Hacker News Reader

VladimirGolovinon SpaceX launches and nearly lands starship on its first suborbital flight

Definitely not a miss. They got telemetry data (3000 signals) covering the entire flight from start to landing -- which would've been impossible if it went RUD mid-flight. Plus they've located the bug (low pressure in the header fuel tanks) -- and the bug is plain and clear, with no uncertainty.

I'd definitely call that a success.

VladimirGolovinon Ask HN: How do you work through large ideas?

My current framework for that (chronologically organized journal) has its deficiencies, so I've been looking at Zettelkasten for nurturing big, long-term ideas. It looks promising so far -- it's certainly better than a journal for revisiting, updating, tweaking, and for "spending quality time with the idea".

However, I've been using it for just a month or so, and it's too early for me to form any conclusions.

VladimirGolovinon Solar is now ‘cheapest electricity in history’

Could the levelized cost of energy (LCOE) be considered an appropriate metric to account the "costs for a conplete system to provide electricity for a population"?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_energy

Here's a Wikipedia page on cost of energy per source (in LCOE) that has a table of sources for Germany. According to it, solar is 37-115 €/MWh, while CCGT (gas) is 78-100 €/MWh:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cost_of_electrici...

VladimirGolovinon A Thai national park is mailing trash back to tourists

Also, "the government will take strict measures to blacklist visitors who damage national parks or are noisy and disruptive."

I fully support this policy, and I hope it gets implemented in more parks around the world.

VladimirGolovinon Tell HN: Never search for domains on Godaddy.com

Never search for full domain names anywhere. Find a service that can search for a substring in the domain name (e.g. https://www.namedroppers.com/), and search for substrings instead of the full name.

For example, if you want to see if DogHeaven.com is available, search for "ogheave".

VladimirGolovinon The Art of Not Thinking

> I think her post fails in the last section "Do the easiest part first". This is too much thinking, reasoning and I think will backfire. She should delete this section.

I respectfully disagree. This approach absolutely works for me. I usually start a big difficult task by removing trivial inconveniences (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/reitXJgJXFzKpdKyd/beware-tri...)

For example, when I'm about to write a spec, I first do the easy trivial stuff, such as creating and naming the document. Or, when I write a difficult email, I write a rough version of it in a blunt caveman language.

I'd keep this section intact.

VladimirGolovinon France to introduce controversial age verification system for adult websites

They tried it in Russia with Telegram. All they did is teach the entire country how to use VPNs.

VladimirGolovinon WinUI – The modern native UI platform of Windows

I'm on a 27-inch monitor and I cannot stand non-maximized windows. I maximize because I dislike the feeling of clutter at the edges.

VladimirGolovinon Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

There is an obscure Russian book on creativity and talent, “On the nature of Talent / The boy who could fly” by Igor Akimov and Victor Klimenko (1988), that explores the concept of “energy potential”-- the thing that you call “mojo”. It resonated with me 20 years ago, and it resonates now, after a re-reading.

Here are some quotes from that book. Please excuse my rough translation:

When the creator is larger than the task, he is OK -- he has no need to exercise his willpower or to spur himself.

When the creator is equal to the task (e.g. the shape of the chair he is designing causes him discomfort but he cannot figure out why exactly), the willpower wakes up and stands behind his back, expecting an assignment. If the creator has enough energy, the willpower just states, “here’s the task, no need to rush -- we’ll solve it, no need to worry”. But if the creator has low energy, the willpower rolls up the sleeves in order to gather up missing energy.

When the creator is smaller than the task, he’d better step aside, or the task will crush him.

If the creator’s energy is depleted, peace of mind is a godsend to him.

The ability to solve problems (the structure of the creator's soul) is not affected by any external conditions, nor by time. That’s why no matter how hard life tries to crush the creator, he cannot be crushed. To uplift him, there’s no need to pump him up with energy externally. All he needs to do is to muster up just a bit of strength to lift his eyelids -- and notice the task. Seeing the task is his salvation. Squash the smallest task -- swat! and it’s gone. No problem that the task was small: a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. The subsequent task will be easier for him -- because he’s already moving, he has some momentum. And so his energy level begins to rise.

But if he wastes his energy potential, he loses himself. No protection: he is vulnerable all around, and even if nobody is intending to hurt him, he sees malicious intentions in every word, gesture or action, however well-intentioned.

Our energy capacity increases in only two cases: 1. When our energy is expended during creative labor. 2. When our energy is expended during physical exercise, resulting in pleasant tiredness.

