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throwphoton

148 karma · joined April 27, 2020

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throwphoton··on Two capacitor paradox
Argh is this real or not? Would energy radiated away as a result of inductance be analogous to energy radiated away by gravitational waves in the "water pressure analogy"?
throwphoton··on With remote work plan, Facebook dashes hopes of paycheck arbitrage
You would also need to avoid any and every other way of revealing your location.
throwphoton··on The Ten Commandments for C Programmers (1987)
Interesting. Not casting a void pointer return value seems like a bit of a shibboleth for the "C is not a subset of C++" community.
throwphoton··on London may have gone into a Covid-accelerated decline
> So those 1 in 6 know exactly how it will impact them because it already has.

It could impact them differently if they contract it again.

throwphoton··on Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down
> too much faith in dependency oriented programming

Which is why it's a distraction to even consider this particular person's track record.

Even if this same person pulled one critical package a month for the next year, the fundamental problem is still that the ecosystem in general relies on parties with no obligations to manage critical dependencies.

throwphoton··on London may have gone into a Covid-accelerated decline
> I'll be in the pub by the end of the year.

Does this mean that you think the risk of serious morbidity or mortality is overestimated, or because you think at some point the reduction in social interaction is worse than the pandemic itself?

throwphoton··on Tell HN: Interviewed with Triplebyte? Your profile is about to become public
Wow...

> Google Buzz publicly disclosed (on the user's Google profile) a list of the names of Gmail contacts that the user has most frequently emailed or chatted with.

Google Buzz is something you definitely don't want to be similar to.

throwphoton··on What a typical serverless architecture looks like in AWS
Any diagram like this should include an estimate of usage, and how much that usage will cost, for every "block of architecture" displayed. Absent that, it's impossible to tell whether it's a good idea or a bad idea.

Moreover the cloud providers should make it harder for an uncontrolled "block of architecture" to accidentally spend too much money. The focus seems to be on "always available", but depending on how fast it's spending your money, it might be better if it crashed.

Expanding further, perhaps each "block of architecture" should have a separate LLC dedicated to it to control billing liability. Incorporate your "lambda fanout" to keep it from bankrupting your "certificate manager" when it goes haywire, and let it go out of business separately.

throwphoton··on The Ten Commandments for C Programmers (1987)
What can you do with a void pointer without casting it, apart from comparing it to NULL?
throwphoton··on Tell HN: Interviewed with Triplebyte? Your profile is about to become public
You're missing the point by focusing on the job search information specifically.

Any information provided without a clear understanding that it would be made public should not now be made public by default, even if it is just a name and some badges.

throwphoton··on Employers are rethinking open-plan office design
To keep it properly ventilated you'd have to have a fan blasting air directly down onto your head.
throwphoton··on Where Have all the Gophers Gone? Why the Web beat Gopher (1999)
And once you did that, your content was on the "World Wide Web", not just some "Gopher server". The WWW name made the venue sound more intriguing.
throwphoton··on Reddit's top user leaves platform after harassment
That would only really matter if the poster were really close to the threshold. Moreover the gaming of the system would be unlikely to work forever, requiring too much coordination of effort.

But to answer your question, yes, it is turning the karma system on its head for people near the top of the standings; the idea being that having "titans of karma" in the community becomes detrimental at some point.

throwphoton··on Reddit's top user leaves platform after harassment
You'd lose any privileges associated with a high number of karma points, also all of your previous content would be removed, so people could cover the same territory in possibly new ways with less fear of being called redundant.

It basically compensates for first-mover advantage in forums.

throwphoton··on Reddit's top user leaves platform after harassment
Same way term limits make sense. Hit the ceiling, then you're done. Make room for someone else. Avoid stagnation.
throwphoton··on Reddit's top user leaves platform after harassment
Someone should start a competing service then. My recommendation would be to have a "maximum karma" limit, at which point the account (mod or not) and all of its activity are deleted, and the owner has to sign up again and work their way back up from zero.
throwphoton··on The Intel Comet Lake Core i9-10900K, i7-10700K, i5-10500K CPU Review
It's becoming really difficult to figure out whether an X-core i5 is better or worse (even for a specific purpose) than a Y-core i7 or any other combination of [model, clock_speed, num_cores].

Last time I bought a machine I cut this Gordian Knot by not giving a shit, which has to count as some kind of failure of branding.

throwphoton··on Why Is This Website Port Scanning Me?
> It does not, however, sound like an attacker can establish arbitrary TCP connections

Maybe not, but what if the ports you have open actually are HTTP servers for development purposes? In that case wouldn't a website be able to crawl your unreleased work, and/or mess with what you're doing, with requests seemingly "out of nowhere"?

throwphoton··on Electrons May Well Be Conscious
I think you're combining consciousness and free will into a single thing. Consciousness lies in the subjective experience (in fact it seems like you allow for perception); whether you have any agency or are just a subjective experiencer "riding along" with deterministic fate is a separate matter.
throwphoton··on Two leading economists disagree about the flagging American Dream
Why should society accommodate "the gifted" instead of the other way around? Highly talented individuals almost intrinsically less in need of society's assistance.
throwphoton··on Electrons May Well Be Conscious
> I think the two are simply illusions

I've never understood this line of reasoning. If consciousness, in the sense of subjective experience ("qualia"), is an illusion, that what is being fooled? It seems to just push the question one level deeper without providing any insight.

throwphoton··on Timeline of the Far Future
> The year 300,000 will look similar to year 301,000 - despite being separated by a millennium - this is unthinkable at this point in time.

The Fermi Paradox is rooted in the idea that if alien intelligences were doing things that we could recognize, we should have seen them by now.

Perhaps they do exist, but have progressed so deeply into the unthinkable that we can't even.

Perhaps we will as well.

throwphoton··on So much of academia is about connections and reputation laundering
It's the correct asses though.
throwphoton··on Apple unveils biggest update to Logic since the launch of Logic Pro X
I'll tell you this much - if there were a good alternative to Logic that ran on Linux, I'd stop buying MacBook Pros. But I can't adjust to any other workflow, so I bought a new MacBook this year.
throwphoton··on Can AI Become Conscious?
This sounds like some kind of "cognitive homunculus" looking at itself in a mirror. Does it explain anything, or just push the question of what is perceiving the subjective experience one level deeper?
throwphoton··on U.S. FTC indicates it is looking at Zoom privacy woes
I wish I knew that before I installed it. Does the MacOS uninstall actually remove all traces of Zoom at this point?
throwphoton··on Bitcoin Halving Just Occured
I wonder how long people with large, leveraged positions are able to wait for that increase before they get nervous.
throwphoton··on The Office Is Dead
I think that was meant to sound Dilbert-esque, but really any business impacted by the probably inevitable recession, which manages to both stay afloat (with some cutbacks) and convert to a work-from-home arrangement, is probably being pretty competently managed. What you describe is probably a relatively good outcome with all that's going on.
throwphoton··on Population-level herd immunity against Covid-19 will not be achieved in 2020
The same philosophical discussion can happen with respect to raising the speed limit by 5 miles per hour; it will result in more deaths... is it worth it?

But letting Covid-19 run unchecked is more akin to raising the speed limit by 50 miles per hour. The prudent choice is not to go with it.

throwphoton··on Holocene Extinction
> We're the first species to potentially cause a global extinction event

There's evidence that cyanobacteria did it earlier, on an even more massive scale:

"...biologically induced molecular oxygen (dioxygen, O2) started to accumulate in Earth's atmosphere... causing almost all life on Earth to go extinct." [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event

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