HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

kyralis

901 karma · joined August 27, 2018

submissionscomments
kyralis··on Tesla to wind down Cybertruck production
Hating the cybertruck might be tribal for some people, but definitely not everyone. I thought it was stupid and ugly from the moment it was announced, and I still think it's stupid and ugly, and it is demonstrably bad at the job of "being a truck".

You can celebrate Tesla for trying something new while still hating the actual thing that they tried for being bad.

kyralis··on Tesla to wind down Cybertruck production
Eh, depends on your use case. I've got an F250 that I use for towing, and we specifically chose a standard bed rather than a long bed when we got it - and that's after having an 8' bed on our previous truck. The long bed is certainly nice sometimes (and was great for camping in!), but it's also pretty annoying whenever you're not actually using the bed length, which ends up being most of the time.

I haul plywood all the time, though; the shorter bed isn't really a problem. either you slide it in at an angle or you put the tailgate down and put it in that way with a strap.

kyralis··on Mac at any scale
Just a random anecdote:

For years, "code review" in iOS meant "email your patch set to a particular email address, which would format your patch and send it to a mailing list". That list would be populated with people who could approve or disapprove it.

The server that ran that conversion was a MacBook sitting in a pretty random "server" room that included MacBooks, iMacs facing a wall, and other Mac devices used as headless servers.

Useful more than a decade ago, still useful now!

kyralis··on Could a modern chess engine on a Pentium have defeated Kasparov in 1996?
So.. learning from a previous match is unsporting? That's going to invalidate an awful lot of matches...
kyralis··on Investor-owned utilities charge 23% more for electricity than public providers
That's not really accurate. All of those other power sources have ongoing maintenance costs as well, and "making back our investment" is also a cost.
kyralis··on Apple's new 'Switch to Safari' campaign details why you should ditch Chrome
This really is a grey area. You can't define "the market for electricians in my local town" and get any antitrust protections. Defining the market is a huge part of how politicians make this political and therefore something they can profit from.
kyralis··on Improving site performance by shipping more CSS
Claiming that performance is not complicated, as a blanket statement, is absurd.

There are certainly plenty of performance problems that are not complicated, you're correct that many people do not have the skills necessary to solve even simple performance problems. The connection to social intelligence is a leap that doesn't really follow, though; this feels more like you just trying to dump on people who are missing skills, which isn't usually very helpful.

Regardless, however, there are absolutely performance problems that are complicated. When you're trying to optimize performance in environments constrained by compute, network, disk, and memory, finding the right solutions to reach the right optimum amongst the contributing factors can, in fact, be very much nontrivial. This is especially true if you're working on more general systems for which client use patterns may vary wildly.

kyralis··on When did Google get so weird?
... assuming you build the tool and then think that it's worth polluting context with making that tool available, and then that the LLM decides to actually use the tool. Tool parameter space and tool selection still remains a complicated topic.
kyralis··on Two-tier encryption in the UK
The original implementation of iCloud included Apple's ability to recover the data. You can view this as a backdoor, and that might be fair, but the reality is that it's also a feature in the eyes of many customers - because people will lose devices and passwords, and when Apple doesn't have the keys that means they also lose data. Many customers would rather be able to get their data back.

Apple has moved more things into the bucket of "we do not have the keys for this" over time, but pretending that this isn't a tradeoff for the common customer is disingenuous. That's why ADP exists, so that those who want to make a different tradeoff can do so.

Commenters on HN tend to be technically savvy and tend to want the defaults to be tailored to a technically savvy customer base. That's fine, but that's not a real representation of all of the smartphone users out there, and in this case Apple is directly offering the choice that they usually get knocked for taking away.

kyralis··on Global Glacier Extinction Explorer
Works for me? What version are you running?
kyralis··on LG TVs caught spying even when offline or on standby
The intention is to allow for automatic installation of software that is actually needed for the function of the peripheral - think proprietary cameras or non-standard printers/IO/etc. It's not a bad goal, but it leads to manufacturers abusing it, unsurprisingly, for things that are not, in fact, necessary.
kyralis··on US police fear Meta smart glasses could be used to secretly record them
The irony of someone on Fox News arguing for compromise is thick.
kyralis··on Parque Arqueológico do Solstício
That assumes a perfectly vertical stone, which is not really indicated by the article's description of the stone placements.
kyralis··on Apple defeats liability for not scanning iCloud for CSAM
They are not lying when they say that they cannot read your messages at rest or in transit without actively changing the code so that you start trusting a new key. The keys sync between devices in ways that Apple cannot read.

This is not bulletproof, because they can potentially change the code to do this - this is what the FBI vs Apple thing was a few years ago was all about.

kyralis··on Apple defeats liability for not scanning iCloud for CSAM
Also, Apple's E2E iCloud encryption vastly predated the NeuralHash efforts.
kyralis··on Apple defeats liability for not scanning iCloud for CSAM
This is based on a faulty understanding of the underlying systems. The risk with this sort of E2E encryption is not that the service provider pinky promises not to decrypt what they have, it's that they promise they will not insert a new key into your circle of trust to subsequently start decrypting things.
kyralis··on Mapping homes you can buy from the US government for <$100k
It's not even just wanting jobs for family; it's wanting to be around services that I think people don't always consider. Sure, you could plan on doing everything yourself if that's truly your hobby, but most remote workers will want to be able to call a plumber or an electrician when something goes wrong, and even finding tradesmen in those locations can sometimes be challenging.
kyralis··on Why Switzerland has 25 gbit internet and America doesn't
The article does not include the word "density" at all. Switzerland has 2.5x the population density that the US does.

