Hacker News Reader

flipcoderon Visual Studio Code Comes to Raspberry Pi

I don't know about nano but Vim has many autocomplete plugins

flipcoderon Tell HN: All your Google Music deleted on February 24th

"The YouTube channel you're currently using isn't supported for the Google Play Music transfer."

Uhh... ok...

flipcoderon Google Stadia shuts down internal studios, changing business focus

Well that didn't last long

flipcoderon Element (Matrix chat app) suspended from the Google Play Store

It's only a matter of time until they start banning browsers for not blocking certain websites. It's the exact same logic.

flipcoderon Japanese people stay fit for life without visiting a gym

Are these step counts really as much as they sound like? My fitness tracker hits above 10,000 steps even the days I stay indoors, just from walking around the house doing things, although I do pace around more than most.

flipcoderon Researchers’ AI aligns sheet music with MIDI audio

Does your midi software properly translate drum rudiments that have specific notation symbols? That would be quite impressive actually. Drumming has a lot of technique-specific and informal stylistic things that would be hard to translate.

flipcoderon How does consciousness even make sense?

Consciousness is mysterious, but I find it even more mysterious that the universe had the capacity for consciousness to even exist in the first place. How does something start with capacity to have first-person awareness of itself? It seems almost magical.

flipcoderon Dropbox officially launches its own password manager and a secure vault

https://techcrunch.com/2011/06/20/dropbox-security-bug-made-...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/09/07...

lol

flipcoderon Coding is not ‘fun’ – it’s technically and ethically complex

I guess my view is it's sort of like learning one note on guitar and saying guitar is so easy because you learned it in a day. Would you introduce yourself as a guitar player after doing that?

If I memorize one word in a foreign language, am I bilingual?

Here's some rocket science too: t - 10s

I like words to hold clear meanings. If everything is easy because there's one easy thing about it, the word has no meaning. If a coder is anyone who can do Hello World, it's pointless even calling yourself one. It means nothing.

flipcoderon Coding is not ‘fun’ – it’s technically and ethically complex

Oh, I agree that its easy to start out and even kids can start, but saying it in the context of getting a job feels very deceptive.

Facebook had a commercial where they said something like "we'll hire anyone who can code, it's as easy as learning multiplication tables!" I don't remember the exact quote but those outreach programs but it felt a bit ridiculous at the time.

If you say something is easy and a person fails at it, they'll feel worse when they fail. If you acknowledge it's challenging at first they're better fit to handle it with grit and keep trying. Programming is something you're going to have to fail at continuously before you get it. And if afterwards you say, "see wasn't that easy?" there's no sense of accomplishment.

flipcoderon Coding is not ‘fun’ – it’s technically and ethically complex

I've always thought the view that "coding is easy" is a bit insulting to those who worked hard to learn to do it well. Sure, there are certain concepts in coding that are easy. But isn't that the case with everything? It depends on what you're building and if the person has a general interest. The idea that was pushed by Facebook and others that its as simple as memorizing multiplication tables I always found deceptive and ridiculous.

flipcoderon Ask HN: Name one idea that changed your life

"Be proactive, not reactive."

and

"Effectiveness is more important than intelligence."

flipcoderon Show HN: AI Generated SEO Articles

Is "AI Generated SEO Articles" the new term for a spam bot?

flipcoderon SmileBASIC 4 for Nintendo Switch

The companies making classic consoles really missed an opportunity with this. Instead of making them temporary specialty items, they could have added a basic API and way to browse and download community games. I know this would have needed moderation and warning messages for the normal user, but it could have been a "developer mode".

Right now the closest thing we have is a linux system running emulation station. It at least has custom apps called "ports", but it's missing a built in app browser/downloader for those, though.

