Hacker News Reader

lololomgon Dwarf Fortress' creator on how he's 42% towards simulating existence

I agree that version control is a fundamental part of software and if you ever have to read code I hope you have access to the versioning and issue discussions. Some people are ok without it for personal projects, but one day someone is going to read your code. Please be nice to them and give them the history behind your decisions.

lololomgon Ethereum Solidity Available in Microsoft Visual Studio [pdf]

> Most of the downsides (need for oracles for instance) apply to all blockchains.

This is the part that kills all good uses for Etherium (and other blockchain apps) as far as I can tell. If you are relying on oracles then you are not 'running on the blockchain' any more so why even bother at all? What are you gaining with Ethereum that you can't already do without it?

I just don't see a use case that 'regular' people would be interested in. All the apps currently on Ethereum are only used by other Ethereum fans. For someone outside of the bubble there's no compelling reason to become users.

lololomgon Ethereum Solidity Available in Microsoft Visual Studio [pdf]

Yes but you won't make any money. The fastest GPU you can buy right now will mine maybe 50c worth of bitcoin in the next 12 months if you run it 24/7.

lololomgon FBI Breaks into iPhone. We Have Some Questions

Apple noticed: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/03/report...

lololomgon FBI Breaks into iPhone. We Have Some Questions

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/03/report...

Apple already suspects that this is happening

lololomgon New Kid on the Blockchain

I don't follow what you mean, there are loads of bitcoin prediction markets. Adding Etherium doesn't give you anything new.

lololomgon New Kid on the Blockchain

All of this was already possible without Ethereum. I don't see what Etherium adds to the equation here? For example with Bitcoin you can already create escrow accounts with trusted third parties (aka oracles) being the decider.

lololomgon New Kid on the Blockchain

Even if they can fix all of that, I still don't see the application here. It's tantalising but ... there's nothing new or interesting you can really do with Etherium.

Is there?

lololomgon New Kid on the Blockchain

The bit that I don't get is how Ethereum will communicate with the outside world.

Example: I bet a friend that Hillary will be the next president. We create an Ethereum app/contract/whatever and fund it with $50 (worth of 'ether') each. When the election rolls around, we want to pay the winner automatically, but how can you do that?

You could have a rule to check some 'official' source on the internet but that data could easily be faked or unavailable. Then what?

If this kind of app is not suited to Etherium, then what are some good examples of Etherium's capabilities?

lololomgon Intel Kills “Tick-Tock”

GPUs are keeping Moore alive

lololomgon Scientists warn of perilous climate shift in decades, not centuries

7 degrees? Holy shit

lololomgon Sorting a Billion Numbers with Julia

Impressive, what's the speed like when you add a few bytes of payload?

lololomgon Ask HN: Terminated two weeks before vesting cliff – thoughts?

They may not even be able to pay OP even if he does prevail in court. Something to keep in mind.

lololomgon No More Full Table Vacuums in PostgreSQL

They say that they'll happily host 3TB databases, but the cost is too high for databases larger than a few GB.

1TB (with only 100GB of RAM) will set you back $150k a year!

For comparison we pay our generic service provider about 20% of that to manage 2 redundant dedicated servers with 24/7 monitoring and support.

lololomgon Firing People

Great, let's rewrite it. We'll start with this piece here and get immediate benefit without having to complete the entire rewrite first, and then we'll decide which piece to do next!

lololomgon Ask HN: Helping a dev who drinks?

Can't code while drunk either of course.

lololomgon Short men and fat women 'get fewer chances in life', research says

> Metabolism is a scientific fact.

The difference between 'high' and 'low' metabolism is very small. You just eat less which is why you are thin as a rail. People are very bad at self-reporting caloric intake, there are several studies on this.

lololomgon MH370 Debris Storm

I'm no expert but I really don't think those photos looks like debris that's been floating in the ocean for 2 years.

lololomgon AlphaGo beats Lee Sedol again in match 2 of 5

A smartphone can crush any human alive at chess.

lololomgon AlphaGo beats the world champion Lee Sedol in first of five matches

I watched the commentary on Youtube and it was fantastic! I don't play go myself but I was glued to the screen the whole way. I particularly enjoyed how the commentators demonstrated why the moves made sense by playing theoretical future moves right on the board they had up.

lololomgon AlphaGo beats the world champion Lee Sedol in first of five matches

> As far as I know there is nothing particularly novel about AlphaGo,

By that standard there's nothing particularly novel about anything. Everything we have today is just a slight improvement of what we already had yesterday.

World experts in go and ML as recently as last year thought it would be many more years before this day happened. Who are you to trivialize this historic moment?

lololomgon AlphaGo beats the world champion Lee Sedol in first of five matches

They only used 175 GPUs in the match 5 months ago.

lololomgon AlphaGo beats the world champion Lee Sedol in first of five matches

'True AI will always be defined as anything a computer can not yet do'

lololomgon AlphaGo beats the world champion Lee Sedol in first of five matches

They did not say exactly but something like a couple hundred GPUs

lololomgon AlphaGo beats the world champion Lee Sedol in first of five matches

Today a tiny $300 desktop computer can beat any human at chess. It only took a few years after the Deep Blue vs Kasparov game.

lololomgon AlphaGo’s ultimate challenge: a five-game match against Lee Sedol

Lee seems to be ahead so far in game 1

lololomgon The Mystery of When to Stop Antidepressants

No I don't want to taper down. I've tried that and decided that it's not worth it for me. I'll probably take them till the day I die. There's almost no side effects and I function so much better on them. Why stop?

lololomgon Announcing SQL Server on Linux

MSSQL < Oracle?

No way. Maybe Postgre is nicer than MSSQL for you. I don't know. But Oracle? Oracle is worse than MSSQL in just about every way that matters.

lololomgon The Mystery of When to Stop Antidepressants

The annoying thing about (for example) SSRIs is that it's annoying to take accurate doses like that.

My escitalopram comes in 5mg, 10mg and 20mg. If I want to slowly taper down from 20mg a day, I have to start chopping off bits from an already tiny pill every day for months on end. I can't just drop down to 15mg a day, it's too abrupt.

lololomgon Announcing SQL Server on Linux

Would you yourself actually choose SQL Server on Linux for a project?

I'm a big fan of SQL Server but the main thing that hurts it is the cost. Licensing our two servers today would cost a quarter of a million dollars. The OS cost is a rounding error. If I'm paying that much money for SQL Server I don't think I'd choose the Linux version for at least another 5 years from now. It needs to prove itself and there's almost no benefit to offset the risk.