HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

Pet_Ant

3,409 karma · joined February 10, 2020

submissionscomments
Pet_Ant··on Boris Becker:'Whoever says a prison life is easy is lying–it's real punishment'
> For those who start with little to nothing, it's no loss.

Prison rape and violence and loss of agency is "no loss"? I'd argue the fact that in rap circles they'd rather die on the streets than go in tells you something.

Pet_Ant··on Firefox 147 Will Support the XDG Base Directory Specification
> Ctrl-Q (quit application) right next to Ctrl-W (close tab)

That bug was actually fixed in the Dvorak release...

Pet_Ant··on Show HN: Awesome J2ME
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-let

> From Middle English -let, -elet, from Old French -elet, a double diminutive from Old French -el + -et.

Pet_Ant··on I defected from America to live with nomads in Central Asia
I mean, I think after the umpteenth bug featuring 20 year old Java Enterprise code you aro only allowed to make minimal changes to, we all start to think about this don’t we?
Pet_Ant··on Chimps are sticking grass and sticks in their butts, seemingly for fashion trend
I wonder if a chimpanzees butt is sufficiently similar to a human's to trigger filters as "inappropriate adult content".
Pet_Ant··on Why movies just don't feel "real" anymore
Yeah it's less about Chris Pratt's ability to inhabit and exude a character, as much as co-branding them film with Chris Pratt's brand as a cross-over.
Pet_Ant··on Reselling tickets for profit to be outlawed in UK government crackdown
I think tickets should be auctioned by the venue. It means there is no incentive for bots or scalpers.
Pet_Ant··on Google is killing the open web, part 2
Really? Because I have an old iPad (4th gen?) that no longer works on many sites. If it was backwards compatible they'd still function.
Pet_Ant··on Google is killing the open web, part 2
JavaScript is ever evolving and it means you need to stick to one of the two browsers (WebKit or Firefox) and keep upgrading. XSLT hasn't changed in years. It's an actual standard instead of an evolving one.

I know that other independent browsers that I used to use back in the day just gave up because the pace of divergence pushed by the major implementations meant that it wasn't feasible to keep up independently.

I still miss Konqueror.

Pet_Ant··on The fate of "small" open source
> The problem isn't that AI slop is doing something new. Phishing, blogspam, time wasting PRs, website scraping, etc have all existed before. The problem is that AI makes all of that far, far easier.

The term I like is that AI has _industrialised_ those behaviours. While native hunted buffalo, it wasn't destructive until it was industrialised [1] it that it became truly destructive.

[1] https://allthatsinteresting.com/buffalo-slaughter

Pet_Ant··on Manganese is Lyme disease's double-edge sword
> or otherwise

That's where you would be wrong. By the time you posted your comment there are already people hawking manganese bracelets on FaceBook as a cure for Lyme disease.

Pet_Ant··on A Common Semiconductor Just Became a Superconductor
Can you make a closed loop helium cooler? Also, that level of coldness seems like it would have negative interactions with other components.
Pet_Ant··on Steam Frame
Saw that the Steam Frame was wireless and lost interest. Wireless is always an extra complication that never improves things. I've learned lots about framing to hardwire my home network. Sure, make it an option, but I won't pay for latency, battery life, battery weight, cost, or pairing issues of wireless solutions. Give me (replaceable, standard) cables anyday!

That said, there is hope, because if there is a wireless version and it takes off, it can't be hard to make a wired version.

Pet_Ant··on Hard drives on backorder for two years as AI data centers trigger HDD shortage
I think we agree. To risk being trampled by a race to the bottom, they choose to rise above by forming a cartel.
Pet_Ant··on Hard drives on backorder for two years as AI data centers trigger HDD shortage
Yes, anywhere there is a race to the bottom. That is why you see cartels rise up, like unions are cartels. Things that are not cartels generally have ever diminishing margins.
Pet_Ant··on Elon Musk's $1T pay deal is a troubling display of corporate capture
Jensen is an arbitrary example. I'm asking how do you disentangle company performance from internal and external factors.

If you had a company that was making buggy whips at the invention of the automobile, you expect the company profits to go down at no fault of the CEO. A better CEO just changes the slope not the direction.

So what you want to do is not reward based on performance of the company, but on the CEO and to do that you need to figure out the "wins above replacement" [1]. How much better did the CEO do than any schmuck chosen at random.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wins_above_replacement

Pet_Ant··on Elon Musk's $1T pay deal is a troubling display of corporate capture
That seems like a bad incentive. If someone had a debt to the IRS or a bad divorce and needed the extra money, do you want them to start taking moonshoots with their companies? You want them to do right by their companies not themselves.

