HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

challenger-derp

88 karma · joined January 27, 2021

submissionscomments
challenger-derp··on I also filed the corners off my MacBook
That's kinda clever, and possibly something to consider for users who prefer an alternative to filing.
challenger-derp··on Full Writeup of the Windows GDID
Are there limits on what kinds of websites can request for a visitor's global ID information?

Must a website direct the user to log into their MS account before it is able to get a hold of the user's global ID information?

challenger-derp··on Dropbox Paper mobile App Discontinuation
> (I’m a very early user, signed up before 2008, have 3TB of free lifetime storage from referrals and internship bonuses)

I thought I had it lucky with my measly 25GB of lifetime storage. Have been using Dropbox for free for well over a decade – I would pay but their entry level plan far exceeds what I need.

challenger-derp··on Mathpad: A mathematical keypad for students and professionals
Am eagerly anticipating the commercial availability of Mathpad.

At the moment I'm using Espanso, an open source software that lets users map typed character sequences to unicode. So it's possible to set things up in such a way that typing the character sequence ";" "a" ";" makes Espanso replace the entire ;a; string with the greek symbol alpha α.

Symbols like ⇒ that can kind of be "drawn" with common keyboard characters "=" ">" is possibly nice to be mapped to the character sequence ;=>; This is a personal preference inspired by Typst's math notation design choice.

challenger-derp··on Darker Than a Dark Pool? Welcome to Wall Street's 'Private Rooms'
As I understand it, for retail market participants, the concern of dark trading venues is at least twofold:

1. With some brokerages, retail orders are prioritized for dark venues over lit ones (i.e., first routed to see if they can be fulfilled on dark venues, otherwise, then route to lit ones) where they are essentially trading against more knowledgeable participants. A common argument in favor of this, oft cited by dark pool operators and affliated brokerages is that on average, historically, better prices for all participants have been attained with the assistance of dark pools.

Relatedly, on many trading venues, even lit ones, trade orders are demarcated to distinguish between retail and non-retail – a feature visible to larger participants like MMs and one would imagine high volume participants – which is essentially extra information to a subset of participants that indicate that an order is safer to trade against.

2. Dark venues operate outside the standard public exchange framework. Trade orders are not _as_ visible to the broader market. This lack of transparency can disadvantage retail, who don’t have equal insight into the supply or demand of shares. This opacity possibly hinders price discovery of the "real" price.

challenger-derp··on MathScroll – Infinitely Scroll Mathematics
It's not loading on my end, but I checked out the web archive version of it and have to say that this feels possibly quite fun and, dare I say, potentially addictive. Not sure if there's an intention to extend this, but giving the ability to filter by topic, "trending-ness" (like the "hot" metric on Reddit), controversy, date of post/last engagement, etc. could be a potential next step.
challenger-derp··on TabBoo – add random jumpscares to websites you're trying to avoid
I've never thought about this – but it's quite the brilliant idea provided the user isn't someone prone to getting a heart attack from a jumpscare.
challenger-derp··on Nobody cares
This list is quite well-put.

Also, for a large number of roles, people are judged by the net value that they've contributed (net of mistakes). In a pretty large subset of such roles, it's usually the case that small-ish mistakes result in small-ish penalties, or sizeable penalties that aren't apparent immediately – so in the short-term, the here and now, folks in these roles are incentivized to focus on the big picture, and to ignore what they might feel could cause small-ish mistakes.

Consider a person involved with the modification of city street infrastructure to better cater for bikes. It's pretty good by most people's standards to have made progress by building reasonably use-able bike pathways, stands, etc. in say, a 4 km radius in a year. If it just so happens that like three out of, say, sixty of such constructs are problematic (mistakes) but they aren't big-ish problems, then on the whole, this person would be, quite justly, credited for having contributed to at least fifty seven functioning constructs; all in all, pretty good work despite three problematic constructs.

Of course, not all types of work is like that. That is, not all work are that forgiving in the sense that most earnest mistakes turn out to be small ones relative to the overall value produced. E.g., trading: algorithmic or otherwise.

