Hacker News Reader

sk0gon Dynamic music and sound techniques for video games

Is some sort of volume "equalisation" or compression being applied maybe? Could also be reacting to the change in ambient volume conditions otherwise.

sk0gon Report Phone Spam – Shut down robocallers and text spammers

That's surprising to me, almost everyone I know will leave voicemail. Recruiters especially, which tends to be myst of my legitimate phone calls TBH!

Though with people of my age "cold calling" isn't all that common, typically you text the person first to make sure they are available and keen on a call. Unless it's an emergency of some sort, of course.

sk0gon Report Phone Spam – Shut down robocallers and text spammers

Honestly pre-COVID I got spam calls maybe once a quarter. After giving out my number every second time I left the house, that number is more like a few times a week.

I would say I am pretty privacy conscious (when possible), so this may not be the average person's experience.

sk0gon Report Phone Spam – Shut down robocallers and text spammers

YouTube ads have no ability to interrupt my day-to-day life out of the blue, and also don't poison a legitimately useful communication medium for personal relationships.

Phone spam is much more harmful than ads you kinda-sorta opt into, IMO.

sk0gon Report Phone Spam – Shut down robocallers and text spammers

Who would bear that cost though? My prediction would be the customers again, because they would make the phone support harder to reach than it already is as a "solution" to the increased demand for phone support.

sk0gon The world nearly adopted a calendar with 13 months of 28 days

Oh nice, the more you know! Kvira probably refers to the same word meaning "week", but seems like there's theories it could derive from Greek mythology as well.

Lots of influence from Greek culture in Georgia for sure. For a fun fact, the Georgian for "Greece" is saberdzneti -- the land of the wise. Berdzeni itself means wise (as well as Greek), but I'm not certain if it's derived from an alternative historical name for the Greek.

sk0gon The world nearly adopted a calendar with 13 months of 28 days

Similar for Georgian, Monday through to Thursday are named roughly "two-Sabbath" to "five-Sabbath", with Saturday being Sabbath of course. Not sure why those numbers, but I assumed it was because it was the number of days past Saturday?

Friday and Sunday get different names, unrelated to Sabbath as far as I can tell -- paraskevi and kvira.

sk0gon Cooperative C++ Evolution – Toward a TypeScript for C++

C# does not transpile to C++, so no. You are still left with the .net runtime, garbage collection, etc.

sk0gon California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

(On average), for a walk to the stop of 100-200 feet the bus would need to stop every 200-400 feet. 300 ft seems to be roughly 100m, which is probably much too short a distance still. 250m or ~800 ft aligns better to my experience with cities with good transit, and in the worst case scenario you have to walk 125m to your nearest stop.

sk0gon This is what the year actually looks like (2018)

I wish :) I feel like I use BitBucket more than they do; JIRA has dark mode while BB doesn't...

sk0gon This is what the year actually looks like (2018)

It's about as common here (AU) as referring to dates as sprints since epoch. So not very.

sk0gon Meta in Myanmar

Sure.

FB could set the baseline visibility level of each post and comment to 0, and selectively boost specific ones to be seen by people other than the poster. Not boosting, is not censorship after all.

sk0gon Who lusts for certainty lusts for lies

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.

sk0gon How Equifax Was Breached in 2017

Most CXOs have extensive experience in their relevant fields. Your retort seems needlessly defensive.

sk0gon I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

FYI the edit might have made it more confusing, since there's a double negative now. "don't believe you can't actually own code" reads as "believe you can actually own code", which I'm not sure is what you were going for.

sk0gon Phind (code beating GPT4) seems to have used WizardLM's finetuned checkpoint

See my other comment for a more expanded take, but let's go with Intel for example. If they had to do all work out in the open, and share all progress they make, all they could compete on would be timing and pricing.

Pricing isn't going to be something they are likely to win on, and the timing is either time to market, or time to release IP. For the former, why buy i9 for $1000 when you can be an Indian alternative for $500 in, let's say, 6 months? For the latter, if companies can release findings after some fuzzy period like "when the prototypes have been validated," that's still IP but with a timed secrecy.

sk0gon Phind (code beating GPT4) seems to have used WizardLM's finetuned checkpoint

I was responding to an obvious exaggeration in kind, which was a bad move on my part.

Yes people can and will still continue to do stuff for the sake of it. Some of it will be amazing. The huge things like building the next 5 CPU generations though, is that going to be practical? Who will fund that, and why?

