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dak1

2,676 karma · joined April 2, 2012

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dak1··on Chess grandmaster Daniel Naroditsky has died
Danya was such an incredibly positive influence on the chess community, a tremendous teacher whose YouTube content I’m sure will remain popular for years to come, and my personal favorite chess commentator.

He was also only 29 years old.

I’m actually in tears right now struggling how to break this news to my son, who absolutely loved Danya and had a chance to play him OTB last year.

dak1··on iCloud Private Relay down for some users
If you're using this on an iPhone, the failure is quite non-informative. Trying to browse to a URL looks like you failed to input anything and it just falls to a blank screen.

On the Mac, you'll see the message "Safari can’t open the page. The error is: “The operation couldn’t be completed. No such file or directory” (NSPOSIXErrorDomain:2)".

dak1··on Dear Chess World
I think I have on 3-4 occasions played a game where, after evaluating on chess.com, got a 100% accuracy (which is engine correlation). A couple times were all theory and then blundering a mate in 1, but...

I did have one game where I didn't know the theory except a very vague recollection in the beginning. I actually thought I had blundered in that game and was trying to figure out what I'd do if my opponent made a certain move — they didn't find it, I ended up winning material in a tactic and they resigned — I was in complete shock when it came back 100% accuracy (and I definitely did not see the engine response to the move I was worried about, which was the best move).

I'm only around 1600-1700 on chess.com.

Not taking a position either way on Hans, but I have no doubt he knows far more theory than I do (and I do know some lines 20+ moves deep), and correlating with an engine is not impossible even outside of book.

dak1··on Imminent merger of a supermassive black hole binary
science will happen
dak1··on 1Password 8 will be subscription only and won’t support local vaults
But how can you justify removing the ability to have a local vault?

Why would anyone think for a second that it would be a good idea to force people to store every password for everything in their life in your cloud without an opt out?

That, even more than Electron and the subscription model (both which do bother me), is an absolutely deal breaker. I've paid for every version of 1Password since v3 in 2009, but I'm done with it now.

dak1··on JSON with Commas and Comments
That looks a bit like NDJSON, assuming that the space between the objects is actually a newline.

There are libraries[1] that support parsing it and it's not too hard to do yourself, either. Some fairly popular projects use it to represent multiple responses in a single response body[2].

[1] http://ndjson.org/libraries.html [2] ElasticSearch uses it for msearch response bodys, for example.

dak1··on Gitlab is moving to a three-tier product subscription model
We recently spent a couple weeks going over pricing with a GitLab regional Account Leader.

We already use GitLab for all our source repos, CI/CD pipelines, and had been using it for issue management as well — all fully self-hosted. The hope was to drop Jira, which was also being used for project planning, and fully adopt GitLab, but the costs were simply unjustifiable.

Basically GitLab ended up being a full order of magnitude more expensive. Even with discounts, which got things closer (but not all the way there), the fear was after a period of time, the discounts would be ended/phased out and we'd be stuck.

I'd love to see those features that compete directly with Jira (like roadmaps and multi-level epics) come down to the Premium level, which is more price/feature competitive.

We love GitLab, but find ourselves stuck using the free tier and paying for services we don't love, rather than supporting GitLab. I'd suspect we're not alone there, either.

dak1··on Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon
It sounds like this was an issue with an independent antivirus vendor, not Apple.
dak1··on More Than 70 West Point Cadets Accused of Cheating in Academic Scandal
It's almost expected you don't have enough time. When I was at West Point they'd explicitly state that.

Additionally, there was a hard lights off policy at midnight to ensure cadets got enough sleep, yet people invariably would be up with a flashlight underneath their covers trying to get work done until 2am.

Plebes in particular got less time as well, as they'd be subject to additional tasks/hazing until a given time when they couldn't be disturbed (I believe 7pm).

dak1··on More Than 70 West Point Cadets Accused of Cheating in Academic Scandal
I went to West Point almost two decades ago.

It's important to remember that almost every cadet here was a plebe (1st year student). Plebes are under enormous pressure, and they are only just beginning the inculcation of the honor code (they've all only been there about 6 months now).

