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machinelaboon I just don’t want to be busy anymore

I guess the problem is that the author has brought it up in the article. Race has no place in this article and yet it's there.

machinelaboon I wrote one of the fastest DataFrame libraries

Those arguments apply to Python as well. There is nothing special about Julia that warrants your arguments.

machinelaboon There Should Be No Computer Art (1971) [pdf]

Computer art is not ok as much as paintbrush art is not ok.

machinelaboon Ask HN: What happens when someone copies an NFT onto another blockhain?

Yes, but if Banksy himself advertises the auction and provides the proof that the NFT is issue by him, then there is no confusion. Imagine if Banksy interviews with CNN and advertises his auction. Or Youtube or in person in an event.

Beeple did just that.

But, I get what you're saying. There is a verification process to traditional art as well. You cannot simply impersonate Banksy and call Sotheby's, they need to verify you are actually Banksy.

machinelaboon Money corrupts; bitcoin corrupts absolutely

We need to fix the loop holes. Money is also an amazing instrument that keeps us motivated. Without the lure of money and its power, we wouldn’t do anything. Startups? Why bother when there is no money involved.

I really think if there was one thing we got right - that’s money as a civilization. What we need to do is fix the loop holes. That includes taxes, corporation as persons, the whole 2011 movement of Occupy Wall Street.

machinelaboon Fabbrica: A sans serif typeface with a utilitarian aesthetic

Some problems:

a has a larger aperture than c, s, C, S, e, etc.

f, t have unusually sharp overhangs but that's the style you're going for. I am not a fan of IBM's Plex's sharp corners either because it ruins the texture of the font. Either make all corners tight or not. Their argument is "Machine + Humans" or "Tight corners + Soft curves" but your eyes don't give a shit about those things.

a's tail is too long

A, V have a massive opened corners (usually done for small size readability) but Z, X, Y's crotch doesn't. You need consistency here.

Double-story g is hard to justify in a font based on drafting templates and generally doesn't feel like it fits into this type of a typeface. However, its ok to take some liberty here.

Fitting needs work first. S's side bearings need to be cut down by a lot. o, c, e's fitting is much larger than it should be.

There is a lot of work to be done here. I am pretty grumpy generally so don't take this too seriously. Have fun and hope you're enjoying the process!

machinelaboon Fabbrica: A sans serif typeface with a utilitarian aesthetic

I have a pet peeve about font licensing.

Typographers struggle to make a living in most cases, but yet they don't offer better font licenses. I don't understand why they don't make it simple single license term for all usecases and make a sale. It's masochistic.

machinelaboon Ask HN: How to get a Logo/ Corporate Designs in 2021?

Logomark and Logotype are two aspects of Logos. Some companies decide to do both, some only one.

Regardless, the purpose of a logo is to discern and identify amongst thousands of other similar looking logos. I lean towards Logomarks (Nike, Apple, Starbucks) and less towards (Stripe, CocaCola, Kellogs).

I recommend getting a logomark + logotype designed by a professional graphics designer.

machinelaboon Ask HN: How to get a Logo/ Corporate Designs in 2021?

Don't Google and disregard all advice here - find a good graphics designer at your local artist directory, college or club. Here in USA, it is AIGA and a number of colleges. Find competitions or contests for graphcis design where they can display their work. Find people this way and you will have a better time than buying some stupid crap for $5.

machinelaboon Printvideo.com

If we follow your logic, why not just stop dealing with Germany and the Germans all together?

Tolerance and forgiveness is a value we need embrace. You should ask yourself if anyone at IBM today supports the holocaust.

machinelaboon The Compact Disc (1982) [video]

It’s unfair to compare a college course to traditional TV media. College courses in the 80’s were similar to Coursera too.

I urge you to watch news channels from the 80s. Literally every TV media was degraded from Discovery channel to History channel.

machinelaboon Ask HN: What happens when someone copies an NFT onto another blockhain?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Amu2mOsIz-w

There are experts that can verify Picasso. Digital assets are copied verbatim with 100% fidelity and zero error.

machinelaboon Ask HN: What happens when someone copies an NFT onto another blockhain?