I absolutely believe that US regulation choices encourage telecom monopolies and suppresses service in the US, but it's impossible to make a credible argument for that without acknowledging the density challenges that the majority of the US (geographically) faces.

kyralis··on Scientists find molecular-level evidence for two structures in liquid water
> Rightly or wrongly, homeopathic products are considered medicines, not supplements, and people in general are very mindful of spending money on medicines that don't work.

[Citation needed].

People spend enormous amounts of money on junk "cures" and have done for centuries. Homeopathy is just one of the many current such scams.

kyralis··on Scientists find molecular-level evidence for two structures in liquid water
The problem with making claims about the chiropractic practices is that it spans such a huge range of "absolute bullshit" to "physically grounded adjustments". Joints and vertebrae (especially) really can be out of alignment, and you can absolutely see that on imaging. Muscles in constant tension can be self-reinforcing in ways that don't easily correct themselves without an external force. My wife has significant back issues as a result of various injuries -- one leading to an SI joint that frequently pops out of place, one due to an injury that fractured most of the spinal processes -- and you can absolutely feel the "pop" when an adjustment helps something slide back in place. This is validated by imaging and sports medicine, not just chiropractic quacks.

At the same, adjusting your back isn't going to cure your cancer, no matter what idiots with fake degrees say.

The challenge is that the latter is just as stupid as homeopathy, but whereas homeopathy really has no redeeming qualities beyond the placebo effect, at least chiropractic practices actually do sometimes have groundings in reality.

kyralis··on HackerRank open sourced its ATS. My resume scored 90/100. Oh wait 74. No – 88
Is it? Or is it a 65% chance of a resume getting ignored before a single human sees it, reducing your pipeline's likelihood of catching qualified candidates by the same?

Gates that reduce resume flow-through are only useful if their reduction is correlated with quality. Otherwise they're just dragging out your hiring process or unnecessarily causing you to ultimately lower your hiring bars.

kyralis··on Apple decided not to roll out Siri in EU after denied request for exemption
It's not launching in China either.
kyralis··on Apple decided not to roll out Siri in EU after denied request for exemption
This isn't GDPR, it's DMA. They're not subject to it.
kyralis··on Zig by Example
You're not wrong at the high level, but learning a particular language to the point of fluency is still an investment if you're interested in being productive while writing it. Sure, once you have the experience, reading most new languages is easy -- but learning the idioms and particular syntactic choices of a new language to that point that you can reach for them without having to constantly search or consult references isn't something that's instant. There's also a mental cost to how many of those languages you can have "ready to go" in your brain at any given time, and for languages that are evolving -- most of them, at this point, honestly, even old languages like C++ -- there's a cost to keeping up with the language as it changes.

All of that is investment, and not all languages pay off that investment.

kyralis··on I’ve banned query strings
Yes, and if the site actually used query strings, then it would of course accept them. Why does it have any reason to accept invalid query strings?
kyralis··on I’ve banned query strings
There's a referrer header, if the client wishes to send it. If they don't, the "courtesy to the web host" is done at the expense of the client. This particular web host takes umbrage at other sites taking advantage of their clients that way, which seems reasonable to me.
kyralis··on Women are getting most of the new jobs. What's going on with men?
> It doesn't matter if men are being left out of jobs (statistically) — they're [according to the ideology] the eternal benefactors of invisible, omnipresent systemic privilege.

This implies a contradiction that doesn't exist.

Centuries ago, the aristocracy was statistically left out of jobs and also the eternal benefactors of (quite visible!) omnipresent systemic privilege.

There are multiple potential reasons for men to, statistically, be taking fewer of a set of newly created roles. It could certainly be some systemic bias against them, but it could easily also be that they are choosing not to take them for what are surely good reasons for themselves. It could be that fewer men are interested in new jobs right now period, relative to women. I'm sure there are many other potential explanations as well.

kyralis··on American aviation is near collapse?
I haven't yet made a single claim. I've asked a question about alternative hypotheses. For instance, that DEI initiatives allow qualified candidates who otherwise would have been overlooked to achieve positions they otherwise might not.

You are asserting that DEI means that unqualified individuals are being put into positions from which they should have been excluded. That is a statement for which you have yet to provide any proof.

kyralis··on American aviation is near collapse?
You're making a claim about it - twice now - that you haven't actually yet justified by any data. I'm suggesting there are, in fact, alternate explanations.
kyralis··on American aviation is near collapse?
Does it? Or does it mean that we got rid of those people who would otherwise likely be rejected due to inalienable characteristics and who could have helped avoid groupthink, leading to an improved chance of solving problems?
Page 1 of 8Next →