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hnmcs

159 karma · joined October 18, 2014

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hnmcs··on How Black People Are Being Shut Out of America's Weed Boom
/s/asset manager/currency trader/
hnmcs··on Redox – A Unix-Like Operating System Written in Rust
https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=rust+redox+gui

led me to multiple interesting websites

tweak the terms for more results, of course

hnmcs··on Why Google Wants to Sell Its Robots: Reality Is Hard
Watch out guys, we've got a stalking horse over here.
hnmcs··on How Black People Are Being Shut Out of America's Weed Boom
> "mom and pop broker"

/s/broker/asset manager/

hnmcs··on Google Puts Boston Dynamics Up for Sale in Robotics Retreat
I'm going to go with Reuters for that story:

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-military-innovation-id...

Being that they were the source, best as I can tell.

summary: Schmidt joins board to help an "alphabet" US govt agency or two modernize their operations with industry best practices

editorial: This could be good or bad, depending on how things turn out. And for your weather forecast, it either will be rainy tomorrow, or it won't.

hn-cross-ref:

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=www.reuters.com%2Farticle%2Fus...

hnmcs··on How Black People Are Being Shut Out of America's Weed Boom
So I was complaining about the tail wagging the dog.

It happens in terms of literal power and ownership, when money is produced and awarded in toxic ways, yet it is all that matters for obtaining power and ownership.

And it happens in terms of the mind: of people working in aid of a status quo which is being driven the wrong way.

Well guess what, you're not going to let some insane human elitists (how close is that guy Donald Trump to them? anything is too close for my comfort) try to drive me through the tail of the dog that is my life. If you have an insane and toxic system, then it's better to start getting radical.

Ah, but now -- how to get radical? There we all explode.

update, with recommended reading:

They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45, Milton Mayer

We either do or don't have people successfully playing at money/power/mind-game for the stakes of controlling the planet from the top down. Either way, I am afraid. Because a bunch of moronic dictators fighting each other unsuccessfully is no better than a single one successfully winning such a game.

hnmcs··on How Black People Are Being Shut Out of America's Weed Boom
If my rhetoric is too grandiose, or my illogic too hazy, then I have to concede that you can parse details out of it which seem to be incorrect.

So, sure, that's exactly how we want our businesses to be, you are right, I concede for the sake of a limited argument under all the rest of the assumptions you have when you make that statement. I have unstated assumptions as well, everywhere.

Overall I was trying to make a hard point. I think that people are a just a little too content with the status quo. I believe only radical changes can fix the brokenness of our systems, and only on a long time line. (Our systems are broken at so many, many different levels, we could start by talking about problematic broken hardware/software systems if we wanted, and probably arrive at the conclusion that the present paradigm needs a radical change in the long run, saying nothing of money, law, or politics.)

I wanted to complain about how we expect our businesses to behave, because I think it's dysfunctional. But in the pragmatic sense, I'm not making any useful complaint. You are being more pragmatic.

The first thing I've come to realize the importance of by now, is that talk is just talk, and radical changes aren't going to happen on any time line, not without a lot of consensus.

I sincerely hope that some aspect of the human nature itself does not prevent us from coming to healthier consensuses than what we currently have. All I see is a system that maximizes paper profits while not counting environment damage or exhaustible resource availablity. Accounting is everything, and I fear for all humanity if we don't come to some better system of accounting value.

hnmcs··on How Black People Are Being Shut Out of America's Weed Boom
A tail wagging the dog is the notion I wish to deplore the most.

Way too many people think that pure logic (and wisdom of experience) is what leads to their value-judgements and opinions. Like my example mom-and-pop broker above (who is no fat cat in the scheme of things, just someone too invested in the neoliberal capitalist paradigm to think straight anymore), they will switch their value judgements when their one true god (money, joint-stock ownership, and the corporate form of governance) tells them to switch. When weed is blacklisted, they can invent reasons to hate weed. When weed is legal, it's just another glorious benefit of our market system to provide this good/service to all the people who demand it. (And for them to rightfully earn a profit somewhere in the trade, or in the ownership of the business providing the service.) They make up reasons to believe what the markets tell them to believe. A dog wagged by a tail, if you will.

Likewise, when you have central banks and too-big-to-fails in this environment buying up everything in the stock markets with an exponentially growing supply of USD, JPYs, and euros, you wind up in a situation where the market tail is actually trying to wag the economic dog.

We forgot that it was supposed to be the other way around, because of how far we've gone off the rails into our deficit-spending-until-death mode of existence, since year 19XX, for some value of XX, I favor about the time Reagan took over, but you can go back further if you like.

Thanks for sharing your reference, by the way.

hnmcs··on How Black People Are Being Shut Out of America's Weed Boom
Once I met a guy who worked for some Edward Jones-type company, investing the money of moms and pops, making money from watching various markets for opportunities to make profits.

