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bdowling

2,578 karma · joined June 26, 2014

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bdowling··on App designed by Indigenous people in W. Australia preserves language, culture
Science does change based on ideological beliefs.

See, e.g., https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism

bdowling··on AI headphones let wearer listen to a single person in a crowd by looking at them
Being able to selectively mute people was an element in a couple of Black Mirror episodes.
bdowling··on Ask HN: What's your favorite Underrated Anime that no one talks about?
Kill La Kill is also fantastic as a gateway to the classic anime and TV that it references. See, e.g., https://marshmallowgoop.tumblr.com/catalog-project-part-i
bdowling··on Ask HN: What's your favorite Underrated Anime that no one talks about?
Welcome to the NHK - A black comedy about hikikomori, the anime industry, cult religions, conspiracy theories, pyramid schemes, suicide, and other topics. Not cheerful topics, but it is funny and has a lot to say.
bdowling··on WinDirStat – Windows Directory Statistics
Zip file support has been in Windows since 98 (via the Plus pack) or Me (2000). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZIP_(file_format)
bdowling··on OpenAI didn’t copy Scarlett Johansson’s voice for ChatGPT, records show
Recasting a voice actor when there was a contract with the prior actor (and such a contract would typically allow for recasting) is one thing.

Copying a famous actor’s voice without any kind of agreement at all is something else.

bdowling··on Opening Windows in Linux with sockets, bare hands and 200 lines of C
This is fun and all, but if you lose your connection, your windows will go away and your program will usually exit.

It’s almost always more usable to run a desktop session in Xvnc on the server and connect to it with a VNC client, because if you get disconnected, you can just reconnect.

bdowling··on Speeding up C++ build times
You think only inexperienced developers have stopped reading books?
bdowling··on Show HN: I made a spaced repetition tool to master coding problems
So, inverting is just swapping the left and right pointers for the entire tree? Why would you ever do that? That will flip the ordering of the tree and none of your search or balancing functions will work anymore. Shut up! Don't ask questions! Uh, ok.
bdowling··on FTC announces rule banning noncompetes
> If the invention takes 3 weeks and $0…

…then the patent can be invalidated on the basis that it is obvious.

If the invention is commercially valuable, then invalidating it (or just pretending it doesn’t exist until you get sued, then invalidating it) can make more sense than licensing it.

A related issue is that there are many, many patents that most people (e.g., competitors) mostly ignore, because everyone, including the patent owner, knows that they would be invalidated if challenged.

bdowling··on FTC announces rule banning noncompetes
Is there a video that goes with those slides?
bdowling··on FTC announces rule banning noncompetes
Don’t forget that the lawyers probably took 33-40%, after costs.
bdowling··on The Curse of Monkey Island
We can't truly exalt our enlightened present and future without denigrating the past.
bdowling··on All-cash offers, wealthy buyers push Southern California home prices to a record
> many/most states have laws that the seller/buyer must disclose, not the price the house is sold for, but how much of a loan was issued for the house.

As far as I know, this is usually not true. Neither the buyer nor seller must disclose the existence of a loan on the property. For example, many loans are between family members who would prefer to keep them private, and the law allows that. Practically, however, any commercial lender (even a seller who offers financing) will record a mortgage with the county recorder so that he has priority in a foreclosure.

The sale price, however, usually is disclosed at least to the county assessor for property tax purposes. The exceptions would be where an heir inherits a property and the value is not reassessed.

bdowling··on Base 10 is not a good base
Nerd sniping? Not this time, buddy.

https://xkcd.com/356/

Edit: You got nine of us with one comment. You win.

bdowling··on When Nostalgia Was Deadly
Is there a term for nostalgia for a time and place that one never experienced? Triggered by music or movies or reading about history, some people experience a kind of nostalgia for life in times they never lived and places they've never been to. (A popular one is Japan during the economic boom of the 1980's.)
bdowling··on Japanese police arrest man for tampering with Pokémon Violet save data
There is certainly a possibility of civil liability for breach of contract or copyright infringement for violating a EULA.

In some cases, a person could even face criminal liability (e.g., hacking game servers using a modified client could be both a EULA violation and a crime).

bdowling··on Japanese police arrest man for tampering with Pokémon Violet save data
> Also less than a year ago age of consent in Japan was 13 years, talk about priorities.

