Hacker News Reader

dhson Steve Pavlina: 30 days since I quit Facebook

Making use of EdgeRank gives me more control than just hiding people.

Whenever I'd like to see more of somebody, I go to their page, make a couple of comments, and pronto, their posts enter my stream, squeezing out posts of people I didn't interact with. Problem solved.

dhson How should I get started with programming? Which language should I learn first?

If programming languages were cars... http://www.cs.caltech.edu/~mvanier/hacking/rants/cars.html

dhson [dead]

Ah, thanks (@darren et al., too). There's always another subtlety to learn...

dhson [dead]

I don't get it (maybe because English is not my native language). I've always thought that "I consider X" means that someone does express an opinion, and not a fact. Am I missing something?

dhson Leisure Suit Larry in HTML5

Shix, it's too late to edit... but you're right. Got carried away writing this, and didn't think far enough - sorry!

dhson Leisure Suit Larry in HTML5

"Porn", here, means that you see a bed with a fat black bar which says CENSORED and blocks your view on what's going on.

IIRC, that black bar is shaking, though.

dhson Leisure Suit Larry in HTML5

Ooooh nOOOOooo! Don't click that link! Please! NOOOOOOOO!

It's 1987, in the wee hours of some morning. I'm tired and frustrated, staring at the green-on-black screen of a 640k XT running Leisure Suit Larry, my first-ever video game (on my first-ever computer, too). I've been up all night, trying all kinds of ways to get those pills off the window sill. Failing again. And again.

I notice that the screen is kinda blurry now; then I realize that it's because my eyes water. I need to stop playing this - now! Save game, turn off computer, go to bed.

Can't sleep.

How do I get those pills without falling off the balcony? Maybe tie a rope to the railing and hold on to it while leaning over to the next window, where the pills are. There is a rope in the game, but it only appears when your bride ties you to the bed and leaves you there, forcing you to restore. How could I get that?

Need to sleep.

Can't.

The knife! One of the bums has a knife! Maybe you need the knife before you marry, to cut the rope in the wedding suite, later. Then use the rope on the balcony, hold on, lean over, grab the pillbox. This could work.

How do I get that knife?

The wine! You can buy a bottle of wine in the 7/11. The trick, maybe, is to trade in the wine for the bum's knife. Of course, all this has to be done before you first meet the bride in the disco...Imma try this - now!

Get up, boot computer, load game...

I (mostly) stopped videogaming after my Larry Laffer experience. Much too dangerous. Could have ruined my life.

But before I stopped, I did see the fireworks. Would be kinda nice to see them again, after all these years...

NOOOOO!!! Must...resist...clicking...

dhson How I Made It: Marissa Mayer, Google's champion of innovation and design

Wait, what? I used to shave - twice! - while waiting for AltaVista to load its homepage full of crappy colorful ads. Then I switched to a plain white Google page that took like a second to come up. And you're telling me that I wasn't using a better interface?

dhson Head of Design at Facebook: How Her Team Uses Data To Make Decisions

If I'm told by a machine that "X will miss you", I do consider that disingenuous. There's a programmer using a program, trying to get an emotional reaction from me by the entirely speculative claim that another human being - probably emotionally close to me, but more probably not emotionally close to them - will miss me, suggesting an emotional connection human->machine->human where none exists, trying to exploit my natural tendency to anthropomorphize. And that kinda rubs me the wrong way.

dhson Artificial Intelligence Stack Overflow about to start

Excuse me, but I'd really like to see your evidence of how the computational theory of mind is "widely accepted".

dhson The creators of no-longer-with-us products explain what went wrong

It also runs on a Mac II vx, with System 7 and 32mb of RAM.

dhson Tron done Mac II style with HTML 5 (very very geek)

How odd...Firefox 3.6.12 on Ubuntu 10.04 here, and it works fine.

dhson The Man Who Invented the Computer

Yes, it's very much a matter of perspective, which is why I find it so fascinating. Babbage is clearly a candidate, as is Konrad Zuse [1], who built the first functional Turing-complete machine, and designed the first Turing-complete programming language [2] (it didn't have recursion, but neither had FORTRAN, before the mid-70s). Bottom line (for me): computers are the result of international and cross-generational cooperation and knowledge exchange; that's were progress seems to come from.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konrad_Zuse [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plankalk%C3%BCl

dhson ShowHN: Generate your own MTV (Last.fm+Youtube)

This works great for me! The "MTV" function covers a need I didn't even know I had. Thanks a lot, and rock on!

