Hacker News Reader

Jizzleon After the War on Drugs: Blueprint for Regulation (2009)

  be it chocolate, coffee, wine, or [heroin]

  ensure that those chemicals are available safely and taxed appropriately

While I agree that prohibition has proven time and again to be a terrible thing, I'd also argue that some drugs are so dangerous in small doses that sale should never be sanctioned. Still, I would not argue in favor of strict punishments for sale nor use, especially. Issues of sale should come with punishments similar to improper business practices--tax evasion, fraud, etc--based on the scope and scale of the transactions.

As you point out, people often seek certain substances because at some level they feel it will make things better. The improvement they seek may be proportional to the strength of the substance, meaning those seeking out street drugs are probably also in the most dire straits. From that perspective, punishment seems quite cruel--kicking a person when they're already down.

Jizzleon What If OpenDocument Used SQLite?

The article notes "that this is only a thought experiment." And I think it should stay that way. It's very interesting to think about, yet SQLite offers nothing but problems for developers and content creators. While maybe a bit clunky, a zip file manages to be a close best choice. When considering that a document may be hundreds of megabytes with thousands of assets OR a single page of text, zip offers enough simplicity and robustness, while being highly accessible.

Jizzleon The quest to evolve neural networks through evolutionary algorithms

While perhaps not immediately pertinent to the problem, the emergence of sexual reproduction is credited as a major factor in the explosion of variation in multicellular organisms. Part of the advantage, ironically, is that sexual reproduction is a rather large burden compared to evolutionary strategies that came before. The fact that sexual reproduction is so challenging perhaps ensures that less is left to chance by filtering out individuals that cannot meet the burden and rewarding those that tend to be better at achieving reproduction itself. Likely there is some relation between improved reproductive success and some novel traits that helped to achieve it. I don't have the knowledge to weigh in on AI analogs, but I could imagine roughly a strategy that involves co-related burdens and goals to improve the chances of choosing the right individuals.

Jizzleon How JavaScript works: Event loop and the rise of Async programming

Oops, should've specified C# specifically, in which deadlock has become notorious. I don't think there's anything wrong with async/await per se. It looks to me like the linearity of js engine event loops wouldn't produce the same problem.

Jizzleon How JavaScript works: Event loop and the rise of Async programming

I quite like async/await except that it's annoyingly easy to produce a deadlock, and given a snippet, it's not obvious that such a deadlock should occur.

Jizzleon Did Media Literacy Backfire?

I think when clicks equal money, there's a lot less room for ethics in journalism.

See: https://www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp

Still, as the article points out, efforts to sanitize reporting will fail. But I think that's OK. I'd rather see a populace interested and misinformed, than one uninterested and uninformed.

Jizzleon What If Time Really Exists? (2008)

You're right that simulation arguments generally don't rely on QM interpretations. I mention it as potentially detracting from simulation because a common argument includes the need for computational shortcuts. QM as it is popularized now simply fits the shortcut narrative better than it would under the Bohmian approach.

Jizzleon What If Time Really Exists? (2008)

That's true, but such proposed extensions or alternate interpretations are then filling in the gaps that would lead people down the path of the simulated universe in the first place.

Jizzleon What If Time Really Exists? (2008)

It's the most obvious counter-interpretation. I think it's become remarkably successful, but also suffers in its embrace of causality. While the Copenhagen interpretation can skirt the issue completely, Bohm's must wrangle with the implications of both relativity and non-locality and no one has been completely successful as such. Also, if it were the leading view, I don't think discussions of a simulated universe would be as popular.

Jizzleon What If Time Really Exists? (2008)

The appearance that quantum effects might be attributed to 'hacks' probably has more to do with the hackish nature of the Copenhagen interpretation. For instance, there is no stated physical explanation for the collapse of a wavefunction--it is only an extremely convenient way of explaining many experiments. A crude analogy--you can describe the flipping of coins with simple probability, but this is a non-physical yet very convenient explanation.

Jizzleon Hyper 1.0.0

Looks like it is using the electron framework http://electron.atom.io/

To be sure, JavaScript can sometimes be fairly terrible as the scope of projects grow. The advantage here is how easily rich (or even absurd) UI elements can be implemented across all platforms by using web technologies. It also makes it comparatively easy to create a platform that is highly customizable and pluggable.

Jizzleon India has launched a 648MW solar power plant

I'd guess the typical overhead of material and contracting could be drastically different between the two markets. Also, it seems the complexity and size are far less in the Indian project. 9m modules on 4700 acres in California vs 2.5m modules on 1270 acres in Tamil Nadu.

Jizzleon IRC v3

In many ways, the idea of IRC chat has grown significantly beyond the conventional client. From the ubiquity of chat for productivity in applications like HipChat to the hugely successful Twitch.tv platform, IRC has proven to be a viable backbone in these scenarios. It's quite nice then to see a concerted standardization effort. Hopefully, many of the proprietary features we might recognize today will be widespread and freely available in the future.

Jizzleon The State of JavaScript – Survey results

I see a lot of beauty in the js ecosystem, but only insomuch as related technologies come together to produce platform-independent, user-facing components. Similarly, I find C# or Java and their related technologies to be more beautiful on the server. Of course, one downside to this opinion is the requirement for skill in multiple ecosystems--and perhaps your employer had sought to consolidate these skills with js across the board.

Jizzleon The Circular Electron Positron Collider

Ah, thanks. This gives me better perspective.

Jizzleon The Circular Electron Positron Collider

I'm under the impression that the reason we couldn't confirm the Higgs boson before the LHC was that electron-positron colliders could not easily produce the massive particles needed. Proton-proton or Proton-antiproton collisions seem to be much more useful for Higgs production. The Large Electron–Positron Collider almost got us there and it exceeded 200 GeV. What then would a 250 GeV machine do for us?

Jizzleon Itsy Bitsy Data Structures – Simplified examples of many common data structures

As someone who has implemented all these before, I thought the presentation was great. Yes, there are some holes, but in under 1500 lines, ASCII art and all, a lot was covered. More importantly, the ideas put forward can always be built upon--more data structures, more talk about time/space complexity or even probability (e.g. bloom filters), forays into solving famous problems with those data structures (optimally or not), etc, etc. Whether this is the first and final installment or not, it's a nice contribution.

Jizzleon Fixing JSON

Hand-editing JSON may not be the most important way of interacting with it...

In that case, the arguments in favor of breaking long-established compatibility for the sake of hand-editing should be particularly strong.

If personal forgetfulness about editing around commas or date strings are strong arguments, then they should surely also apply to every programming language that uses commas or lacks the concept of a date literal. After all, the code of programming languages exists to be edited, and JSON is merely a means of serialization.