Hacker News Reader

CountSessineon Congratulations, Mini, you made the stupidest turn signals ever

This reminds me of the colour word test, where you have to say what colour a word is but the word itself is the name of a different colour. The cognitive conflict behind this is called the Stroop Effect and I wonder if this isn’t being inflicted on drivers behind these minis.

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

CountSessineon San Francisco’s quest for the perfect trash can

Maybe a gussied-up trash can is an excellent metaphor for 2021’s San Francisco? A city that can engage in world-class bike-shedding, but can’t deal with the entrenched interests and perverse incentives that make life miserable for so many of its inhabitants?

CountSessineon Intel is reducing server chip pricing in attempt to stem the AMD tide

I agree but this is a game you can play with your customers when they actually want what you’re selling and you have market power. When you’re losing ground and customers are leaving the shop, it’s time to cut the bullshit and give people what they want.

CountSessineon No Surprise, Uber and Lyft Lied About Helping Workers

And if there’s no business in charging riders 3x more for their ride? Throwing him out of work is an acceptable outcome?

CountSessineon CIA’s turn to admit to its fiasco

Why would Pakistan’s majority Punjabi people want to absorb more Pashtuns into their country? Pakistan is a democracy after all. Why would other countries do the same?

CountSessineon Climate change: IPCC report is 'code red for humanity'

That's 1 thing (the meat industry) whose carbon emissions are both direct (not supply-chain based) and wouldn't be captured by a petroleum+coal producers tax. Not thousands.

Meat production is about 15% of our global carbon emissions, so certainly it can't be ignored - but when the other 85% is coming from activity fueled by petroleum+coal, it doesn't make a lot of sense to throw up your hands to reject a carbon tax because there's "thousands" of emissions source (which ones?) which collectively amount to less than a percentage point of our carbon footprint.

We mustn't let the best be the enemy of the very, very good. A straight-forward carbon tax on fossil fuels is both enforceable, linear, and not that complicated. Can we ignore ranching and meat production? Of course not. So let's tax both.

CountSessineon Climate change: IPCC report is 'code red for humanity'

It doesn’t actually seem that complicated at all. Tax crude oil and coal. That’s seems pretty simple. Maybe there’s something I haven’t thought of.

CountSessineon Climate change: IPCC report is 'code red for humanity'

…which, seems like a good thing?

CountSessineon U.S. per capita carbon emissions are lower now than in 1918

Or... perhaps just by having everything manufactured in China? Which doesn't work so well when you're China?

CountSessineon A macOS-like operating system based on FreeBSD

But you can do this with XWayland?

CountSessineon A macOS-like operating system based on FreeBSD

XQuartz is not the primary MacOS compositor/renderer. It’s analogous to XWayland.

CountSessineon What's bad about Julia?

It interferes with the Julia REPL line discipline.

CountSessineon What's bad about Julia?

Ah good to hear. I wish I could edit my post. But vim bindings are nowhere to be found.

The good news I guess is that having a clumsy REPL has really gotten me into vim-slime.

CountSessineon What's bad about Julia?

I love julia and wouldn't mention this if I hadn't written a big chunk of data-analysis code with it...

It's a small gripe, but one thing that really bothers me is that they gave up on libreadline for the REPL (for what seem like fairly superficial build management issues, looking at the original email threads) in favor of a custom solution, which

* doesn't support vim-like or emacs-like keybindings, and

* won't read my .inputrc file and my customizations

It's just maddening using julia's REPL without this. It's easy to dismiss user complaints like this, but I can go back and forth between bash and into the python REPL and all of my line discipline actually makes sense, but then the julia REPL is broken and clumsy.

Also, pdb.set_trace() is a lot easier and more productive than what Debugging.jl has to offer.

CountSessineon “I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft” (2004)

10.4 (Tiger) was fantastic because it was the first version where the UI and the underlying file system drivers and bash were in-sync - in 10.3 you could delete a file in Terminal but the change wouldn't show up in Finder.

MacOS just kept getting better and better until sometime around Yosemite or El Capitan, with a small hiccup with Lion.

CountSessineon Ethiopia's controversial mega-dam on Nile tributary

Well that just makes me even more curious. How does a nation of 110 million, 70% of whom don’t even have access to electricity, have a GDP of $272 billion? $2700 GDP per capita would put Ethiopia in the ranks of the middle-income countries.

CountSessineon My proposal for scaling open source: don’t

I don’t want to waste mental capacity on someone’s dumpster-fire interface. I reserve that mental capacity for the task that I’m trying to accomplish with the tool.

CountSessineon The historical significance of DEC and the PDP-7, -8, -11 and VAX

Yeah - and when the first single-chip CPUs were made, they were extremely cut-down. Forget about TLBs and operating modes - the intel 4004 didn’t even have hardware interrupts! They had to dispense with any kind of interrupt-driven IO and instead had to poll hardware.