NFT's are a weird thing, it is half scammy (practicality) and half useful (ownership, non-fungibility of the token itself). I am reading up on the NFT standards (ERC721 is the simplest one) [1] and this is the core contract API:

  contract ERC721 {
   // ERC20 compatible functions
   function name() constant returns (string name);
   function symbol() constant returns (string symbol);
   function totalSupply() constant returns (uint256 totalSupply);
   function balanceOf(address _owner) constant returns (uint balance);
   // Functions that define ownership
   function ownerOf(uint256 _tokenId) constant returns (address owner);
   function approve(address _to, uint256 _tokenId);
   function takeOwnership(uint256 _tokenId);
   function transfer(address _to, uint256 _tokenId);
   function tokenOfOwnerByIndex(address _owner, uint256 _index) constant returns (uint tokenId);
   // Token metadata
   function tokenMetadata(uint256 _tokenId) constant returns (string infoUrl);
   // Events
   event Transfer(address indexed _from, address indexed _to, uint256 _tokenId);
   event Approval(address indexed _owner, address indexed _approved, uint256 _tokenId);
  }

It's not hard to understand. This ERC721 NFT token can verify is its owner (ownerOf()), and the actual item of interest (tokenMetaData()). Item of interest is secured either on the blockchain itself or offline using URL reference in the metadata.

All good. But that's all she wrote. Banksy can list his digital artwork on the internet and many people can bid on it. That is actually valuable if you think about it in isolation. The problem is on the auction side, with decentralized bidding - you have no idea if this artwork was pumped up by fake buyers. There is no Sotheby's or Christie's auction house to mediate this.

URL metadata is also weird - now you're passing on the value of the token to whoever owns the Domain Name and the servers responding to the GET request. If the artist decides to sell or forgets to renew the domain name, your NFT is useless unless the data was backed up somewhere. Even then, the next buyer of the NFT would want to access the URL and get their goodies instead of getting it from anywhere else since that's not on the tokenMetadata.

[1] Source: https://medium.com/crypto-currently/the-anatomy-of-erc721-e9...

machinelaboon The Compact Disc (1982) [video]

Pay attention to how clearly information was presented in those days. I've not come across any media today that can present information in systematic and concise manner without trying hard to grab my attention, perhaps a handful of YT channels are an exception.

machinelaboon The internet didn’t kill counterculture – you just won’t find it on Instagram

I feel liberated after reading your comment.

machinelaboon UK to depart from GDPR

I am appalled at the level of discussion here. Nationalism, both from EU, US and UK side is tiring, this flame war needs to be shut down. This not what HN is for folks.

machinelaboon I Shipped, Therefore I Am

Oh I remember when video games used to be shipped in that they had to finish everything. No patches later. It’s going to get burned on the ROM and off it goes sailing to their customers.

Now a days, shipping to me evokes “Fuck it, ship this shitty MVP to customers because ship ship ship” and then they wonder “Gee, why didn’t my app take off?”.

I understand the need to ship, but I never see anyone daring to challenge the frantic broken shitty app philosophy and maybe wondering if they built them with care, maybe... just maybe customers with actually come? Has anyone tried to go against the grain since the SEGA days? It’s high risk.

Thanks for a great perspective.

machinelaboon I Shipped, Therefore I Am

I like those better. Craft is great as well.

machinelaboon I Shipped, Therefore I Am

I am not a fan of the term "ship", similar to "sell". It's a horrible term. It evokes the image of a frantic imprudent developer churning away at ball of mud trying to meet their shipping metrics and feature bloat targets.

Does anyone feel the same? If someone told me "I sold stuff, therefore I am", it just leaves a bad impression of them for me.

Build stuff with care and craftsmanship. Strive for excellence, take pride in your work and deliver, not ship.

machinelaboon Why I don't like Tailwind CSS

It is actually fast though. Just doesn't produce coherent design over time and creates a huge mess where design langauge is intertwined in symantic layout.

Hey, wasn't that the original intent of HTML+CSS? To isolate markup and design?

machinelaboon Why I don't like Tailwind CSS

Taiwind CSS is how you get incoherent overall design. Each element is customized to "look" nice but there is no overall architecture and design system. Padding here and padding there, this bold and that bold - visually tuning the entire page to look nice, but lacks a level of design coherency that is achieved best with a classic CSS based approach. You can do it with Taiwind to "remember" standard padding/spacing and Tachyons does it better than Tailwind, but I personally prefer the classic method even though its not as immediate as Tailwind classes inline with HTML.

