HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

ythn

448 karma · joined November 13, 2016

submissionscomments
ythn··on Twitter Will Show Who Pays for Ads and How Much They Spend
Won't this just lead to "laundering" platforms like what happened with Whois?
ythn··on Negative Base
You failed because:

> One is counterfeit and is either heavier or lighter

It turned out the counterfeit was lighter and you discarded it after the first weighing.

ythn··on Slack outage: Connectivity issues affecting all workspaces
In my company we use Cisco Jabber for official comms but Slack unofficially. So when Slack goes down, we fall back on Jabber.
ythn··on Toward a Mature Science of Consciousness
> In this instance, I feel creating something that behaves like a normal brain would not straightforwardly lead to an understanding. In the contrary, it may left us with more questions than answers.

Depends on what level of abstraction you create it.

Two examples:

1. a person creates a complex video game using assembly language (Roller Coaster Tycoon). It can probably be said this person understands very intimately how every aspect of his game works at every level of the computer.

2. a person creates a complex video game using <Unity, Unreal, etc.>. It can probably be said that the person understands how their game works at a high level, but lower levels (memory, OS, graphics) are still magic to that person.

ythn··on FDA approves first marijuana-derived drug and it may spark DEA rescheduling
> is a health issue not a criminal one.

It's both. Some drugs are so powerful, that you will lose your moral compass and do anything to secure more of the drug, including harming others. So, while I agree for the most part, certain hard drugs like heroin will have you mugging old ladies as soon as you run out of money.

ythn··on Hundreds of skulls reveal massive scale of human sacrifice in Aztec capital
It's almost as if God was helping Abraham understand what He felt like sacrificing His own son (Jesus) to the world.
ythn··on Teens Who Hacked Microsoft's Xbox Empire and Went Too Far
Great article, and was happy to see they got reasonable prison sentences.
ythn··on Seximal: A better way to count [video]
Maybe he meant you don't end up with a number with infinite digits?

10/4 = 2.5

vs.

10/3 = 3.33333...

ythn··on Ask HN: What’s your “Everyone has a price” experience?
> Please share your experience which validates this point

Sound like your story actually invalidates this point. You didn't have a price - you refused and didn't cave.

ythn··on Why China doesn’t dominate soccer
> American mainstream sports tend to rely heavily on the authoritarian figure of the coach, who draws up plays for obedient players to execute.

Which sports is the author referring to other than American Football? I played volleyball, and the coach had little control over the way a serve would play out other than which players were on the court.

ythn··on Is There a Smarter Path to Artificial Intelligence? Some Experts Hope So
> The idea that artificial intelligence will be achieved by adding a few layers to a "deep" neural network, or by throwing more data at it is laughable.

It's called "cargo cult science" and it's an important part of the AI hype train to keep funding coming.

ythn··on YAML: probably not so great after all (2017)
C++ is the worst offender: .cpp, .cxx, .cc, .h, .hpp, .hh, etc.
ythn··on YAML: probably not so great after all (2017)
From a reddit comment: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/8shzcu/yaml_pr...

Seems like YAML tried too hard to be predictive of intent. I never got into YAML myself simply because it seemed like "JSON, but less ubiquitous and more hassle to find libraries that support it"

ythn··on Harvard Rated Asian-American Applicants Lower on Personality Traits: Lawsuit
I thought it was funny
ythn··on Dell XPS 13 Review from a lifelong Mac user
> WiFi is super shitty in XPS series.

Holy cow, yes. My wife's XPS 13 had the crappiest Killer WiFi card, and Dell would not acknolwedge that it was the source of all of our issues no matter what I tried, no matter what evidence I presented. The WiFi card was causing all sorts of issues from slow browsing, to the entire computer freezing on restart/shutdown, to no WiFi after wake up from sleep... the list goes on.

I finally rage quit after a session with Dell support had me run hours of meaningless diagnostics tools and then said everything was ok and to check my router. I told them right from the get go that I suspected the Killer WiFi card was faulty, but the technicians always ignored that piece of info.

I bought an Intel 8265 to replace the Killer WiFi card, and when I went to replace it, the antenna ball broke off of the Killer card and was stuck inside the little socket! There was a tiny flake of solder I was able to grab with my finest pliers and pull it out, allowing me to install the Intel card. After installing the Intel card EVERY SINGLE PROBLEM described earlier went away.

https://www.amazon.com/Intel-8265-Generic-2230-8265NGWMG/dp/...

