Hacker News Reader

dlsaon Ask HN: Is it still conceivable to remain an anonymous developer nowadays?

Yeah, that comment they don't like? Crazy people will false report some incident to get a SWAT team at your address. Other crazy people will call your employment and start a campaign of attacks to get you fired. Plenty of examples of this out there. Some people, eg youtubers, get swatted multiple times. Police turn up multiple times. These aren't isolated cases.

dlsaon Ten years after the Higgs, physicists face the nightmare of finding nothing else

Be more interesting. Ok, is it worth me writing a rebuttal to all this? Seems I struck a chord.

Edit: reading some of the comments and seeing venom and vitriol. They're the opposite of the feedback I've gotten from elsewhere.

dlsaon Ten years after the Higgs, physicists face the nightmare of finding nothing else

I didn't take it as a jab. I also received a bunch of messages from people poking fun at me elsewhere for my comment. In the past several physicists have been a source of fine wine when I've won a bet.

There will probably be photos of couches in my office next week when I get back.

dlsaon Ten years after the Higgs, physicists face the nightmare of finding nothing else

I've received feedback from some very smart people who laughed out loud and knew exactly what I meant by having a good look. Two of them are physicists and many more are engineers. They said they have found many metaphorical couches and there's a lot of nothing. They've also found quite a few interesting metaphorical paperclips and other debris. But that there's so many more places to look. They also think there's a bunch of metaphorical couches they still haven't found. Its especially hard to look under something when you can't even recognise what it is to look under. Thats part of the difficulty.

They've also assured me they'll let me know when they finally find another metaphorical tv remote.

dlsaon Ten years after the Higgs, physicists face the nightmare of finding nothing else

I already did.

dlsaon Ten years after the Higgs, physicists face the nightmare of finding nothing else

At least they are finding nothing and confirming they are finding nothing. Less scrupulous operators might be always finding something even if its not there. So that's a sign of good science.

Maybe there's something they haven't found because there's so much data? Mix things up and look again? Change assumptions?

Or as someone I know likes to say to various smaller humans: have you looked around the couch? Really? Are you sure? Have you had a good look? this is how the tv remote usually subsequently reappears as there is a difference between just looking and having a good look.

The best science also happens when you've looked, not found it but now know where not to look. Even better science happens when you know exactly why it shouldn't have been there at all. Surprising science happens when you find the errors in your assumptions and discover it can sometimes be where it previously was not expected to be.

dlsaon Ten years after the Higgs, physicists face the nightmare of finding nothing else

Paperclips are important! We need to optimise paperclip production!

some time later

The entire universe is one giant paperclip constructor.

dlsaon Cheat sheet for if I'm gone

Good idea. Also needed as part of a disaster recovery or continuity plan. Eg every business should have one.

For those who use a domain with a catchall on it for various purposes... do you have a plan for dealing with what happens if you die and all those many many aliases inadvertantly get handed to some new domain owner?

dlsaon Tell HN: Google does not list application permissions in the Play Store any more

The fact you couldn't find that reason yourself implies you could not have made an informed choice. You were effectively compelled. That isn’t permission consent. That was permission coercion. Being forced to consent isn't ethical.

dlsaon Tell HN: Google does not list application permissions in the Play Store any more

Trust is earnt. I can reasonably have a default level of low trust for practically any app. This isn’t some blind anger stance. Its not blanket mistrust or some kind of ignorance. It is healthy scepticism. Totally reasonable in today's environment.

Plenty of app developers have muddied the water enough that apps should have a lower level of trust given to them. Stealing data is a reasonable fear now. It is not reasonable to assert otherwise.

It is therefore reasonable for a person to wonder why geolocation is requested but then be suspicious why it doesn't seem to need it. Regardless of the underlying technical reason. Those technical reasons are part of informed consent. If I don't have informed consent, do I really have consent?

Its also not a sad state at all. Its healthy. Its part of the modern landscape that someone can be suspicious and rightly so. If not, you're setting people up for misfortune. Is there some reason you want people to blindly trust like this? That seems almost abusive to me.

dlsaon Tesla to Cut 10% of Jobs

Musk should dig a pit. A pit. An office in a pit. In the the ground. In a pit. Pit office. Office pit. Yes. In a pit.

dlsaon Conway's Game of Life in APL in Forth

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_%28programming_language%29

Here's their example:

The following expression sorts a list of strings by their lengths:

x@>#:'x

Ooooooookay. Personally, I recommend a lot of alcohol. This will be a very wild and geeky ride. Bring extra pizza.

dlsaon I disabled WiFi on the new Samsung fridge

Its all very interesting as an idea. But in reality when things go fully tracked you'll be fined for not having location data for every trip. It will impact insurance. Your registration. Even basic road usage. People have this idea right now that public roads will always stay free. This is not guaranteed.

Even the coming road taxes are all about constant tracking. How far / which road did you drive? They'll demand the answer. And you put a faraday cage to stop this? Suspicious. The default assumption is going to be fraud. Criminal behavior.

All the EVs will soon enough have some variety of tracking sooner or later. So thats basically all new vehicles. The alternatives will also, whatever they are. Hydrogen?

