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GuiA

20,066 karma · joined October 10, 2011

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GuiA··on Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive
That’s a very good point. One line of thinking I’m interested in is social networking over email.

Everyone has email, so you could imagine a social networking app that’s just a thin layer over your email, and every interaction is encoded as an email being sent under the hood. Want to share a picture with your friends? Send an email. Someone wants to comment on it? They just send an email. Etc.

The main purpose of the app would be to offer a nice, device responsive, consistent presentation. Additionally if this were an open, documented standard, an entire ecosystem of “email apps” could emerge.

(Of course as far as your actual email account goes you’d want to auto archive the emails + not get notifications for them, but that’s easily configurable)

GuiA··on Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive
What you’re referring to is splitting the presentation from the content. The server (eg Facebook) provides you with the content, and your computer/software displays it to your liking (ie without ads and spam and algorithmically recommended crap).

There’s a lot of history around that split, and the motivation for HTML/CSS was about separating presentation from the content in many ways. For another example, once upon a time a lot of chat services ran over XMPP, and you could chat with a Facebook friend from your Google Hangouts account. Of course, both Google and Facebook stopped supporting it pretty quickly to focus on the “experience” of their own chat software.

The thing is that there is very little money to be made selling content, and a lot to be made controlling the presentation. So everyone focuses on the latter, and that’s why we live in a software world of walled gardens that work very hard to not let you see your own data.

There is some EU legislation proposal that may make things a bit better (social network interop), but given the outsized capital and power of internet companies i’m not holding my breath.

GuiA··on Ask HN: If you could work remote where would you live?
On a small sailboat outfitted with batteries and solar panels. Ideally I'd dock only once every few days to take meetings/sync my data/connect to the internet, and then head back to open waters.
GuiA··on How a star explosion may have shaped life on Earth (2015)
Read Nick Lane’s The Vital Question. He goes into a somewhat related line of thinking about energy transfer in hydrothermal vents and what could have led to primitive structures that lead to life.
GuiA··on A Hidden Origin Story of the CBD Craze
It’s a well debunked meme, see this thread https://twitter.com/danalarsen/status/1167941723969900544
GuiA··on London may have gone into a Covid-accelerated decline
You don't know what things will be like by the end of the year.

As long as 1) the virus is still around, 2) we do not have a vaccine, 3) we have not reached a certain level of herd immunity, policy making should be based on the day to day data that we have, and about the immediate term.

Perhaps the evolution of the situation means that it will be safe to be back in the pub celebrating with your buddies for Christmas. But then again, perhaps not. We don't know.

Claiming broad things like "I will be back in the pub by the end of the year" is not about sensible decision making, it's pure emotion and is not what we need right now.

GuiA··on London may have gone into a Covid-accelerated decline
> I'll be in the pub by the end of the year.

"The war will be over by Christmas."

GuiA··on Show HN: A dependently-typed programming language with static memory management
Interesting analogy, but people are using Haskell, Prolog, etc. in production... if I were to stick to the comparison, I'd suggest that projects like Lighttable are more akin to the runway outfit.
GuiA··on What Unity Is Getting Wrong
Building your own thing is fine if you're solo. When you start having to collaborate with e.g. artists who expect their assets to render the same way they do in their editor, or a game designer who needs to edit levels in the engine, etc., then you introduce a bottleneck due to the fact that some people are working on the engine, and others on the game that depends on the engine.
GuiA··on Breathing habits are related to physical and mental health
Maybe you'd feel way worse if you didn't do it.
GuiA··on The Kawaiization of Product Design
Your comment ends at your claim but you do not provide any sources, evidence, or reasoning.
GuiA··on The Kawaiization of Product Design
The way these things tend to go is more that some illustrator does something a little different, others see it and like it, it spreads, and it’s now the new mainstream, until it all repeats again.

The ideological bent you choose to read into it is... interesting.

FWIW “large heads tiny limbs” has been a thing many times in the history of art, look at eg late 1800s caricatures

GuiA··on Surviving Depression
It’s hard to bring up that point without being misunderstood. While therapy can obviously be incredibly positive, like any discipline it suffers from a large proportion of mediocre practitioners, and a smaller but more dangerous proportion of harmful practitioners.

