Hacker News Reader

ipsinon How to spend money on your friends without it looking like bribery

Same, the thoughts seems at least inspired by those events. The same insight could be labeled "How to bribe someone by making it seem like friendship."

ipsinon Stop Building Closed Ecosystems

Content streaming is one case where I wish,wish,wish they were non-closed ecosystems.

Make your offerings available via an API. Make the actual content stream with whatever DRM standards you (the "platform") need to feel comfortable.

Let me wrap all my streaming services with a single platform, having decent search and ability for me to do automatic price arbitrage. Why rent on Netflix when it's free this week on Hulu?

It could be so much better, but it's not.

ipsinon The Galaga no-fire-cheat mystery (2012)

Does anyone know more about the Galaga programmer, Tetsu Ogawa? I haven't seen any interviews, or even an idea about whether he might be alive or dead.

ipsinon Hyperscale in your Homelab: The Compute Blade arrives

If you want to continue the chain of specific goals in service of no specific purpose: run Kubernetes on it.

ipsinon What happened with the substation attack in North Carolina?

Referring to actual people as "illegals" is gross.

ipsinon VALL-E: Microsoft’s new zero-shot text-to-speech model

Are these text-to-speech models manually controllable in terms of prosody, etc., or is it all transformer-based text-to-audio?

I've followed some of the research on prosody transfer, etc., but it still seems bad in the TTS systems I've heard.

ipsinon Citing new evidence, families sue feds, Raytheon, Lockheed over 1996 TWA crash

What about the Navy radar tracks for an intercepting missile, and how those, like witness accounts, were actively discounted and suppressed, in favor of a "no missile" narrative?

ipsinon Senate passes bipartisan bill to subsidize U.S.-made semiconductor chips

If this were true, there would be a reduction in US military spending, but I'm... very much not buying that.

ipsinon Artistic Radiance Fields

@ak92501 posted this one last week. This isn't to say "it's old news" (it isn't!) but that if you're on Twitter and like summaries of ML papers, they're a great follow.

https://twitter.com/ak92501/status/1536518567688122368

ipsinon How to Not Get Hit by Cars

It's best to be out of the path of the door so you don't have to decide, but I imagine otherwise it's situation dependent. "Am I going fast?", "Is there a huge truck behind me?", etc.

ipsinon We’re discontinuing the Stablegains service

Re: "The error bars are not infinite."

I feel like they are infinite? Because, for example, in hyperinflation, there's no upper bound on how long someone is going to keep printing money.

Any given instance will stop at a finite number, but you can't bank of that being the high water mark.

ipsinon Bad government policy is fueling the infant formula shortage

I don't understand what the two have to do with each other.

You say there's already a monopoly but if we'd bought a stockpile from the monopoly at market prices, we'd... still have a stockpile.

ipsinon The hyped and distorted claims of psychedelic marketing

I'm worried that we're going to split into a two-tiered system where people with money can go to clinics for recreational or therapeutic treatments, and people who don't want to spend that money can go to jail.

That's already the situation for ketamine clinics.

ipsinon Effects of fexofenadine, diphenhydramine, and alcohol on driving performance

It seems like a "victimless crime" in the same way that a hit and run is a victimless crime, as long as you get away with it.

Someone has willfully chosen to make life more dangerous for everyone else. It's possible they won't be caught, but ignoring the act carries a real possibility of harm.

There are people who would drive drunk every single day, if they could get away with it.

ipsinon Bits of advice I wish I had known

"Speak confidently as if you are right, but listen carefully as if you are wrong."

I hate-hate-hate this advice. When I assert something confidently, I'm willing to put money on it.

The first time I ran into someone I respected who was confidently wrong, it threw me for a loop. It makes you seem like a blowhard bullshitter! Guessing is fine, but say it's a guess.

Edited to add: I suppose this is a variant of Cunningham's Law, but I still hate it.

ipsinon I employed a California resident, so now I’m subject to its regulations

I also pay the $800 tithe, because I live in California and manage my marginally unprofitable property LLC in another state.

