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curiousObject

1,006 karma · joined February 23, 2023

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curiousObject··on Signal launches version 8.0 with Signal Secure Backups
The official Signal website is signal.org

Because of the security and privacy focus of the app, it is best to look there for news about Signal.

https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=signal.org

curiousObject··on Robert Duvall has died
Actors express the human condition, and that’s more difficult than you think.

To pretend to be a person that you are not, on demand, for months on end, is hard and it demands great empathy and skill.

curiousObject··on The shadowy world of abandoned oil tankers
Your comment hints at another problem, which is that allowing the cargo into a port possibly could be exploited as a loophole to break sanctions.

Yet another big problem is that cargo might be too low in value, or even undesirable. Like the cargo of Ammonium Nitrate that exploded in Beirut a few years ago (it had been taken off the docked ship which then sank in the port. The cargo was stored in the port, then stuck in legal and payment disputes, and the result was horrific).

curiousObject··on Art of Roads in Games
This is interesting, I look forward to reading more. But I think it’s wrong, if you want to represent reality.

Real cities were all built in the past, for older vehicles, which moved at different speeds, and were controlled by drivers with different goals from today’s drivers.

So, if your game has bad and unsafe road designs, which have been partly retrofitted to reduce the worst problems, then that is accurate.

A game with optimal roads is not an accurate simulation of reality.

A professional modern road designer will simulate the expected movement of vehicles through a new or redesigned road, to try to discover major problems.

They look for problems with turning radius, visibility, stopping distances, and interactions with other road users.

I believe that a game designer could offer to do the same.

The game could draw a good algorithmic road shape first. But next offer the player an option to run a simulation of individual traffic movements, to discover serious issues, and let the player know about problems.

To the OP, I suggest this simulation approach, not trying to discover flawless algorithms. That’s not how it happens in the real world.

Several comments have suggested similar issues.

curiousObject··on Spanish track was fractured before high-speed train disaster, report finds
Thank about the change in airflow. The train would use more energy because of having to push air that is trapped by the barrier

Also the issues other comments described, including that any fault in the barrier means a new safety hazard

curiousObject··on Iran Protest Death Toll Could Top 30k, According to Local Health Officials
The simple absence of on the ground reports from a variety of independent sources tells me that these numbers should not be simply ignored.

If there’s nothing happening, then the obvious way for the authorities to prove that is to let observers in, and let independent information out. They do not do this, so I will take these reports of deaths more seriously.

curiousObject··on Ask HN: I'm getting emails about trial accounts on sites I don't recognise
Unless you’ve got evidence to the contrary: this sounds most likely to be spam campaigns that’s being sent to millions of email addresses, from leaked lists or random generated.

One of the emails is yours

curiousObject··on Ask HN: I'm getting emails about trial accounts on sites I don't recognise
“ emails for a few services”

You mean these emails are more than just a first verification step to check that your email address exists and to confirm that you want to sign up as a new user?

curiousObject··on Windows 11 shutdown bug forces Microsoft into out-of-band damage control
There were multi-million device Microsoft BSOD outages in 2024 as well. It was mainly the bad Cloudstrike update debacle, but also a contemporaneous problem with Azure.

Luckily, It sounds like this new failure is recoverable by normal user action.

curiousObject··on Iran is likely jamming Starlink
Is this not only a side effect of Iran doing widespread GPS and GNSS jamming or spoofing?
curiousObject··on 'Bandersnatch': The Works That Inspired the 'Black Mirror' Interactive Feature (2019)
>Hard to describe

But why not try? It is history, and you are a unique witness of it

curiousObject··on Ask HN: Why are Italian cities riddled with graffiti?
It’s been a problem for a while

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_graffiti

curiousObject··on Why do AI Chatbots Use "I"?
https://archive.is/9hy5q
curiousObject··on Ask HN: Can we (technically) extract salt from our sweat?
Extracting is easy, just wait and evaporating, but collecting would be an inefficient process because of scale and topology of surfaces

Why?

curiousObject··on People with personality disorders often use language differently
Some of these language patterns sound like the person is aware they have a personality disorder or some sort of behavior problem. That’s probably good.

Though, they do say “these patterns aren’t usually deliberate”.

