HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

A_Parr

55 karma · joined August 4, 2019

submissionscomments
A_Parr··on Where America's climate migrants will go as sea level rises
The irony is that it used to be an ocean before climate change covered everything in glaciers.
A_Parr··on James Lovelock: 'I Would Not Waste My Fortune on Colonizing Mars'
The fun part about those numbers is that Mars and Earth have roughly the same amount of CO2 in their atmospheres.
A_Parr··on Cigarette butts are polluting the ocean more than plastic straws
In 10 years, you won't be able to make that joke.
A_Parr··on An app that empowers people to review Vegan products. They donate $1 per review
Few enough people can be bothered to leave reviews for free, charging for them is going to drive that number even lower. So people paying for fake reviews need to buy fewer to get results.
A_Parr··on We Wasted $50K on Google Ads So You Don't Have To (2019)
The salesman exploits quantum physics by keeping what their company does in superposition until you collapse the waveform by revealing what you're willing to pay for. Instantly a developer at that company gets a bad feeling about something, but doesn't know what, until their manager walks over with a note from sales. They then retroactively do a bunch of work to have a deliverable by the next quarter.
A_Parr··on Normalization of Deviance (2015)
The Silver Stallion -- by James Branch Cabell

"The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true. So I elect for neither label."

A_Parr··on Ask HN: What Product to Build with Drones?
>What would be a great idea? We really liked the news about "drones planting 1 billion trees" or "drones doing surveillance of sharks in the bays".

Combine the two. "Drones planting 1 billion sharks in the bays"

A_Parr··on Tesla can sell vehicles in Michigan under legal settlement
A little background on why this was necessary is that the law already existed for decades to stop GM/Ford/Chrysler from doing the same thing, which was a very real threat to their industry. The bill simply changes a word to keep Tesla from using the loophole of not having a franchise to begin with.

From the article, it sounds like Tesla simply decided to become a used car dealer in Michigan as another workaround. It's not a settlement because nothing else has changed. The law didn't apply to selling used cars.

A_Parr··on Robot tanks: On patrol but not allowed to shoot
GITS is largely post-cyberpunk, but dips into cyberpunk for ideas. Mostly for it's antagonists. The cyberpunk driver of the post-cyberpunk tank being an interesting take on things, at least.

Clarification for those who don't know. Cyberpunk spun off of a bunch of genres that call themselves $name-punk but ironically ignore the -punk aspect and just replace $name for the name of the technology they replaced magic with in what's otherwise a fantasy story. (Including literally magic as technology.) Because cyberpunk was taken, the cyber version of $name-punk ended up being called post-cyberpunk instead of cyber-steampunk for whatever reason.

A_Parr··on Ask HN: What spectator sport would AI compete in?
I doubt you'll see mixed human/AI racing.

Even if you could trust the robot cars to run along side human driven cars, you can't trust the human drivers around the AI opponents.

A_Parr··on How Swedes were fooled by the book “Surrounded by Idiots”
You can say that about punching people in the face, too.
A_Parr··on McGill Pain Questionnaire [pdf]
[not a doctor, but...]

Saying that they sum everything is there to catch people trying to game the system by maxing everything out.

The first part gets you to describe your symptoms, the last 6 questions get you to rate your pain, and compare it to other likely painful situations you've experienced.

If you're too busy screaming and throw the clipboard back at them, you might need some help. Or you really know how to game the system.

A_Parr··on Shenzhen court rules AI-written article has copyright
Neuter a duck and it's a robot, got it.

Human level AI just got a lot easier to create.

A_Parr··on Ask HN: What do you use to protect your Linux box from malware?
ClamAV on Linux is mostly for checking for Windows malware in files that might end up on Windows.
A_Parr··on It’s not that just MMORPGs changed, but the whole internet culture
Ironically posted on Reddit unironically.
A_Parr··on So Long to ‘Star Wars’
A New Hope was genuine. Empire, was an allegory for George Lucas turning to the dark side.

Return of the Jedi was full sell-out.

I-III seem to be designed to maximize spite against his rabid fanbase, while pandering to the children which made him his fortune. Seeing how he hated his hardcore fans, and had good reason to, makes those movies genuine in the same way punk music is.

A_Parr··on How the US killing of a top Iranian general rekindled Kim Jong Un's worst fears
That's why they keep it over there.
A_Parr··on Dating apps need women. Advertisers need diversity. The AI solution: Fake people
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8419368.stm

"A Japanese man has exchanged vows with a woman he met in the virtual world - a character from a popular dating simulation game called 'Love Plus'. ..."

That was over a decade ago.

A_Parr··on Ask HN: What is the stigma against Wikipedia as an official reference
Either the Wikipedia article has a citation for the reference you should use instead, or it needs one and you shouldn't be referencing it.
A_Parr··on Impossible Pork
You were thinking out loud.
A_Parr··on 15ft tumbleweeds trap drivers and force Washington state road closure
If you meant red-eared sliders as "Florida turtles", they're ironically banned for sale in Florida because they became an invasive species there.
A_Parr··on Firefox considering off-by-default preference for loading user.js files
I've lost my voice from all the other features they've dropped over the last decade plus. It's all fallen on deaf ears, anyway.

They don't care about Firefox users, because they're not Chrome users.

A_Parr··on Amazon threatened to fire employees for speaking out on climate, workers say
The first part is proven by the voters re-electing the same people who made that decision.

The second part should be changed to that they're voting in the United State's best interests, which doesn't necessarily have to be society's best interest.

A_Parr··on Ask HN: What advice would you tell yourself ten years ago?
10 years ago, when you saw an those as an investment opportunity, and thought, "Who would be stupid enough to use this thing?" You and most other people (myself included) had a high enough opinion of humanity that we thought that number would be low.

The people who got rich asked themselves the same question but had a lower opinion of humanity.

A_Parr··on UK academics set to launch 'virus' software for online ‘hate speech’
'Partiality' seems fitting.
A_Parr··on Tell HN: Happy New Decade
If by kind of fits, you mean the entire problem? Yeah.

Of course, the epoch is so arbitrary that a decade means nothing anyway, whether or not it's a year off.

If people like numbers flipping back to zero, we should just tell time in binary.

A_Parr··on LibreCAD version 3 code license switching to GPLv3 in 2014 was illegal
Wow.

That basically kills the whole thing. Who knows what else was messed with without anyone noticing?

A_Parr··on LibreCAD version 3 code license switching to GPLv3 in 2014 was illegal
Not for switching to the GPLv3 license, but for removing the text of the previous MIT-style one when doing so. It's literally the one thing you can't do with the license.
A_Parr··on Lego Block Structures as a Sub-Kelvin Thermal Insulator
That's what they get for not picking up their toys.
A_Parr··on Are Humans Fit for Space? A ‘Herculean’ Study
The ISS is about the same distance from Earth that New York City is from Washington DC. It's technically still in the Earths' atmosphere.
Page 1 of 3Next →