California has a lot of things going for it and I appreciate the purpose of taxes, but at this point I'm viewing it as an $800/year incentive to leave.

ipsinon MIT graduate students vote to unionize

This sounds very much like extortion, and I'm curious how any school with a purported honor code or sense of academic standards could allow it.

Even if the student didn't have proof of threats, the situation itself should be enough to get the student a new advisor or oversight with the existing one.

I mean "should" in an ideal sense. I think this kind of shit is common.

ipsinon Elon Musk to join Twitter’s board of directors

What are the practical effects likely to be, anyway?

I'm wary of Musk because he comes from the same "memelord shitposter" tradition that has served the right wing so well in the past few years, but I don't think he's angling for the return of Trump?

ipsinon Block a tweet, its author, and every single person who liked it

You'll always get voices from outside the bubble... even if they come in the form of people in your bubble dunking on the dumbest takes from outside it.

ipsinon Nvidia Hopper GPU Architecture and H100 Accelerator

I mean, I'd already internalized P100 < V100 < A100 as a Colab user.

Schedule me on an H100 and I promise I won't mind the "confusing" naming.

ipsinon Why America can’t build quickly anymore

Yes, it was definitely a thing.

https://www.npr.org/2021/04/07/984784455/a-brief-history-of-...

In Los Angeles the two closest lessons I took were the 210 Freeway in Pasadena (which literally cut through poorer, Blacker neighborhoods) and the 710 Freeway which was supposed to connect to it.

The last part of the 710 Freeway was meant to go through a richer, whiter neighborhood. Some houses were purchased, but the connector was held up in lawsuits from at least the 1970s, and remains unfinished to this day.

ipsinon White Castle wants to install robot cooks in 100 new locations

"The improved workflow allows for the redeployment of team members to focus on creating memorable moments for customers."

I... doubt it? It seems like it would allow the redeployment of team members to "no longer working at White Castle".

ipsinon A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors

"topics around diversity and inclusion in tech ... tend to be flagged to death by users"

Ouch. Any readers have favorite HN-like forums where this doesn't happen?

ipsinon IRS to ditch biometric requirement for online access

So for anyone who's already used id.me, how hard will it be to purge the biometrics? (And same question for if you live in California)

ipsinon Exponential growth isn’t cool, combinatorial explosion is

Misses an opportunity to talk about Stirling's approximation to the factorial.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stirling%27s_approximation

Gigantic fake numbers are rubbish (I believe that 110%), but saving work with approximation is cool.

ipsinon In second largest DeFi hack, Blockchain Bridge loses $320M Ether

"We’d like to offer you a whitehat agreement, and present you a bug bounty of $10 million for exploit details"

So, um, wouldn't the person pulling off the exploit be a fool to try and accept this "bug bounty"? Even if the offer is fully sincere, the legal system doesn't run on "code is law", and it seems like the original hack could be prosecuted under CFAA whether Bridge wants that or not.

ipsinon mmWave radar, you won't see it coming

So far these applications seem pretty innocuous, but for things like gesture & other control systems, can mmWave be jammed or spoofed?

ipsinon Tesla to recall vehicles that may disobey stop signs

It sounds like the "recall" is an over-the-air patch, and you can't opt out.

I suppose "recall" may also be a legal term, but it doesn't seem to fit well in this case.

ipsinon I won the local election, but my township ignored the results and state law

It's interesting that there were over 200 write-in votes, and no official candidate? I wonder why the write-in campaign. Fees or signature requirements?

https://www.ccpa.net/DocumentCenter/View/38413/Unofficial-Su...

I would hope that the PA Attorney General would take an interest in getting him seated.

ipsinon Scary fraud ensues when ID theft and usury collide

Why isn't the Bank of America account in his name? I was under the impression that know your customer laws would require them to match up the individual taking the loan and the individual holding the bank account.

Is it really just a simple as an ACH transfer?