Traditionally, they are given by far the most leeway. The expectation is that going through this process will only hasten and harden their understanding of the importance of the honor code.

I recall reading stories in the news about happenings when I was cadet, and there's always invariably some nuances and details that are either incorrect, missing, or misunderstood by people not familiar with West Point.

Some cadets are also still going to go before an honor board, which may very well lead to their separation.

Without knowing more details, I trust the administration (including cadet-led) to take actions in the best interest of our country, the institution, and the Corps.

dak1··on AWS forked my project and launched it as its own service
A lot of how people and even companies conduct themselves has as much to do with cultural norms as it does with strict legal requirements.

It looks like Matt Asay, the lead for the open source and marketing team at AWS, has already reached out and said he's looking into it (and thanked Tim for the contribution).

I think there's generally a cultural norm to recognize an individual's contributions in general, especially when freely given.

If the comments on here largely echoed that sentiment and demonstrated that it was a cultural norm, expect AWS (and others) to be more likely to adhere to it in the future — it costs almost nothing, but there's definitely a value in having a positive reputation.

We do have the capacity as a community to define and uphold such cultural norms. Laws and licenses are not as binary as code.

dak1··on AWS forked my project and launched it as its own service
I'm extremely disappointed to see how many comments on here focus on the very narrow legal questions and amount to: "Your license didn't say they couldn't."

Open source software is more than a license and code. It is a community and the digital public square.

And the Tragedy of the Commons is just as applicable to our public square as it is to William Forster Lloyd's common land.

Either we as a community hold ourselves and others within our community to a higher standard than the text of a license, or licenses will inevitably become increasingly restrictive in the future, to the detriment of all.

dak1··on The Pentagon has ordered Stars and Stripes to shut down
What right do you have to determine who is allowed to have an opinion, and why is serving a precondition?

I did serve, I've done time overseas including in Iraq, but I did not do so out of some distorted sense that it made my citizenship or opinion somehow more valuable than any others.

I served to protect and defend the rights of every person under the Constitution. Suggesting that somebody's speech be curtailed or ignored because they did not is frankly antithetical to the oath we took.

And frankly, it's not surprising to me that somebody who so callously disregards one aspect of the 1st Amendment would treat the rest of it with the same level of disdain.

But I'm certainly not going to allow you to attribute an opinion to most who serve without standing up as a counter example.

I appreciated The Military Times and S&S when I was overseas, and I know many other service men and women who did as well.

dak1··on Porn Sites Still Won’t Take Down Nonconsensual Deepfakes
Is there a clear bright-line between a cartoon or South Park-style animation, a hand-drawn photorealistic graphic, and a ML-generated one that should be legislated differently than existing laws against commercial usage of somebody's likeness vs fair use?

If so, what is that bright-line, and what unforeseen consequences might legislating it have?

I recognize the limits on regulating free speech are weaker in the UK where this story originated as opposed to in the US.

dak1··on Japan’s Entry in Flying-Car Race Takes to the Air
People are going to be dreaming of flying cars until some other technology comes along that completely obsoletes them.
dak1··on I learned 1500 Chinese Characters in a Month
Note that there's a large difference between learning characters and learning to read.

Simple examples: 可口可樂, 手機, 大哥大

If you just knew the characters, you would understand those as: 1) Can Mouth Can Happy 2) Hand Machine 3) Big Older Brother Big

Those are actually: 1) Coca-Cola 2) Cell phone 3) Cell phone (slang)

And those are just for simple nouns. There's also grammar patterns and characters like 把 that can modify sentence structure, to name a couple more examples.

dak1··on ICANN board withholds consent for a change of control of the .org registry
It's usually more effective to have specialized interests, since it's very rare to have agreement on multiple issues across a large population (this should be intuitive to the HN crowd, where every issue you add doubles the number of potential positions, even though they're not random).

Find an organization that already exists and get involved in it. If one doesn't exist, create one.

For packaging, you'd have a few potential avenues: 1. Work to build support politically. Even small groups of 30-40 people (or smaller) are very attractive for local politicians to meet and speak with. 2. Reach out to companies directly. 3. Get earned media (possibly in conjunction with 1 or 2).