dhson Dave McClure responds to Arrington's post

...saw a spade for a spade

I haven't seen that one in a while :-)

dhson Bots playing the market make some bizarre patterns

From what I understand, the biggest argument is that higher granularity gets more information to the market faster, so it will move in the right direction faster. However, this seems to me to be a fairly low-granularity model itself; there must be much more subtlety in practice.

dhson The real truth on Wikipedia is in the edits

There's recursive storytelling and poetry (the kind of stories/poems where, at the end, you find yourself looking at the beginning again). It's also possible to describe certain processes which occur as part of some mental disorders as recursive (e.g. the fear of fear; depression because of depression).

dhson Religious Outlier

Indonesia, one of the poorest and most religious countries, is also one of the least violent (#57; USA: #24).

dhson Paul Graham is now tweeting

Just delete "all the way".

dhson Is There Anything Good About Men?

Also, while the man is out at war, the woman usually won't be procreating with anyone else until the man dies.

There is some counter-evidence to this claim: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dear_john_letter

"Dear John," the letter began. "I have found someone else whom I think the world of. I think the only way out is for us to get a divorce," it said. They usually began like that, those letters that told of infidelity on the part of the wives of servicemen... The men called them "Dear Johns".

dhson Ask HN: How can you be rational and still believe in free will?

The belief in "free will" in a strict sense indeed strikes me an irrational and unscientific, since it seems to imply "freedom from cause" - free will can cause things, and nothing causes free will, since if something would cause free will, it wouldn't be free, but bound to that other, external thing. And since Science takes the view that there must be a cause for everything, the assumption of free will does not seem to be in tune with it.

However, even without the presence of "free will" in a strict sense, there can be freedom of action, in the sense of freedom from external and internal constrains, freedom from coercion and from compulsion. It means that I am able to recognize all my options in a situation and may freely chose between them. This easily acknowledges that my situation, my options and my choices all have causes (are not "free" in a strict sense), but still gives me the ability to change my world, by deliberately chosing the actions I prefer to take from the spectrum of those available under my current constrains. It also means that others can hold me responsible for the results of my actions.

dhson Install PAC-MAN on Sequoia voting machine w/o breaking tamper-evident seals

Germany has 80 m, and hand-counting works well. It does seem to be easy to parallelize.

dhson The default position of HN is skepticism

YMMV, but I often get more interested in a new topic by reading a skeptical comment. I remain skeptical about skeptical comments.

dhson The default position of HN is skepticism

I must say that I love it this way. I see a headline that seems interesting, and there's a discussion, I read the skeptic first comment before all else, because it usually states quite clearly what the author of that headline is trying to sell. It's Anti-PR. I find this useful in more than one way.

dhson What different sorting algorithms sound like

I like that. And in breadth first search, one could use a filter on a saw wave to have the breadth of the frequency spectrum manipulated by the search.

dhson Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain

Not that I wouldn't like to be as optimistic, too, but Nature does seem to have made enough use of unreliably folding proteins to have come up with BSE, Parkinson's disease, and some others <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_folding#Incorrect_prote... >.

I'm a big fan of Scott Aaronson, too, btw :-) Here's a pic of him demoing the soap bubbles experiment he refers to in that paper you linked to <http://www.scottaaronson.com/soapbubble.jpg >.

dhson Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain

Protein folding is suspected to be an NP-complete problem <http://www.liebertonline.com/doi/abs/10.1089/cmb.1998.5.27 >, so it seems to me that having reason to believe it will someday be solved equals having reason to believe that someday NP-complete problems can be computed in polynomial time. Alternatively, you might hope for a domain-specific approximative algorithm, but this seems tricky, too, since mis-folded proteins can end up as really bad stuff, e.g. prions <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prion >.

dhson Poll: Male or Female?

However, humans - male, female, and variant - often lust for the anatomical features of other humans, and the associated emotions often trump any rationality. And there is danger in not noticing this. And a surprising number of humans, here and elsewhere, don't seem to notice it.

dhson Poll: Male or Female?

After checking out that PUA stuff, it appears to me that the goals you call "questionable" are not grounded in rationality at all - it's all about not meeting the emotional needs of the women involved, and they mostly smell like men whose emotional needs have not been met by the prior women in their life (maybe even starting with their first woman, their mother). Lots of "popular" PUAs just seem vengeful to me, and I take that as a sign that it's their emotions that ultimately motivate them.

dhson Dark Patterns: dirty tricks designers use to make people do stuff

Looking at the headline, the theme here is "dirty tricks". Evil intent. And while I agree that you can use dirty tricks to make people not do something they'd better do, I fail to see how the examples given by the GP speak of evil intent.