Atari was the closest to realize that potential but completely screwed it up. They put in an actual decent system but it made it too expensive. (https://atarivcs.com/) If this was around the $100 price point, I could see it doing amazingly well even if it was less powerful But more expensive than a nintendo switch? wtf

The pi absolutely has potential to be a programmable game console with the right distro and applications, it just isn't quite there yet.

flipcoderon An ARM-based MacBook SE could destroy Chromebooks and mid-priced Windows laptops

I don't think this will always be the case. Applications like Bitwig Studio have both traditional and touch interfaces. It's only a change in GUI. I can see most applications in the future having "responsive" gui layouts like how web designers deal with screen sizes, but for touch interfaces.

flipcoderon An ARM-based MacBook SE could destroy Chromebooks and mid-priced Windows laptops

If macbooks and ipads were one product, people would buy that one product instead of both, halving Apple's profits on them. ;)

flipcoderon The CIA’s human experiments with mind control (2017)

What is worse: a nuclear weapon or a psychological weapon? Nuclear weapons sound more dangerous, but they cannot be used invisibly without triggering a catastrophic response, meaning their power is largely from the leverage they give to the owner. Psychological weapons can be hidden and used without detection, can be approved of by secret courts, and directly benefit governments in far more scenarios with far lower risk. They are also cheaper. So what is more dangerous to the public?

flipcoderon The Weirdly Enduring Appeal of Weird Al Yankovic

I'm glad to see he's still popular since I imagine he has a lot more competition these days with youtubers doing their own parodies.

flipcoderon The myth of the developer that can't code

I believe the fizzbuzz failure thing is largely interview anxiety

flipcoderon Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours?

i3, vim, and vimium.

Not only saved me tons of time and increased my development speed, but allowed me to recover from RSI and pains in my forearm, which in my case was caused by moving my hands between the home row, arrow keys and mouse constantly, and especially worsened when using the mouse scroll wheel.

flipcoderon The 1, 2, n pattern

I generally agree with this, although this is more helpful when you can't predict future usages of an abstraction. I don't think there's anything wrong with an early abstraction if you know for certain it will be reused, or if it makes the code easier to understand.

flipcoderon Contrary to Trump’s Claim, Google Isnt Building a Nationwide Coronavirus Website

https://twitter.com/i/events/1238602623516733440

Twitter is saying they are. (?)

flipcoderon Pine64 Unleashes $200 Rockchip-Powered Pinebook Pro Linux Laptop

wait, you can just poke them away?

flipcoderon What If Consciousness Comes First?

I've also heard that it could be that everything that exists, is "potentially conscious", such that if it is connected in such a way where it can experience and actuate, it can become aware of it's own essence, and that consciousness is just the first person experience of the universe itself. That idea is interesting but it doesn't quite solve anything, since the harder problem is figuring out exactly how the brain awakens it.

flipcoderon Girls’ advantage in reading can largely explain the gender gap in STEM

> I am old enough to remember being bullied in school for being into computers.

Yep, when I was young, even some of my teachers and other adults tried to dissuade me from computers and programming. I remember being mocked and ridiculed by other kids, and no one was incentivizing it when I was in school. If anything, people were avoiding it because it was uncool. I always thought it was the social stigma present in their own peer groups that were keeping them away from it, and not gatekeeping, at least from what I witnessed.

flipcoderon Learn you a Lisp in 0 minutes

That's probably because the first few steps are very incremental. It skips ahead faster after that. If you were to make a longer version of this that was more gradual, I think people would be able to pick up more advanced concepts correctly, although it would definitely be much longer.

flipcoderon Learn you a Lisp in 0 minutes

I've always thought learning entirely by example would be possible and might have speed advantages for quick learners. I'd like to see this method explored more.

flipcoderon Ask HN: What are you working on?

I'm working on a project that maps the steam controller as a synthesizer and midi controller, called couchsynth. I'm also working on a textfile-based music sequencer called textbeat (https://github.com/flipcoder/textbeat).

flipcoderon YouTube bans content “showing users how to bypass secure computer systems”

It's like how free speech is both a reference to the first amendment and a concept in and of itself, meaning that you can support free speech in private spaces, without supporting it as a requirement under law. There's always confusion over the difference between what should be allowed under law and how things should be ideally.

flipcoderon Reddit has quarantined /r/The_Donald

The death threats in /r/technology were also being agreed with and upvoted. This wasn't a brigade but the result of the level of political anger. Any community that has a lot of people is going to have tons of bad ones that try to rationalize violence. T_D has 700,000 people. This includes many trolls and angry people but like it or not, many that are perfectly fine with following the rules.