HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

blocko

22 karma · joined July 5, 2018

submissionscomments
blocko··on How to earn a billion dollars
There's a great deal of labor involved in building+preparing casks, storing them, monitoring, maintaining the temp/humidity of a space. Additionally, a good chunk of the price of aged whisky is just due to the fact that the product is constantly evaporating and you're getting a lower yield on the same initial input. Price increase != value created
blocko··on Anthropic cut up millions of used books, and downloaded 7M pirated ones – judge
Sure. I'd say reproducing and distributing it to someone who happens to ask the right questions would qualify
blocko··on Anthropic cut up millions of used books, and downloaded 7M pirated ones – judge
Depends on how closely that person can reproduce the original work without license or attribution
blocko··on The Copenhagen Book: general guideline on implementing auth in web applications
What is the rationale behind the following?

> When comparing password hashes, use constant time comparison instead of ==.

If you were comparing plaintext you'd get some info, but it seems overly cautious when comparing salted hashes. Maybe anticipating an unknown vulnerability in the hash function?

blocko··on We need technology that is less immersive, not more
I'll get this occasionally when I've scrolled to the end of an article without realizing, attempt to scroll further a few seconds later, and then have my eyes/vision caught off guard by the absence of movement. Missing a stairstep was a good example--there's a similar moment of "frozen time" in both cases
blocko··on Ideal monitor rotation for programmers (2021)
There's some jank involved depending on which combo of x/wayland, window manager, and compositor you're using, but if you can manage to get virtual monitors working on an ultrawide it's great.

A lot of recent models also support "picture by picture" mode, allowing you to connect two separate inputs to the monitor and avoid doing anything in software.

blocko··on Ways to shoot yourself in the foot with Postgres
I mostly agree, but there is one slight benefit: whenever I read one of these articles, each topic acts as a little quiz where I get to test whether I think it's a do or a don't before seeing the explanation
blocko··on Please don't be spooky
I think it actually adds some of the human part back in. "Hey, got a sec?" in person comes with quite a bit more context--body language, tone of voice--and a pretty quick transition into the content.

To me, the rhythm of an informative first message feels more natural than responding to someone's ping and waiting 2 minutes for the follow-up.

blocko··on Is this the end of social networking?
I've seen people claim that they show a variable amount of ads depending on the user, which I imagine would be based on your clickthrough rate or other metrics. The ratio between ads and content also seems to vary over time for me so I feel there's some form of optimization happening
blocko··on ImHex – A Hex Editor
Looks maybe like the opposite, there's way too much smoothing. I don't mind pixel perfect fonts or even aliased text but these just look like an aggressive blur was applied to everything
blocko··on Photogrammetry Guide
It's shorthand for "I believe this is a problem that can be solved by the technology rather than requiring a manual workaround", not "I am entitled to a solution"
blocko··on Ask HN: YouTube Channels for the Intellectually Curious
+1 for Freya Holmér, I had skimmed through some explanations on shaders in the past and never really sustained much interest until finding her series. It's been a while since watching but I think the contextualization/demos really helped me understand the big picture of video game graphics
blocko··on How does perspective work in pictures?
They mention this under the "What if there is no true perspective?" section:

Second, they point out that viewers almost always view pictures from the “wrong” location. A cornerstone of linear perspective is the idea that the viewer must be at the focal center of the image to view it correctly. If you view a linear perspective image from the focal center, it should be like looking through a window—indeed, Leonardo da Vinci wrote that linear perspective images only work from the focal center. Yet, in reality we don’t do this. Most of the photos we look at would have to be viewed with one’s eye a few inches from the page. People in art galleries walk all around and view paintings from all sorts of angles. Hence, the whole idea of linear perspective falls apart.

blocko··on The Burnout Society
My understanding of detachment is incomplete but I think the simplest answer comes down to whether it's in your nature to accomplish those goals without an ego-based drive. Regardless of someone's stage of enlightenment, they still eat/drink/sleep and part of the reason is that your body will gravitate towards those activities if you let it. I think the same goes for more complex work, but it's hard to say. One thing to contemplate would be the difference between detachment and complete spiritual bypass / avoidance
blocko··on One in five Covid-19 patients develop mental illness within 90 days – study
"Practice" with depression resonated with me. Having another episode feels much more familiar, and there's an advantage to having already recognized and improved a lot of issues with my thinking/coping patterns which exacerbated it the first time.