People are allured by the rapid prototyping aspects of Tailwind which is the main bait. It's pretty fast to see results immediately without openining the css file.

machinelaboon Julia: A Post-Mortem

> I think Julia should really seek to displace MATLAB as a near term goal .

Have you studied MATLAB and its ecosystem? It ranges from real time control to image recognition to sophisticated engineering-specific toolboxes (RF, 5G, LTE, etc.). They also have proprietary algorithms that do things no Julia package can do. Sure, there is PDE solvers and the ecosystem is growing for Julia, but it is at-least an order of magnitude smaller than MATLAB if not more. I urge you to explore the documentation, APIs and toolbox details on MATLAB: https://www.mathworks.com/products.html

Take a look at the LIDAR toolbox for example: https://www.mathworks.com/products/lidar.html

or LTE: https://www.mathworks.com/products/lte.html

and I've used DSP toolbox the most: https://www.mathworks.com/products/dsp-system.html

I am not condoning use of MATLAB, just stating the facts having used Julia and MATLAB extensively. I personally like Julia language FWIW. At work, we use MATLAB and happily pay for it. Their support is absolutely top-notch and for us it is the reason alone to use MATLAB. Julia has support but not even close to MATLAB's direct line to compiler engineers (yes, I've had them fix a bug and do a release in an afternoon).

machinelaboon What Is RPN? Why Did/Does HP Use RPN? Learning RPN (1999)

I don’t think it’s more intuitive. It’s just that you’re used to it.

machinelaboon Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?

Tough question: Isn't baldness a genetic trait just like the pigment of the skin? Are you X% less attractive if you have a certain pigment of the skin?

Person's baldness was given to them at birth. They had no say in it just like the pigmentation color. What's the objective difference?

machinelaboon Show HN: Make slides with text, markdown, YAML, JSON or JavaScript, your call

For me, slides are like art. I make slides with graphics, with weird arrows, boxes and call outs, images tiled in a particular way, and many custom things. They're more graphical than textual because slides aren't about people reading them - they're already listening to you and simultaneously listening + reading is difficult for the audience. Slides should show visual relationships of your talking points. Use graphics to show architecture, hierarchy, dependencies, etc. Use images to give context. Can it be done programmatically? Sure, if I spend 4 hours customizing my code. I'd rather fire up Powerpoint or Google Slides and roll with it. Also, I present once a quarter, I never found these automatic slide generators useful but I presume if you're presenting concise/textual information often, it can be useful.

machinelaboon We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google

This is research in the form of bike shedding. Let’s talk about how the bike shed is going to look for a nuclear power plant.

CO2 impact for stuff like this - we probably have bigger fish to fry.

machinelaboon We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google

There could be many other reasons:

- Outside media continues to refer to her as Timnit including NYTimes which affects HN users

- If someone’s name is Gorot Trzebiatowski (please forgive me if you have such a name), most people would go with Gorot because it is shorter and easier to pronounce / write. Subconsciously, these things happen.

You’re right - No need to assume malice where probably there isn’t. This is conspiratorial thinking - find some pattern of data that supports mainstream narrative and make conclusions from it. This is what QAnon conspirators do all day.

Although I’m curious about your motivation for analyzing this :-)

machinelaboon We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google

This is one of the most illuminating assessments of Twitter. It’s virtue signaling , as cliche as it sounds to use that term - that’s what Twitter has become. No fault of Twitter, we’ve created a culture in our society where persons with their open identity cannot easily voice dissenting opinions and going against the grain without getting cancelled.

What a fucked up world we live in.

machinelaboon We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google

Thanks, I read your comment in its entirety. I think we need more people like you. Disagreements about issues and these things happen all the time. My fear was founded in the fact that people perceive me as either 1) Faking as a non-white person (see some accusations here) 2) On top of that, accusing me of being racist. The truth cannot be more further from that. 3) Downvoting because its a difficult conversation. 4) Perhaps tracking me down and finding my identitity and may be someone crazy can go nuts and cause harm to my persons or my career.

machinelaboon We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google

That's a good point. May be we need ways to have a common person without a huge media presence have a way to voice their concerns of racism.

Since media cannot cover thousands of individual cases, there should be legal avenues without deep pockets for lawyer fees to sue companies for racist behavior.

The court should look at this situation objectively and factually.