$30 was all it would have taken to make the XPS 13 from a piece of garbage to an awesome laptop. I'm already paying $1000+, why not $1030+? But now, I will never buy another XPS again because it required 10+ hours of my time to troubleshoot and fix all by myself.

ythn··on The Peter Principle Revisited: A Computational Study (2009)
If I were running the company, I'd just masquerade the demotion as a promotion:

1. Promote from principal engineer to technical manager

2. 2 years later -> this person sucks at management but they were a great engineer

3. "Promote" from technical manager -> principal engineer level 2

ythn··on The Peter Principle Revisited: A Computational Study (2009)
Why not just have a configurable threshold (say, 2 years) where if the promoted person is determined incompetent in their new role, they are bumped back down to their previous role (keeping their same pay) where they are more efficient/competent.
ythn··on Sexual harassment is rife in the sciences, finds landmark US study
Yes, exactly! Concisely put. That is my concern, supported by the StackOverflow survey results a few months ago
ythn··on Sexual harassment is rife in the sciences, finds landmark US study
Yes but must we always have Big Tobacco funding tobacco studies, Big Beer funding alcohol studies, etc.? It makes your publication reek of bias.
ythn··on Sexual harassment is rife in the sciences, finds landmark US study
Apparently my original comment was flagged and removed (I don't know why - maybe a moderator can shed some light). It said:

> I read an article (semi) recently posted here where women and other minorities felt attacked on Stack Overflow because of their gender/color, even though they were (for all intents and purposes) anonymous! Could this be the case here as well - women interpreting something that's not sexual harassment as sexual harassment? I.e. if a professor criticizes a woman's paper, she might interpret that as an attack on her gender, even if it isn't: > The most common type of sexual harassment is gender harassment, the report finds. Such behaviour conveys the impression that women do not belong in the workplace or do not merit respect — “the put-downs as opposed to the come-ons”, Johnson says

Is this self-reported harassment? If so, a "put-down" is highly subjective and the SO article shows that women and minorities can take extra offense where none was intended.

ythn··on Sexual harassment is rife in the sciences, finds landmark US study
> Also, why is the solution 'women and minorities need to toughen up' (If that's not the intended reading of your comment, feel free to clarify)?

That's not the sole solution, no. But that's still part of the solution. If a woman or black man feels attacked for their gender/color even when anonymous... that means they've been conditioned to take offense by default and we need to figure out how to remove said conditioning as the default response.

My point is that getting negative feedback on an assignment, for example, is not necessarily sexual harassment. If the negative feedback specifically calls out gender, then yes, but I'm afraid a lot of these cases are just women being offended that they got negative feedback even if they would have gotten the same feedback had the assignment been submitted anonymously. Then again, I haven't read the publication.

ythn··on I Quit My Job to Live on Donations to Zig
I hate this elitism attitude people have like everyone should have taken a 101 for every topic in the universe. If all bugs are shallow given enough eyes, all problems are "X 101" problems given enough people.

"So and so helped me fix a hard problem"

"Isn't that just [problem category] 101?"

ythn··on Behind the Messy, Expensive Split Between Facebook and WhatsApp’s Founders
What's the definition of "low income"? It would vary wildly from country to country.
ythn··on Depressing and faintly terrifying days for the C standard [pdf]
> and document the behavior it will follow.

So it's unspecified in terms of the standard, but specified by the implementation

ythn··on De Beers admits defeat over man-made diamonds
Why make an aircraft wing out of diamond when you could make it out of graphene?
ythn··on GDPR for lazy people: Block all European users with Cloudflare Workers
> Everything spelled out in the GDPR is a great thing for users and should have been there from the very beginning - being able to erase all their data, see all their data, export their data, and get notified when data is accessed.

I hate this "empowering users" philosophy of the EU. It's reminiscent of "right to be forgotten" type regulation where EU believes users should be in control of "their" data, when it reality it isn't "theirs" to begin with. Once data is "public" you can't ever "erase" it because it's not "yours". I'm sorry, if you shoplift in my store (online or no), I'm keeping track of you no matter how much you demand that I erase "your" information.

ythn··on GDPR for lazy people: Block all European users with Cloudflare Workers
To me it seems like a case of wanting to have the cake and eat it too.

"I want to use your free service without participating in your monetization model. K thanks" -- EU citizens

ythn··on StumbleUpon closing after 16 years, accounts can be migrated to Mix
Just unsubscribe all subreddits, and only opt-in to interesting, niche communities. My feed got 10000x less toxic after I unsubbed from /r/politics, /r/news, and the like
ythn··on Amazon device recorded private conversation, sent it out to random contact
Such a system would be a huge GDPR nightmare. You'd need consent from every visitor to your house to collect data on them, and also you have to delete it if they ever request you to. Best not to even try.
ythn··on Adobe Photoshop 1.0.1 Source Code (2013)
The original GameMaker was written in Delphi, iirc!
← PreviousPage 3 of 23Next →