Now, just a note in closing, the distribution of the price of mistakes in a given role is a different matter, can be an art in that it involves qualitative judgement, may be largely sensitive to context, and may be quite opinionated depending on who is reached for comment.

challenger-derp··on Intel’s board, and an example of when boards and short-termism fail
would be helpful if I could get assistance with the paywall – I could be wrong, but I'm assuming a sizeable handful of commenters in this section managed to read this paywalled article?
challenger-derp··on Imagining faces in tree trunks and your morning eggs? AI can see them, too
There's a related line of research that concerns computer vision models and optical illusions.
challenger-derp··on Show HN: I made crowdwave – imagine Twitter/Reddit but every post is a voicemail
I just wanna say I like the idea and I think you're (OP) right on the mark on there being people who prefer communicating by voice in an informal setting instead of using text. Voice may be, in certain situations, a higher bandwidth medium since intonation may be incorporated. On the flipside, I personally feel like I could be exposing more of myself to the world than I'd wish to with voice.. like people with particularly unique voices may fear de-anonymization via voice.

Overall, I think it's a project worth playing around with, and who knows, traction could start building up.

challenger-derp··on David Chang on the long, hard, stupid way
> And ultimately I think being a chef is one of the hardest jobs to motivate people because there’s no lure of a giant paycheck or bonus or stock options. You’re really trying to teach someone to better themselves through their own personal integrity.

1. jobs that are monetarily incentivized in this way are quite common though.

2. for certain kinds of jobs, if an employer desires employees to go the "long, hard, stupid way" while short-cuts lie in plain sight, the employer might wish to incorporate forms of incentives and disincentives into their payout system rather than rely on their employee to "just do it".

challenger-derp··on 100k Stars
Enjoyed playing around the visualization to get a better mental picture of Earth's neighborhood. it's mind-blowing to know that there are 200 to 400 billion stars just in our galaxy alone. And it's even more breath-taking to comprehend that our galaxy is but one of a ≥100 billion galaxies in the _observable_ universe.
challenger-derp··on A Visual Guide to Vision Transformers
Very nice. I wish I could do this sort of scroll story in my digital notes. Is this done with a javascript library?
challenger-derp··on We have more to fear from stupid people than evil ones
Similar to how people are intelligent in different ways, we too may be less-smart-than-the-average in different ways.
challenger-derp··on Hacker leaks millions more 23andMe user records on cybercrime forum
this made me spit out my morning coffee. ugh.
challenger-derp··on LK-99 isn’t a superconductor
I'd like to second this. Bonus points if a magnet were included so that the sample could be "levitated" over it. This is definitely a kind of novelty gift suitable for science-y and geeky friends.
challenger-derp··on Disney Eliminates Its Metaverse Division
That actually sounds fun. It's like karaoke but more than singing songs... even without the acting aspect, it sounds fun to experience the story unfold while you're in it. Not sure if people will feel bogged down by the additional effort they'll have to put in and prefer to just stare at a screen though.
challenger-derp··on Ask HN: How many hours do you work on a daily basis?
It varies. Some days 4 hours, other days are 12 hours.
challenger-derp··on Creation happens in silence
The preference for silence may not be universal. John Von Neumann, a highly regarded scientist, appears to prefer noisy environments according to his Wikipedia entry [1]:

In Princeton, he [John Von Neumann] received complaints for regularly playing extremely loud German march music on his phonograph, which distracted those in neighboring offices, including Albert Einstein, from their work. Von Neumann did some of his best work in noisy, chaotic environments, and once admonished his wife for preparing a quiet study for him to work in. He never used it, preferring the couple's living room with its television playing loudly.

References

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann

challenger-derp··on I don't like making the best things
> I used to love X, but now it's been a few years since I've done X. What changed? At some point, everything got serious. [1]

> I started to only want to publish the best things, so I didn't publish at all. ...

> When I try to make the best thing, I become less happy, actually I become paralyzed. ...

> When I try to make the best thing, it feels different. It feels like I'm trying to prove something to someone instead of trying to discover something for myself. ... I'm just me, so I should make me things.

Pleasantly surprised to have chanced upon this piece of writing which has, in a few short paragraphs, captured a series of complex emotions I'd think are common among creators.

Practically I think it helps to be in touch with a community of creators who can offer support, guidance and empathy.

Personally I am far from mastering my emotions to the point where I'm comfortable putting my not-best creations up for public criticism/discussion while simultaneously recognizing the need to build up courage and wisdom to do so. I think for some this aversion partly stems from their upbringing's (family, education system, peer expectations) lack of openness/encouragement to exploration and failure to tolerate failure (failure comes hand in hand with exploration).

