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jbob2000

2,749 karma · joined August 12, 2014

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jbob2000··on Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?
Multiple cursors in Sublime Text. Made it incredibly easy to do repetitive edits to json data or html templates. VS Code does a better job of cursor management now, but I think that was inspired by sublime text.

Language and date time services like Moment and i18n. Huge productivity gains from having off the shelf solutions for multi-language features.

Node.js and Express got rid of all the cruft from backend API development. It’s a breeze to spin up a new API, whereas years prior needed a fairly strict environment setup to run reliably.

jbob2000··on Facial recognition can predict person’s political orientation with 72% accuracy
Profile photo with a person wearing a baseball cap and Oakleys? Yup, that’s a republican.
jbob2000··on NASA Needs to Rename the James Webb Space Telescope
Sex is the only thing that matters. Views on sexuality are the highest our morals go right now, the test of how much you care about the world all comes down to what you believe people should do with their penises and vaginas. Obama kickstarted drone bombing warfare, but he also repealed Don't Ask, Don't Tell, so therefore he is Good.

(I'm being sarcastic... I think...)

jbob2000··on Sir Kazuo Ishiguro warns of young authors self-censoring out of 'fear'
The problem with cancel culture is much the same as the problem I'm having with my QA department:

We have a very small, rock solid front end. Most of our work is simply updating content. It's very straightforward work and you have to try very hard to introduce bugs. But when you staff a team of 6 people and tell them "it's your job to find something wrong with this website", they WILL find something wrong. I have a meeting this afternoon to explain to my Product manager why the content looks different on a mobile screen than it does on desktop because the QA team thinks line breaks are a bug ("the content document didn't break the line here, but the mobile view did, it's a bug").

When you empower people to take others down via subjective rules, then it's always a moving target. You can never reach a point where people are safe and happy. Check out the shuffles deck subreddit for some egregious examples of cancel culture gone wrong, https://www.reddit.com/r/Shuffles_Deck/.

jbob2000··on The GPU Sadness Index: Tracking eBay Pricing
This is a market inefficiency. These companies could be reselling the video cards without doing the extra work of putting together a full PC and everyone would be better off - you don’t have to resell parts as “used”, the company doesn’t have to ship you parts you don’t want, both of you don’t have to pay taxes on stuff nobody wants.
jbob2000··on Facebook says it will pay news industry $1B over 3 years
This analogy doesn't work because information is not a limited commodity. Once you've "printed" the news, its value drops to 0. This isn't the old days where you had to physically print 1,000,000 papers if you wanted the message to get to 1,000,000 people. You can "print" the news once now, and EVERYONE can see it.
jbob2000··on The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed
Empires fall from within. Yes, nobody will stop the US with military, and nobody would try because that's not how you win. You don't need a big military to crush the fragile supply chain that a plane like this demands.
jbob2000··on The unusual ways Western parents raise children
Checkout this article, "Childhood autism spikes in geek heartlands": https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20589-childhood-autis...

There's a correlation between parents who are both "systemizers" and their child having autism.

I've also heard the theory that Austism is basically what we've been genetically selecting for over the last 100 years or so - the world wants brainless consumers - what is better than someone with sensory disorders, who can be primed to get up and buy with a simple prick?

jbob2000··on My billion pound company has no HR department
I work for an enterprise company. The motherboard on one of my staff's macbooks died during the lockdown and it needed to be repaired. Do you know what the Enterprise IT told us to do?

"Take it to the Apple store".

Are you fucking kidding me? You want me to send my staff out during the lockdown to get a piece of YOUR hardware fixed? No option to ship it, no drop off desk at our office or something.

You're absolutely right that when you setup a department called "IT" they are now a group of people that need to be catered to as much as the other staff.

"We don't want to expose IT staff to risk, so send your own staff to get the computers repaired. Then it's your fault if they get sick and die." was the message I got.

jbob2000··on Launch HN: GreaseBoss (YC W21) – Real-time system to manage industrial greasing
I pursued something similar. The challenge you may face is that the act of regular inspections, maintaining the RFID tags, and paying for the service may cost more than doing a poor job of grease maintenance. The alternative is just simply doing regular rounds with a grease bucket.
jbob2000··on Virtual passport app presents real data risk, experts warn
People here will criticize this, but then turn around and put the same information through Binance or other crypto exchanges.
jbob2000··on Robinhood CEO, Reddit Co-Founder and Others Testify on GameStop Stock
I'm just referencing what the Citadel CEO said to the Financial Services Committee last week.
jbob2000··on NASA Has Decided to Start Building the Lunar Gateway Using the Falcon Heavy
Between NASA, SpaceX, and various other space initiatives, there probably aren’t enough skilled people available to do the work. It’s literally rocket science.
jbob2000··on How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)
Or this:

“Find creative ways around standards, limits, laws, processes, morals, etc. so I can make a quick buck and pass you some table scraps”

jbob2000··on I built ByteDance's censorship machine
Ok, and if my company's marketing team proposed an ad with a bunch of white people in it, they would also be cut off.

