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Psilidae

120 karma · joined September 12, 2016

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Psilidae··on Ask HN: Is there a new habit you cultivated recently that is really paying off?
Great recommendation! I haven't really used our local library because I keep forgetting that it's an option. But, I just checked and it looks like ours has the same Inter-Library Loan process for requesting books.

Thanks, I'm going to try to remember this and start using it more. Hopefully it'll help me both save money and reduce the number of unread books collecting dust on my already full shelves.

Psilidae··on NTSB: Autopilot steered Tesla car toward traffic barrier before deadly crash
Aside from resolution, another reason suggested is to avoid slamming on the breaks in the middle of a highway for false-positives.

https://www.wired.com/story/tesla-autopilot-why-crash-radar/

Psilidae··on Ask HN: What do GitHub stars mean to you when evaluating a project, if anything?
I'll use it while comparing multiple projects to guage community support and how "alive" the project is. Stars are obviously not the best representation, but it's a nice way to see how many other people have evualuated the project and are either using it or at least thought it looked good in some way.

This past weekend, while trying to choose a JS framework for a webapp, stars played a decent role in my choice when it came down to two that seemed to have similar features and comparable commit activity. One project has ~200 stars, while the other had ~13,000, which definitely helped push me toward the latter.

Psilidae··on Visa card network crashes, causing increased decline rates across UK and Europe
That seems like a really cool concept. But also way too free. How are they making money?

Their privacy policy (which was hard to find) doesn't describe how they handle your transaction data, yet almost half of the policy is describing how they're going to collect and disclose (web) information for advertising.

Psilidae··on GDPR for lazy people: Block all European users with Cloudflare Workers
For what it's worth, I'd argue the same should be permitted of a small car maker. If I want to go build my own cars, step 1 should be putting a motor on a chassis and being able to drive forward. Step 1 shouldn't be adding airbags and seat belts to a couple axles.

The safest car is one that can't drive, and the most privacy-friendly software will fail to compile. You should be able to build a functional car before you need to worry about making it as safe as possible, and similarly you should be able to build a functional MVP of your software before you need to worry about compliance with a huge international policy.

Psilidae··on GDPR for lazy people: Block all European users with Cloudflare Workers
If I were running my own company right now, this is probably the approach I would take. I'm a big privacy advocate, but I'm also anti-authoritarian and don't like being forced into things by overbearing laws.

Blocking Europeans sounds a lot more reasonable than having to hire a lawyer and spend double the time and effort just to be compliant while writing a new JavaScript MVC Todo List app.

Psilidae··on GDPR for lazy people: Block all European users with Cloudflare Workers
By that logic, doesn't the entire Internet fundamentally violate GDPR?
Psilidae··on You Need Deli Cups
And while you're at at: every coffee maker should be a Keurig and buy only disposable utensils to save time washing silverware.
Psilidae··on [dead]
I like were this is going. When do we start burning books and arresting people who speak something that isn't in the list of Good Words?
Psilidae··on Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2017?
Where can you buy those now? I remember they existed, but I thought that was basically a registrar bug that was fixed. The last time I searched around, I couldn't find any registrars that permitted emoji domain names.
Psilidae··on Ask HN: Alternatives to Reddit?
Every week I still get a Quora Digest email, and every week, if I glance at it, I find myself asking "seriously, are these really the best there is?"

I'm sure they're algorithmically picked, but it seems to be heavily polluted with things phrased as questions that are really just rants/complaints, political provocatism, naivete, bragging and showing off privilege (interestingly, frequently tied with seemingly being very naive); the ones that depress me the most are questions being asked by people who clearly must have been incredibly sheltered and repressed. For some of those, I am glad there's a place like Quora for people to actually get those questions answered, but Quora itself doesn't seem to be great at highlighting interesting questions.

Psilidae··on Ask HN: Alternatives to Reddit?
SA is still my go-to when I'm looking for some random stranger's advice on a topic. Bonus points because I think humor is a good thing to have included in any subject, including serious discussions.
Psilidae··on Scale-invariant instantons and the complete lifetime of the standard model
I was about to say, this headline sounds like one of those fake papers generated by a machine learning algorithm, like SCIgen (https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/archive/scigen/).
Psilidae··on Who and what is Coinhive?
That's also a description of ads.
Psilidae··on How knowing Lisp destroyed my programming career (2006)
Anyone have any idea why it's on there?
Psilidae··on What the Grayscale Challenge Taught Us About Phone Addiction
I wish I could try this!

