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PSZD

100 karma · joined June 26, 2018

2 decades spent on HN, account #N+1
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PSZD··on Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher
Marginal - definition 2a: of, relating to, or situated at a margin or border.

Succinct and precise; a well crafted sentence. A marginal OC results in unpredictable crashes and can be corrected with a small offset; marginality describes the behavior and explains the solution.

Inscrutable clues casually conveyed can now be readily explained, at least, unlike the training data of [silence]. Brevity is the soul of wit, but perhaps also exasperated confusion.

PSZD··on Why It’s So Hard to Change People’s Commuting Behavior
I think daily (or nearly) is much easier than you think, mainly because it's so much harder to form a habit like that when you have to make a conscious daily choice between "easy" and "hard".

Context-dependence like "not raining or icy" does make sense.

PSZD··on Why It’s So Hard to Change People’s Commuting Behavior
I was living less than 5 miles away from work for years, it made it very easy to commute by bike (although winter really sucked at times).

This year, that got bumped up to about 12 miles (work moved, not me). At that sort of mileage, it takes much longer to bike, and doing it consistently 5x a week with a physical job is iffy. Not to mention, bike infrastructure to that location is much worse, mostly because the only option runs along a 6-lane road, and resulted in me crashing due to road debris in the dark. Bills from that incident could have bought me a car.

Other options are mainly limited to public transport (buses). Typically takes me about 2 hours one-way, including wasted time at the start of a shift.

Then there are cars. Guaranteed to save me a minimum of an hour a day, with much lower chances of personal injury.

PSZD··on Recycling Rethink: What to Do with Trash Now China Won’t Take It
Mechanical sorting (like shoe sorters) is very effective for discrete objects. Really cool to see stuff flying down a belt at 20mph+, get scanned/imaged from all sides, then thrown down one of 50 chutes without stopping.
PSZD··on Fifty Women Say Salesforce Helped Sex Traffickers Exploit Them
Isn't that societal obligation codified as taxes?

> I don't think you deserve more credit than anybody having a net worth of $10k donating $100

Would you also consider this something not to admire but require?

PSZD··on Spotify will now suspend or terminate accounts it finds are using ad blockers
Pennies on which dollar, exactly?
PSZD··on How A Young Woman Followed Two Hackers' Lies to Her Death
Something that may not be obvious is how victims (companies, at least) frequently want to bury the story just as much as the person who conned them. "We lost 8 digits of internet money last night and have no idea who did it" just doesn't sound good to other people who are supposed to trust you.
PSZD··on Why Captchas have gotten so difficult
Humans are the problem, not some mythical AI powering the bots. It costs a fraction of a cent to get a CAPTCHA solved. The only real counter being used is making it take longer to solve a CAPTCHA - which is exactly what the services like reCAPTCHA do, while minimizing the impact on heuristically 'good' users.

Making CAPTCHA solves take 30 seconds or a minute instead of 5 seconds is the state of the art.

PSZD··on When a Bike Company Put a TV on Its Box, Shipping Damages Went Down (2017)
I'd say being "careless" means dropping that 60-80lb package to the floor instead of gingerly doing a squat with it, even 10 of those a day and your back will thank you unless you have impeccable form. "Use existing equipment" - perhaps a familiar phrase, one that protects your joints but not necessarily the packages.
PSZD··on When a Bike Company Put a TV on Its Box, Shipping Damages Went Down (2017)
Working at a large brown shipping company, I've never seen anyone go out of their way to mistreat packages marked as fragile (or anyone talk about doing it).

That said, it's policy not to treat packages marked 'fragile' differently. Boxes get reused a lot, and a sticker like that has very little correlation with it actually being fragile. (60lb box of bolts? Fragile! 2' by 4' mirror that shatters from a 1 ft drop? Not fragile!)

For bicycles in particular, the issue IMO is that they're typically packed terribly, while being large and awkward enough to be handled with all the other large and heavy (70-150 lbs) stuff.

Damages will occur, it's just a matter of statistical frequency at a scale of 20 million packages per day handled by 100,000+ employees. Frequently, the damage won't even be discovered until delivery, and then there's no easy way to attribute the damage properly. That means aside from particularly egregious stuff where it's obvious you screwed up (say, laying a 55" TV flat and dropping a 30 lb box on it) you have to go way up the management chain to find anyone who cares. At a lower level, easily measured metrics like process rate are far more important.