Transport privacy is likely dead already.

dlsaon Conway's Game of Life in APL in Forth

I might need to learn APL. It seems like I'm missing out on something. Lisp was a gift which helped with my C and Elixir. That was a mini-revelation in itself.

dlsaon Workers quitting over return-to-office policies

I think just wiping the fees/charges off commuting would be a good start. PT / Fuel costs are still a thing as they continue to increase. Not everyone is using EV. Yet.

dlsaon Workers quitting over return-to-office policies

If the office is so great, pay me extra for the commute.

dlsaon Qantas ferried an engine on the wing of a 747 (2016)

Imagine the other team unloading what they were expecting to be a warhead.

dlsaon NPM security update: Attack campaign using stolen OAuth tokens

All of them to at least some extent and several we will soon have names for because they are still emerging.

dlsaon PhD students face cash crisis with wages that don’t cover living costs

That would be a useful comparison for ranking. Exactly what is their overhead?

dlsaon PhD students face cash crisis with wages that don’t cover living costs

No idea. But aren't those campuses wonderful with their huge buildings, new carpet, great landscaping, and every admin staff member has an amazing office chair and fitout. They even refresh that carpet every year along with brand new seating. The art! Its always changing as well. The university cars are great too. I've seen plenty of amazing cars that researchers drive around. The libraries are constantly changing each month. They renovated that building just last summer, didn't they? That oval is being redone as well. Amazing.

Like I said, no idea. Ok, maybe some idea.

dlsaon Much of the rise in autism is likely a statistical mirage

Can a brain scan detect autism? Is it objectively detectable without interviews or behavioral observation?

dlsaon Ask HN: How do you deal with rude interviewers?

Bad and rude interviewers imply even worse colleagues, supervisors and managers. Its a measure of the overall company culture and not simply just their professionalism.

Its ok to continue the interview but its also ok to finish, leave and never return. They're as much under investigation for fit as you are. Hold them to your standards.

You got a glimpse of what working with them would be like in future. I'd say you found them lacking. Can you imagine a code review with that person?

dlsaon How do you power a rocket engine?

I've planted many seeds to grow trees I'll never sit under. As did many many many others before me. This is the true nature of this world.

Perhaps you might reconsider your limiting beliefs before reality catches up with you. Maybe not. At least you might still yet have fun on roads and highways you didn't pay for. Schools you didn't build. Parks your money never constructed.

I cannot imagine being so limited and short-sighted. But, as they say, You be you.

dlsaon Infinite Mac

Something involving a web server, a websocket (ws) server acting as a switch or repeater, a emulator specific websocket client to act as a network adaptor. Each emulator would then send packets via websocket to the ws server which would then send to the other connected ws clients. All the ws would be abstracted behind the emulated network adapter.

That would give you enough to let a bunch of Bolo addicts go to the same site and play multiplayer. It would also let them share files amongst those emulators.

But that wouldn't necessarily let any of them talk to an appletalk server near the server, eg on its real lan. For that you'd need a tuntap thing acting as a bridge or router.

That said, you probably wouldn't require that appletalk/netatalk server. As long as one emulator holds the maps or files etc you could use that as a file server. No tuntap required.

Hmmm...

dlsaon Show HN: I grouped HN by topics, so you don‘t have to

I feel like it uses too much vertical space. It seems oddly verbose and spaced out. Yet the sense of verbosity is a little weird because it is sourcing from HN. It might be that I'm too used to the compactness of HN... but perhaps its too much surrounding whitespace? Probably. UX is definitely an art and science.

Otherwise I like the idea and the overall execution.

dlsaon I don't like computers (2016)

Speak for yourself. We still have LAN parties. Plenty of times its online and thats ok. But we regularly gather up our computers on wheels and drag them everywhere. Sixteen to twenty xboxes is quite a sight.

If anything its gotten larger. Plenty of us bring kids with their own computers.

We all have dedicated server hardware. Monthly get-togethers at least. Mostly Factorio and similar but also quake/doom and quite a few others. We can still link back home for files and add more server space. We've now got the skills and hardware to do things we previously couldn't.

Why should we only remember the good ol days when we can live them right now? As for the music, the best stuff has just been written. Why limit yourself, anyway? We have a catalog of way more than fifty years!

dlsaon Biden to Propose 20% Tax Aimed at Billionaires, Unrealized Gains

This swimming pool is getting warm isn’t it? But its fine, there's still a frog in the water.

dlsaon What made the NES so interesting?

laughs in PAL

Weren't NTSC somewhat also grainier with more pronounced horizontal gaps between each scanline? Certainly seemed so.

dlsaon Ask HN: Is your ICE car getting less MPG lately?

No.

But while I'm thinking of it, has anyone had any issues leaving a wifi or bluetooth obd2 gadget plugged in all the time? I'm thinking of doing a thing with the nearest bored raspi I find but I'll need continuous obd2 sourced data.

Think in terms of recording / graphing etc.

dlsaon Vimeo: “We are a B2B solution, not the indie version of YouTube.”

A clear pivot. Yet it will definitely anger plenty of people. Like... a lot of people. Still, I don't appreciate the apparently short notice they gave. That's a significant change in their terms I'd be wary of in future. Something happened and there was a knee-jerk reaction or decision made. Not sure if I read that right however.