Means of increasing our energy potential: 1. Positive emotions. 2. Motion / movement. 3. Solving problems.

VladimirGolovinon I can't process the information that is coming at me

First off, do you still read the news? If so, consider cutting them completely.

As for the rest, deal with issues in a sequential manner. Don't deal with multiple things at once. Be stubborn: pick one thing, kill it dead, move to another.

And consider adopting a GTD-like system. If you deal with information, you will benefit from having a clear distinction between actionable information (tasks) and non-actionable information (reference). See a task? Put in on a task list. Not a task? File it into notes and forget about it.

VladimirGolovinon Ask HN: How is actually Italy confirming SARS-Cov2 cases?

>> Roche's best machines, for example, can process 4,100 RT-PCR tests in a fully automated fashion

What's this number? Tests conducted per day? The number of DNA patterns known to the analyzer?

VladimirGolovinon Free virtual tours of 2,500 museums around the world

That would be fantastic on a 4K monitor, with the capability of zooming into the paintings and the original audioguide sound. And the soundscape please. And the ability to customize the sound of my own footsteps. I would absolutely enjoy that.

Some museums have amazing architecture and feel (The Foundation of Joan Miro in Barcelona is a great example) and having that feel represented by a proper walkable 3D environment would greatly enhance the experience.

I'm a bit concerned though that simulated museum visitors may break the immersion -- we haven't crossed the Uncanny Valley yet.

VladimirGolovinon Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community

> I imagine that most people aren’t aware of the graphs.

And even if they are, they aren't aware of log scale.

VladimirGolovinon ZZ is a modern formally provable dialect of C

This is a very interesting idea. The world needs more languages that make formal provability practical.

And I think I found a typo: thery is_open(int*) -> bool; -- should be "theory".

VladimirGolovinon The Bulwer Lytton Fiction Contest: 2019 Winners

Found a nice Lisp snippet:

"All I can say is that I have never been so insulted (even by the likes of my moronic sister (who seems to delight in making me uncomfortable (and she is so good at it, knowing just how to push my buttons (which I think is a skill that all siblings possess to some extent (which I believe proves some sort of genetic link (despite the fact that I really enjoyed genetics in school (relating on so many levels to Gregor Mendel and his peas (but of course peas make me gag, since my throat swells when I eat them)))))))) as I was by someone suggesting that I have ADD."

VladimirGolovinon Music Generates Feelings That Are Only Weakly Bound to the Music

For me, it's Morrowind and Morrowind. The in-game music was amazing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xULTMMgwLuo

VladimirGolovinon Staying Focused on Projects

My solution is to keep journals / diaries per project. In my experience, journals can handle even the most extreme interruptions (long travels abroad, urgent switches to different projects, long stretches of manager's schedule, health emergencies, etc).

I keep my journals in Workflowy, organized as follows: root folders for projects, subfolders for years, sub-subfolders for months, and the records at the bottom level.

It's not necessary to write daily. Write only if you have a message to your "future you" that could help him / her pick up the project after an interruption. Describe open problems, dilemmas you're facing, dead-ends you've encountered, decisions you've made, and next actions.

It's not necessary to write proper prose. Writing in caveman language is perfectly fine, as long as the future you can understand that.

VladimirGolovinon Ex-World of Warcraft developer's thread about China and the gaming industry

Overwatch is a fantastic game.

VladimirGolovinon Tesla Model 3 represented over 15% of September new car sales in The Netherlands

I've seen quite a lot of electric cars in Barcelona this summer. Mostly Teslas, BMW i3s, and some Renaults with the plug hidden behind the front logo. The main street, the Diagonal, has charging stations, and often I saw plugged-in cars charging there.

VladimirGolovinon Understanding Recursion as an Absolute Beginner

To anyone trying to understand recursion, I advice to learn basic Haskell. This is the language where recursion actually "clicked" for me.

All you need is very basic Haskell. You don't need functors, applicatives or monads. You only need simple functions, pattern matching, and maybe some parametric polymorphism to simplify the examples and make them more general:

  fliplist :: [a] -> [a]
  fliplist [] = []
  fliplist (x:xs) = fliplist xs ++ [x]

  l = [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]
  f = fliplist l

  main = print f

VladimirGolovinon Ask HN: How to get this fraudulent copy of our website shut down?

The dude was kicked out of of Google and his e-commerce provider.

