HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

hakeberio

16 karma · joined August 24, 2020

submissionscomments
hakeberio··on The Ashley Book of Knots (1944)
Knot theory in topology is super interesting and have very practical applications in the real world (protein folding, chemical structures, etc). Fun fact: Conway was involved in tabulating 11-crossing prime knots.

I found this veritasium video helpful: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DBhTXM_Br4&pp=ygULa25vdCB0a...

hakeberio··on My Hardest Bug Ever (2013)
gnarly bug! what's the name of the paper?
hakeberio··on Coinbase valued above $100B, ahead of direct listing
Regarding your last line: futures trade nearly 24 hours, 6 days/week. It's also several times bigger than the ETF market, in terms of average daily dollar volume, so you get the liquidity and smaller spreads as well. [1]

[1]: https://www.cmegroup.com/education/courses/futures-vs-etfs/w...

hakeberio··on “User Engagement” Is Code for “Addiction”
Definitely. It reminds me of Orwell's Newspeak in 1984- although the novel itself shows that having a "clean" vocabulary doesn't completely prevent "unclean" thought deemed by the authorities, having a censored set of language can "nudge" people to certain propaganda.
hakeberio··on FreedomBox: Run your digital services from your home
I use Wireguard regularly when I'm out to access my home LAN where I have some VM's running various things like pihole (DNS server to block ads), mail server, hobby dev server, etc.

Wireguard is very light (cf: OpenVPN) and easy to setup/use- highly recommend using it.

hakeberio··on Android Ported to RISC-V
Developed/rich countries "kicking away the ladder" from developing countries is a well-known concept- there's an interesting book by the same title by Ha-joon Chang.

To be clear, I'm not saying that any of these actions are justified.

hakeberio··on Putting Raspberry Pi Online with Caddy and SSH Tunnel
Pivpn is beginner-friendly and you can always branch off from there.

https://www.pivpn.io

hakeberio··on PayPal to allow cryptocurrency buying, selling and shopping on its network
Seems useful! Curious about your business model- it seems like your payment processor takes 0.5%/payment; do you charge some percentage on top of that? If so, how much? Adding a "what is our business model" section in the about/faq page would make things more transparent.

On the operations side of things, I assume your site acts as an intermediary, drop-shipping the item?

hakeberio··on A Coronavirus Vaccine Could Kill Half a Million Sharks, Conservationists Warn
Looking from a different angle, I can see few valid reasons for using cosmetics:

1. Cosmetics often includes medical/dermatological products which are essential for some people.

2. Cosmetics can be used not just for "vanity" but to cover big scars and other unwanted-attention-invoking skin conditions; similar to how plastic surgery may be life-saving for some folks and enable them to live a "normal life".

3. Seeking beauty/aesthetics is not a bad thing in itself

I assume, though, most cosmetics are used for nugatory reasons, and we should always questions whether these above use cases really justify killing millions of animals.

hakeberio··on When do we become unable to learn a language like a native speaker? (2018)
Similar theory I have is that it's acceptable for most children to learn their language full-time; whereas for adults, usually it's a side thing on top of their full-time work.

If given the opportunity to immerse in language learning full-time for 3 years (time it takes for most children to speak somewhat coherently) and with an open mind, adults can react fluency, I think. Maybe even faster than children, since adults have more context to bind and commit new information to long-term memory.

As a kid, memorizing vocabulary words was a brute force task because I had no relevant context (Latin/Greek, history, etc), but now I can pick up words, even foreign words pretty quickly because I have "hooks" in my mind to which I can attach them.

hakeberio··on Actively speaking two languages protects against cognitive impairment
Learning a new language is often accompanied by the very real feeling of your "mind expanding." I think that's because being able to understand/speak another language is almost like experiencing a whole new world; another rich set of culture, people, literature, etc different from yours suddenly become very much accessible.

The Wittgenstein adage

> The limits of my language mean the limits of my world

rings true for me.

hakeberio··on Raspberry Pi as a local server for self hosting applications
GCP also offers a "always free" micro-instance that's more than enough for the task at hand. https://cloud.google.com/free/docs/gcp-free-tier#always-free