If everyone in management you ever interacted with only measured your performance by LOC written, how much time would you spend refactoring?

PSZD··on Discord raises $150M, surpassing $2B valuation
All of those were a pain in the ass for one reason or another, Discord caught on like wildfire because it was a huge step up from what existed. Pretty much a combination of the best parts of IRC + Teamspeak + Skype.

You don't think Discord has any lockin? For a lot of games, coordinating voice chat these days is "paste a discord server invite in chat". Pretty much any guild/clan/subreddit/group/whatever has a Discord (apart from ones with really old TS servers etc), so if you're in one of those, you probably have Discord. Much easier than negotiating Skype/Mumble/TS3.

I'd say Valve/Steam is feeling a lot more pressure these days than Discord.

I'm not sure Discord will ever be a hugely valuable company, but judging by the fact that every launcher in existence (Steam, Battle.net) is trying to clone their features, I'm sure they can at least sell it for quite a bit.

I was really expecting them to push out of the gaming niche, but with the store it looks like they're doubling down on that angle.

PSZD··on Amazon driver arrested after taking GPS 'bait' package off Washington Co. porch
> who doesn't follow my delivery preferences and takes my stuff to random UPS stores that I have to pick it up from

Corporate policy, Access Point after 1 attempt is cheaper than 3 attempts when the resident is likely at work anyway. Driver release (most situations where the package is left at your house and the shipper didn't explicitly authorize it) is at driver discretion, it's their problem to a degree if something gets stolen.

PSZD··on Glitter bomb tricks parcel thieves
150-200 packages is a really light route, 150-200 stops and 300-400 packages is more accurate. This time of year, 250+ stops for a residential route isn't particularly unusual.

Biggest reason to leave a package at the driveway is a fence/gate. A fence keeps stuff in or out, either way, not respecting that is how you end up with stories like this: https://www.khq.com/news/responders-ram-driveway-gate-to-sav...

PSZD··on CenturyLink is blocking customer internet, saying Utah legislators told them to
> more of a Yelp-like entity

Yelp would also work, if the business concerned cared a ridiculous amount about resolving complaints there. That's the only value - that these particular companies care an awful lot about resolving complaints left with the BBB.

Got bullshitted by Comcast phone rep, skipped straight to BBB complaint since I didn't want to deal with Comcast for hours/days, less than a week later I had their VIP Customer Service department calling/emailing daily until they (not me) got the issue resolved.

Perhaps an FCC complaint results in the same result, but it worked out perfectly for me.

PSZD··on Do I really need to get out the soldering-iron again?
I got 2/6 right, the 4 wrong were 320kbps. Using the cheap-but-decent shp9500s and no dac, but quite good hearing. I'd chalk it up to having been listening to almost exclusively streamed 320kbps, it was interesting to note that the 4 I got wrong were because I discarded the more 'neutral' toned one which was actually lossless.

The 128kbps was of course very easy to pick out.

I'm of the opinion that 320 vs lossless is meaningless enough to not really bother, but I know for some tracks it was trivial for me to tell the different. Mostly it was the very complex/atmospheric tracks, Mind In A Box being a good example, where 320 lost a notable amount of quality. Probably others like Ne Obliviscaris as well.

The biggest problem with Spotify is that not all of their library is available at 320kbps.

PSZD··on I Used to Be Homeless
I live on less than 30/day (including rent) working a poorly paid manual labor part time job in a state with income tax. No, I don't own a car. Yes, I split housing costs with other people.

> What happens when you get sick and have to miss a shift?

As mandated by state law, I get paid for my normal hours.

> It's disingenuous to perpetuate the notion that "discipline" is all that's needed to survive on minimum wage

It's also amusing to be lectured about how your situation is impossible by people who are going into debt making 80k+ a year.

PSZD··on Microsoft’s problem isn’t how often it updates Windows, it’s how it develops it
I'm using win10 on spinning rust, never seen updates take that long. These days I just let it do it's stealth updates at auto-picked times while I'm at work/sleeping, works out well.

