Hacker News Reader

davirosson Why Silicon Valley Shouldn’t Work with the Pentagon

_then SV should absolutely work with the Pentagon so that the US doesn't fall behind competitively._

Is this necessarily/automatic enough of a Good Thing as to be assumed as such by fiat?

This seems largely equivalent to "From a pure game theory perspective, everybody who could should work to advance nuclear missile design".

davirosson Brains Sweep Themselves Clean of Toxins During Sleep (2013)

There's a (good, rather surreal at times) webcomic along these lines, PowerNap. Cyberpunk-ish future, just about everybody takes a drug to eliminate the need for sleep, protagonist is someone who's allergic to the stuff and is navigating life in a world where sleep itself is a disorder. (Plus strange dreamscape things) http://www.powernapcomic.com/d/20110617.html

davirosson The story of Heady Topper, Americas most loved craft beer

Most of the issue there is that, due to tradition, the official definition keeps getting bumped up so Samuel Adams counts. (Most recently from 2 million to 6 million barrels)

More practically, I'd say to look at microbrewery limits, which are 15,000 barrels/year.

davirosson Brilliant Jerks Cost More Than They Are Worth

Why would you be concerned about coworkers making "too much" in relation to you? I mean, if the company were going to close as a result of pay, then I'd potentially be concerned (more that it's a failing company or a failure of management), but I can't imagine a scenario where I would look at a fellow coworker and have it harm me any that they're getting paid well.

davirosson Thousands of Low-Income Americans 'Donate' Blood Plasma to For-Profit Centers

This was something I did twice a week myself, to help get through college. It worked well for being a way to get additional money in a way which worked with the rest of my schedule, though having income directly tied to health wasn't always great. (Have a minor cold? Now be knocked out of a week or two's deposits)

davirosson 'All I wanted to do is build a house' (2010)

"Thinking of fires, for example - these used to be a major hazard, but their now more or less a solved problem, and a lot has changed since the fire codes were written. "

We're exactly talking about fire codes. But fair, let's talk about lumber stamps. How much weight can a random hunk of wood support? Under what conditions? Do you know? Probably not, different ways wood can be treated can dramatically affect how it behaves. How it's cared for (drying, etc) can also do the same. Both of those definitely contribute to flammability. Or just "Where did the wood come from? Is it from an area likely to have borer beetles, compromising any treatment?"

I mean, sure, if you pick through codes, there's probably cruft in there. I'm not foolhardy enough to say that everything is 100% based on modern understanding of materials science. But it's quite the reach to go from there to "Nah, let's get rid of them, they're in our way! Common sense will do just fine!"

davirosson 'All I wanted to do is build a house' (2010)

They're a solved problem, solved by implementing fire codes.

Or, more to the point, as noted above, they're paid in blood. Each time enough people die in previously unforeseen ways, we come up with solutions in aggregate. Chesterton's Fence is apt here.

davirosson DoomRL Open Source Release

It does note that the original plan was to open-source it once the Kickstarter completed, so I suspect a decent amount of it was "From an older era of Roguelike development"

davirosson Amazon Worker Jumps Off Company Building After E-Mail to Staff

12 story building, but he jumped from the 4th floor and hit a balcony midway down. Still resilient, but not the full impact imagined.

davirosson What I learned from spending 3 months applying to jobs after a coding bootcamp

Alternately, it suggests that people getting emails like this should be sure to send them to Recruiting with a "Could not follow instructions, do not hire" note.

davirosson Google Flights will now tell you when fares will increase

"No Country Redirect", I believe. Specifies to avoid geolocation

davirosson Ask HN: What keeps you from exercising?

I haven't found something I enjoy, mostly. This feeds into not prioritizing it, as other people have already noted, "Preferring doing just about anything else", which leads into feeling like there isn't time for it...

In theory the trick is finding something I enjoy, but I haven't had a good track record there.

davirosson Is There Any Room for the Not-Passionate Developer?

This is always worrying to see when set as an expectation. I mean, I enjoy coding. My employer gets my 40-ish hours of attention. But I just can't seem to get into after-hours or weekend coding side projects.

I have ideas to explore (Nothing I'd ever want to turn into a business, perish the thought), but I just... can't find the motivation to spend more hours doing what I already spend about a third of my life doing. I enjoy reading articles and the like, sure, but if I wanted to work on side projects, I'd need to take extended time away from work to "reset" and get into something.

Does this make me destined to fall behind? I'm hoping not, but given how many people talk about needing one's job to be their all-consuming passion, to be something they spend spare time and weekends on... I'm not always hopeful.

davirosson We Wrote an Algorithm to Unravel the Rhymes of Hit Musical ‘Hamilton’

Addendum: Methodology - http://graphics.wsj.com/hamilton-methodology/

OpenNews walkthrough of development/design process - https://source.opennews.org/en-US/articles/hamilton-algorith...

davirosson Startup offers landlords continuous, deep surveillance of tenants' social media

Note who works for/with them and remember that if you're ever in a hiring position (or able to influence hiring)?

