Hacker News Reader

Detruson Ask HN: Ethical ads providers to monetize personal blog

https://www.carbonads.net/

I'm not sure what they track

Detruson Show HN: Hupreter – Create apps by describing them in English

Maybe works in 10% of cases.

I remember seeing a natural language to SQL engine which worked in 50% of cases so the expectation was higher. https://blog.einstein.ai/talk-to-your-data-one-model-any-dat...

Detruson Don’t we all just want to use SQL on the front end?

https://supabase.io/ ? MongoDB stitch?

Detruson American Airlines confirms UFO contact over New Mexico on Sunday

New movie coming out https://www.yahoo.com/huffpost/harry-reid-ufo-coverup-090047...

Detruson What I Worked On

Says somewhere that traction for Bel would be 20 users. Early traction.

Detruson The Rise and Fall of Ambrosia Software (2019)

My favorite was Ares. https://github.com/arescentral/antares

A unique combination of strategy and action.

Played a lot of Escape Velocity too. Those games were special.

Detruson South Korea's fusion device KSTAR runs for 20 seconds at 100M degrees Celsius

Lockheed Martin's approach does what you're talking about. Small, fast to iterate design.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlYClniDFkM https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/products/compact-fusion...

Detruson Computers Without Clocks – Ivan Sutherland (2002) [pdf]

By benchmarking them, like GeekBench does. And those benchmarks are the only thing interested parties rely on, not the marketed speeds.

Detruson Show HN: Grid – Multiplayer Creative Workspace

I'm guessing Evernote with a fun UI

Detruson Ask HN: Will Apple continue to be a major disruptor?

iPad Pro and iPhone 6S advertise 4K video editing capability that's only possible with custom chips, re-architected motherboards, etc. They could again be first in the industry to do something noticeably different. Here they're giving cheaper, low power, mobile devices capabilities that are otherwise only possible on desktops. Preferably $3000+ machines. That's what their vertical integration allows.

Although currently this 4K video editing on iPads is not working well.

Detruson A Plague of Helicopters In New York

And US/Soviet troops believed they were in Afghanistan/Iraq to liberate, plant trees and help locals.

In reality they were enforcing a colonial order https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvZRsdHgxgA and the locals are fighting back in an attempt to secure power locally, not give it away to foreign masters and watch them grow more powerful as a result.

We in the West must ultimately favor our own victory in such matters. The main reason ISIS must listen to is the West can't tolerate their insubordination, culturally and economically. It upsets the capitalist global order. We won't have enough trade with territories that chose not to develop economically in order to preserve old customs or prioritize local economies above ours.

Detruson A Plague of Helicopters In New York

Yes but those we call terrorists are more like upstart colonialist mercenaries and don't care about any of that. They only care about the opportunities our military response affords them.

Terrorism is a propaganda word used by the bigger powers precisely because it has misleading connotations.

Detruson Eve: My Concerns

In your #2 example, you'd have to pass the semantic meaning to it somehow. It doesn't look like a simple document database. There is logic and semantics. There is a total cost fact, which you'd update by saying total cost excludes employees that are "is:Quit" "is:Fired" etc. All the facts and queries on top of it would then work.

This is a similar idea and there is a long elaboration https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voG5-15aDu4

Detruson OpenDoc

And then https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FF-tKLISfPE

Don't forget Cyberdog https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xjkm_fSM1g

You could drag and drop files into that browser in 1997! Sadly some Youtube videos are hard to find.

Should be here somewhere https://www.youtube.com/user/EveryAppleVideo

Detruson David Bowie, an Internet pioneer

The interviewer's perspective was no less prophetic about the current reality. The internet is mostly a tool to spread the same old media type of content, just more and faster. A lot more America's Favorite Home videos and niche channels than were possible before. A lot more spam, gossip and passing notes, which is not very alien.

Engelbart also thought we would get somewhere alien. He underestimated the power of the mainstream.

Detruson The Key War on Terror Propaganda Tool: Only Western Victims Are Acknowledged

There are shorter videos from Chomsky on this, but this one breaks it down thoroughly https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvZRsdHgxgA

The truth is, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq are colonial wars against insubordinate populations. We extract resources from those countries and their neighbors. When someone stands in the way they have to be punished so that other countries stay in line.

There is little hope of winning hearts and minds with all the civilians that have to be killed. The main goal is to punish and make examples of insubordination. The West merely needs to scare them and their neighbors to get its way within a few decades. It worked well enough with Vietnam.

Detruson A Distributed Haskell for the Modern Web [pdf]

Urbit http://urbit.org is lots of fun

Detruson Smartphones, Posture, and Mood

Put a case for glasses under the back of the laptop.

Detruson How to Decimate a City

We're just living with the consequences and are used to them.

The result is inflation. Before new waves of immigrants and women joined the workforce, a single salary had more purchasing power. The effects are offset by certain goods becoming cheaper because of increased production. But other goods require two salaries when they previously required one. And people don't have savings, they have credit which makes up most of the purchasing power, trading it off for indentured servitude.

Salaries have not kept up with profits since the 1970's, but if they did there could just be inflation, not an increase in purchasing power and economic independence. Current regional salary bubbles around Silicon Valley and NYC cause regional inflation, particularly in housing. Its supply is limited by laws and tech. Same old tech housing is not a good that adds anything new to the economy.

