Hacker News Reader

mLubyon Be wary of imitating high-status people who can afford to countersignal

Doreen dropping the knowledge. I just learned another fun Coco Chanel quote: "Those who create are rare; those who cannot are numerous. Therefore, the latter are stronger."

Little known fact: before he was Pied Piper's cool attorney in Silicon Valley, but after his first job at a Superstore, Ron LaFlamme lived in NYC where he was told that he "wasn't thought about at all" by Don Draper. https://youtu.be/LlOSdRMSG_k

mLubyon The Physics of Scuba Diving

I wouldn't trust Amazon with my life(-support equipment), especially not a product with 3.5 stars and obvious misspellings. Things like shoddy air quality, masks designed for aesthetics over function, etc. can create unintuitive risks that extend your stay underway from "6-12 minutes" to "the rest of your life."

mLubyon How to hack the simulation?

Alastair Reynolds's Revelation Space sci-fi novels include mysterious communications from beings that want to cross into our reality from another universe or timeline (I forget which) and need our help to do so.

Coincidentally I read that just as rowhammer hit the news. Maybe we could do something similar to gain access to other simulations running on the same hardware.

mLubyon The most unethical thing I was asked to build while working at Twitter in 2015

https://www.smart-jokes.org/programmer-evolution.html

mLubyon California man fined for selling maps of property boundaries without a license

I like the idea but predict legislatures would enact keep-alive bills that `renew *.law`.

mLubyon Lessons from a Professional Password Cracker

I'm surprised a password cracker would advocate switching to biometrics, the one type of password you can't change.

mLubyon More US Employers Are Trapping Workers in a New Form of Indentured Servitude

  I was coding remotely where the sun always shines
  rebased my co'mmits and I pushed to CI
  I closed 16 bugs in the comp'ny repo
  And the scrum master said, "Well, bless my soul"

mLubyon Online art communities begin banning AI-generated images

AGI is an existential threat to human-led governments. Why would they build something to displace them?

mLubyon Online art communities begin banning AI-generated images

Pushing "accelerate" costs a great deal. Investors will want a return on their capital: either in money pressed from unequal access to the resulting paradise or in direct power over this new god.

mLubyon A Re-Purposed Tactical Decision Game

> We first presented this scenario before the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, when most military officers were thinking in terms of conventional combat [seizing the town]. We suspect that after two decades of irregular warfare, the minority approach described here [of negotiating with local leaders] might be more prevalent today.

Most games only let players do the former: shoot till the enemy HP is depleted. Would love to see more development along the second path that isn't just dialog trees: where the enemy's morale is depleted.

mLubyon Can We Throw Satellites to Space? [video]

> What if you dug a very deep hole, created a near-vaccuum, and you shot the rocket out like a rail-cannon?

What would happen is your payload would follow a ballistic trajectory up through the atmosphere into space, then it'd fall back down and hit the ground somewhere west of the hole because earth rotated under it while it was in flight.

As XKCD puts it, "The reason it's hard to get to orbit isn't that space is high up. It's hard to get to orbit because you have to go so fast." https://what-if.xkcd.com/58/

Also the way 2-body orbits work, you will always return to the point you last changed your velocity. That means your hole-launched spacecraft's flight path is actually an elliptical orbit that's so extremely narrow that it looks more like a straight line up and down, and then the ground prevents the vehicle from continuing on its orbit around the Earth's center of mass. So if you want to "circularize your orbit" you have to increase your sideways velocity by thrusting at the top of your orbit, so you can as Hitchhiker's Guide puts it "throw yourself at the ground and miss." That way the ellipse is mostly a circle around the Earth and you'll return to that thrust point in space rather than returning to hole's entrance.

So you'd want to make the hole more like a train track running just under the surface (or an evacuated tube just above the surface). That's sort of what SpinLaunch and other non-rocket space launch systems like mass drivers and Project Babylon.

mLubyon Ask HN: Nested Resources in REST/HTTP API URLs?

If average users will see the URL in their browser, make it meaningful. After all, it is a user interface.

  X blog.com/users/1234/posts/5678
  √ blog.com/tom-nook/thoughts-about-urls

mLubyon Physical buttons outperform touchscreens in new cars, test finds

That makes sense.

Do aftermarket physical panels exist for consumers to replace their touch dashboard with physical buttons linked to the same functionality? That'd sidestep the long pole issue and give drivers the ability to customize their cars.

