HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

silasdavis

765 karma · joined February 27, 2013

Wearer of socks.

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/silasdavis; my proof: https://keybase.io/silasdavis/sigs/W1ncYgiogWNgpdzI7fQk-YTKecuo-Mj2tl9i3qEv-jQ ]

submissionscomments
silasdavis··on Updating the Go Memory Model
Exactungly, Go's flavour of channels are full of subtle bugs. I could count on N hands the number of times I've had to make a channel to drain a channel.
silasdavis··on JavaScript Object Signing and Encryption is a bad standard (2017)
Yeah it's curious isn't it? Seems to get more attention than I understand.
silasdavis··on Ohio sues Google, seeks to declare the internet company a public utility
> If they can easily become a natural monopoly, decentralisation won’t solve anything in the long term.

I don't follow the reasoning here.

silasdavis··on Rf: an experimental refactoring tool for Go
> I don't think that has any reason to be stated in a discussion about a refactoring tool.

Find and replace is the baseline, and for many refactorings is insufficient and fragile, however in replacing a stable, unique, and isomorphic token it is basically as good as it gets, so I think it is relevant. Its probably the least useful thing a refactoring tool could do.

silasdavis··on Aukey kicked off Amazon following fake reviews allegations
Having moved to Spain from UK I have noticed amazon.es worse than amazon.co.uk in numerous ways. Continually nags me on checkout to sign up for 'student prime' for which I would not be eligible anyway. Continually tries to offer its own exchange rate to GBP on checkout. The range is significantly less and most categories are dominated by bear identical products under throwaway brands. Definite bargain basement feels.
silasdavis··on First genetically modified mosquitoes released in the United States
It would remove those less fit. I think the point of the effect only being at second generation is that it makes the lack of fitness signal weaker in these males than ordinarily sterilised males. Added to that they keep releasing the modified mosquitoes so they are more numerous (in effect more fit since they have a massive breeding advantage from the humans breeding them).
silasdavis··on First genetically modified mosquitoes released in the United States
We can make a better disaster film script than that. How about some rare second generation females survive then turn out to be far more potent disease carriers and rebuild a population of super mosquitoes in their place.

Mosquitoes are buggers though.

silasdavis··on Intel Internet Party Line (1997)
This is rather like the utterly-irritating-until-you-start-using-it-yourself voice note feature of many popular messaging clients.
silasdavis··on Intel Internet Party Line (1997)
This may be the unseen hand of the moderator. See the 'second chance pool': https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented/blob/m...
silasdavis··on IT companies warn in open letter: EU wants to ban encryption
There is a longstanding thread of political thought in the UK about banning encryption https://www.wired.co.uk/article/uk-encryption-whatsapp-amber...
silasdavis··on A CO2 capture solvent with exceptionally low total costs of capture
> yet more bits are mined in SV than anywhere else

Are they?

silasdavis··on John Sullivan resign as executive director of the Free Software Foundation
I don't think anyone in this thread was alluding to a period of history. I think they were making a normative statement.
silasdavis··on Bitcoin Is Time
The idea you could be downvoted on hacker news for being anti-crypto is a novel one
silasdavis··on The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology
I don't think scarcity in ad space is particular artifical. Attention is a limited resource.
silasdavis··on Police seize $60M of Bitcoin from fraudster, but he won’t provide the key
Since they know the addresses they can certainly watch the funds. I wonder if he has any release monitoring conditions. He'd need to find a jurisdiction and ways in which to spend it.
silasdavis··on Police seize $60M of Bitcoin from fraudster, but he won’t provide the key
Yes, very. I occasionally have a day where I cannot remember my master password for my password manager. Often after a prelonged break or change of context.
silasdavis··on Nq – A simple Unix job queue system
Apart from it being academic citation ransomware: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15319715
silasdavis··on Boeing 737 Max cleared to fly again 'too early'
In Ryanair's case that bias may run in the opposite direction to that which you imply: https://www.bbc.com/news/topics/cqwdgxed80gt/ryanair-pilots-...
silasdavis··on Technical issue resolved after ‘150k police records lost’
Or more accurately, accidentally deleted. 'losing' these records would actually be a lot worse. I wouldn't underestimate the police's ability suffer a breach and lose the records either.

