Hacker News Reader

0x456on Open AI gets GPT-3 to work by hiring an army of humans to fix GPT’s bad answers

Does anyone know if Hacker News comments are being used as training data? I wonder this about Gmail, Skype, Voice Conversations on Xbox Live, etc. Mostly too afraid to ask because it sounds like paranoia.

0x456on “We removed the RSS feed since this technology became obsolete”

Even more sad when a Tech journal doesn't have an RSS feed, but posts to Facebook and Twitter instead. For example https://www.thenewatlantis.com/

0x456on “We removed the RSS feed since this technology became obsolete”

I still miss Yahoo Pipes.

0x456on Show HN: Emoji to Scale

Some of these don't show up for me (like Saturn). This might work better with a web-font? Although then you'd lose the harmonious platform emojis. I wonder if there's a way to check if a unicode character exists in a font and dynamically substitute, without using canvas.

0x456on How to Evaluate Startup Offers

Drag-along rights, with a waiver of appraisal rights?

0x456on Ask HN: Why is Node.js hated so much?

On the question of "is it hated", Stackoverflow publishes a survey every year on interesting questions like this. It doesn't get a lot of attention here for whatever reason.

https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2021#most-loved-dr...

0x456on Ask HN: Why is Node.js hated so much?

My guess is because:

- lots of people don't like Javascript

- lots of people don't like V8

- the guy who made Node.js (Ryan Dahl) doesn't like it either

- programmers think anything without thread support is a toy

I like Node.js, Javascript, and Ryan Dahl, and have no strong opinions on V8.

0x456on Ask HN: What do you wish you knew when you were a CS student?

That one day that new api or programming language you're just learning will be considered not only obsolete but dangerous.

0x456on The Wayforward Machine

This seems very likely extrapolating from current trends.

0x456on Ask HN: Why don't SSDs have built-in protections against excessive writes?

There's S.M.A.R.T. and a lot of freeware that can read it and tell you how much has been written to the disk. If only it were built into operating systems, with a graph, then you could set up warnings, like you can for overheating CPUs, etc.

0x456on Ask HN: What is your strongest contrarian opinion?

The irony of a topic like this is that the algorithm will put the least contrarian opinions on top.

Right now the most conventional/pedestrian opinion you could possibly imagine is listed first.

0x456on Show HN: I was playing with fundamental constants and 13.8 b years popped out

If you leave off the "to light years" conversion, you'll see that the units don't match up. A light year is a measure of distance (m). The result of this equation is 3.86×10^99 s^4/(kg^2 * m^3). How or why Wolfram decided to convert that into 13.82 billion light years is anybody's guess, but it's definitely wrong and nonsensical. You can't convert a s^4/(kg^2 * m^3) unit into just an m without more.

0x456on Steve Jobs: Let's force Amazon to use our payment system (2010)

A contrarian might ask "How many bugs were there in the HTML5 APIs that replaced it?" Probably fewer considering HTML5 is an open/modern code base? Some high profile ones in Audio though...

0x456on The first webcam was invented to keep an eye on a coffee pot

Eventually, a grumpy old man* will show up and mention teletype and time-sharing. Someone else will incorrect him saying cloud computing is different. I'd love to hear Peter Norvig and Bill Gates talk it over.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6Ztdp70peU&t=115s

0x456on Turing Oversold?

There is also the related "Matthew effect"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_effect#Sociology_of_sc...

0x456on The first webcam was invented to keep an eye on a coffee pot

Breakrooms also have a dark side:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peryton_(astronomy)

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/may/05/microwave-ov...

0x456on Larry Summers Visits America (2018)

Also available at:

http://larrysummers.com/2018/10/09/36229/

https://web.archive.org/web/20210820121158/https://www.ft.co...

0x456on September 11, 2001 media synced in real-time

They should include C-SPAN coverage.

https://www.c-span.org/video/?165916-101

https://www.c-span.org/video/?165959-2

The second link is a particularly disheartening time capsule of political discourse that morning.

0x456on Twenty percent of a picture of a dog

This article is about NFTs.

0x456on Project Horizon – Technical Considerations and Plans (1959) [pdf]

Here is the Wikipedia Article about this topic:

Project Horizon was a 1959 study to determine the feasibility of constructing a scientific / military base on the Moon

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Horizon

0x456on Colorado county's voting machines banned after security breach

There is also the Emmy Nominated HBO Documentary "Hacking Democracy", from 2006.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacking_Democracy

0x456on NDA expired, let’s spill the beans on a weird startup

Apparently surgeons can do something similar. The experienced surgeon you talked to is just there you get to you agree to surgery, without explicitly telling you a first year (poorly/un)supervised resident will do all the cutting.

0x456on NDA expired, let’s spill the beans on a weird startup

Often you'd see HN posts near the top, with few votes or comments. Although Rust sounds amazing, it has a Submarine* feel to it. Would the project be on the front page if the title didn't mention Rust?

I think Haskell had this problem years ago as well: it was like any obscure algorithm you'd lookup on Wikipedia had sample code ... in Haskell only.

* http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

0x456on The Greatest Regex Trick Ever (2014)

2600 word lead-up to "Tarzan"|(Tarzan)

This style of writing is just obnoxious.

0x456on NDA expired, let’s spill the beans on a weird startup

"We want to hire people like you to go and interview at other companies."

"During the interview, you'll evangelise our clients' products."

0x456on Google Internal Comics

Hopefully someday this will have a companion site, like https://www.explainxkcd.com/

0x456on Effects of cat ownership on the gut microbiota of owners

Shockingly, it also has an effect on the brain microbiota of owners:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3963851/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxoplasma_gondii

0x456on U.S. senators propose 25% tax credit for semiconductor manufacturing

Intel can just use TSMC to build their chips: https://9to5mac.com/2021/01/08/bloomberg-intel-considering-o...

If second place wasn't fatal for TSMC, AMD, or ARM, perhaps it won't be for Intel either?

0x456on ISS transit during solar eclipse

Beautiful shot. There was a particularly funny xkcd about this a few weeks in advance: https://xkcd.com/2463/