Hacker News Reader

aaaaaaaaaaabon Stadia died because no one trusts Google

It's a vicious cycle, for which the blame falls solely on them. Should be a cautionary tale for all companies.

aaaaaaaaaaabon Telefunc: Remote Functions instead of API

What should I call my JavaScript CORBA library to get the most stars on GitHub? Corba.js? Corby? What's the current trend?

aaaaaaaaaaabon 230K Chinese “persuaded to return” from abroad to establish Extraterritoriality

>e.g., opium

lol, are we back to the 19th century?

aaaaaaaaaaabon Why are plants green? To reduce the noise in photosynthesis

This doesn't explain why terrestrial plants didn't evolve some way to utilize e.g. UV radiation. It should be possible in theory, since we know of radiotrophic fungi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiotrophic_fungus

aaaaaaaaaaabon An inorganic user engine driving ad campaigns on major websites and podcasts

The problem?

So you're saying that laypeople shouldn't be allowed to create new browsers that interact with the Web in whatever way they want to? Why exactly?

aaaaaaaaaaabon Show HN: uFuzzy.js – A tiny, efficient fuzzy search that doesn't suck

>a language that evolved to manipulate text documents

Tell me you know nothing about JavaScript's history, without telling me you know nothing about JavaScript's history.

aaaaaaaaaaabon Why are nuclear power construction costs so high? Part III – the nuclear navy

>I'll eat a roll of toilet paper covered in hot sauce if someday nuclear fission is financially viable enough to produce power for civilians at a decent scale.

So all the world’s nuclear power plants operate at a loss? That’s a pretty strong proposition…

aaaaaaaaaaabon An inorganic user engine driving ad campaigns on major websites and podcasts

Lmao, no.

When you put a webview in an app, the app is the browser. Period. A browser is by definition an app that displays webviews. And yes, a browser can access and modify the webpages it is displaying, no shit. That’s literallt the job of the browser, aka the user agent.

aaaaaaaaaaabon A call to reconsider memory address-space isolation in Linux

This is a good opportunity for Rust!

aaaaaaaaaaabon An inorganic user engine driving ad campaigns on major websites and podcasts

>the verification javascript embedded in the ads that are present on the page cannot (sometimes at all) realize that they are within a webview

Good! Webviews are browsers. Browsers are webviews. There’s no way to tell the difference, because there is no difference!

aaaaaaaaaaabon Ken Thompson really did launch his "trusting trust" trojan attack in real life

What if the theorem prover was compiled with an infected compiler?

aaaaaaaaaaabon How New Are Yann LeCun's “New” Ideas?

Just throw more GPUs at it bro!

aaaaaaaaaaabon Posits, a New Kind of Number, Improves the Math of AI

1. IEE754 floats are already nonlinear. The precision is the highest around zero.

2. Bitmap images are not using floating-point values, except in some super niche use cases like GIS data, so “posits” are irrelevant for the use case you’ve posited. (ba-dum-ts)

3. Non-linear gamma is completely unnecessary for bit depths >= 16.

aaaaaaaaaaabon Factory jobs are booming like it’s the 1970s

And not real estate either.

aaaaaaaaaaabon Factory jobs are booming like it’s the 1970s

>Asset prices dropping

Which assets in particular?

aaaaaaaaaaabon Kill-sticky, a bookmarklet to remove sticky elements and restore scrolling

Stadia and GeForce Now already does this.

But I don't think this will be the business model of the Web at large. Server costs would be too high. Webassembly blobs with WebGL gives you the sweet spot by offloading the compute cost to the user while stripping them practically all of their freedoms.

aaaaaaaaaaabon Kill-sticky, a bookmarklet to remove sticky elements and restore scrolling

One way or another, the endgame is going to be websites which are nothing but a fullscreen WebGL canvas driven by webassembly.

Things will steadily devolve for users from that point.

Then we’ll need about ten years for the next generation of hypermedia to surface, which hopefully won’t have Turing-complete scripting on principle. But I’m not sure whether developers are smart enough to avoid repeating the same mistakes again and again…

aaaaaaaaaaabon Kill-sticky, a bookmarklet to remove sticky elements and restore scrolling

Via Shortcuts: https://imgur.com/a/FRy12rp

aaaaaaaaaaabon Turns are better than radians

A Wild Berger has appeared!

aaaaaaaaaaabon Turns are better than radians

Uh oh. I see you didn’t yet encounter the Einstein-notation for tensors :-)

aaaaaaaaaaabon Turns are better than radians

>since you don't ever need more than 1 turn

Helix.

aaaaaaaaaaabon Turns are better than radians

>Huge selling point for turns, IMHO.

Ok, then let’s measure angles in quarter-turns! Then the equation becomes even nicer:

i^x = cos(x) + isin(x)

Beautiful! :-0

Except not. Because you’re obscuring the connection of sin/cos with their hyperbolic counterparts. I.e. this is no longer true:

sinh(x) = -isin(ix)

cosh(x) = cos(ix)

Also, this new convention obscures the connection with the exponential map of Lie groups.

I.e. the exponential map of the complex unit circle as a Lie group is:

e^ix = cos(x) + isin(x)

Similarly, the exponential map of the unit hyperbola of the split-complex plane is:

e^jx = cosh(x) + jsinh(x)

Similarly, for the group of unit quaternions:

e^q = cos(|q|) + sin(|q|)(q/|q|)

These are deep connections, which would be obscured by using anything other than radians.

aaaaaaaaaaabon Turns are better than radians

The sin/cos lookup tables would only contain an octant of the circle and use various symmetries to map other values to that range. Thus the resolution is ~0.176 degrees for a 256-entry table.

sin(x) = -sin(-x) = sin(pi - x) = cos(pi/2 - x)

cos(x) = cos(-x) = -cos(pi - x) = sin(pi/2 - x)

aaaaaaaaaaabon Turns are better than radians

So which programming language makes sense to you? Dare I say… Rust?

aaaaaaaaaaabon Stop parking apps from exposing your location

What if you don’t record the images, just feed them into a license plate recognizer and store those?

aaaaaaaaaaabon Traffic cameras expose your location through parking apps

As soon as you put a huge identification plate on your vehicle there’s no expectation of privacy.

aaaaaaaaaaabon The Subcontrabassoon Project

Other extreme bass instruments:

- octobasse: https://youtu.be/12X-i9YHzmE

- subcontrabass saxophone: https://youtu.be/kgt2m9Q7Kz0

- subcontrabass flute: https://youtu.be/dA70S6NJsCw

- subcontrabass recorder: https://youtu.be/U3CsmeKU2vE

- subcontrabass tuba: https://youtu.be/OK1GDkvFdL4

aaaaaaaaaaabon Tradition is Smarter (2018)

>Consider a world without antibiotics

In a world without antibiotics I’d rather not want anyone getting within 10 feet of my son’s penis with an unsterilized blade, thank you. Not to mention the whole “direct oral suctioning” tradition of some religious groups [1], which sounds like a recipe for spreading herpes and other goodies.

[1] https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/health/health-topics/safe-bris...

aaaaaaaaaaabon FBI misled judge who signed warrant for seizure of $86M in cash

>if an engineer fucks something up, s/he can be personally responsible for the fuckup

Except software engineers :)

aaaaaaaaaaabon GET3D: A Generative Model of High Quality 3D Textured Shapes Learned from Images

Those meshes and textures are far from usable for realtime rendering in a 3D game.