VladimirGolovinon Ask HN: How to get this fraudulent copy of our website shut down?

Get a lawyer to file a DMCA complaint to their host, payment provider, and, most importantly, Google. We used this approach to nuke a Romanian cloner who copied our app.

VladimirGolovinon Progression of the Inevitable (2009)

> The laws of genetics, like other inventions and discoveries, are crystals inherent in the technium, awaiting to materialize. There is nothing magical about these patterns, nothing mystical about technology having a direction. Every technology in the abstract is a latent structure

This reminds me of Meditations on Moloch, a great essay by Scott Alexander (https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/):

> Just as the course of a river is latent in a terrain even before the first rain falls on it – so the existence of Caesar’s Palace was latent in neurobiology, economics, and regulatory regimes even before it existed. The entrepreneur who built it was just filling in the ghostly lines with real concrete.

VladimirGolovinon Why I Switched from Python to Clojure (2016)

I'm teaching my 12-yr old daughter Python right now, and this looks like a neat analogy -- I'll try it in a few minutes.

VladimirGolovinon China's e-buses dent oil demand more than electric cars do

No need to build and maintain the infrastructure (rail and overhead power lines.)

The ability to navigate the road freely -- trolley buses often have trouble circumnavigating badly parked cars in their way, sometimes causing the driver to get out to reattach the "prongs" to the wires.

Also, trams are somewhat prone to "tram jams" caused by one faulty streetcar blocking the railway. And they simply cannot get around a badly parked car.

VladimirGolovinon Middle School Misfortunes Then and Now, One Teacher’s Take

Seconding all points. Having grown up in 80's Russia, this is exactly what I feel.

VladimirGolovinon Middle School Misfortunes Then and Now, One Teacher’s Take

I definitely think there's a silver lining (at least here in Russia). My theory is that smartphones reduce street crime and bullying by providing stimulation.

Back in the eighties when I grew up, the world was much, much less stimulating than it is now. Bullies bullied weaker people, hit on girls and tortured animals just to get their dopamine fixes and to alleviate boredom.

Now all the potential bullies have smartphones full of apps. And the homescreen apps they have on their phones are the result of a decade of competitive evolution -- they are apex attention predators. As a result, their smartphones provide them with more than enough stimulation to keep them occupied all day: porn, dating, gossip, news, games, gambling.

As a result, I haven't been mugged in a decade (knock wood). There were a couple of tries, but I just disregarded them.

I say this is good.

VladimirGolovinon Ask HN: Tools for rational decision making?

I'd recommend to read up on "maximizing" vs "satisficing":

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5MW3DWbvcrztvKnMS/in-praise-...

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/science-choice/20150...

Personally, in your example with the phone, I think that maximizing is a good strategy. My phone is a critical part of my work envronment, so I'm prepared to invest time and money when chosing and buying one -- that is, I'm a maximizer when it comes to buying phones.

On the other hand, when the cost of error is small and the timespan of possible negative consequences is short (e.g. mintes or hours), I'd satisfice. Examples: buying a bottle of water or a quick snack.

As for deciding when to stop, there is the Secretary Problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem), but using this strategy can be painful for maximizers.

VladimirGolovinon Bye, Bye, Google

You can be an Apple user without being a part of the Apple ecosystem.

I've been an Android user since forever but I had to switch to iPhone X to dogfood my app. I "switched without switching" -- my photos are still saved to Google Photos, my contacts are synched with Google Contacts, etc.

I'm perfectly fine after the switch. All my mobile workflows are intact. When it's time to switch back to Android, I'm sure I'll be able to switch without any major problems (except for one thing -- I'll likely miss the build quality of iPhone X).

VladimirGolovinon For the Love of Pipes

It has, in the form of function composition, as other replies show. However, the Unix pipe demonstrates a more interesting idea: composable programs on the level of the OS.

Nowadays, most of the user-facing desktop programs have GUIs, so the 'pipe' operator that composes programs is the user himself. Users compose programs by saving files from one program and opening them in another. The data being 'piped' through such program composition is sort-of typed, with the file types (PNG, TXT, etc) being the types and the loading modules of the programs being 'runtime typecheckers' that reject files with invalid format.

On the first sight, GUIs prevent program composition by requiring the user to serve as the 'pipe'. However, if GUIs were reflections / manifestations of some rich typed data (expressible in some really powerful type system, such as that of Idris), one could imagine the possibility of directly composing the programs together, bypassing the GUI or file-saving stages.