Hacker News Reader

wamatton Chrome Widevine DRM can no longer be disabled

This all sounds really encouraging. I've become a vocal supporter of Firefox again since switching back a year ago. On that note, it may seem trivial to the average user, however it would be great if the powers that be could consider not forcing UI animation on the user without any possibility to disable it. IMHO one of Firefox's greatest assets is it's rich legacy in user choice and customization. Many users (myself included) reluctantly switched away for performance and security reasons back in the day. With that said and while sensitive people are a minority group, we do exist and UI animation can cause elevated stress and fatigue.

wamatton LEDs may cause retinal toxicity at occupational domestic illuminance

>LEDs being relatively bluer than incandescents or common fluorescent phosphors

There is nothing inherently bluer about LED technology. LEDs are readily available in color temperatures down to 1600K.

wamatton FreeDOS 1.2

Depends on whether one's utility function definition, includes the nostalgia parameter

wamatton To Slow Global Warming, We Need Nuclear Power (Op-Ed)

Although considered somewhat non-traditional, aneutronic fusion[1] approaches may have interesting possibilities on significantly smaller budgets than ITER

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneutronic_fusion#Current_rese...

wamatton To Slow Global Warming, We Need Nuclear Power (Op-Ed)

It's kind of unfortunate that the label "nuclear power" seems to inevitably bundle both nuclear fission and nuclear fusion into the same public policy debate. Their respective safety profiles couldn't be further apart.

While the economic risks for a failed nuclear fusion strategy can be argued, given even a modest chance for eventually producing large amounts of clean and safe energy output 24/7, should we not be pursuing fusion more aggressively?

wamatton To Build a Better Ballot

>The odds of the U.S. changing its voting methodology are so infinitesimal, I'm having trouble conceptualizing it.

You mean how Maine just passed Rank-Choice (Instant Runoff) voting as law? [1]

"On November 8 [2016], Maine voters passed Question 5 and became the first state in the nation to adopt Ranked Choice Voting for state and federal elections. The Yes On 5 campaign was led by the Committee for Ranked Choice Voting, a grassroots, Maine-based organization founded by former independent state senator Dick Woodbury of Yarmouth, and led by Kyle Bailey of Gorham." [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting

[2] http://www.fairvote.org/maine_voters_adopt_ranked_choice_vot...

wamatton Chrome 55 uses 30% less memory than 54

Good catch. All the quoted memory figures are for private memory.

The shared memory figures in the session test (10 tabs and 15 extensions) were all at 0 in both Chrome 55 and 54.

wamatton Chrome 55 uses 30% less memory than 54

For me the situation is perhaps not quite as clear cut. On the one hand I'm seeing nice improvements in the large memory hogging tabs. For example a typical reddit thread was reduced from 399 MB down to 295 MB.

On the other hand, it appears all extensions now have a >50MB memory usage floor. For example, the Authy extension was using 5MB under Chrome 54. It's now using 55MB on Chrome 55. Similarly the simple archive.is button extension went from 5MB to 55MB. That's a lot of RAM for spartan functionality.

For the record, I'm using the chrome://system/ page to compare before and after.

That said, it may be possible the additional memory usage for extensions may be a reporting change as opposed to an actual memory increase. Unsure either way.

wamatton Halite: An AI Programming Challenge

Here's one with a suprising comeback

https://halite.io/game.php?replay=ar1478706105-405156479.hlt

wamatton Spotify excessively writing to drive

Or do it with a one liner

perl -pi -e 's/VACUUM/xxxxxx/g' /Applications/Spotify.app/Contents/MacOS/Spotify

wamatton Minoca OS: A new open source operating system

Interix which later became, SFU (Windows Services for UNIX) and then finally SUA (Subsystem for Unix-based Applications) was initially developed in the 90's by Softway Systems, as an optional addon subsystem to the Windows family of OS's.

For the record, it did not ship built-in or as part of the kernel. Even within Microsoft, it seemed the project was in perpetual life-support-mode.

Still, I do feel a small pang of sadness. There was once a time in the early 2000's, where I would have loved to see this chimeral oddity succeed.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interix

wamatton Kattis Problem Archive

Nice to see this getting attention :)

So here's something rather unusual (or not?): While HN says I submitted this story 6 hours ago, actually I submitted it 2 days ago.

A HN Algolia search confirms

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=kattis or http://imgur.com/a/O0pws

At the time, I was a little surprised to see it not get upvoted more. OTOH it was kind of a slow period (Sunday evening IIRC). The original submission stayed for a few hours, then dropped off the frontpage with only a vote or two.

Which does make one curious, in what way could this occur? Had I bungled a planned HN launch? (and then maybe a mod helped out to resubmit). Or is there some other mechanism at work.

wamatton Paper Planes

That's a nice touch and yet it takes additional attention detail and time to implement. Which sort of makes one wonder what it would be like if browser defaults were inverted.

IOW tabs, by default, would become muted if they lose focus. With an optional flag to keep background audio playing, settable through JS.

wamatton How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

>This was actually a didactic piece.