If you have small, achievable, reasonable goals, then it may even be a win-win scenario for all of the above, which makes it easier to make progress. For example, you could have a campaign goal of reducing x% of packaging to reduce y tons of waste.

It could be positive media attention for a company to say they've worked with a group like yours (or a small local company!) to reduce packaging and help save the environment (and it may even save the company money).

Finding ways for everyone to win and creating a big tent (as opposed to trying to influence by vilifying) tends to be more successful, in my experience.

dak1··on Having trouble with the IRS site? Try all caps
Every time I encounter a site that disables pasting something, I just disable JavaScript, paste it, and then re-enable. Obviously not a solution for non-technical users, though.
dak1··on Scientists discover brightest supernova ever seen
Anton Petrov has pretty decent coverage of this on his YouTube channel[1].

This type of supernova has been theorized, although to my knowledge not previously observed (due to the mechanics, about 50% of the energy is radiated as visible light, which is why they're so exceptionally bright).

We do have a star near us that is theorized to have undergone a pulsational pair instability supernova in the 19th century: Eta Carinae.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhjHs2L4kqw

dak1··on State projections for Covid-19
Those are hospitalizations, not infections.
dak1··on Chinese military personnel charged for hacking into Equifax
Just to play devil's advocate: If an armored Brinks truck gets in an accident and cash spills all over, it's not legal to take just because it's no longer protected and on public land.

Intent has to matter a lot in these cases, though.

If a bill blows a mile away and somebody happens to find it with no knowledge of the crash, that's qualitatively different than witnessing the accident and then rushing to grab the money you watched spill out.

dak1··on In Its First Funding in 14 Years, 1Password Raises $200M Series A
On Nov 23, 2010 (still have the e-mail in my inbox), they sent a "Happy Thanksgiving and 3 Gifts For You!" with free downloads of 2 books and links to give away a license of 1Password for Mac, 1Password for Windows, and Knox for Mac.
dak1··on Separating gifted children hasn't led to better achievement
From the article, it sounds like the measure of 'better achievement' is baseline scores across all students.

I was always of the opinion that separating based on ability level was not about improving the baseline, but about allowing those able to learn greater depth to do so.

Not every student is going to earn a Fields Medal or develop new medical procedures, and frankly, that's ok.

But we do need some who will push the boundaries.

The only issue I have is that the selection process itself has not been entirely merit-based, frequently showing preference for students from certain backgrounds at the expense of gifted children of color or from less wealthy backgrounds (and at the expense of society as a whole, who has lost out on the benefits those children could have provided, given the opportunity).

dak1··on Fallout from Blizzard Hong Kong Incident
The CCP can move quickly and decisively to ban access to the world's 2nd largest market, and it uses that power to chill speech and force governments and companies to take actions it wants that are antithetical to a free society.

Small nations and individual companies cannot stand up to this coercion individually, and free, market economies lack the organization to respond in a cohesive way.

The optimistic belief that economic growth and market integration would liberalize authoritarian or totalitarian countries should by now be wholly debunked.

The CCP is responsible for some of the most horrific atrocities and violations of human rights today, and has largely managed to silence the world from even speaking out against its actions.

Individuals should do everything they can to express their opposition to this state of affairs, but the only viable response is for the governments of free peoples who care for and value these freedoms to jointly act in response.

If we value freedom over money, there must be economic consequences (including economic isolation) for China for its actions, and we should not be reluctant about promoting these freedoms globally, including within China.

The GATT and WTO rules in place today are not sufficient to counter the threat China represents. It's time to rewrite the rules of global trade to prevent the CCP from freely benefiting from trade while simultaneously using it as a hammer to blunt and distort the values that enabled the markets from which it benefits.

dak1··on Brexit – where now? The flow diagrams
I hope this post is intended as sarcasm, and others interpret as such.

There are 650 MPs in Parliament, with vastly different constituencies and agendas. You would need 326 currently elected MPs to be on board with this plan, not even considering the possibility of election results changing those dynamics.

And at the beginning of this process it was not clear that the UK could unilaterally rescind Article 50, either, which adds further risks and complications. Not to mention the referendum itself was decided by over 33 million people casting votes.