Single thread and cpu limited would explain it, since what I do have is almost unbeatable single-core performance from a high OC on an old i5.

PSZD··on Making Windows Slower Part 2: Process Creation
My version of this - OS (Linux) crashes due to overclock stability testing filled EFI NVRAM, and I had to manually delete the crash dumps after running into puzzling issues later on. Apparently it was possible (on some hardware, at least) for the automatic dumps to brick your computer: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=919485
PSZD··on Google to Charge Phone Makers for Android Apps in Europe
Actually, their overall market share wasn't particularly considered. They were fined for abusing their dominance in the market for app stores that are available on Android, and their dominance in the market for licensable smart mobile operating systems. Both of these categorically exclude Apple as competition.
PSZD··on SEC Sues Musk and Seeks Ban for His Tweets on Go-Private Deal
Musk didn't say he wanted to take the company private, he said he wanted to AND that he had secured funding to do so at a specific price.

This is a clear statement of facts, something that would be entirely reasonable to trade based on. It also appears he knew this was a false statement, at best it was very reckless. I really don't see how you can defend this.

When your words make people gain or lose 9 or 10 digits of money in a matter of hours, they are taken very seriously.

PSZD··on Why Mistranslation Matters
Reading Nietzsche translations recently, German does seem to have a considerable capacity for allusion and double meanings that are very hard to translate. Perhaps not in modern or common usage, or nearly as much as English.
PSZD··on San Francisco Officials to Tech Workers: Buy Your Lunch
Because (as someone entirely uninvolved) it looks like an absurd bit of overreach, something akin to mandating that locally-sourced toilet paper be used at all businesses in the city.

Go right ahead, but don't mind a bit of sensible chuckling elsewhere in the country.

PSZD··on Reddit Security Incident
Reddit still doesn't require an email, the signup form is just a well executed dark pattern - you can hit next and skip providing an email.
PSZD··on How Sellers Trick Amazon to Boost Sales
Same here, but it's because I find it very easy to recognize the Chinese "brands", signs that a product is just Prime arbitrage, fake reviews, etc. If you want a selection of these lower-quality listings, take a look at lightning deals. I think actual counterfeits are fairly rare compared to just garbage knockoffs, but I also don't buy many products that are highly counterfeited.
PSZD··on The brain may clean out Alzheimer’s plaques during sleep
You're just considering "involuntary" lack of sleep, when there seems to be a serious epidemic of voluntary sleeplessness as indicated by frequent boasting about how little sleep one can get by on.
PSZD··on ‘No Poach’ Deals for Fast-Food Workers Face Scrutiny
The point is that people buy themselves absurdly expensive vehicles on credit. Assuming everyone with one of those vehicles had it bought for them is absurd, and reads as an indictment of the author's high socioeconomic status.

Outer appearance of a vehicle also means very little - my motorcycle looks great, but it has 50k miles and cost me less than a lot of the commuter bicycles I see people on.

PSZD··on AntiPolygraph.org appears to have been “de-listed” from Google on key searches
I do agree with this, but think there's enough societal pressure these days that it's very hard for a for-profit company to do.
PSZD··on AntiPolygraph.org appears to have been “de-listed” from Google on key searches
> while betraying which way you, personally, are "polarized" on abortion

I'm curious what side you think I fall on, seems to me it could be argued either way. I have no strong opinion on it and picked it purely because it's an evocative example. Perhaps too evocative!

Some other examples might be terrorism, animal rights activism, transgender-as-mental-illness. Including both sides can be legitimately and understandably very upsetting for some people; in other cases we demand equal representation.

Are situations like OP's an inevitable product of the tyranny of an algorithm, one that errs to the safer side of excluding results?

PSZD··on AntiPolygraph.org appears to have been “de-listed” from Google on key searches
Is it appropriate to rank extremely high for something you're directly opposed to? Consider other polarized topics like abortion - should sites enlightening the user on why it is murder, instead of providing useful information, be presented front and center? I'm fairly sure this has come up as a controversy recently, but can't think of the exact topic.

Certainly Google could decide whether it is appropriate on a case-by-case basis, but at that point it starts to be very explicitly political. Once you've stripped away the fig leaf of neutrality, their monopoly would look outrageous to a significant portion of the population.