HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

basil-rash

932 karma · joined August 27, 2018

at outlook dot com

meet.hn/city/us-Orange

submissionscomments
basil-rash··on CNN and USA Today have fake websites, I believe Forbes Marketplace runs them
Yes, the top chain in the talk page is exactly what I’m referring. And, as expected, the fair critique of the article for violating wiki guidelines has been shot down by passionate editors who want to push their narrative.
basil-rash··on CNN and USA Today have fake websites, I believe Forbes Marketplace runs them
For mainstream folks, perhaps. The second you even go slightly outside of what the media has declared kosher it goes off the rails. Take RFK’s page, for instance, which is just a collection of inflamed opinions soured from “reputable“ news outlets.
basil-rash··on Hydrothermal explosion at Yellowstone National Park
Or… a geyser? Kinda the one thing absolutely known for going up and down.
basil-rash··on FCC liability for radio pirates operating on your property
Wild. How soon until the standard housing lease boilerplate contains clauses like “you may not transmit any electromagnetic radiation at all under any circumstances whatsoever” as a means of landlords trying to cover their booties?

More seriously, I’d be mighty concerned if I were a landlord and saw someone putting up a ham antenna, regardless of whatever licensing they claimed to have. It’s a bad day for public radio.

basil-rash··on The one person in America happy about tipping fatigue
Except here the grocery store pricing is “name your price” and folks are free to pick the price that suits the level of service they desire/receive.

It’s a leaver we have, and it’s rather powerful if you know how to use it. Doing away with it because “the mental gymnastics” of calculating ~1/5th of a total is too much for some folks to handle is just ridiculous pandering to the lowest common denominator.

I’m happy to receive the best service available at the places I frequent because the staff knows I will compensate them generously. If folks are unwilling to do so, that’s fine: they can still get food/drinks. But they’ll always be further back in the priority queue than me, because I value the time of the wait staff.

basil-rash··on The one person in America happy about tipping fatigue
Personally I love tipping. I’ll tip even for ridiculous things like buying a bag of coffee bean. Guy seemed nice and smiled and tried to answer a question I had - sure have an extra couple bucks. Not a big deal to me, but who knows maybe it is to him. Hell sometimes I’ll even tip an additional 20% on top of the built tip at places where they add ~20% to the bill before you get it, though I reserve this for exceptional cases.

On the flip side, I’ll just as happily tip near 0 at a restaurant when the situation calls for it. If we were somehow to abolish tipping, this would not be possible - prices would just increase uniformly.

basil-rash··on The one person in America happy about tipping fatigue
McDonalds does not allow tipping: https://www.mcdonalds.com/gb/en-gb/help/faq/why-are-staff-no...
basil-rash··on Physicists have created the most fiendishly difficult maze
One rather significant yet under appreciated difference between human and computer path finding in general is that humans cannot BFS. The closest we can get is a sort of modified beam search. But there always will be a latency added when switching heads that computers simply do not have (módulo generally insignificant cache stuff, perhaps)

This has significant implications to search spaces that are very heavily branched with many deep dead ends but a relatively shallow goal.

The number of problems in general life matching that description is… huge.

basil-rash··on UK election day 2024: traffic trends and attacks on political parties
It’s all as compared to the week prior, so the take away would be that folks from NI are slightly more likely to be offline on election day after 4pm than folks from other areas, where they’re more likely to be offline on election day slightly earlier in the day. Idk what more there is to say about that.

The whole piece is more of a “look we’re cloudflare: we process a lot of traffic and can analyze data!” marketing piece than anything.

basil-rash··on A landscape of consciousness: Toward a taxonomy of explanations and implications
Scott Aaronson’s take on this is certainly worth a read for anyone interested in consciousness , quantum mechanics, comparability theory, etc: https://arxiv.org/abs/1306.0159
basil-rash··on Twilio confirms data breach after hackers leak 33M Authy user phone numbers
> Even though my area code is XYZ, I'm in the same city as you

The area code wouldn’t be a red flag for me, but this absolutely would.

basil-rash··on Engine Sound Simulator
By far the worst offenders when it comes to neighborhood car sound are EV’s. They have decided across the board to blast the most bone chilling drone imaginable every time they are backing up a driveway or driving at low speed – you know, the kind of thing that happens in neighborhoods all the time.

The tone itself is the worst part. It’s as if it was specifically engineered by top audio scientists to be as repulsive as possible (that’s probably exactly what happened), then they turned the volume dial up to 11 so it’s still grating even in your house several doors down. I believe Tesla led the charge here, but now they’re all equally guilty of disturbing the peace and wanton noise pollution.

Just play a nice v8 sound at a reasonable volume for gosh sake!

basil-rash··on Let's Stop Asking "Why Do You Want to Work for Us?" In Interviews
? You can answer however you like. Don’t feel limited by following the prompt to the T, they’re more interested in big picture impressions than strict prompt following ability.
basil-rash··on Open source 'Eclipse Theia IDE' exits beta to challenge Visual Studio Code
Odd example - VS Code already has an outline view, and it’d be very easy to build one yourself as an extension if you wanted. (TreeViewProvider API).