While eschewing failure appears to be of little detriment to the "cog in the machine", cultures that have yet figured out how to discuss, accept, and tolerate failures are destined to avoid innovation. People who are serious about creating/innovating should find means of coping with people who are overly critical/ dismissive of "not-best" iterative attempts.

Footnotes:

[1] Took the liberty of generalizing the author's post by replacing the act of publishing which was the author's original focus to "X" with the intention of having "X" being any activity.

challenger-derp··on FTC cracks down on companies that impose harmful noncompete restrictions
Can anyone shed light as to why the push for symmetric non-competes isn't a movement?
challenger-derp··on Ask HN: Anyone else regret leaving an old job for a new one?
I enjoyed reading this comment and agree mostly with what was conveyed.

>I don’t think people should go back to a prior employer.

Personally, I don't think that going back to a prior employer is a bad look. I've seen colleagues who left and came back in a more senior role.

challenger-derp··on Show HN: I built Haystack – your own google for scattered workplace knowledge
Can see how this has potential. I've worked on a similar thing at work and there are some nuances as to the level the embedding is performed at (e.g. sentence level) and the kinds of queries that your search engine will be good at (i.e. good ranking of results). Also, depending on how heterogenous the data is, other factors (dated-ness, colleague whose writing/instructions/tutorials you prefer) can also be incorporated into the ranking algorithm.
challenger-derp··on Surely you're publishing, Mr. Feynman
Quoting the last two paragraphs of the blog post (cuz I think that's where the gist of this post lies):

> Research should never be driven by success, because the pursuit of it either disheartens, or beguiles, even the greatest of men. An ideal Research should truly ever be ignited by curiosity. It should be fueled by the desire to know. And it should be done for the pursuit of truth and truth alone, no matter what it is. Feynman investigated the curious wobbles only for the pure joy of satiation. And the rest, as they say, is history:

> "I went on to work out equations of wobbles. Then I thought about how electron orbits start to move in relativity. Then there’s the Dirac Equation in electrodynamics. And then quantum electrodynamics. And before I knew it (it was a very short time) I was “playing”–working, really –with the same old problem that I loved so much, that I had stopped working on when I went to Los Alamos: my thesis-type problems; all those old-fashioned, wonderful things. It was effortless. It was easy to play with these things. It was like uncorking a bottle: Everything flowed out effortlessly. I almost tried to resist it! There was no importance to what I was doing, but ultimately there was. The diagrams and the whole business that I got the Nobel Prize for came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate."

challenger-derp··on Show HN: AI magics meet Infinite draw board
The UI/UX is great as many commenters have pointed out. Your write-up (readme) is also excellent. Though, at the moment, your cloud server is having trouble processing requests, I got error notifications about your cloud server posting.
challenger-derp··on Show HN: A new search engine UX I've been working on in my free time
love it. If i could configure my google search UX to this something like this, I would. Reminds me of TweetDeck in its early days. This is a power tool for avid searchers.
challenger-derp··on Everyone going to World Cup must have this app, experts are sounding the alarm
If they really really want to track people:

- Sir, you have to install this application, it's available on both iOS and the Google Play Store.

- Do you have a Debian package?

- Give me a moment to check our database of alternative OSes.. Why yes, yes, we do have this as a Debian package.

- ... Well... is the app truly compulsory?

- Yes Sir, indeed it is I'm afraid. Security, safety and all that.

- ...

challenger-derp··on US Government plans to develop AI that can unmask anonymous writers
> that's not actually implemented

That's my understanding as well.

> it's a convenient talking point in the west

When online comments get worked up about The Social Credit System, a key thing I believe they're trying to do is spread awareness of how disturbing it is that a government is even considering such a thing that, as we understand it, is closely related to being a core technology in an authoritarian dystopia.

While it's not implemented at scale, the unnerving fact is that govt policy makers did a careful enough take on a social credit system to decide that it was worthwhile investing (probably non-trivial amounts of ) money and resources into exploring it and did eventually reach a point where they were a handful of steps short of wide-scale implementation.

challenger-derp··on US Government plans to develop AI that can unmask anonymous writers
^ In case anyone is interested in learning more, the first part of what vmoore is doing is termed back-translation.
Page 1 of 3Next →