Already with performance based compensation you have the problem with rewarding executives with the general market as opposed to their own performance. I mean, potentially Jensen Huang is terrible at his job and Nvidia is only making half of the money it should but the AI boom is covering for it.

100% performance means no one would man the ship of a failing company trying to correct the course.

Pet_Ant··on Europe converged rapidly on the United States before stagnating
1) It's subsidised through cheap labor. The start-up whose founder live and work in buildings built by undocumented labor. Eat food grown by that labor, and served from food trucks run by undocumented labor. It's innovation subsidised by misery.

2) the brain-drain is unethical because it takes subsidised education of individuals without returning anything in return. Emmigrants should get a bill of the cost of their upbringing. It's really free-loading, especially for a country with such a poor public education system as the US.

Pet_Ant··on Europe converged rapidly on the United States before stagnating
I think the lack of social safety net in the US is a gun to the head of American workers that gets more productivity out of them (at the cost of well-being which isn't accounted for). The billionaires are necessary as aspirational opiate that allows those same people to work themselves to death with the balm that they too will soon join the ranks of the billionaires. Let's not even start on how the American economy depends on undocumented immigrants which function as disposable citizens. They function economically as citizens but don't consume resources and can be sent away as needed if they happen to be inconvenient.

I do not think there is an ethical way to challenge the American economy. It'd be like trying to beat the costs of Dubai's construction industry without enslaving Asians.

Pet_Ant··on IP blocking the UK is not enough to comply with the Online Safety Act
> What happens when the US decides that that shouldn't be happening anymore?

Like the US did with Swiss banks?

“…the standard of justice depends on the equality of power to compel and that in fact the strong do what they have the power to do and the weak accept what they have to accept.” — Thucydides, 5.89 (trans. Rex Warner, Penguin Classics edition)

(half-remembered quote found using AI)

original source https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/History_of_the_Peloponnesian_...

Book 5, end of paragraph 89

Pet_Ant··on 52 Year old data tape could contain Unix history
For the same reason one visits a museum. If that doesn't make sense to you, then doing this won't either.
Pet_Ant··on Myna: Monospace typeface designed for symbol-heavy programming languages
I don't know why "->" should render as an arrow when we could just use an actual Unicode arrow. If need be, have macros for your editors that allow you to convert the "->" into an actual arrow.
Pet_Ant··on OpenMW 0.50.0 Released – open-source Morrowind reimplementation
This Claw?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claw_(video_game)

I mean it's 2D platformer, you should be able to reverse engineer the engine and reuse the assets. I mean the have bit perfect decompiles of N64 games to C now. It's doable.

Pet_Ant··on OpenMW 0.50.0 Released – open-source Morrowind reimplementation
I've felt that properties that earn a certain threshold should become public domain. You've made enough money, and now you are part of the culture. The heft of having created a cultural landmark or cornerstone ought to be enough weight to ensure their other projects get enough of a boost.
Pet_Ant··on RISC-V takes first step toward international ISO/IEC standardization
People complain about fragmentation, but I feel like they are missing the forest for the trees.

In the past if you didn't find something you needed, you'd design your own. Now you just tweak RISC-V.

I mean "12 variants of RISC-V" is actually less fragmentation than "RISC-V and 11 others".

As long as there is a stable core to target, that is all that matters for main stream adoption, and profiles and distros are already there with RVA23.

Pet_Ant··on Tech workers' fight for living wages and a 32-hour workweek is a battle for all
> Free markets are very brutal and at the first glance are bad for humans, but their efficiency gives the tax base for redistribution. Also they're inherently moral, because if you can do something for your fellow citizens and swap your labor for their money and back, then you shouldn't expect to be entitled to their surplus earning redistributed via the welfare system.

At first, you seem like a sensible person, but then you seem to be completely ignorant as to what "moral" means.

Pet_Ant··on Amazon says it didn't cut people because of money. But because of 'culture'
I assume they will just open more offices overseas?
Pet_Ant··on Introducing architecture variants
> If you're negotiating deals worth billions of dollars, or even just millions, I'd strongly suggest not doing so with a hangover.

...have you met salespeople? Buying lap dances is a legitimate business expense for them. You'd be surprised how much personal rapport matters and facts don't.

In all fairness, I only know about 8 and 9 figure deals, maybe at 10 and 11 salespeople grow ethics...

Pet_Ant··on AMD could enter ARM market with Sound Wave APU built on TSMC 3nm process
Couldn't you switch up the decoder logic and make it a RISC-V chip and just blow away existing competition that isn't quite Pi yet?
Pet_Ant··on Project Shadowglass
Yeah, it definitely seems like it is 3D. If it wasn't you'd expect a lot more pop-in and jumps when you cross a scaling threshold. It's a cool effect, but it's like a voxel pass on a 3D world AFAICT.
← PreviousPage 4 of 34Next →