That is a completely impractical collective action problem and a conspiracy theory on par with others like the moon landing or 9/11.

dak1··on Brexit – where now? The flow diagrams
The original referendum itself was the real heart of the disorder. The government is now tying itself into knots trying to put into action a perceived desired action, even though the general concept of "Brexit" has a tremendous number of vastly different interpretations, and nothing close to a majority actually exists for any of those options.

There never should have been a referendum to begin with, and the idea that a simple majority vote could have such dramatic consequences was frankly actually undemocratic.

Based on how entrenched certain positions are (see the DUP, for example), the (rightly) strong opposition to a No Deal, and the fact that ANY deal is going to make a majority of people unhappy, it would seem there is no majority in Parliament willing to be connected with the actual outcome.

Therefore, it seems the most likely scenario by far is simply an extension. That will probably lead to a General Election or a Second Referendum, where the "choice" can be said to be given to voters, which would also give MPs cover for any decision made.

The EU will not decide against an extension either, as their preferred outcome is the UK remaining in the EU. The longer this drags on, and the more impractical Brexit options are shown to be, the more the likelihood the UK decides to remain increases.

The only way I see the UK actually leaving the EU is if hard Brexiteers decide to back May's deal; however, that would be considerably more politically risky for them than simply continuing to take a hardline position — even if the end result is remain.

dak1··on Studying the demise of historic civilisations
That's no different than saying the English alphabet is just a modified version of the Anglo-Saxon futhorc runic alphabet, and that with a dictionary and a bit of training you could use that too.

'ȝ' becomes 'g', 'Ð' becomes 'D', and we still use 'æ' today, which is also a rune, and they even used 'W'!

Also, the number of characters in Chinese has also drastically changed over time. So while many characters have a 1:1 lineage, far more characters simply did not exist 1 or 2 thousand years ago.

The only commonality is that they are based on pictographs and have a traceable etymology, although that's true for all languages.

dak1··on Studying the demise of historic civilisations
The script has changed considerably over time between different dynasties, and different areas have had mutually unintelligible languages, even if sharing similar script.

For example: Japan shares many characters with Chinese, and Korean and Vietnamese both used to use Chinese characters, but they are all separate languages. Similarly, numerous "dialects" in China are less mutually intelligible than many different Western languages. Compare Portuguese and Spanish to Cantonese, Mandarin, Taiwanese (Hokkien), Fuzhounese, Shanghainese, etc. Not to mention languages like Mongolian (see the Yuan dynasty). And that doesn't even begin to get into even more ethnically diverse regions like Tibet and western China.

Then there's also the "warring states period" when, for over 250 years, no fewer than 14 different independently governed states made up what is today eastern China.

Claims that China has always been one civilization are politically expedient versions of history that glaze over an enormous quantity of inconvenient facts.

Did you know that after the Ottoman Empire conquered Constantinople, Sultan Mehmed viewed himself as the successor of the Roman Empire and declared himself "Caesar of Rome"?

China today is as much a continuation of those previous states as Turkey is of the Roman Empire.

dak1··on PCjs Machines
Writh's Law: Software gets slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law

dak1··on We Need Chrome No More
Other browsers need to catch up to Chrome with their development tools. I'd be happy to use Safari or Firefox for development, but...

- I can't disable CORS in Firefox (yes, sometimes you have to disable CORS rather than modify the Allow-Origin header response, for example if you need to test against a production backend) (and, no, CORS Everywhere is not a sufficient solution).

- I can't inspect WebSocket frames in anything except Chrome.

- Safari does not allow self-signed certs over WSS (and there's no way to override it).

- Safari does not respect System-wide APC Config for Proxies.

There's a handful of other issues. Both Safari and Firefox do do things well, and often better than Chrome. For example, Firefox tends to actually handle standards correctly, whereas Chrome tries to be overly forgiving. And Safari's Develop and Debug menus are easily the best and quickest way to disable CORS or JavaScript, and examine service workers.

Unfortunately, some of the above issues are blockers.

I can test with Firefox on staging or in production, but not being able to test up front during development really impacts compatibility testing.

If another browser was as good or better for development, I'd be happy to use it.

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