It was a big challenge getting an entire CPU on a single chip back then. Arguably, every single microprocessor from the 4004 to the 386 was just restoring features that the minicomputers originally had.

CountSessineon China beats US in patent filings for second straight year

Most of the primary research is NIH money handed out to university researchers. But then easily as much money is spent in human trials and that’s privately funded.

CountSessineon Git for Computer Scientists (2010)

The git plumbing and plumbing commands are straightforward and easy enough to understand once you read about them a bit (I recommend the free Pro Git book online).

The original git porcelain commands - git branch, git reset, git pull - are execrable. They’re filled with implementation details (index/cache vs staging), weird and suggestive syntax that seems like it should be extensible and widely applicable but isn’t (localbranch:remotebranch), and nuclear-powered self-destruct functionality hidden amongst playthings (git reset vs git reset —hard).

CountSessineon Temptation of the Apple: Dolphin on macOS M1

I don't keep contacts in the standard app so I wouldn't be allowed on Facebook anymore then.

Probably for the best. Social media is poison.

At some point they can just tell you to upload your contacts and drivers license via email or a web form if you want to use the app, WTF do you plan on doing then?

I'm really trying to help you understand why Google and Apple can't rely on OS-level caps and perms. If you don't understand how app devs can cheat you blind regardless of what system-level perms you set, you're clearly not an app dev. I can ID your device and send it encrypted back to my server. I can find your non-standard address book and read it off the user partition by nicely offering you a utility service like backup. It's gzipped and encrypted and sent back to my db and forget about your privacy. I can do a lot more on your ROM'ed android device than you expect, and I can do it all with permissions and a bit of social engineering.

Now just imagine what I can do with your grandma.

CountSessineon China will likely ban all Bitcoin mining soon

With that much computing power taken out of the network, how does this affect the network’s ability to even make a quorum?

CountSessineon Temptation of the Apple: Dolphin on macOS M1

It’s just a cat and mouse game. I see your address book and verify that the entries aren’t in your friends list and I ask again until you give me the real stuff. And then your ROM devs figure out how to make the data more convincing. And then I start running AI algorithms on it. It’s like captcha - there’s no end to the competition. And in the meantime you can’t see your timeline until you give me the real stuff.

Or, Google and Apple tell me to f*cking cut it out and threaten to toss me out of the App Store.

CountSessineon Temptation of the Apple: Dolphin on macOS M1

"Facebook wants access to your address book:

In order to view your facebook timeline and newsfeed, we need access to your address book. Please allow access.

Allow/Deny"

There's no automated capabilities-based OS-level permissions model that can protect against this. Accessing the address book is a legitimate app request - just not for Facebook Inc. in my opinion. But they can gate access to your timeline and friends by demanding it. And I guarantee you that 9/10 smartphone users will grant it. This is why you need curation and app store rules.

CountSessineon “Bush Hid the Facts”

You know I’d love to read a book about the Unicode standardization process. Unicode and the “16-bits is enough for all modern scripts” business must be one of the biggest failures of requirements analysis in computing history. And the fact that at the same time they were upsetting so many of their partners with Asian unification to me means there must have been a real issue with personalities and project responsibilities.

CountSessineon It's your device, you should be able to repair it

For one thing, I think it's an important point to make when someone else makes the, "look how repairability has regressed since the golden era of getting the Apple II schematics in the box with the computer!". At the time, design was cheap. Why not give it to your customers? It's not like they're going to go out and make one themselves.

The fact that manufacturing is cheap now and schematics are not only the key to repairability but also counterfeit Chinese knock-offs is a problem worth understanding.

CountSessineon It's your device, you should be able to repair it

This was in a very different era, when manufacturing was difficult and expensive. Having the schematic didn't necessarily get you anywhere. That's no longer the case - now the design is expensive but the manufacturing is cheap.

CountSessineon “They introduce kernel bugs on purpose”

I have to wonder what's going to happen to the advisor who oversaw this research. This knee-caps the whole department when conducting OS research and collaboration. If this isn't considered a big deal in the department, it should be. I certainly wouldn't pursue a graduate degree there in OS research now.

CountSessineon The U.S. corn belt has lost a third of its topsoil

I want this to happen too

CountSessineon The U.S. corn belt has lost a third of its topsoil

I'm kind of puzzled by this. Your post defies conventional wisdom (which you say is misleading). I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt because conventional wisdom is often misleading. But these links seem to indicate that in fact corn farmers ARE directly subsidized, both in terms of crop insurance (cheaper than market insurance is clearly a subsidy), as well as price protection. See that second link, especially ARC and PLC, which compensates farmers if their prices fall below benchmark rates set by Congress.

Is that not a direct subsidy? Are they wrong? (genuinely curious - your post is interesting enough that I felt I had to do some research to clarify my own thinking)

https://www.cato.org/commentary/examining-americas-farm-subs...

https://www.downsizinggovernment.org/agriculture/subsidies