sillysaurus3

For example, I've been working on an essay for some time now, but I'm seriously considering making it into a companion video. I have no video experience whatsoever, so that's a tall order. But what are you to do? If you want to make an impact, are you sure it's still possible to do it by writing 173 essays over 15 years? It used to be, but the world seems to be changing.

(This is mostly a reaction to this post being one of the rare videos Deemed Worthy to be on the front page, when there are tens of thousands of others. It's not a good idea to mix up the content too much, but there really are a lot of quality videos and no central curation mechanism. Unlike articles. /r/videos is for mainstream content, like https://youtu.be/kJGGlVg5PpY. There really isn't any place that collects intellectually gratifying content like the current submission.)

Without straying too far from the original premise, it's worth pointing out that the idea of using a graph database for traditional tasks is in fact a new idea. Most people would not consider doing it, and that makes it new.

Notice an interesting philosophical thing that happens every time philosophical debates occur: We quickly get mixed up in a debate over the meaning of words. "What do you mean by 'new'?"

It's worth excluding such questions from debate. Questions over the meaning of words rarely go anywhere interesting. http://www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html

Oh dear, look where we've ended up. But it was an intriguing place, I hope.

The overall point is that if you advocate something non-traditional on HN, you're in for a world of hurt. This place is nothing if not adversarial. You'd better have your I's dotted and your T's crossed. But those constraints are what make the medium so interesting.

Just the opposite. Rarely do you see any discussion of the benefits of a new idea. It's mostly hate.

I suspect we're probably talking past each other, though. Concrete examples would resolve it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16542183

Notice the top comment is negative. In general, almost every top comment on HN is negative. It's hard to write well positively, just like it's hard to be a comedian and only make clean jokes.

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Notice no E, R, T, or F keys. First the R key went out, and I got around that by leaving "r" in my paste buffer and typing Command-V instead of r. But then the T key went out about a month later.

Apple wants $600 for a logic board replacement.

It's so annoying to lug an external keyboard everywhere I go. Tiny wireless keyboards just aren't as responsive. But it's less annoying than paying $600 on top of a $2k MBP.

Interesting. The impressive part is that their platform correctly identified the attack and automatically applied the solution within 20 minutes. I wonder how?

Possibly a team of smart sysadmins on standby? It's easy to detect when you're being attacked, but hard to mitigate. So whenever you get attacked, set up your site to automatically forward over to this service, and their clever humans take it from there.

Some of the most impactful tech projects are just mechanical turks, so it wouldn't be surprising. But I wonder what the truth is.

Say you're running a website fronted by Cloudflare, for example.

There are tens of thousands of examples to choose from. For a makefile-based webpack, there are zero.

Unfortunately concerns like this matter.

Surprisingly, most physicists I've talked to also seem to have a healthy appetite for risk. Maybe this is a generational thing. The current generation has one eye on wall st and the other on startups.

It would depend how much noise is in the graph, and how much energy 600 computers use relative to the total energy usage of various parts of the grid. If they went to a major city, probably not. But perhaps the usage in a smaller town would show up as a spike.

I'm really curious whether this would work. Kind of a creepy thought. Hard to escape the eyes of modern technology.

On the other hand, they thought about every aspect of this heist, so maybe they're going to power the computers with gasoline generators. It's hard to know what to be paranoid about when thinking deviously.

So? People freak out all the time about things that are true. It doesn't change that it's true.

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This is an interesting connection. Could you elaborate on this?

https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/blob/cc8ae51e6f62f86d0...

(Unrelated, but an amusing coincidence.)

I've been thinking about the game theory aspect of that, and it's a bit hard to work out whether that will cause even more miners to flee. If so, that could very well be a death spiral.

It's hard because transaction fees might make up the difference. Though it's hard to imagine everyone being ok with >$100 transaction fees.

To a point. Imagine if some crafty hacker leaks Slack's entire message history across all companies. Think of the chaos.

Kind of weird to consider that maybe we haven't seen a catastrophic breach yet.

Except... It's not quite that simple. Most people don't care. The vast majority of programmers simply do not care enough to band together and force employers to give you a higher stake.