With the addition of Webview Editors and Views there’s not really anything an extension can’t do to its UI. Notice this is very different from saying there’s not much an extension can’t do to VS Code’s UI. Extensions are given a box, and they gotta stay in it. Personally, I’m fine with that.

basil-rash··on T-Mobile users enraged as "Un-carrier" breaks promise to never raise prices
The only thing you can probably get out of a “guarantee” is a piece of paper you can submit as evidence in a court of law. How much you value that depends a lot on what it says and who gave it to you.
basil-rash··on Private investigator sent to man's house for modifying legally purchased handbag [video]
Awful summary. There is very clearly a LV logo right in the middle of the wallet. LV is famous for their leather being absolutely covered with their logo, it’d be rather difficult to make anything that didn’t show it. (Unless you really were just wanting to repurpose the leather and used acetone to dissolve the coating. But that would not get you that sweet sweet youtube ad revenue – not to mention the revenue he’s getting for these fake LV items, which he would not be able to match with just “plain leather wallet”)

It’s really not a cut and dry case.

basil-rash··on Beyond velocity and acceleration: jerk, snap and higher derivatives (2016)
The funny thing is I’m almost certain everyone here has been exposed to the term “jerk”, in the exact technical meaning, but didn’t make the relation that the colloquial meaning and the technical meaning are the same.

Acceleration feels like a constant force (because… it is). When that force changes, you feel “jerked”.

basil-rash··on Beyond velocity and acceleration: jerk, snap and higher derivatives (2016)
The first one comes up in control systems: you have two displacements, the target position and the real position. You subtract them to get the error, also a displacement. You can then integrate that error term to get the total error over the course of the control period. That would be “absement”, measured in m*s. You might then tune your control algorithms to optimize that value.

I’m not sure how to think about the lower orders. You might, for instance, have a learning control system you expect to come to a lower error state over time. The integral of the absement would be a decent way to capture that phenomena.

basil-rash··on Arvind has died
Yes. “an illness he was being treated for suddenly worsened”
basil-rash··on VS Code extensions are less secure than browser extensions or even NPM packages
Indeed. One should always disable extension auto updating. Besides that, there’s not really any less security than NPM packages. It’s the open secret of the whole industry that we just open ourselves to RCE every day because the alternative (vetting dependencies) is too annoying.
basil-rash··on Silicon Valley salaries are shrinking, leaving workers in the lurch
Number 9 is more than sufficient alone. Everything else is ancillary.
basil-rash··on T-Mobile users thought they had a lifetime price lock–guess what happened next
Don’t forget the unconstructive meta-analysis.
basil-rash··on How Apple Fell Behind in the AI Arms Race
Is that how you treat all your users? “Using my product is better than a bullet in your brain so shut up and take it.”
basil-rash··on How Apple Fell Behind in the AI Arms Race
Just “Forgot” then reassociated the pods and saw no such animation. I did see some animation the first time I connected, but I may have skipped through it because I was excited to try out my $600 headphones and it was in the way of me and the music. Still no answer for why the headphones setting page lists every shortcut except skip/prev.

If AI was real, Siri would tell me I can simply triple press the crown when I ask it to skip the track while wearing airpods. Or at least be able to answer when I directly ask it “how to skip a track when wearing airpods max”. As is, it just runs a google search and tells me to figure it out myself. Thanks.

basil-rash··on How Apple Fell Behind in the AI Arms Race
Ah! Coulda sworn I tried that… thanks!

Weird that its not listed in the settings menu with all the other shortcuts.

basil-rash··on How Apple Fell Behind in the AI Arms Race
I ask Siri to skip the current track sometimes, because my $600 airpods max couldn’t be bothered to make their buttons configurable. That’s about the only time I use or want to use “AI” on my phone ever – and I wish I didn’t have to do even that.

Edit: hot damn I just learned double clicking the crown skips the track, later Siri!

basil-rash··on Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico
If it’s a one way trip, the cancer might end up being a blessing.
basil-rash··on I added some optimizations to my compiler that turns Lisp into JavaScript
In the context of a discussion on JS, the spec assigns a very specific meaning to the term “object”, one which value-types do not satisfy. That is, indeed, the entire point of this thread, and to suddenly switch terminology then ramble about how you’re better than “script kiddies” screams rhetorical incompetence.

It's clear that you don’t know JS. I was trying to help you understand one interesting design decision they make, but you’ve taken to personal attacks against the entire community in a way that I don’t find worth humoring. Good day.

basil-rash··on How many photons are received per bit transmitted from Voyager 1?
For the spectrum in question: FCC’s “US258 G117”, 8.4-8.45GHz reserved for “Space Research (deep space)(space-to-earth)”. Pretty neat.

https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-47/chapter-I/subchapter-A...

basil-rash··on In Colorado, an ambitious new highway policy is not building them
Grocery stores are different because bums aren’t allowed to sit around there waiting for a woman to come by for them to harass. If they were, I’m confident many would object.

It’s clear that you don’t have much concern for the harassment experienced by those woman columnists you read, so I don’t think there much more I can say here. I imagine if you were to have any direct experience at all with the problem, your position would be different.

That all said: what’s your upside? What do you gain which you consider to be worth these women whom you do not know sacrificing their safety?

Page 1 of 15Next →