Trying not to get political but the end of copyright feels like communism to me. No private property and all that. While I didn't live through it myself, the associated trauma WRT the USSR certainly left some deep scars that people still haven't healed from.

In any case, if -- and it's a big if -- AI continues to develop at the current rate, a solution like UBI will have to be seriously considered. Economies probably don't function when people don't create value, earn, or spend.

sk0gon Phind (code beating GPT4) seems to have used WizardLM's finetuned checkpoint

I would contribute to a lot of open source projects if it took a few minutes at a time. Working full-time hours over many years is a different question however.

sk0gon Phind (code beating GPT4) seems to have used WizardLM's finetuned checkpoint

With no copyright and intellectual property knowledge wouldn't be free, it simply would cease to be generated. If you can't profit (at least modestly) from your work, there's no incentive to perform that work.

Lots of things sound good in a perfect world, but we don't live in one.

sk0gon We’re all just temporarily abled

What's the questionable supplements allowed? Herbal stuff like ashwagandha or whatever, or not-technically-steroids-but-close-enough substances like SARMs?

sk0gon We’re all just temporarily abled

To put it in programming terms, you're likely to improve more with the slow grind of an hour or so an evening side-project, rather than competing in a hackathon every 3 months.

One observation I had was that people coming to the gym to spend majority of their time on the treadmill are mostly women. I'm not sure if it is to lose weight, or simply because with infrastructure hostile to walking, the likelihood of problematic encounters increases greatly. Though I wouldn't feel entirely safe walking around at 23:00 without my dog either.

sk0gon Secret identities in Dwarf Fortress (2017)

Have you heard of Goal-Oriented Action Planning (GOAP)? I've tried implementing it from scratch and it's really easy to get interesting, emergent behaviour. It can also be difficult to debug however, or reason about why things are happening -- or how to make things you want actually happen. I have a feeling commercial products would have much better tooling to ease some of those pains.

sk0gon Austral Programming Language

I guess there is no "strict separation" in C++, since that mechanism is, I believe, optional. Adding implementations to your header files might never pass PRs, but still.

It does enable header-only libraries though.

sk0gon Coroutines for Go

So it's intuitive because you are familiar with those concepts. I don't see how that goes against what I said.

sk0gon Coroutines for Go

Goroutines and channels aren't intuitive either. You learn them and become familiar with them over time, at which point they become intuitive __for you__.

sk0gon As a therapist, I know what’s breaking couples up

Financial and social constraints also prevent divorces, which may be less of an issue for people well off.

Divorce rates are low in lots of poorer countries, but that doesn't mean the relationships there are perfect. From what I've seen, often the woman would become a pariah and have no real source of livelihood. Divorce isn't even an option, no matter how toxic or abusive their spouse or relationship may be.

sk0gon Functions and algorithms implemented purely with TypeScript's type system

Can you use something like Zod with the newtype pattern? I use DDD-style types for domain specific data over primitives.

sk0gon Functions and algorithms implemented purely with TypeScript's type system

Go is sane for some definitions of the word! If I got to choose a language to work with though, it would definitely be Kotlin or C#, but I prefer Go over Python because there are fewer ways to solve problems, leading to generally simpler code.

It's like a modernised C but for web/infrastructure. Unfortunately ignores about 3 decades worth of progress in other languages, and is simplistic to a fault. Jumping into an unknown codebase is easier than every other language I've used as a result.

sk0gon Functions and algorithms implemented purely with TypeScript's type system

Precisely, TypeScript only exists at compile time. Half their goals relate to this fact, which leads to constraints regarding what the language can achieve.

> 3. Impose no runtime overhead on emitted programs. > 4. Emit clean, idiomatic, recognizable JavaScript code. > 7. Preserve runtime behavior of all JavaScript code. > 8. Use a consistent, fully erasable, structural type system.

https://github.com/Microsoft/TypeScript/wiki/TypeScript-Desi...

sk0gon Functions and algorithms implemented purely with TypeScript's type system

Some quirks I've noticed are typed objects not performing any validations, like for building DTOs. Structural typing so the newtype pattern is not possible without some awkward hacks. A general "disconnect" between compile time and run time behaviour, so once you start casting your errors are relegated to property access/usage time, which makes — IMO excessive — test coverage paramount in catching bugs wherever you have conditional logic.

I would have gone with C# or Kotlin if I had the luxury of choice, but I'll get that with a deliberate career move maybe.