Same shit, different process.

jbob2000··on I built ByteDance's censorship machine
And you don't think the CCP's promotion of Han is the same thing?
jbob2000··on I built ByteDance's censorship machine
We do the same thing in the west. Look at the people you see in ads and on TV, it's always an idealized look at what the people in power WANT society to look like.

My company recently moved away from animated characters back to using humans in their ads. Most of the people in our ads are mixed race, you can't really tell if they're asian, white, arab, or "tanned".

So it's the same promotion of a genetic look, just with a different group of people.

jbob2000··on Robinhood CEO, Reddit Co-Founder and Others Testify on GameStop Stock
Citadel did more trades in one day than the entire market did in one year.

Retail investors do a couple of trades a year.

A tax like this would end high frequency trading overnight.

jbob2000··on California State Legislator Introduces Bill to Decriminalize Psychedelics
The cultures with a long history of psychedelic practice are just as bad for spiritualist bullshit as this new age culture. Actually, most of the bullshit these New Spiritualists spout is taken directly from these cultures; chakras, spirits, "bad energy", shamanism, etc. all comes from those cultures.
jbob2000··on California State Legislator Introduces Bill to Decriminalize Psychedelics
I'm not advocating for prohibition, just asking "what are we going to do with the next problem that comes after legalization?"
jbob2000··on California State Legislator Introduces Bill to Decriminalize Psychedelics
I did my fair share of psychedelics a few years ago. The community is very diverse and spans a lot of different backgrounds.

One thing I repeatedly saw was those with weaker minds getting sucked into the "oneness spirituality psychic-plane we-are-just-vibrations" bullshit. I watched a smart young lady drop out of university to become a psychic. I watched an acquaintance get divorced because she realized she had sacred powers, saying "my husband drains my energy and he's why could never levitate". I'm struggling to pull my partner out of this hole after she has spent close to $10,000 on building a "vibration healing" business.

I've done just as many drugs as these people, yet I never fell to these delusions. Sure, there are people who get sucked in to this stuff without the drugs, but I can't help but notice the correlation.

My biggest concern with legalizing LSD and psilocybin is that we don't have a good way to combat these delusions when people take them on.

jbob2000··on Controlled levitation of nanostructured thin films
They're using light to heat the bottom of a thin material. Bottom of material heats up, heats up the air underneath the material, hot air expands and makes it float. Controlling the strength of the light controls how much heat the disc generates and thus controls its height. Heating one side of the disc causes it to heat unevenly and move in the opposite direction.

Do I have that right? Hot air rises, so if you stick something light on the plume of hot air, it will also rise? I think birds discovered this millions of years ago.

jbob2000··on Reply All Is Having Its Own Reckoning Now
Honestly, no. A one-off event around a really stressful time (forcing unionization on a small company) is not indicative of a toxic workplace. It's a bad look for management, but I don't think that means the workplace is toxic.
jbob2000··on Reply All Is Having Its Own Reckoning Now
Because there isn't workplace discrimination, it's just a bunch of people acting "concerned" and being ignored. What is the actual issue, aside from being "concerned"?
jbob2000··on Reply All Is Having Its Own Reckoning Now
Was it toxic? Or did one person feel it was toxic?

From what I can tell, the union pleas are being ignored. That doesn't make a toxic workplace. It's unfortunate, but it's not toxic.

My management ignored my pleas not to litter iframes all over the app and scrape shitloads of client data, but I don't consider that treatment as "toxic". I also didn't get a raise this year and my pleas were met with "everybody didn't get a raise, that's just the way this year went".

So I'm really struggling to see how making pleas to your management = toxicity. What kind of bullshit victimization is that?

jbob2000··on Reply All Is Having Its Own Reckoning Now
Exactly. It’s just a complaint about “the culture”. What exactly happened to make them dislike “the culture”?
jbob2000··on Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3060 in half
So Bitcoin is a weight in addition to all the banking weight?

We’re running two banking systems right now. It’s inefficient and stupid.

jbob2000··on 68% of the top links on Facebook since September are in support of Donald Trump
I’m not sure I would characterize his angry word vomit as “smart” or “intellectually honest”. He’s a male Ann Coulter; a loudmouth who loves to stir up controversy.
jbob2000··on Changes to sharing and viewing news on Facebook in Australia
Facebook would finally be valuable again if all of the content farm news garbage was kicked off.

Unfortunately, the people who like that stuff also buy stuff from online ads. It’s the same reason why TLC and The History Channel now only show reality TV; because people who watch those shows buy the things they see advertised.

jbob2000··on Computers Aren't Fun Anymore (2020)
I am rewatching Star Was and it amazes me how interoperable their technology is. R2-D2 can just hook into the Death Star and begin reading data. There's even a funny scene where C3PO tells him to hook in to a port, only for R2 to be electrocuted. Their power ports are the same as their data ports, crazy! And Chewbacca, not exactly a paragon of intellect, is able to reassemble C3PO after he had been blown apart. And although his head is on backwards, he seems to be about the same as he was before being disassembled.

All of their technology is so advanced, and yet so... analog? It's beautiful, they get to just live their lives; they don't have to fuss about with documentation, closed source, outdated libraries, missing binaries, copyright, etc.

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