He was so in love with how effectively the whole world made sense in terms of dollars, contracts, and trades. He liked the meta-economics of the prevailing world economic order. He would think in terms of "is it worth it to me to buy your debt?" if ever you said anything within a mile's distance of implying that you might want money for some economic purpose.

Well, at that time, there was no weed boom. It was illegal for the most part, in the U.S.

And his worldview, which always tried to relate everything -- from national or world news, right on down to the conversations of everyone around him after the workday was done -- everything he related to in terms of how our existing systems of money, contract obligations, and legal decisions was so logical and coherent and wonderful.

What did he think about weed then? That it was an unproductive (one of his favorite words) and likely immoral industry of drugs, not fit to be placed in his glorious world of markets and trade deals.

What does he think about it now? You know already. What do all these full-time market-men think about it: markets are awesome and efficient and now it's just another market service for them to try to arbitrage and to buy ownership of so that they themselves can maximize profit on the margins.

What was the difference before and after? Well, in this one respect, there is no difference: he still goes on effusing self-serving pro-US-capitalist rhetoric everywhere he goes. The one difference is that now he doesn't think weed is bad, it's just another thing for him to try to leverage financial/economic advantage out of, behind his Edward Jones-style desk, while there is a whole 'nother entire class of people mentioned in this article who probably don't dig his own worldview as much as he does.

hnmcs··on Google Puts Boston Dynamics Up for Sale in Robotics Retreat
thank you
hnmcs··on Open Letter to Debian and Ubuntu Developers
(2015)
hnmcs··on The Single Piece of JavaScript on HN
I see things more in terms of signal/noise considerations.

Rational minds can disagree, and intelligence can't understand much-greater-intelligence (so lessers might downvote much-greaters for that reason, besides the first-mentioned reason), but you don't have to worry about armageddons of downvotes. Or the balance of votes.

Just upvote what you consider "signal", and downvote the worst kinds of noise.

Thus you, my parent comment, are barely voted on at all, while the one by jewbacca rises to the top all day, no matter the weather.

hnmcs··on Elements of Clojure
One's life changes so much, after they leave /r/javascript and join /r/clojure.

Forgot to mention, clojure community isn't doing too badly at StackOverflow:

http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2016#tech...

hnmcs··on Google Puts Boston Dynamics Up for Sale in Robotics Retreat
Well I did see a YouTube of him at a Google conference around 2014 or so, doing some power points and taking questions from people.

Here, I found it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MG_nOddk01E

("biologically inspired models of intelligence", I/0 2014)

That's not the robotics domain per se, but if you're the director of engineering at Alphabet/Google, you probably have opinions about robotics.

I'll welcome any material news about him in our our thread, the more recent the better.

hnmcs··on Google Puts Boston Dynamics Up for Sale in Robotics Retreat
Time for an update on things from Kurzweil?

http://singularityhub.com/2013/03/19/exclusive-interview-ray...

http://www.kurzweilai.net/

hnmcs··on Twenty-nine teams use same dataset, find contradicting results [pdf]
> I don't understand what people mean when they use it today

By now, it often is used to be friendly. There's a subconscious acknowledgement that long words take people's time. The speaker can even be talking about his own work and tell everyone "tldr version: " at the top.

Google uses it a lot in their own docs: https://developers.google.com/s/results/?q=tldr

You can also choose to pronounce it "teal deer" and use images of a green deer animal to signify the same.

...

In some situations, if you want, you can say it to be mean.

hnmcs··on 'Music' from /dev/urandom
I knew it would take a few bare minutes before someone would come to make that distinction about how Google search links work.

Then I would have to say "okay copy the domain and path from your search result, which isn't a link, and which Google probably hides already (so this new advice won't work any more) or they will hide it some day, so the system doesn't work as literally as I described it."

So if Google has found more and more ways to avoid people avoiding their tracking, that's fine, and what I said literally doesn't apply if you take it 100% literally, but at least you understand what I'm saying about how to avoid the naive copy paste surprise.

hnmcs··on 'Music' from /dev/urandom
It was an excellent share you although I don't quite think "turning off CSS" would be my preferred defense.

You can paste to an intermediate area to be sure you didn't catch something hidden from whichever site you don't trust (which allows users to inline arbitrary HTML elements with arbitrary styles).

This is a habit one already might be in if they want to avoid being tracked from clicking on, say, Google search results. You'll avoid some of their tracking features if you copy the link you want and paste it to some text-holding zone first. (This also avoids the site you land on knowing your "referer".)

hnmcs··on Apple users targeted in first known Mac ransomware campaign
Came expecting a pun regarding old files / applications that failed to work after a forced system OS upgrade.

Was disappointed.