But even being aware may not mean you really deeply understand why you have a problem.

curiousObject··on A Cozy Mk IV light aircraft crashed after 3D-printed part was weakened by heat
It sounds like simply running the engine on the ground for a few hours would have been a much cheaper way to debug this issue. Safer, also.
curiousObject··on Tom Stoppard has died
This exact dialogue takes place in real life regularly.

One reason that it is funny is that it plays against that.

We the audience maybe forget for a moment that we are not watching real life. We are watching a drama or entertainment. So we expect something relevant to happen. That’s the convention.

The exchange plays with that expectation. It deliberately forces us out of our pleasant illusion and makes think us about our real experience - we are sitting in a seat and watching a performance, which is happening at that moment.

And nothing happens, just the same as real life

curiousObject··on What's Hiding Inside Haribo's Power Bank and Headphones?
Why these batteries got all the attention - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45322135
curiousObject··on How to Cheat at Conversation
https://archive.is/QjkKQ

This story has used other titles, like - What We Lose by Letting AI Speak for Us

curiousObject··on A startup’s quest to store electricity in the ocean
What happens to 100-200 m long pipe in underwater waves when e.g. a hurricane or a storm comes?

That’s an excellent question, but it is also similar to asking what will happen to wind turbines in a storm.

Maybe some will break. Maybe that’s an acceptable outcome. Probably they can be improved to reduce that risk

curiousObject··on Someone Snuck into a Cellebrite MS Teams Call and Leaked Phone Unlocking Details
https://archive.is/NfjJm
curiousObject··on Text Depixelization
How close is a linear box filter to what happens on low-resolution SSDs?

Maybe you meant CCDs? Not SSDs

curiousObject··on Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement
if you have a lot of fake traffic then ads on your site will have an even worse conversion rate than normal?

Yes, if you only count purchase/sale conversions

Maybe no, if you also count clickthrough and view conversions, perhaps even lead conversions sometimes (because fake sign ups are possible).

But you’re right. Purchase conversions are one incentive

curiousObject··on Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement
Is there any incentive for a company to remove fake traffic[0] from its stats and analytics?

I guess there is no incentive in most markets. Facebook, etc make only a token effort to reject non-troublesome bot traffic.

[0] bots and other automated traffic which cannot generate revenue or human ad views

curiousObject··on Founder sentenced to seven years in prison for fraudulent sale to JPMorgan
some heroic founder "risking it all". He wasn't. He was risking the company's "all", after asking the employees to suck up his mismanagement.

I agree. He was asking employees not to cash their paychecks sometimes. $5000 is inconsequential compared to that forced investment from employees and business partners

curiousObject··on Founder sentenced to seven years in prison for fraudulent sale to JPMorgan
why isn't the founder of UPS in prison? I don't think it was legal to go and literally spend their money at the casino

That was FedEx’s founder, Fred Smith. It wasn’t UPS

He only had $5,000 of funds remaining, which he gambled playing blackjack, so the potential loss to investors was small. He’d already lost almost all their investments through operating FeDex

curiousObject··on Samsung Galaxy Ring's battery swelling while on someone's finger
I’m looking forward to the new Samsung Galaxy Neckband /s
curiousObject··on Apple says it may stop shipping to the EU
Apple calls for changes to anti-monopoly laws and says it may stop shipping to the EU

If that happens, then the demand is big enough that companies would import millions of iPhones from other regions and sell them in the EU.

For warranty service, the company would ship the phones back to the original country where Apple sold them.

Then, if that causes Apple too much trouble, then Apple would have to detect that the phone had been spending most of the time in the EU, and refuse to provide free servicing under warranty.

That’s an interesting can of worms for Apple.

curiousObject··on Tesla influencers tried coast-to-coast self-driving, hit debris before 60 miles
Yes, but we want self-driving cars to be better than that, or there’s no need for them
curiousObject··on Tesla influencers tried coast-to-coast self-driving, hit debris before 60 miles
You are correct that they were testing the system, so they probably waited too long to react. But Tesla’s car didn’t do well in this incident

A competent human driver would instinctively slow down, look at the potential obstruction, and think about changing lanes or an emergency stop.

Most probably, the visible object is just some water spilled on the road or that kind of thing. But if it isn’t then it’s very dangerous

This car appeared to be blind to any risk. That’s not acceptable

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