I doubt there are many others here, but if anyone is still using a Windows Phone, I just submitted a suggestion for greyscale options to the MS Feedback Hub, so you can search "greyscale" there to upvote the suggestion.

Psilidae··on Ask HN: Would like to learn blockchain tech, where do I start? What to build?
Cryptocurrencies and blockchains are not the same things.
Psilidae··on Ask HN: Would like to learn blockchain tech, where do I start? What to build?
This may be too basic for you depending on your experience, but this is a really great explanation of blockchains that I think even people without a technical background could understand: https://unwttng.com/what-is-a-blockchain
Psilidae··on Tech Start-Up Fires Engineers Amid Union Organizing Effort
This is what I want. I personally feel like I am (or should be) on the side of "unions are good", but I'm also confused by how much "unions are bad" sentiment there is. But my confusion is almost entirely because of _the lack of anyone talking about the issue_. Honestly, most of what I know about unions is from ~8 years ago when I got the gist of "unions help workers voice needs and desires, but businesses don't like paying more" in my AP US History class. I feel like I'm missing a huge part of the issue, yet I have not actually heard anyone from either side actually getting into the details of _why_ there's an argument.
Psilidae··on Retrospective: Looking Glass
I find Windows trend to be quite odd, too. And that's really telling of an issue, because I'm still using my Windows Phone and desperately want more quality apps. However, when I move back to my desktop, I rarely use UWP apps--with the exception of a handful that sync with my phone, like podcasts or my budgeting app.

Even when I use my Surface, I rarely end up using the UWP apps because, as said, they're dumb. Even the Microsoft ones feel half-baked and lacking. I think Microsoft should have dumped more money into Research and tried to find a novel method for automatically handling different UI sizes without dumbing down the UI.

I like the idea of the Store, too, but I think instead of forcing all apps to this new interface, they could have created a new package format, like Mac's _.app_ directories, to allow one-click install distributions of classic Windows applications.

Psilidae··on Can I buy a GPU yet?
For $5 a month I'll manually check Newegg every day (or so) and update an API for you.
Psilidae··on Hawaii’s false missile alert sent by worker believing attack on US was imminent
I can see value in having someone capable of issuing alerts who is geographically _on_ Hawaii, as the potential for dropped communication lines seems problematic.

I don't know enough about military/federal operations to know whether having them handle it would imply keeping operations on the islands, or if they'd literally "centralize" it to somewhere on the continental US.

Psilidae··on MS to Give Windows 10 a ‘Modern’ Overhaul with Light Weight Polaris Windows Core
Maybe in a year they'll release a new "Windows 10 Classic".
Psilidae··on Ask HN: Any open source project which you have used to make some passive income
Ad revenue, I presume?
Psilidae··on Hawaii "button pusher" refusing to cooperate with FCC, internal investigators
This would make a bit of sense. I think someone on here mentioned how the whole incident really highlighted that the general public has no fucking idea what to do if they receive a message like this.

While it's worryingly similar to crying wolf, I would hope that this does lead to more of the general public (even outside of Hawaii) actually thinking about how they'd handle and react to an imminent threat.

Psilidae··on Hawaii "button pusher" refusing to cooperate with FCC, internal investigators
Given all of the incompetency here, including the awful UI, and the password on a sticky note that got leaked, I wouldn't be surprised if the links themselves leaked info like: "Send missile alert (confirmation password is hawaii1)".
Psilidae··on Show HN: The last person to use this button gets $200+ USD, via Smart Contracts
Yeah, this seems like a ploy to get people to install some shady browser extension.
Psilidae··on State schools to make computer science a core subject – Boston Herald
Personally, I don't think CS should be a core subject in primary schools. I think it'd be better to have some kind of technology competency subject, to help teach basic use, problem solving, security and privacy practices, and whatnot. A bit of programming and the core concepts of logical thinking and algorithms wouldn't be a bad idea, but I think most students wouldn't actually need to know CS.

If they want to address job demand, I feel it'd be better to increase teacher pay to get better CS teachers, so there'd be a few _good_ CS graduates, rather than many _average_ CS grads.

Psilidae··on Apple, in Sign of Health Ambitions, Adds Medical Records Feature for iPhone
I don't use any apps at the moment for tracking medical records, but if I did, I'd be using Microsoft's HealthVault.
Psilidae··on Subverted Design
It thoroughly confuses me how every company seems to want to reach as many customers as possible yet most would rather invest time on maintaining multiple platform-specific native apps rather than have one good web app.

It's just splitting design resources, engineering and testing resources, and shutting out customers who actually want to use the service but don't have the system on which they chose to focus.

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