Not that Apple is distinctly notable for ransoming your one-time files and applications; on the contrary I've heard more often about people having issues when their Windows / Other OS reaches the end of its support.

edit: It was sarcasm and I know your downvote policies, etc, etc. I just know you guys sometimes roll with the funny punnies, and I was seeing if I had what it took this once. Maybe next time I'll nail a good one though, with a little more creativity and a little more funny to it. Contentless statements can exist here, and I want to learn to make them.

hnmcs··on Zero-Knowledge Contingent Payment
> scalable

But not scalable beyond BitCoin's ~7 transactions per second, right?

Asking because I read this last month:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/17/business/dealbook/the-bitc...

hnmcs··on Google AdWords Switching to 4 Ads on Top, None on Sidebar
But of course.

Yet I can see the other side of the coin -- that they are right to downrank others for this (or at least: that it is a useful heuristic for judging other websites), even while at the same time they are right to frontload ads on their own results pages. Their best research probably suggests they should lay it out this way, as has been said elsewhere in the discussion.

Nevertheless, I personally downranked Google Search about 6 years ago, when I could see how far it was already from any idealized concept I had of it, as a (reliable, objective) library-style index search program for internet pages, which would just report back things honestly, like a database query.

hnmcs··on Anti-bullying program focused on bystanders helps students who need it most
Honest, critical feedback. I can't put it any other way. Based on reading multiple posts by you over the past few days.

You're not nearly as quality of a communicator as Alan Watts, not nearly as good of a thinker, not nearly as insightful as he.

Since you're still green, I recommend just making a new name, and then continuing to do the internet forum philosophizing you do under some other name. That's my best honest recommendation, not trying to say you're bad at communicating, thinking, or being insightful, when compared to everyone else in general.

Just it bugs me to see someone posting regularly, philosophizing, under that name. So let your content exist, but under a new name. While you're still green.

hnmcs··on The maths of the paper disproving conspiracy theories don't add up
That's the genius of our ruling class. They're so brilliant that no one knows they even exist. The political-science professors, perfectly sane men, look at me with wonder when I talk about the ruling class in America.

They say, "You are one of those conspiracy theorists. You think there's a headquarters and they get together at the Bohemian Grove and run the United States."

Well, they DO get together at the Bohemian Grove and do a lot of picking of Secretaries of State, anyway.

But they don't have to conspire. They all think alike. It goes back to the way we're raised, the schools we went to -- after all, I'm a reluctant member of this group. You don't have to give orders to the editor of The New York Times. He is in place because he will respond to a crisis the way you want him to, as will the President, as will the head of the Chase Manhattan Bank.

-Gore Vidal, 1986

http://davidsheff.com/article/gore-vidal/

hnmcs··on Why squared error?
Nah. It's not like that theorem implies that we must square errors, based only on axioms which are facts of the natural world.

On the contrary, squared errors are part of the formulas taken as axioms from which to derive the theorem.

I wouldn't be surprised if we could derive a theorem whose essence is tantamount to the essence of the famous Central Limit Theorem, using some other arbitrary formula. Like error to the fourth power.

hnmcs··on Zero
So the whole thing is a love poem then, with "cipher" actually meaning "zero", "nothing", or "negate".

Cool.

hnmcs··on Flipboard releases React Canvas
Both.

Alternate your time spent learning.

Sometimes study high-level, sometimes low-level. (Low-level, tongue-in-cheek, as in "JS is the bytecode of web applications.")

hnmcs··on Semicolons in JavaScript are optional (2010)
Only reason I posted this was that I got fooled by the brand-new "search" interface on HN when I was checking if it had been posted before. I got results for only the past 24 hours, but interpreted it as results for all time.
hnmcs··on Semicolons in JavaScript are optional (2010)
summary / teal-deer:

Provocative author says: you never need semicolons in JS, so don't feel you have to use them. Free your mind from the cargo cult. Provocative author admits that you do need them to get something like this to parse correctly:

  a = b + c
  (d + e).print()
And then recommends using semicolons in this way:

  a = b + c
  ;(d + e).print()
</summary>

Frankly, I'm not persuaded.

hnmcs··on Redesiging a Broken Internet: Cory Doctorow [video]
Thanks for the heads-up. It is a good way to get more, relevant information quickly.

But given that the link is an hour-and-a-half long, and that article is quite brief, it would be more accurate to say that he's filling in some of the content of his presentation with some-of-up-to-all-of his article. (But the link must have a lot more than what's in the article.)

I may listen to all of the presentation in the near future, on the chance that he will have something fresher and newer to say than things he's already said about his "war on general-purpose computers" thesis.

- https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=the+coming+war+...

- http://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html

I appreciate him spreading such messages.

hnmcs··on It's All About Time – Remote timing attacks in PHP
At this time, these few options are available:

https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc

>Text after a blank line that is indented by two or more spaces is reproduced verbatim. (This is intended for code.)

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