I'm not even insinuating that a union would be a good idea. I'm saying, in a free market society, you can't be surprised to find out you just aren't worth making rich.

In that context, it's very important for us all to work together. And I've been trying to think of ways for us to do that. There must be something better than the rat race to the bottom, with a few survivors reaching the top by scrambling over the fallen.

It's not you. It's the society around us that coaxes us into thinking the way you expressed. It's a cartoon, a caricature of real life. Very few people wouldn't be embarrassed to be an imposition on others, or feel like trash for not being able to afford rent. We're all trying, hard.

But there are so many people now. And some people really aren't trying, and really do put others into weird predicaments.

It's hard to mentally separate the former from the latter.

I hear this and I think "You probably don't know what it's like to be in that situation."

It's often temporary, so a little flexibility fixes the problem.

But yes, sometimes you're right. You just phrased it in a bit of an inhumane way.

I know exactly the spot in the code where they could do what you suggest, because I've often wondered why they don't.

elisp gets a bad rap. But it's mostly self-inflicted.

Also http://www.patrickkphillips.com/grammar/is-it-a-bad-rap-or-b...

A “rap sheet” is a criminal record, and a “bum rap” meant a false accusation (or even a false conviction). Even when the charge was valid, it should come as no surprise, a guilty party might claim it was a “bum rap” just to save face.

Had no idea what a bad rap actually meant.

Oho, so Arc does compile to JS now.

You gonna release the compiler or what? (Sometime this decade.)

Out of curiosity, for the date rendering, did you xdef racket's date libraries or implement your own date algorithms in arc?

I guess you could've also shelled out to `date -r <timestamp>` which would get the feature done in about ten seconds.

"How you doing today?"

"Oh, you know how it is." He gives me a weak smile. I can tell he feels worn down from the daily grind.

I pick up my script, then think of a way to keep chatting.

"Hey, this is going to sound weird, but I also have <foo> medical condition. Do you have any advice on getting that treated?"

I have no idea why this made sense to me, but it was something like "Pharmacists fill scripts, and they also see prescriptions daily, so they know which illnesses are treated by which medicines, so therefore this is totally not a weird thing to do."

He gives me this super surprised look and stays mostly quiet. I say "I should see a doctor huh?" and he says yeah. I walk away feeling like a dummy.

I didn't mind at all, and I'm not afraid to try to make new friends. But now instead of this random person thinking of me as a neighbor (he always called me by name) I'm pretty sure he thinks I'm weird. And I am.

The point is, I don't really care about being weird. I don't think I'm alone in this. But I stay quiet because it damages social relationships to express myself in odd ways. It's better to be on a cordial first-name basis than have an arms-length-but-personal experience with them.

The opportunities you mention for meeting people are really not as frequent as you make it seem. And it's unclear what to say to force a conversation. Yes, some people have this skill. Some are also naturally good looking. But seeing as this is Hacker News, I think the audience might be closer to my side of things.

The reason I wrote this was that you mention there are all these opportunities. But going over in my mind, I can't see a single way to talk to that guy that isn't socially weird. He's at work. He just wants to get his job done and move on to the next customer. I don't know anything that could make him laugh. Asking about his day or asking him to tell me what it's like to be a pharmacist would be seen as yet another frustrating thing to deal with at work. And there are other people in line behind me, so this is an imposition on everyone else.

But those people are opportunities too, right? I could just turn around and start chatting them up. Except not really. It's the same for everyone else in life: We're all busy, all dealing with our own things. And the older you are the busier you get.

All of this is to say, you can live in one of the biggest cities in the country and still feel completely isolated and alone. I know. And maybe this comment will put it into context that it's not really their fault. It's just the shape of the situation.

I usually hack on my projects at the mall on a couch, and end up meeting quite a lot of people. But only if they happen to be hacking away on something too, and eventually I ask them about it. But that seems rather an uncommon situation. So I'm wondering "Outside of work and family, where would other hackers have excuses to meet people in daily life?"

Even now, the smart thing is to stay quiet and not post this. You're told to stay quiet in a thousand ways by the society around you.