My personal experiences with mental health professionals (over several decades, in multiple countries) were unhelpful at best, and at worst they included things like recklessly prescribing medication (within 10 minutes of the first meeting), relying on outdated junk science, pushing for more appointments/making it very hard to end the patient relationship, etc.

Considering that many people who are likely to go to a therapist are likely to be in a vulnerable place to begin with (doubly so for children/teenagers), the recent wave of blind faith in therapy and the belief that “go see a mental healthy professional it can only make things better” is reckless.

GuiA··on Singing is the most accessible stress reliever
I've found that the lag impacts even day to day speech. Turn taking cues are all out of whack, and I notice that e.g. my teammates interrupt each other significantly more. It makes conversations in groups larger than 4-5 people very awkward.
GuiA··on Nintendo 64 Architecture – A Practical Analysis
If you made a video of the slides with a recording of your voice over it and posted it on Youtube, I’m sure you’d get a great response
GuiA··on WorldBrain's Memex: Bookmarking for the power users of the web
I suspect you may have misunderstood the spirit of my comment. I believe that computing should be accessible to everyone, and can guarantee that the harsh thoughts you put in my head are far from my intent.

Let's say you want to enable someone to make coffee at home. One could imagine two different approaches:

a) you give that person a bean grinder, some equipment to match their taste (e.g. an espresso machine or a chemex), and teach them how to make a tasty cup of coffee in their kitchen.

b) you give that person a nespresso machine, and tell them to order capsules once a month from amazon.com

Computing used to be much more like the former approach, philosophically. The foundations that we rely on today were about small, composable, modular programs, operating using well documented open standards and protocols. This approach gave us things like UNIX/POSIX and the internet.

However, mainstream computing has shifted towards much more about the latter kind of approaches. You stay in the walled gardens, you have no way to directly manipulate your data, and you're reliant on _features_ to get anything done.

In our previous coffee example, "pulling a long shot" would have to be a "feature" on the Nespresso machine, that the designers at Nespresso decided to surface on their machine as a switch of some sort for the end user to access. For approach a) though, it's something you can naturally do as part of the process.

One could also argue that a) is also maybe more aligned with the hacker ethos.

That's where my frustration at overzealous productization in computing comes from.

That's not even getting into how approach b) tends to be consistently worse for the environment and society.

GuiA··on WorldBrain's Memex: Bookmarking for the power users of the web
That’s the software economy we’re in. Everyone’s thinking in terms of “productization” and “features” and “user journeys”. Only old grumpy hackers care about minimal, composable tools anymore. Sigh.
GuiA··on 17yo guy built 14.7“ f/2.89 Newtonian reflector telescope
That's one thing I was definitely envious of American teens of, as a French teenager. I did odd jobs for family friends etc., but that was a few hundred euros every few months at most; I was jealous of my internet friends in the US who were making the same in a week or so by working at the local coffee shop/tee shirt store.

They could drive too, which I cared less about because buses/subways/trains seemed much less of a hassle and much safer.

GuiA··on Ronin – A Lisp-based image processing tool
Check out acme/plan9. Lots of similar cursor/content/programming synergies.

There are entire parallel end user computing universes out there that we have barely scratched the surface of.

GuiA··on Ronin – A Lisp-based image processing tool
They complement each other. There are certain things that I’d love to pull up a command line for (e.g. quickly aligning dozens of objects using a non trivial heuristic); but on the other hand there are plenty of things where the act of visually working through it, placing multiple options side by side on the canvas, rearranging things by hand etc., helps in solving the problem itself.

What would be really nice is if we had a solid set of standards for inter operation, such that I could work on the same video editing project in After Effects, through the command line, through some open source tools someone else wrote... etc.

I have a project right now where I have assets generated in Sketch, some other assets generated by Python scripts, all feeding into an AE project, the output of which gets fed back into some of the Python scripts... I can do great things, but it’s super kludgy/buggy to work with, and as a software engineer see so many trivial ways in which it could all be so much faster and more pleasant to work with (e.g. After Effects natively only supports very limited JS like scripting, so I have to have duplicated Python + AE code... and if the AE motion tracker could serialize tracking data for Python...).