If those workers want to enjoy the full benefits of their salaries in the form of goods, they have to save up and move to cheap boring areas. Such consumption is physically or emotionally impractical. I guess that's where Hyperloops come in.

Basic income could also lead to inflation. It's unprecedented and will have weird new consequences. The expectation with adding more workers was that more people would have economic freedom. The result is fewer people enjoy economic freedom, the middle class shrunk so more people have to work. If basic income doesn't remove a large percentage from the workforce or new sectors aren't added, the result will again be inflationary.

Kickstarter is economic freedom now.

Detruson Early 20th Century Technocracy Movement

Yea the overall economy makes decisions on what to manufacture. Do you make a bunch of entertaining fluff or focus on essentials? Wal-mart merely optimizes the supply chain of fluff.

As far as markets vs centralization, it was always this way. There was never a purely capitalist or communist society that lasted long and supported a large population. The argument was always the implementation and balance of centralization and privatization.

Starting from scratch in a radically different system is too disruptive, even if the final result would have been better. A lot has to do with culture, as people say you can write Java in any language. You have to change an existing system very slowly.

Detruson Early 20th Century Technocracy Movement

Soviet Union tried to do this through 1960's computers, surveys and experts.

Adam Curtis "documentary" is the extent of my knowledge on their attempts

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3gwyHNo7MI

It's a monumental complex systems problem. Besides the 1960's computers the Soviets were hampered by their utilitarian ideology that didn't take home decor into consideration.

Detruson Klong – a simple array language

What problems go away if you use a non-text IDE like http://peaker.github.io/lamdu/ ?

Detruson Strange Things That Have Been Happening in Financial Markets

That is a key feature of capitalism.

Detruson Scientists think antioxidants may make cancer cells spread faster

Well, scientists release studies, which are far from conclusive. Various industries use them to advertise to people who don't understand that studies mean nothing.

Detruson A New Golden Age Part III: The Basic Income Guarantee

I don't know either but it seems like yet another way of doing inflation. You can infuse money various ways and to various sectors of the economy. Quantitative easing, playing with interest rates, funneling 401K into stock indexes gives it to the rich. And prices for what they buy or where they live go up. The expectation is more money moves around, doing something useful. BIG should do the same for consumer goods and poor areas, increasing prices and maybe increasing economic activity.

Detruson Rise of the meta-platforms and the new 'web browser'

Yea, the browser based web keeps losing market share. First to mobile apps, now to dedicated document readers. Both performance problems. But the slow document problem is not very technical, mostly politics. There's no mechanism for enforcing requirements across a wild west of bloat.

Flash's demise was for similar reasons. Bloat caused by over eager developers gained it a reputation for slow loading times and unusable websites. In this case the usable web is punished too.

Detruson The real anti-Facebook is good old email

2630 lines of code to run Sublevel or posted by users? A small codebase is interesting for nerds. And yea it is snappy.

Detruson Stupid Apps and Changing the World

Yes financial reward and power wasn't properly distributed in these cases. But economic impact is not just about their individual success. It's economic.

Detruson Stupid Apps and Changing the World

Real impact is "low" and the market will reflect that after the hype settles. There wasn't much to pour money into at the start of this tech bubble/cycle so FaceTwitter got a lot more.

Every other business that doesn't aim to be some small boutique has growth and impact in the back of their minds, or got the idea after a taste of success.

And by far the biggest impact in computing has been from NLS-Mother of All Demos and Xerox PARC Smalltalk, who were aiming for exactly that. Measured in the trillions. Each individual startup's hyped up billion dollar share of this pie is small. As it should be, since they handle narrow subsets of functionality and can't even work seamlessly with each other. And most users can't deal with all the different UIs.

Detruson Stupid Apps and Changing the World

I was never good at mathy things, decent at abstract art.

The masses were already entertained by AOL chatrooms and ICQ. A lot of older people I see stay in touch with email, and they got each other's addresses by talking on the phone. And they use it exactly like facebook newsfeed, forwarding silly news stories to each other and not being able to format out the endless forwarding chain. They don't think a lick of the innovative engineering and billions of dollars behind facebook, because their batch of friends just forwards emails. I've heard some complaints about the terrible formatting, people asking to be taken off the lists, people not knowing how to do it, but it mostly works. Facebook confuses them too. Some only use Skype.

What is facebook when you boil it down to its real functionality?

Address book with photos

Event system for the address book

Mail forwarding between people in the address book

Filters for forwarded messages

Filters for people in the address book

Media storage and filters on who can view it

But mostly a UI that enables a larger percentage of casual computer users to use more of these features than they could in email. Takes the friction out of the forwarding messages use case. Sharing photos and the address book are in one place and searchable.

A single UI for a bunch of features that used to be a mess of separate UIs http://static3.businessinsider.com/image/4dd4d1cf4bd7c8c90f0...

And there are your entertained masses and billions of dollars. But what was it worth when half of those features were stuck in email?

The GUI and the way we organize programs is why we shoveled a bunch of these features from one place to another and made a big fuss about it when an unknown proportion of users started using more features than they did in email.