

I'd love to contribute some design / artwork for packaging if you decide to release it as a kickstarter!

Feel free to reach out to me.

_5659on Ask HN: What are other career options as a CS major?

Hey, I was in a similar spot when I was graduating.

I honestly took a year off to just teach math to kids and work at the mall.

Same story, quant finance. Math background. Didn't go anywhere with that immediately.

Here's what I wish I'd done.

Take the minimum amount of steps it requires to go to grad school or line up a quantitative finance job. Even if you don't care about those possible paths, you have the privilege of applying whereas many do not. At least talk to some of those people and see what they have to say to you. It sounds like you're coming up with a catastrophic idea of your future without consulting the very people who are supposed to navigate these waters with you.

If you want a 'realistic' answer, it sounds like you just need a job. Any job. Give up the idea that the work will always be interesting. I guarantee you, once you abandon the pretense that you need to be working on interesting problems, you will see that others will bring interesting work to you anyways.

As math major to another, there are interesting problems everywhere and literally all people are interesting and full of problems.

_5659on What Chinese looks, feels and sounds like when you're from Korea or Japan (2009)

To me, the difference almost feels like Chinese is an acoustic instrument that has more flavor in how its played and Japanese feels more like a digital instrument in how its programmed.

_5659on Show HN: Stop creating bad resumes. Use Resoume

I've always felt, no resume is burdened by the fact that I need one. My best opportunities have come through the fact that the person hiring me has never looked at mine.

_5659on PG&E Equipment Might Have Ignited Northern California Wildfire

As a Californian resident, my immediate response was "is this a repost?" and that horrifies me.

_5659on St. John's seed company's onions are too sexy for Facebook

I used to try posting my generative artwork to my public facebook page.

My work was heavy on perlin noise, so basically a lot of curved blobs. This would lead to a lot of automatic flagging for being NSFW.

_5659on Tables, a Product from Area 120, by Google: One tool, many uses

This is my first time reading about Area 120.

Any have insightful observations on this change in marketing?

_5659on Should you get paid based on where you live?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining

Not trying to be snarky. But just in case some readers don't know the history of geographic discrimination.

_5659on Viral effects are not network effects

This is a long and market-y way to basically explain two ideas.

Here's the simple idea:

Viruses infect new users. Users go up. Going viral would be things like FOMO or hijacking a popular twitter account with a sign-up bonus link.

A network effect is sometimes used to describe interaction between users. Users go up because users stay or users don't leave. There's a stark difference in an app that everybody uses versus an app that nobody uses, that's basically it.

Math wise: A virus forms a graph that is a tree. Nodes infect nodes infect nodes. Nodes have to be uninfected to be infected. Lots of real life examples.

A network effect is a network of nodes that interact with each other. This is often just like the example they give, where nodes can form multiple connections to each other. If each edge connecting a vertex represented a function adding value to each user, and a viral effect can only sustain an edge to a vertex it previously was not connected to, then yeah by definition one has more connections than the others.

All this article is trying to say, a viral effect can only add value from one user to another.

A network effect can add value from one user to many users and likewise, many users can add value to one user.

One-to-one vs Many-to-Many

_5659on Menger Sponge

Or: you can even use post-its.

From the article: https://www.flickr.com/photos/rougeux/sets/72157621702780335...

_5659on Streamlit vs. Dash vs. Shiny vs. Voila vs. Flask vs. Jupyter

I like this write-up. Definitely matches my experience testing all of these tools.

I've settled on just using Jupyter. Like the scorecard suggests, it does good enough in most categories. The reason I need a dashboard is to flexibly handle data for most cases. Being able to jump between Python and R and Julia is nice and often needed.

_5659on What Palantir and the LAPD Know About You

One time I interviewed with Palantir. First time I used Zoom. This was yeeears before it became an issue that they don't encrypt communications and I brought it up that I thought it was weird they're relying on third-parties for something that felt... vague but also security related?

In order to suss out exactly what apprehensions I was having about their corporation (forgive me, I knew they were operated by Peter Thiel and this and all that but I was willing giving to give them a fair shake since I was a lot younger and a lot more naive), basically what I asked was a simple question, "what exactly does Palantir do? Because I have read your marketing and releases and everything but I'd like to hear it straight from the horse's mouth with an employee."

"We leverage data."

Oh I see! Well it's 12:00PM and I see we're out of time, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me and looking forward to next steps.

I never hear back and spent the next few weeks horrified by the interaction.

Addendum: What got me the interview was the fact that I studied under one of the chief scientists behind PredPol. I understood how the technology worked and the basic logistics of how to implement it. Regardless of whether I believed in it, I knew how it worked. I think that's what they were after.