If you read past the clickbait title, however, you’ll find that the individual prefectures have had stricter age of consent laws for many years. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ages_of_consent_in_Asia

Did you know that the United States still has NO age of consent law at all? It’s true, there is no federal law that addresses the subject. (Each state has its own law.) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ages_of_consent_in_the_Unite...

bdowling··on The U.S. government may finally mandate safer table saws
The analysis I read listed various reasons why existing manufacturers wouldn’t adopt the technology (sorry, I can’t find the link). Increased cost per saw was one, but adopting the technology would also create two product lines: “safe” saws and “unsafe” saws. So any manufacturer who adopted the tech partially would have to argue that half of their product lines were unsafe. Even if the license costs were zero, these problems would exist.
bdowling··on The U.S. government may finally mandate safer table saws
This is a bizarre take because if not for SawStop, many, many more people would have lost blood, appendages, and lives to conventional table saws. In fact, SawStop the company only exists because 20 years ago every table saw manufacturer refused to license the technology from the inventor. None of them wanted it at any price because it would increase the cost of their saws and reduce their profits.
bdowling··on Interview with Yanis Varoufakis on Technofeudalism
You seem to think this situation is very different from what publishers have done for at least hundreds of years. For at least hundreds of years, publishers have published many, many books each year, only a few of which become bestsellers. The publishers have wielded a lot influence over what books become popular (e.g., by telling booksellers to place them in good spots in stores, by getting reviewers to review them).

Unlike a traditional publisher, however, to whom an author sells the exclusive right to publish a work, you have the right to take your tweets and publish them elsewhere. There are many examples of authors who have adapted their Twitter posts into blog articles or books, and published them on other platforms, or even in print.

As for the contextual value of your tweets, if the tweets form one half of a conversation with a real person whose tweets you cannot use elsewhere, then they can be recast in the form of a dialogue with a fictional person, something which has been done since the days of Socrates.

bdowling··on Interview with Yanis Varoufakis on Technofeudalism
> And you need to repost it somewhere.

Exactly, you can repost them elsewhere. That is the opposite of “you can’t take them anywhere else.”

bdowling··on Interview with Yanis Varoufakis on Technofeudalism
> cannot leave by taking what you already contributed.

Of course you can. Twitter/X doesn’t own your tweets. You can take them and post them somewhere else if you want.

This is all clearly stated in the Twitter/X terms of service. https://twitter.com/en/tos

bdowling··on Former University of Iowa hospital employee used fake identity for 35 years
It might come from:

“To provide for the Punishment of counterfeiting the Securities and current Coin of the United States;”

U.S. Const. Art. I, Sec. 8.

If a mortgage is a security in this context. But I don’t know for sure. Usually the answer is the Commerce Clause.

bdowling··on Former University of Iowa hospital employee used fake identity for 35 years
It wasn’t just any bank, it was a bank insured by the U.S. government. The U.S. government does not take being lied to lightly.

By the way, anyone who has applied for a mortgage in the U.S. has seen many, many warnings about how lying on a mortgage application is a federal crime that carries very serious penalties.

bdowling··on Tips for linking shell companies to their secret owners
Often no member of the public does business with these corporations. E.g., a corporation set up by a celebrity to own a private home and keep her address out of public databases.
bdowling··on Xzbot: Notes, honeypot, and exploit demo for the xz backdoor
For all we know there is a whole cyber-squadron (or whatever their military units are called) behind Jia Tan and other accounts.
bdowling··on How do MRI Headphones work? (2022)
Yes, they would charge for headphones to watch the movie. The movie (there was only one, or maybe two on a long international flight) was played on CRT monitors mounted on the ceiling of each cabin section.

That was 20+ years ago, before flat panel screens in every headrest that could tune into one of a couple dozen looping channels, and long, long before you could watch anything at any time from a huge library.

bdowling··on Activision QA Workers Vote to Form Largest US Video Game Worker Union to Date
I really like this idea, but what you’re describing sounds more like “Software Engineer, Testing Department” than QA. In my experience, QA functions more like an extension of automated unit tests for the things an engineer hasn’t gotten around to automating yet.
bdowling··on A Bug in Early Creative Commons Licenses Has Enabled Copyleft Trolls (2022)
> What do you do in a situation like this?

If you are one of the attorneys in that case, then you are found guilty of fraud and extortion, are sent to jail, are disbarred from the practice of law, and are forced to repay all of your proceeds from your scheme.

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

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