It's worth remembering many of these records are are kept on the basis of non conviction (though there is a time limit).

silasdavis··on Zoom improvements requested by music schools
From the home page of sound jack site (https://www.ianhowellcountertenor.com/soundjack-real-time-on...):

> In practice, musicians ignore sound and watch a conductor when separated by such distances [of 100 feet].

It had never occurred to me that a conductor was a kind of clock at an approximately uniform distance from the performers.

silasdavis··on WhatsApp gives users an ultimatum: Share data with Facebook or stop using app
As others have mentioned increasingly small businesses (like my outdoor exercise class) and loose communities (like my child's school year parent's group) rely on WhatsApp. persuading these loose connections to move away from WhatsApp for one's own benefit is almost impossible.

Sacrificing access to these social amenities on the altar of incremental privacy invasion and power transfer to an unaccountable basically malign organisation is hard to stomach. And rather inconsequential taken in isolation.

What technical and legislative means might be effective in limiting the network effect around group chats? For example requiring in law that groups be accessible to an open federated hub and spoke messaging protocol to allow messages to flow from syndicated groups established on other systems (like matrix or signal or whatever) to WhatsApp groups.

What technical and legal prior art is there here? I would be interested to hear some ideas.

silasdavis··on Sick of spending time on Auth, we built an open source 'Stripe for Auth'
Ory (https://www.ory.sh) seems to have similar aims, could you contrast? Did you consider their existing code?

If you are so inclined also interested in any comparison with https://keratin.tech/ and https://www.keycloak.org

silasdavis··on Palantir to provide UK border monitoring system
> to gather information about the flow of goods and passengers

What level of having a foot in the door does this represent for Palantir? Presumably future extensions will be lower cost.

What forms of additional data trawling might we expect?

silasdavis··on Helsinki Relocation Package: City as a Service
What happens after 90 days?
silasdavis··on The Heart of RISC-V Development Is Unmatched
Gets on my tits also. It's a disclosure.
silasdavis··on Tech firms face growing resentment of parent employees during Covid-19
Agreed no-one who can draw this level of cat deserves our sympathy.
silasdavis··on The database I wish I had
Reminds me of https://github.com/davebryson/bftdb: sqlite replicated by Tendermint (PBFT-ish consensus)
silasdavis··on The tragic physics of the deadly explosion in Beirut
Indeed, thanks, I had missed that after skimming through the filler in that piece.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vince_Coleman_(train_dispatc...

silasdavis··on Google speakers are listening to more than just voice commands
How long until insurers start coercing customers into installing intrusive smart home devices in order to get reasonable premiums? It might not happen tomorrow but if enough people are willing to opt into alarm surveillance you can see how they could lower the liability for insurers.
silasdavis··on London traders hit $500M jackpot when oil went negative
I am fine with your tautology:

> It's not for you to judge whether the $40 is "worth" $40. It is.

What other sensible quantative way of defining value is there?

The question is do we think the position leveraged to extract that value is fair. You seem to think that price manipulation (presumably of some explicitly prohibited forms) can be unfair. So I assume you amenable to some extrinsic definition of fair play.

In your example what might be the form of advantage you exploited? It could be informational or it could be based on capital. Perhaps your informational advantage is based on diligent study of a situation or perhaps it is based on cronyism. Similarly perhaps your ability to take on the risk is based on hard work or inherited wealth. I'm not saying any of these is inherently wrong but people can and do take moral/social positions on such advantages exploited for profit. Even though that discussion might be rather intractable.

So we can define the value of the trade by the spread but that says little about whether the information/capacity asymmetries were fair. If a well functioning market is meant to approximate fairness with sufficient diversity of participants then a market anomaly like this seems like more like an exception to that rule.

I do not think it is justified to call it theft.

← PreviousPage 5 of 8Next →