Hacker News Reader

ShardPhoenixon The Right Kind of Stubborn

I liked PG's essays better when they were more concretely rooted in the details of his work his work at his startup and at YC. This one feels like a sort of non-specific variant of Bulverism - diagnose a bunch of people without presenting evidence, then start psychoanalysing them (also without evidence).

ShardPhoenixon Two weeks of dealing with Google as a developer

Based on the chat transcript Demz seems like either another bot or someone who just doesn't give a shit. Can't be bothered helping someone? Just spam the "I'm sorry you're frustrated" macro then cut them off. Easy job.

ShardPhoenixon Why is Git so popular and frequently used?

When Git was taking over from SVN, the main benefit I remember reading about was the much faster/lighter-weight branching. IIRC in SVN making a branch makes a complete copy of all the files. Since then it's benefited from being the standard everyone (kinda) knows despite its sharp edges.

ShardPhoenixon The Miasma

>When I described this to Amy, she responded with a magnificent rant that was something like “this is a romanticized utopian ideal about a thing that was inhabited by socially inhibited, white male nerds who consider themselves too smart to be misogynistic but, well, often are.”

This kind of thinking is itself a major cause and component of the Miasma.

ShardPhoenixon The Hanabi Challenge: A New Frontier for AI Research

OpenAI claims that their work on Dota2 has carried over to work on a robot hand: https://blog.openai.com/learning-dexterity/

(Which isn't quite practical yet but might be in the mid-term future).

ShardPhoenixon AWS, MongoDB, and the Economic Realities of Open Source

The first four words of the linked Gwern article are "Joel Spolsky in 2002". In fact he gives him credit 3 times!

ShardPhoenixon Oracle to charge for Java from Jan 2019

Note: this applies to new updates to Java 8, as a result of the upcoming Java 11 taking over as the LTS version. Oracle is not charging for Java in general.

As a result the headline and article come across as a bit FUDdy to me.

ShardPhoenixon Ex-Apple Employee Stole Secrets for Chinese Firm, U.S. Says

"Good actors" isn't some term of high praise, it just means those who aren't "bad actors" (who do harmful things).

ShardPhoenixon What Tech Skills Are Hot [React, Cloud] or Not [Linux, Tableau] (2017)

Such large swings in basic things like "Mandarin" make me doubt the quality of the data.

ShardPhoenixon OpenAI Charter

An AI doesn't need to be upset at humans (or even have emotions as we know them) to be dangerous - it just needs to be powerful and to not care about us as much as we care about ourselves. Humans weren't angry at Dodos.

ShardPhoenixon Toys ‘R’ Us Plans Bankruptcy Filing Amid Debt Struggle

>The part I don't understand yet is who is the dumb money buying shares in these hollowed-out debt-laden husks from the private capital vultures? It almost always ends up badly.

Is this based on reliable statistics or on highly visible anecdotes? Perhaps the "dumb money" isn't as dumb as you think.

ShardPhoenixon Building a working game of Tetris in Conway's Game of Life

Thanks to the very lucid explanations, I feel like this gave me a better understanding of why computers might be implemented in a certain way (eg why certain gates or instructions might be used - obviously a physical computer will have different constraints).

ShardPhoenixon Kotlin in enterprise

>You also would probably mention that the code would be less likely to be buggy and crash due to the null safety principle. Not really. Although it makes it easier to deal with null values, Kotlin is no miracle cure. A null value comes from somewhere. If your logic is wrong, your logic is wrong, no matter what is the language used.

I haven't used Kotlin extensively enough to know how much the null safety really helps, but this reasoning seems incorrect to me. You could extend it to say that static types aren't useful either, but in both cases there's a significant benefit from getting faster feedback that your logic is (or might be) wrong.

ShardPhoenixon Slack Said to Draw Interest from Amazon

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=slack,discord

So far of course Slack is still much more popular among business users, but I've anecdotally noticed a big surge in Discord usage among consumers (on Reddit especially).

ShardPhoenixon Maps reveal the structures of ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ books

>In one short story he proposes a kind of reverse CYOA book: A book with many beginnings but only one ending.

