Hacker News Reader

Pulcinellaon Americans increasingly see legal sports betting as a bad thing for society

"When commenting, I suggest being clear about what sort of gambling you mean. Confusion easily arises otherwise."

When commenting, I suggest you read the article first. It would be extremely, extremely clear to you what people mean in this thread when they say "gambling."

Pulcinellaon Monodraw

A perpetual, irrevocable "lease" is just be a "sale". You are just selling a copy at that point. Subscription-based/SAAS software is leased.

I know it's pedantic, but to me the key thing is that it is the rights themselves that are "licensed." Not specific copies. The license covers what ways you are and are not allowed to make more copies (that aren't just your personal copy). So e.g. Open Source/Free Software/Closed Source libraries can be "licensed" and copies of them can be modified and included in work you create according to the license.

Pulcinellaon Monodraw

Personal pet peeve, but the word people use really should be "lease." Copyright and patent rights are licensed (e.g. getting a license from Disney to manufacture Star Wars toys). The particular copy of the software you have is either sold or leased to you. If you buy a physical book, you are just being sold a copy. The book itself doesn't function as an ad hoc, theoretical license or anything.

Not sure how first sale affects software sales other than software rental in the USA is an exception to the first sale doctrine. Software rental is not allowed unless it's a physical video game copy for a video game console or you have a physical copy of the software and you can't just easily make a copy of it in the normal course of using it (not sure exactly what this would mean, but presumably things like software for embedded devices). There are exceptions for libraries and educational institutions.

I am not a lawyer, however.

Pulcinellaon Apple introduces a universal design across platforms

Even before that, mobile UI frameworks are retained mode GUIs, not immediate. They aren't drawing to a blank framebuffer 120 times a second if they don't have to. Redraws only happen when something changes (e.g. "Dirty" rects).

Pulcinellaon Apple Notes Will Gain Markdown Export at WWDC, and, I Have Thoughts

Nitpick: AttributedString is a member of the Swift Foundation framework. It's not limited to SwiftUI.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/foundation/attribu...

Pulcinellaon Root shell on a credit card terminal

"Prompt Kiddie" should be the new "Script Kiddie"

Pulcinellaon Did Akira Nishitani Lie in the 1994 Capcom vs. Data East Lawsuit?

Given how video game patents are in the news lately (with Nintendo suing the PalWorld devs for patent infringement rather than copyright infringement), I wonder how this would have turned out if Capcom managed to patent how SF2 works and sued for that instead.

Personally I think patenting game mechanics is absurd (far worse than software patents, even). It would be like an authoring patenting the three-act structure. More legal clarity around this would be nice. Maybe Judge Alsup could become a combo lab monster[0] as well to help decide the case!

[0]https://glossary.infil.net/?t=Lab

Pulcinellaon Company Reminder for Everyone to Talk Nicely About the Giant Plagiarism Machine

"It's not piracy! I'm learning from all this media I didn't pay for!"

Pulcinellaon Company Reminder for Everyone to Talk Nicely About the Giant Plagiarism Machine

Even "plagiarism" is putting way to positive a spin on it. "Rampant copyright infringement" is more accurate.

I'm sure we all have our own feelings about IP law, but remember what happens to regular people who try stuff like this. I don't think the RIAA, Disney, or Nintendo (or the government) are going to be pleased to hear "it's not piracy! It's a transformative experience protected by fair use!"

Pulcinellaon Why Are ADHD Rates So Much Higher in the U.S.?

In comparison to other places in the world (especially Asia), there is somewhat lower stigma regarding ADHD in the U.S.

I would add the UK to the stigma list as well. The UK government and NHS are pretty rabidly ADHD-denialist and make it incredibly difficult to get a diagnosis.

Pulcinellaon E.U. Prepares Major Penalties Against X

Does the EU not have protections against bills of attainder?

Pulcinellaon Everything is Ghibli

Six sentences can hardly be considered a "rant."

Pulcinellaon 'Dark oxygen': a deep-sea discovery that has split scientists

Hard to determine comment accuracy. Industry will manufacture false claims in order to stop environmentalism because they believe in material wealth over all else.

Pulcinellaon The Movement to Redirect Billions of Taxpayer Dollars to Private Schools

In other words, a private school gets more money from a student’s voucher than a district gets from having that same student enrolled. The voucher doesn’t just move the same amount of money around. A voucher pulls more money from education funding than then enrolling a student in a public school does.

Pulcinellaon The Movement to Redirect Billions of Taxpayer Dollars to Private Schools

Declining enrollment and pulled funding can destroy the ability of a district to carry out the mission tasked to it by the government. This is not just hypothetical. The rural, conservative school district I used to work for (and may, many like them as pointed out in the article) and the families that rely on them do not like school vouchers, even if they otherwise support everything else that politician does. If too many students unenroll and utilize school vouchers, the whole district could collapse due to lack of funding and screw over all the remaining students.

This is compounded by the fact that vouchers often pull out more funding that the government otherwise would provide to the district for that student. This is mentioned in the article as well. e.g. the state pays the district $5k a year per student, but pulls $8k a year for a student that uses a voucher.

Also, in a lot of these rural areas there are no other good options anyway besides the school district. It’s either the district, a scammy online charter school, a scammy fly-by-night charter school, or homeschooling.

Pulcinellaon The Movement to Redirect Billions of Taxpayer Dollars to Private Schools

You have rights with a public school system you don’t have with private school system. And not just “it’s a government run school so they have to follow the constitution.” You have explicit political rights. For example, you have the right to vote in school board elections and bonds. You don’t get to vote for the board of EduCorp LLC.

