Hacker News Reader

6502nerdfaceon Ask HN: What's your favorite HN post?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9561314

> The feeling of having a genuinely clean butt gives you the confidence you need to go crush it in the boardroom.

I still laugh about this sometimes.

6502nerdfaceon Show HN: Open-source search engine with 2bn-page index

Wow, the contrast between what this engine returns for that query and what google returns is amazing. Literally zero relevant links from the former and only relevant links from the latter. Search relevance is a serious high-science research problem, and it's going to be tough to compete with established players that have probably man-centuries' worth of proprietary research IP and some of the world's best scientists.

6502nerdfaceon Vim 8.0 released

The input sequence would be <C-v>10jI#<ESC> (I've just added escape at the end).

I'm guessing the delay you are referring to is the delay imposed by your terminal emulator (not vim) to detect the Escape key at the end that terminates visual block mode. If I'm right, you can quickly press "j" just after you press ESC, which should cancel the ESC-detection delay and cause your comment characters to appear instantly.

Edit: there's actually a few things that could be at play, including your terminal emulator, your screen/tmux (which is like another terminal editor, really), and vim's timeoutlen and ttimeoutlen settings.

6502nerdfaceon One-bit Computing at 60 Hertz

The same author also has a very nice and detailed description of another project, the "KimKlone" [0], which is basically a coprocessor for the 65C02 CPU, injecting itself onto the address and data buses in such a way as to implement new "opcodes" for the 6502, effectively giving it extra registers and instructions designed to hardware accelerate a FORTH interpreter.

[0] http://laughtonelectronics.com/Arcana/KimKlone/Kimklone_intr...

6502nerdfaceon Bride of Son of Cheap Video: The KimKlone

He describes the origin of the name ("Bride of Son of Cheap Video") here: http://laughtonelectronics.com/Arcana/KimKlone/BrideOfSon%20...

6502nerdfaceon SRL – Simple Regex Language

> array of pointers to pointers to characters

    Wouldn't that be char ***argv? (with three stars)

6502nerdfaceon IBM’s 24-core Power9 chip

I've always been a fan of HCF.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halt_and_Catch_Fire

6502nerdfaceon Overselling A.D.H.D.

It would be interesting to know if length of school day correlates with diagnosis rate (controlling for confounding covariates), or if, e.g., Montessori schools have fewer diagnoses than public schools (again controlling for confounding covariates like family income, etc.).

6502nerdfaceon How Silicon Valley's Palantir Wired Washington

Impressionistically, over the past 6-8 months or so, I've seen a lot of new resume flow coming out of Palantir (as a hiring manager at a large fintech co). I get the impression that they're bleeding talent.

6502nerdfaceon Journalists confused an opinion piece for an alcohol-cancer study

Yeah, one of the problems here is that speed is easier to measure than quality, and there's a natural bias to optimize for what you can measure.

6502nerdfaceon Headphones Everywhere

> Here in New York City, 90% of subway riders may be listening to headphones or engrossed in their smartphones, playing games, checking email, etc.

Plus ca change... https://web.archive.org/web/20151123053907/http://i.dailymai...

6502nerdfaceon Chasing Cats

I remember back when Slashdot was cool (i.e., 2002), there was a post [0] about a guy who built [1] a cat-door with attached camera and software that could detect whether the cat was carrying something in its mouth, and only allow the cat to enter the house if not.

[0] http://slashdot.org/story/24258

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20010405175311/http://quantumpic...

6502nerdfaceon Converting a Chest Freezer to a Fridge [pdf]

Lots of homebrew supply shops sell affordable, hobbyist thermostats to put between your chest freezer and the electrical outlet, or, with more work, to replace the freezer's built-in thermostat, in either case converting the freezer into a fridge. Good for lagering or serving small (~5 gal) kegs.

6502nerdfaceon Show HN: VR demo: shooting hoops, triggering score and confetti [video]

The thing that's most novel to me (not much VR experience, though) is how you convey the masses of held objects, given the lack of force feedback. It implies that the virtual hands have some kind of not entirely real existence in the simulation, or it's like you carry everything via an elastic string. A more "simulationist" approach would be to have the hands meet resistence to their movement, but that would break the linkage between player movements and visual feedback.

6502nerdfaceon Show HN: Randomly generated metal riffs using Web Audio API and React

The "safari bug" error message appears for me even though I'm using Google Chrome, not Safari, on my ipad. Is that intentional?

6502nerdfaceon The Fining of Black America

> a stationary bandit.

And a many-armed one, at that!

6502nerdfaceon Spry: a programming language inspired by Smalltalk/Rebol and written in Nim

> Someone need to make lisp without the parentheses [...] Throw in some strong imperative programming so that it's a lisp masquerading as C

This actually describes the R programming language pretty well. A lisp with C-like syntax and vectorized primitives.

6502nerdfaceon Amazon's express delivery service rattles Paris authorities

So, even though you "agree it is fine to prefer either solution," you are willing to use literal, blunt force against your own neighbors to prevent them from using the solution that they prefer? That's neither self-consistent nor very neighborly.

6502nerdfaceon Critical Update on DAO Vulnerability

> The terms of The DAO Creation are set forth in the smart contract code existing on the Ethereum blockchain at 0xbb9bc244d798123fde783fcc1c72d3bb8c189413. Nothing in this explanation of terms or in any other document or communication may modify or add any additional obligations or guarantees beyond those set forth in The DAO’s code.