If they don't, I imagine the Devil's in the "linked to the same functionality" details. It could be that carmakers make doing this legally or technically impossible or maybe just that there isn't demand for aftermarket adaptor software.

mLubyon Class Action Targets Experian over Account Security

Hear, hear! Let's call it "capital punishment."

mLubyon GraphQL kinda sucks

Having worked in big tech and small startups, I think GraphQL is a brilliant way to solve an organizational problem that massive tech companies have.

It's that the team maintaining the API is different from the team that needs changes to the API. Due to the scale of the organization the latter doesn't have the access or know-how to easily add fields to that API themselves, so they have to wait for the maintainers to add the work to their roadmap and get back to it in a few quarters. Relevant Krazam: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8OnoxKotPQ

At a small start-up, if the GET /foo/:fooId/bar/ endpoint is missing a field baz you need, you can usually just add it yourself and move on.

mLubyon Google Timer is gone

The difference is that evolution is the only game in town (well, until humans started bio-engineering).

mLubyon US regulators will certify first small nuclear reactor design

> but that term [battleships] is sometimes used colloquially to refer to any surface warship other than carriers

Really? I wouldn't be surprised to hear someone call a frigate a cruiser or a littoral combat ship a destroyer or an amphibious assault ship a carrier but everyone knows battleships are the biggest big-gun ships out there.

mLubyon Why does nobody seem to know what imperative and declarative mean?

> I wonder if a language can be Turing-complete without flow control. My guess is no?

I agree, unless something like pattern-matching does not count as control flow. But then isn't a conditional just a basic pattern? Why does it get a pass?

mLubyon Be careful how you pay the bills

> jobs that suck are the easiest types of jobs

So no true. Human manual and emotional labor is incredibly cheap compared to the cost of automating those tasks.

mLubyon Glassdoor not so anonymous

A decent outcome would be Glassdoor covering the users' legal fees.

mLubyon Fields Medal was never meant for ‘the greatest mathematical genius' (2018)

Your first clause is complex and correct so you're doing just fine. :)

mLubyon Detroit’s new personalized flight information board is straight out of sci-fi

> CEO of Misapplied Sciences, the company that created the product

Name is spot on. Facial recognition is too creepy to live.

mLubyon Elon’s Out

I'm open to other measures; anything's better than "IDK infinite." What do you propose?

mLubyon Elon’s Out

The guy has 15X more money than god (using the Vatican's wealth as a proxy).

mLubyon ‘Blade Runner’ at 40

Black Mirror. For broad definition of sci-fi and broad definition of film.

mLubyon We need to make adulthood more desirable

  Teacher: Why are only [veterans] allowed to vote?
  Student: It's a reward for doing government service.
  Teacher: No. No! Something given has no value.

  Teacher: What's the moral difference between a civilian and [veteran]?
  Student: A veteran accepts personal responsibility for safety of the body politic, defending it with his life. A civilian does not.

-Starship Troopers classroom scene https://youtu.be/EBxgrr0wL8M (Heinlein had some weird ideas and the movie's satire isn't obvious enough to those who most need it to be.)

mLubyon We need to make adulthood more desirable

Working adult life feels worry-free compared to school. There was always more homework or studying to do after a full day in the classroom.

One of the privileges of adult life is leaving work at the office. (I know not every adult does this but every adult has the option.)

mLubyon We need to make adulthood more desirable

I've seen estimates of 40-60% of all households not paying anything in taxes even if they are filing them. Conditioning voting rights on having paid taxes would disenfranchise a huge swath of low income people as well as people with accounting strategies to minimize their taxes. It'd certainly wouldn't help the US's underwhelming voter turnout.

I agree with your overall point about rights without duties.

mLubyon Mosquito swatter gamer mod with kill counter, sound and rechargeable battery

If we had a paddle that let you cleanse the air of coronavirus, would you be against people using it?

Mosquito-borne illnesses are a thousand times more deadly.

mLubyon Online privacy: to what extent should you try to go dark?

Mass surveillance has been used against citizens in the US too; it's too tempting a tool not to abuse. The legal system loses its credibility when warrants, proceedings, evidence, etc are all secret in the name of national security. And further there are cases where the government circumvents the law's intent by asking companies to do things the government itself must not do.

Whether a thing is "legal" when it comes to government (ab)use of power is the thinnest of defenses. As the senator from Naboo said: "I will make it legal."