Pulcinellaon The Movement to Redirect Billions of Taxpayer Dollars to Private Schools

Of course it’s individual people. The political entity they work for obviously has no will of its own. It is terribly unsurprising to me that people tasked with a job by the government would do what they can to best carry out that job.

Are you scandalized when a city and the county it is in sue each other and the transportation department over who has responsibilities for what sections of road and how much money who should get rather than letting the citizens who drive on those roads decide? Where do you draw the line for what money the government decides how to spend and what money individuals should decide how to spend?

Pulcinellaon The Movement to Redirect Billions of Taxpayer Dollars to Private Schools

I do not wish for taxpayer dollars to fund private school (religious or otherwise) or homeschooling. One of the things I love most about this country is that America is a civic nation. This country is built on shared civic ideals, values, and vision. This country is not built on a specific racial, ethnic, or religious identity like many, many old-world Eurasian nations.

Pulcinellaon The Movement to Redirect Billions of Taxpayer Dollars to Private Schools

Government entities use taxpayer money to fund legal action (and pretty much everything else they do) all the time. I am not a lawyer but I believe it is called “administrative law” and is completely normal. To think so otherwise is completely ahistorical and incorrect.

Pulcinellaon Apple acquires Pixelmator

Yeah Windows does the same thing. It's something indie game devs run into. If you release on Steam, Steam launches your game. Otherwise you have to pay a certificate authority to sign your game or Windows Smart Screen will do the same "this code is sketchy. Are you really really really sure you want to run it?" thing MacOS does for non-notarized apps.

Pulcinellaon AlphaProteo generates novel proteins for biology and health research

For anyone who would like to know more about designing proteins with a certain function, target, or structure in mind, the term to search for is "rational design."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_design

Pulcinellaon Dynamicland 2024

Home page has been updated as well, though I am unable to submit that as I have previously submitted the same URL when the site launched back in 2017.

https://dynamicland.org/

Pulcinellaon Curl is inside 22,734 Steam games

3 Billion devices run Java (disparaging).

22,734 games utilize Curl (glorifying).

Pulcinellaon Apple M4 Support Added to the LLVM Compiler, ARMv8.7

Technically apple-m4 is ARMv9.2a, but a quirk of LLVM defines v9.0 as requiring SVE, which is optional according to the Arm ARM and not supported by the core. ARMv8.7a is the next closest choice.

Hmm I wonder how this happened? I assume at least at one point SVE was such headline feature of 9.0 that LLVM assumed any 9.0 chip would have SVE even if it wasn't technically required?

Pulcinellaon Norway discovers Europe's largest deposit of rare earth metals

Indeed. I am hearing the Norwegian people yearn for freedom.

Pulcinellaon Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

As for "GPT-4" fabricating things, I remember in school how I wrote essays and was given A's despite citing NYT and Wikipedia. Fabrications exist all over the place. If anything, hallucinations might give more examples as to how to be skeptical of any source and look for direct sources as much as possible.

"Actually it's good that AI sucks because it will teach people to be more skeptical" is not a very compelling argument.

Pulcinellaon Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

Background: I taught high school science for half a decade and now I am in tech.

This will never take off. One, there is no money in Ed.Tech. There is no money in Ed.Tech. There is no money in Ed.Tech. What little money there is goes to the obvious stuff like student records databases. Anything that requires an ongoing subscription fee is dead in the water. The only reason those stupid smartboards took off is because they make school boards look cool, they are a one time cost, and can be paid for with bonds (because they are a one time cost). Teachers don't want them (projectors and document cameras are good, though). Ed.Tech is a wasteland of failed startups. Part of the problem is also that classic "the people with the purchasing power are not the people who will be using the product" problem.

Two, everyone outside of education thinks "well has anyone just tried sitting down with the kids and talking to them/explaining it to them?" Yes, obviously. The problem isn't that they are lazy, snot-nosed kids (that's a problem well within an experienced teacher's skill set to solve). The problem is what is the AI going to do with the kid says "fuck you" to the AI because they haven't eaten since lunch the previous day (school is the only place they get regular meals), or they don't even know what to ask because they are basically 4 grades behind in math, or the wifi is dead for the 8th time that month because the school board will never pay for infrastructure.

Three, what if the AI is just wrong and starts confusing the student? Even GPT-4 fabricates things all the time. Sure it can generally put words in grammatically correct order and is passible for writing no one is going to read anyway (like marketing emails). But the moment it requires actual domain knowledge all these AI models completely fall down because, again, they don't actually understand anything, they just are really good at guessing what word comes next.

Pulcinellaon Halo 2 in HD: Pushing the Original Xbox to the Limit

Halo 1 came out before Xbox Live existed.

Pulcinellaon Add Depth of Field to Screenshots

The closest thing I have seen to this (which isn't that close) is the UI debug viewer in Xcode. You can get an exploded-view diagram of all the UI elements that you can rotate in 3D space. No lighting or shadows though and its limited to apps you have debug access to.

I think the Amazon Fire phone also tried something similar in real time with several front facing eye tracking cameras and the gyro+accelerometer to shift the phone UI and simulate a 3D view with parallax. The old mobile Safari tab view also used to shift the tabs based on the phone's orientation.

I would love to see a "globally illuminated" UI someday, even if it's impractical. Something like all those Windows renders the Microsoft Design team put out, but in real time. Totally impractical and a poor use of electricity, but it would be cool to have path traced, soft drop-shadows.

Pulcinellaon UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time (2019)

It's similar to the "shipping your org chart" problem. Constant redesigns means you are shipping your employee performance review and incentive structure.