Nice. So if the community ultimately succeeds in preventing the "attacker" from withdrawing his funds, which he acquired in perfect accordance with the DAO code, which is the entirety of the agreement, could he publicly bring suit for violation of contract?

6502nerdfaceon A Guide to Naming Variables

I've always considered it a dangerous idiom in dynamic typed languages like Python to create identifiers that differ from each other by only a single character (fruit/fruits), point to completely different objects, and are used in close proximity to each other. It's just asking for a hard-to-detect typo that will blow up at runtime.

6502nerdfaceon Is There an Artificial God? (1998)

> As a Christian, my own answer (in short) is that true "good" requires that people can choose to either do good or evil. The only alternative is a pretty clockwork.

This doesn't really address the problem. If god is omnipotent and created the universe, he could have made things so that evil is simply physically impossible, with no contradiction of free will, in the same way that I am physically unable to flap my arms and fly to the moon, and yet I still have free will. The fact that he didn't means he's either not omnipotent or not omnibenevolent (a contradiction for those who ascribe both properties to god). The onus would have to be on the theist to show how "no-evil" somehow logically contradicts free will; and it must be a truly logical contradiction if it is to be any constraint on omnipotence.

6502nerdfaceon $153M in Bill and Hillary Clinton speaking fees, documented

> In most EU countries they would be jailed.

I'm sorry, but I read TFA and I'm not sure what you could be referring to... is it illegal in most EU countries for an event organizer to pay an honorarium to their invited speakers? Or to pay for speech in general? Consider that many make an honest and honorable living in this way... For example, Stephen King has earned tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars for his speech.

6502nerdfaceon Dolphins as a model for alien intelligence

> So failing to conform to Zipf's law doesn't prove a signal is not meaningful, but [conforming] to it is likely to be very strong evidence that a signal is a form of communication.

Then again, Zipf's law is known to describe many non-communicative, "natural" distributions like the sizes of grains of sand, the sizes of asteroids, and the populations of cities (one of Herbert Zipf's original objects of study). And conversely, many levels of representation of human communication have non-Zipfian distributions, like phoneme distributions. (See my comment history for references.)

6502nerdfaceon Basic Income

Summary: GiveDirectly, a charity which has spent the past five years giving unconditional cash transfers to poor families in Kenya and other regions, will now begin a trial of basic income in multiple Kenyan villages, working with MIT researchers on the experimental design.

6502nerdfaceon Talk Obama to Me (video speech synthesizer)

A video speech synthesizer that automatically chops up video of Barack Obama and puts it in order so that he says whatever you want him to.

6502nerdfaceon Why Anti-Authoritarians Are Diagnosed as Mentally Ill (2012)

Yeah, GP is making a clever allusion to TFA, not actually accusing me of appeal to authority :)

6502nerdfaceon Why Anti-Authoritarians Are Diagnosed as Mentally Ill (2012)

Interesting, didn't know that; thanks! I wonder what Tolstoy and Montessori would have thought of each other's schools :)

6502nerdfaceon Why Anti-Authoritarians Are Diagnosed as Mentally Ill (2012)

I transcribed it (with added speakers' names) from my hard copy of Grube's 1974 translation, 2nd edition revised by Reeve in 1992. Agreed, I like the modern English fluency, and supposedly it's quite accurate, though I don't know enough Attic Greek to say myself.

Edit: Book VII, starting at 536d. You can compare against the public domain Jowett translation at http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/republic.8.vii.html (search in the page for "slave")

6502nerdfaceon Why Anti-Authoritarians Are Diagnosed as Mentally Ill (2012)

> Let me tell you that when I was a kid I loved to read, I read voraciously everything I could find, and I did because nobody made me do it.

Completely agreed, and this has been argued since antiquity. In Plato's Republic:

Socrates: Therefore, calculation, geometry, and all the preliminary education required for dialectic must be offered to the future rulers in childhood, and not in the shape of compulsory learning either.

Glaucon: Why's that?

Socrates: Because no free person should learn anything like a slave. Forced bodily labor does no harm to the body, but nothing taught by force stays in the soul.

Glaucon: That's true.

Socrates: Then don't use force to train the children in these subjects; use play instead. That way you'll also see better what each of them is naturally fitted for.

6502nerdfaceon Justice-as-a-Service

> The notion that anything other than a state (read: leviathan) can administer justice is a dangerously misleading notion since unless both parties agree to abide by the system then there is no consistent notion of justice (note that accepting your citizenship is tacit agreement).

Well, how Hobbesian! Of course, this is not the only possible conception of justice, which is, as Plato put it (in Jowett's translation), "sometimes spoken of as the virtue of an individual, and sometimes as the virtue of a State." But in either case, if we want to get all philosophical about it, I share your skepticism... if justice is a virtue, can we really have a virtue as a service (VaaS)?

Seriously, though, I don't think the OP's point is to propose administration of justice outside the state, but rather that certain tech advances can make it economically feasible for small, individual claims to be given a "fair shake" within the state system; claims which currently are too small to be worth a lawyer's---or even the claimant's---time without said tech.