If your car breaks down twice, the second time still sucks due to the core problems of money and time loss, but you now have less uncertainty surrounding the logistics+scope of getting it fixed.

Mental health skills feel like a hard thing to teach in the abstract due to how personal a lot of the work is, but we could definitely do better. Occasional therapy as a normal preventative practice in healthy kids seems like a start

blocko··on Boys lag behind: How teachers’ gender biases affect student achievement
Why wouldn't men and women be interested in each other if they had similar interests? How do gay couples exist in this framework?
blocko··on The tragic physics of the deadly explosion in Beirut
Not the worst idea to specifically point out scenarios with a high ratio of actual-vs-perceived danger
blocko··on What's it like to be an Octopus? (2017)
Odd to think about future "civilizations" of uploaded consciousness(es?) surviving the extinction of the organic species that produced it
blocko··on Orthodox Privilege
The access/opportunity/etc are what is being referred to as privilege, not the quality granting it. In a world where being beautiful doesn't come with advantages, there is no "privilege of beauty", just beauty
blocko··on Wildlife Services, a US agency planting 'cyanide bombs' to kill predators
I was also intriqued and put ~10min looking into it. This study[1] seems to suggest that although reproduction rates might increase modestly when the population is reduced, high immigration rates are the bigger factor. If anyone finds anything on the (voices disappearing)->(estrus) mechanism described above I'd like to see it, sounds really interesting.

[1] https://wildlife.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/jwm...

blocko··on Asian American Discrimination in Harvard Admissions [pdf]
If the goal is an equal playing field, yes. There are significantly more barriers to entry in America for a poor black person than an equally poor white person. Housing, education (especially that which is immediately tied to where you live), employment, and policing all feature systematic and cultural discrimination that have a measurable effect on outcomes.
blocko··on U.S. govt, tech industry discuss using location data to combat coronavirus
I think the solution would be sending as little data as possible to answer the query, and choosing which/how many queries to respond to. Any large scale requests for data would have to be designed in a way that minimizes intrusiveness or risks being largely ignored. I don't think there's a great way to counter spoofing or sending garbage results without sacrificing user control, but the onus to de-noise should be on whatever institution is attempting to collate data. Additionally, if it's an opt-in system focused on public good there would generally not be much incentive to mess with it as long as users are somehow verified as being in the community (cert generated/granted once after initial identity check, etc). Sadly this is all very pie in the sky at the moment, the amount of cultural change + added infrastructure required for any system like this at the scale of a country would be insane
blocko··on Ring Gave Police Stats About Users Who Said No to Law Enforcement Requests
Well that's just about all the data I need to come to a firm conclusion on the matter
blocko··on Ask HN: What have the past 12 months taught you?
This is probably just a funny statement but be careful about submersion w/o conditioning yourself for it prior: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_shock_response
blocko··on Burnout caused by chronic stress is widespread
Mindfulness and stoicism aren't opposing approaches, they complement one another. Stoicism ≠ being stoic
blocko··on Burnout caused by chronic stress is widespread
You can train and improve the control you have over your reactions - the knee-jerk doesn't need to materialize into anything more than the initial feeling if you practice mindfulness for long enough. Definitely still not worth beating yourself up for anything that has already happened, but in my own experience, taking note and improving how I mentally and physically act in response to feelings has made my life immeasurably better over time
blocko··on The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS
Why's that?