Since the people working to put this together clearly don't have the ethical sense to not-make this, at least they might think twice if there's enough understanding that producing flat-out evil might hurt their career prospects.

davirosson Git Tips

Beautiful, I've been looking for something like this for a while. My only issue is getting a strange

  fatal: remote part of refspec is not a valid name in :MARKET-446

error which seems resistant to the usual sort of tweaks.

davirosson Amazon’s Echo Brims with Groundbreaking Promise

It seems to be some sort of not-quite-hardware thing where they download a neural net, based on what I remember hearing about the implementation and that it takes ~10min and flashes a lot of warnings when you switch from "Alexa" to "Amazon" as the available watchwords.

Not that this is completely secure, of course, but it does suggest it'd be non-trivial, at least.

davirosson Why Stack Overflow Doesn’t Care About Ad Blockers

an entire article on a blog centered around a product This is why I'm liking the slow rise of tools for blocking sponsored content as well. (Particularly when combined with FTC requirements about labeling, since if you can't tell the difference enough to block it, there's some investigators who'd like to have a word with you.)

I encourage sites who feel like they need to to block adblocking users. Their demise will be that much quicker and better alternatives can rise in their place.

davirosson Decommissioning a free public API

Why does everything have to be monetized? It seems pretty clear from the article that they spun up a test project until they didn't want to, and they provided a whole two weeks more lead-time than they needed to on taking it down.

I'm not sure why there's this expectation that someone should do a bunch more work for something they wanted to kill off, just for the sake of monetization.

davirosson Gregory Hays discusses his translation of Marcus Aurelius (2002) [video]

The Hays translation is definitely currently my favorite, so this is particularly fascinating, especially given how much variance there is in translation (both in general and with this specific text).

davirosson Business Insider: “You're going to regret ditching cable in 5 years...”

go back to the big bundle which costs them $0.25 per viewer hour and gives them 300 channels to choose from at any time <- This seems like such a weird and creepy unit of measurement. Is that really how they see their product? Indistinguishable viewer-hours where it doesn't matter what's on so long as something's always playing?

My guess is, if this sort of "We're going to squeeze viewers" extraction happens, it'll lead to more people just not watching TV at all, rather than paying more and reminiscing about the good-ol'-days.

davirosson The Sad State of Personal Knowledgebases

This has been my current approach for a while, after exporting everything out of Tiddlywiki when it looked like that was dying for a while (Browser support drying up, etc).

Now that it's been revived with Tiddlywiki5 and development's picked back up, I'm somewhat tempted to get back into it. Main advantage: Better crosslinking, rich content, etc. Main disadvantage: Less simple to edit, some tedium to export.

I'd love to have a Tiddlywiki-like frontend to a set of Markdown text documents backing it. (This is something that's been gnawing at the back of my mind long enough that I might have to buckle down and make it myself) Maybe Markdown + JSON for rich content data...

davirosson The Curta Mechanical Calculator

A Curta has been in my "If I ever have way too much money and have already spread it everywhere else I could" dream-category for years. I would doubly love (and be willing to back) a revival of them (that way it wouldn't feel like I'm buying up a historical artifact for personal enjoyment).

davirosson Show HN: Wox – an open source launcher for windows inspired by Alfred and Launchy

Very cool! I've been hoping something like this would get active development again, since Launchy basically died.

Alfred's been pretty good Mac-side.

Shame that Synapse & near as I last saw Gnome Do seem to have also died off Linux-side.

It's a useful product space.

davirosson Show HN: Data Is Plural – A weekly newsletter of useful/curious datasets

This looks excellent. Are you wedded to the email newsletter distribution format, or would RSS be reasonable as well?

davirosson Ad-blocking: a sign that web publishers don’t care about readers

This is where stronger protections against this sort of deception would be useful. I'm (sometimes) fine with sponsored articles. I've seen some sites use it well. But it has to be honest, clearly marked.

davirosson Stop Googling. Let’s Talk

This seems like something of a selection bias issue. By the same token, I don't know that I've run into anyone lately who's checked their phones while talking with me. Not to say that it doesn't happen, of course, but you might need to find new people.

davirosson Why Do We Admire Mobsters?

This seems like an unfalsifiable set of statements. Anything someone can say to the contrary just gets wrapped up in "But your genes programmed yourself that way".

Hint: There's not a whole lot "Gene survival urges" can do about 2 pellets of appropriately placed titanium and some surgical knives.

davirosson Why Do We Admire Mobsters?

without actually asking Him if He's there and if He cares.

I'm curious. What does this response look like? I can't say I've ever seen anything which would seem to match this, and it's definitely a question I've wondered about when I was a kid falling out of a sense of faith.

davirosson Beware of Open Source Software Zombies

This sort of expectation ends up being a mental block for me sometimes as far as putting something I've done out there. If I put it out there, someone might use it and expect updates. How many projects could I maintain at once? Is this one really worth that much trouble?