As a matter of curiosity, would you mind unpacking this statement?

Not really sure if you mean to say the piece imparts a moral lesson. Or perhaps it relates to the writing aesthetics; Or something else

wamatton Some cities are taking another look at LED lighting after AMA warning

FTA '“Nobody says don’t watch television or use your computer after 9 p.m. because of blue lights,” he said.'

Yeah about that. Seems we have a ways to go still wrt nocturnal blue light usage and health advocacy.

wamatton Ripgrep – A new command line search tool

sure, FAT. OTOH some people think it's not a totally intractable problem

A cross-platform file change monitor with multiple backends: Apple OS X File System Events, BSD kqueue, Solaris/Illumos File Events Notification, Linux inotify, Microsoft Windows and a stat()-based backend.

http://emcrisostomo.github.io/fswatch/

https://github.com/emcrisostomo/fswatch

wamatton Ripgrep – A new command line search tool

On a somewhat related note.

There does not appear be a popular indexed full-text search tool in existence.

Think cross-platform version of Spotlight's mdfind. Could there be something fundamental that makes this approach unsuitable for code search?

Alternatively, something like locate, but realtime and fulltext, instead of filename only.

wamatton Researchers quantum teleport particle of light six kilometres

> I think phenomena are the atomic building blocks of science

Lacking context, this could seem somewhat opaque.

Would you mind clarifying which definition of "phenomenon" you are intending to convey? (eg Kantian or otherwise)

wamatton Anker launches sister brand for home automation

Agreed. Anker does indeed seem to be notable in the way of quality.

That said another contender for this category, may be Aukey. Although somewhat opaque, they appear to be a Chinese company founded in Germany.

While I can't speak to any of their cable products, the power adapters are simply marvelous in my experience.

wamatton Deep Reinforcement Learning to Play StarCraft

That's a good point and not really correct to conflate the two.

It would then seem to suggest, that forces with more than say, 5 units (780 average sustained APM) and above, would likely be getting into super human territory.

wamatton Deep Reinforcement Learning to Play StarCraft

Generalized reasoning in strategy games AI is an especially difficult problem for machine learning. IRL, top StarCraft players routinely model their opponents mental states and psychology to create an edge.

So perhaps it's worth pointing out, that this paper specifically addresses a sub-problem of Starcraft play, micromanagement ('micro') [1]

The game engine runs at 24 frames per second. (As an aside, 'frames' in this context likely does not map to physical FPS of the display).

>We ran all the following experiments with a skip_frames of 9 (meaning that we take about 2.6 actions per unit per second).

The research team found that attempting to move at a superhuman pace (eg one action every frame), resulted in a subpar performance and hyper-parameterization indicated 2.6 to be an ideal action per second.

In context, this translates to an APM of 156. Or, roughly half that of professional Korean e-athletes. [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromanagement_(gameplay)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actions_per_minute

wamatton To tell someone they're wrong, first tell them how they're right

Also very rarely do beliefs exist in isolation. They're usually a part of a framework or ideology. Seeing that greater context, I would imagine, helps to empathize with the other party's POV.

wamatton To tell someone they're wrong, first tell them how they're right

> I'm constantly amazed at people who think their genius is so valuable that anyone would put up with their rancid personality.

Devils advocate here; Isn't this an example of displaying a superior attitude and the sort of the thing you're claiming to be against?

wamatton I Accidentally Some Machine Learning – My Story of a Month of Learning Elixir

Like numerous other memes, this too originates from 4chan. A poster on /b/ back in 2008 wrote:

"I accidentally 93MB of .rar files” and the rest is history.

wamatton Scientists pave the way for large-scale storage at the atomic level

Indeed, reducing 100 datacenter cabinets to one or two, seems like an attractive economic incentive.

wamatton Shedding light on the dark web

Would be great if we had a word for this. The word 'conspiracy' tends to derail conversations because as you say, it doesn't quite fit.

wamatton I Was Wrong About Speed Reading: Here Are the Facts

That's an interesting idea. Do you find it works equally well with non-fiction and fiction?

wamatton Bloody Plant Burger Smells, Tastes and Sizzles Like Meat

Nice to see how HN sentiment appears to have shifted towards greater acceptance or even excitement towards meat alternatives.

For comparison here is the thread from 2012 on the Twitter founders investment in Beyond Meat

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4330247

wamatton Why I think TheDAO is a Success

A side project DAO no-one cares about? Perhaps it's better to view this in non-binary (success/failure) terms.

TheDAO has after all, captured a significant amount of momentum, interest and capital.

wamatton Uber users with low phone batteries more likely to accept surge pricing

You might want to check out Lyft. Been using their 'Line Ride' product as it's currently 50% off (at least in Bay Area).

If their growth team wants to throw VC money our way to keep me on board, why not? Recently commuting from Palo Alto to Mountain View pretty regularly and paying around $7/$8. PS Not affiliated, just a happy user.