Some games work like this (eg Dragon Age: Origins). It's not as mysterious as it sounds.

ShardPhoenixon What If Everyone Voted (in the UK)

You get your name and address checked off when you vote, if you don't get checked off you get fined (~$100). However I've heard of people sometimes not voting without getting fined, not sure why.

ShardPhoenixon What If Everyone Voted (in the UK)

Voting is mandatory in Australia and our political system doesn't seem particularly better (or worse) then the UK.

ShardPhoenixon A.I. Experiments

I don't find this very surprising - I've seen a similar level of framework heterogeneity even at much smaller companies.

ShardPhoenixon A New Phase for World of Warcraft’s Lead Designer: His Own Startup

>Is the problem that there are lots of mediocre artists but not many who can actually execute projects?

I think part of it is that standards keep increasing. Compare this demon concept art from Warcraft 2 (1995): http://vignette2.wikia.nocookie.net/wowwiki/images/c/cb/Daem... to this one from WoW: Legion (2016): https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/56/f2/7f/56f27f98a...

There are probably a lot of artists that can execute at the 1995 level who aren't employable in 2016.

ShardPhoenixon The Day the Moon Blew Up

The meeting seemed a little content-free, I wonder if there was some other discussion happening off-camera? Like, "I'll fund the movie version" or something. Or maybe Gates is really just like "Hey I liked your book, let's get hamburgers in VR".

ShardPhoenixon Video gamers solve a biological puzzle [video]

>The decisions they make during the gameplay get translated into decisions about non-trivial aspects of scientific work. (This is the hard part).

It's a nice dream but I suspect figuring out the mapping from game to scientific problem would take exponential time (ie be totally impractical) if you're talking about unmodified games.

ShardPhoenixon GitLab Enterprise Edition price change

After spending two minutes clicking around my free account, I couldn't see either how I'd upgrade to a paid account or why I'd want to. Seems like an important usability issue.

ShardPhoenixon DeepMind Challenges for StarCraft

It sounds like he has no idea about the machine learning basis of Alpha Go (and therefore presumably any future Starcraft AI) and thinks all this complex decision making has to be programmed in by hand (which would indeed be nigh-impossible).

ShardPhoenixon Yahoo to Spin Off Its Core Businesses

"The decision not to sell the Alibaba stake, which was reported on Tuesday, was driven by “the market’s perception of tax risk” associated with the Alibaba plan"

It's unfortunate that the tax code is so complex that ambiguous "tax risk" is a thing.

ShardPhoenixon Facebook Blocks Internet Pioneer “R.U. Sirius”

I don't use Facebook much but it's the way many of my friends handle invites to events, so I need access to it for that at least.

ShardPhoenixon See what Hacker News looked like on the day you joined

> /r/anime is infuriatingly stupid, /r/awwnime is much more tolerable.

Well that's not too surprising when the latter has almost no comments. You could try r/trueanime - it's smaller and smarter, though it does tend to attract long-winded people.

ShardPhoenixon Developing NASA's mission software with Java

>One of the unique requirements is that we must use accredited software. This means that we can’t just pull in third-party JAR files at will, but we can use anything already contained within the JDK.

This policy seems dubious to me. It forces the teams to roll their own immature versions of things rather than rely on heavily used (and thus heavily battle-tested) 3rd party libraries. (Any special code screening applied to internal code could also be applied to open-source 3rd party code too).

ShardPhoenixon Japan’s New Satellite Captures an Image of Earth Every Ten Minutes

Geostationary satellites orbit much further away (~35,786 km) from Earth than non-stationary satellites (~2000 km).

ShardPhoenixon Warner Bros Suspends Sales of Batman: Arkham Knight PC Version

That forum must be really heavily moderated/censored. Based on eg the Battle.net forums I'd have expected to see much angrier posts.

ShardPhoenixon “A Statement with My View on Curtis Yarvin and Strange Loop”

You're right - socialism is much worse than racism. Socialism (actual socialism, not "social democracy" aka capitalist welfare state) destroys countries (eg North Korea), while racism is merely a moderate problem (eg South Korea is very racist but doing fine).

edit: To be fair, people are probably more sensitive to racism in America because America is so diverse.