HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

treerunner

96 karma · joined December 22, 2014

submissionscomments
treerunner··on Bark – Text-prompted generative audio model
Can someone briefly explain how a model for a specific language is made for this tool?
treerunner··on The Real-World Costs of the Digital Race for Bitcoin
Unfortunately, politicians are too busy playing culture war to dig deep on policy for just about anything. They choose inaction, they choose ignorance.

Carbon aside, it will be interesting to see how this plays out in Texas, where the electrical grid is tenuous.

But to your point, looking at things from sustainability minded perspective (and even opting to ignore value of product as it stands right now), why yes, BTC is bad.

treerunner··on Why human societies developed so little during 300k years
Maybe the biggest advancement in societal development is the idea that in some ways, many ways actually, non-development is the most advanced form of development.
treerunner··on Apple Music Classical
Many types of music have additional requirements, at least for discovery. For example, how about cover songs? It would be nice to find every available version of All Along the Watchtower. This is not unique to classical so why not fix in the parent app?
treerunner··on Apple Music Classical
That’s even more crazy.

Patching one app into another for improved UX and categorization is bonkers.

Also, my kid wanted to use Apple Music classical first thing this morning (he’s a big classical music nut), you literally have to be logged in to regular Apple Music before Classical will allow you to play anything. Weird.

treerunner··on Disqualified from a National Web Design Competition for Using GitHub
One fallacy of web design, of any design, is that in order to be “good” it must be easy.

Sometimes there is a learning curve. Conceptual hurdles abound with a complex tool like GitHub. Working through hurdles help you grow as a technologist and as person —but having the right attitude going in, that’s on you.

treerunner··on A legal dispute that will test the limits of fair use
It’s worth noting that this particular Warhol piece was done much later in his career after he had established his style. Usually he didn’t even execute the work, it was done by assistants in the studio. This painting of Prince is an example of Warhol as art business — which incidentally was one of his statements as an artist.

Opinion: bout the photo and the painting are actually not very good representation of either artists work. I imagine both the photo and the painting would be considered unimportant if it wasn’t for this legal wrangling.

There are many ways that this issue could be approached. For example, could Warhol be allowed fair use in execution but, post-mortem, his estate pay? After all, one thing that the author of the article did not go into is that this argument is really no longer about the creative act.

treerunner··on U.S. appeals court rejects big tech’s right to regulate online speech
Publish all content to blockchain and let the users create their own interfaces as they choose. But first make all content equally and indisputably available?

I’d be cool with this.

treerunner··on U.S. appeals court rejects big tech’s right to regulate online speech
If filtering is not publishing then what is it? Do we need a new term for this arrangement?
treerunner··on U.S. appeals court rejects big tech’s right to regulate online speech
Yes! Absolutely.
treerunner··on U.S. appeals court rejects big tech’s right to regulate online speech
Yet Facebook and Twitter literally base their business model on sorting out what you get to read. These companies manipulate access to speech when their algorithms decide what you like — and yes, this includes ads.
treerunner··on You can create a great looking website while sucking at design
This article is a recipe for ensuring you look just like thousands of other websites out there.
treerunner··on Apple unveils the best photos from the Shot on iPhone Macro Challenge
I get the feeling that iOS runs photos through a neural net filter by default. It would be nice to know exactly what is behind any given shot, both my personal images and those of a collection/competition like this. Thus armed with knowledge, only then can we truly judge for ourselves.
treerunner··on Quit Your Job
Lost me at California as center of universe. And again with the musk name drop. So much for off the beaten path.
treerunner··on Safest mushrooms to forage and eat
Morels are a spring mushroom.
treerunner··on L-Arginine potentiates radiation therapy for cancer
And in the bedroom
treerunner··on How to track users for analytics in a privacy-first, cookie-less future
The reality is that the people doing the tracking are the real users. What a boring relationship to the network - tracking and spying, and grifting.
treerunner··on Archaeologists train a neural network to sort pottery fragments for them
I was trained in Archaeology as an undergrad. I have considered neural nets as a possibility for classification tasks that may otherwise be time consuming. But the material still needs to be collected, cleaned and catalogued by human hands. There are steps along the way where skilled humans can classify objects. The neural net might be a way to confirm or flag human decisions but I would not rely on it as a primary means of classification. The things that are interesting are on the edges of any classification. Transitional artifacts or anomalies. For these you will need human interpretation. Also, I do begin to wonder why we would even bother if no human will be interacting with a given artifact, why not leave it in the ground undisturbed? If that’s even possible. But I start thinking, with the ease of AI, if we are painting ourselves out of the picture. Like using GPT3 to respond to emails as a solution to the problem of too many emails. And imagine the respondent doing the same.
treerunner··on What I learnt roasting 200 landing pages
This is how you architect a boring web.
treerunner··on Based Cooking
Web site as functional editorial. I really appreciate the effort and hope it continues to emerge into a good resource.
treerunner··on IBM is splitting itself into two public companies
Thomas J Watson Sr. was a salesman.
treerunner··on IBM is splitting itself into two public companies
What a long, drawn out departure from Eliot Noyes’ techno-corporate utopian dream this has been.
treerunner··on Salary Negotiation: Make More Money, Be More Valued (2012)
Yes, but what are you making?
treerunner··on The Comeback of Fun in Visual Design
Bringing back skeuomorphic ornamentation is not “fun.” Susan Kare’s original Mac icons, (bitmap icons, not that it matters), now those were fun!
treerunner··on Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)
Loading data isn’t!

It’s simply not possible to make a blanket statement like this. Computers today are so very different and have so many more layers than those from 1983.

I recently refurbished an old Mac Plus. Of course I couldn’t leave it stock, booting from floppies was simply too ridiculous.. So it boots from Zip. Anyways, once I had this machine up and running I was quite surprised at how snappy the interface is - once everything was in place - and that’s the difference. The old interface is paper thin and has nothing going on, no asynchronous, little to no threads, it is just what it is.

treerunner··on The highest paid athlete of all time was a Roman Charioteer
Really? This doesn’t sound very different to me.
treerunner··on WLW: America's 500,000 watt radio station (2015)
Watch Outer Limits, Galaxy Being episode!!!
treerunner··on Why I Write CSS in JavaScript
Bother for human rights. "Javascript" is costly too - but maybe not your concern since it's not a business cost.
treerunner··on My First 10 Minutes on a Server
I always change the ssh port to something other than 22. It has always seemed to work well for me for most automated attacks. Perhaps this is not advisable for some reason?
treerunner··on My First 10 Minutes on a Server
I run a web server with some 50+ Wordpress installs on it. You better believe Fail2Ban is necessary. Without it all resources would be consumed by brute force attacks. If someone knows of a better way I would like to hear about it.
Page 1 of 2Next →