I’m not holding my breath because this kind of computing, while more aligned in philosophy with the early composable UNIX roots, is IMO most entirely incompatible with the state of the (creative) software industry/economy (Adobe, like everyone else, would like to do as much as they can so that you do not give any of your time or money to creative software other than Adobe’s).

GuiA··on Show HN: New UI pattern for file manager type apps
I have a hard time understanding what you've built (and don't have an Android device handy to test). The GIFs are jerky, and it's always hard to tell what is going on with touch interactions on screen recordings alone.

From what I can tell, this shows a few interactions for a multitouch file manager, where there is an explicit "selection mode" to reorder/move files; selection is preserved when navigating away from the current view. Additionally, interstitial affordances are revealed to facilitate rearrangement.

My main point of feedback would be to focus on the presentation - it is very hard to tell what is going on, and all I wrote I feel like I had to speculate to interpret. Explain clearly what problem you are solving, and why the current approaches haven't worked for you.

Btw I'm not sure what the claim of newness is; I have seen these interactions in other software in the past (but perhaps I am missing something).

GuiA··on Travels with John Conway, in 258 Septillion Dimensions
Unfamiliar with the man beyond basic things like the Game of Life, I had his biography on my to read list for a while. His passing unfortunately propelled it to the top of the pile, and I read it in a few days. Conway truly was a once in history kind of person, and the biography feels so casual yet intimate - it feels a little bit like having lost a friend.

Since, I've been slowly diving into the various books and papers he published - they are all awe inspiring. His proof of Morley's trisector theorem is stunning - I can't wait to share it with nieces and nephews because it is that straightforward, it literally can be taught to young children. A proof for a theorem that stumped all mathematicians for over a century. Just utterly stunning.

I have "Winning Ways for your Mathematical Plays" coming in the mail today. Can't wait.

We were blessed to count John amongst us, let's do our best to treat everything with the same playfulness and curiosity that he did.

GuiA··on US video game sales have record quarter as consumers stay at home
Rayman Legends
GuiA··on Lessons I've Learned as a 15 Year Old Web Developer
> Embrace and accept the brownie points you get just by being young!

+1. I was the youngest in everything I did/achieved, until one day I wasn’t. It’s natural to take the ego boost, but it’s definitely something to introspect about and not get too attached to - I’ve seen the loss of the “young prodigy” label affect some friends deeply.

GuiA··on A first look at Unreal Engine 5
It's going to be at least a solid 3-5 years until one can say "now that we have real-time ray tracing" as far as most consumer devices are concerned, and even then it likely won't mean that all games will use raytracing for all rendering - more likely just for select special effects etc. I wouldn't give it less than at least a decade or two before we can have a mainstream fully raytraced game; and even then, I'd guess that good game artists will keep using smoke and mirrors to make effects even more stunning than what they can make by the brute force ray tracing approach.

There are a few indie devs trying to make "finer resolution" Minecraft; e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQv1OEm_www

GuiA··on Cognitive biases and principles that affect UX
UX is to Human Computer Interaction what petroleum engineering is to chemistry.

The methods aren’t wrong per se but it’s probably something we’d be better off with less of, and any questions around “ethics” or “sustainability” are going to be met with lots of entertaining hand waving.

GuiA··on The Wetware Crisis: the Dead Sea effect (2008)
It’s a spectrum, but yes most companies do a terrible job at prioritizing the development and well being of their employees.

Ask your boss to take a week long course that will make you significantly more productive, paid for by the company. What is their answer? 9/10 employers (maybe even 99/100) would say no.

I mean, one of the top posts right this moment on HN is about how employers are recording every single keystroke of their WFH employees.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23165579

Sorry, my shoes are clean.

GuiA··on The Wetware Crisis: the Dead Sea effect (2008)
The prerequisite is a lackluster/dysfunctional/toxic work environment, which is probably like 99% of jobs out there.
GuiA··on Work-from-home boom leads to more surveillance
"Are they generally active on programs and websites that I would consider productive like Excel, PowerPoint, Word, email, as opposed to YouTube or Facebook?"

The CEO talking about his product in terms of first person value judgements tells you all you need to know about the degrees of sliminess involved.

GuiA··on Can AI Become Conscious?
“It” has already become much better than us at many kinds of thinking (playing chess, go, solving equations, transcribing speech,...).
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