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halpert

729 karma · joined December 21, 2021

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halpert··on Dino 0.3: Video calls and conferences – encrypted and peer-to-peer
It's even worse than that. P2P means that connection differences between peers also makea difference. User A might see users B and C, but user B might on see A due to a connection difference between user B and C. It is very annoying to enter a group chat and hear:

User B: Is user C's stream dead for anyone else? User A: I see user C. User C: Sorry, what? I'm right here.

Honestly, other than a 1-1 chat, I can't think of a situation where p2p is worthwhile. Even then, it's almost always better to use an SFU.

halpert··on Tesla to pay $0 in federal tax
It depends on why they have an operation loss. If they’re leasing the trademark from a Cayman island shell corporation, then that would be noteworthy.
halpert··on More than half of Bitcoin investors are in the red, study says
The amount of fiat available, and it’s value is not constant so it’s not really zero sum.
halpert··on HTTP/3: Everything you need to know about the next-generation web protocol
The default Go http server is 1.1, no?
halpert··on Dino 0.3: Video calls and conferences – encrypted and peer-to-peer
P2P group video calls don’t work well unfortunately. Most people barely have enough upload bandwidth to upload one video stream. Needing to upload a stream per peer is a nonstarter for most people.
halpert··on Language homogenization at Harvard
Emulating the past for success in the future is a form of idea homogenization.
halpert··on Case against OOP is understated, not overstated (2020)
Sorry, but state is everything. If you don’t have state, then you’re essentially doing useless work computing an answer that is already known. Computation is only useful because of state.
halpert··on Are Product Hunt's featured products still online today?
Where do they promote the product? It looks like they’re using a random http library.
halpert··on Ask HN: What is one book you would recommend everyone to read?
What’s amazing about Dr. Suess is how much creativity and fun he packs into a very simply written book. Most children’s books are so asinine. “Sally went to the farm. She saw a pig. Sally can drive a tractor. Etc. etc.” There is rarely a point to the book. Dr. Suess uses similarly simple language: “You can think about red. You can think about pink.” While simple, the underlying message is usually profound, and that makes it so much more interesting.
halpert··on Gut microbe linked to depression in large health study
That seems pretty crazy. What have you tried to remedy the issue? Fecal transplant?
halpert··on Gut microbe linked to depression in large health study
What makes beans better than psyllium husk, which has been shown to substantially lower cholesterol?
halpert··on Google Stadia May Not Be Long for This World
Yes exactly. So I’m not sure how a company can change $5 a month, with their own overhead and profit margin, and still make money.
halpert··on Google Stadia May Not Be Long for This World
$5 a month doesn’t seem like it would work out economically with the price of GPUs. Why not buy a powerful computer and finance it?
halpert··on Teachers are leaving and few people choosing the field
I don’t know who in their right mind would want to be a teacher. Bad pay, hard work, ungrateful students and parents, and limited opportunities for growth.
halpert··on [dead]
What gives you the authority to define vernacular? Stated another way, words mean what people understand them to mean. Most people would understand crypto to mean cryptocurrency at this point, sorry. Cryptography is definitely more niche.
halpert··on Is it safe to use __secret_internals_do_not_use_or_you_will_be_fired?
It’s almost like there is no collective we, just loosely associated individuals carrying out their desires to the best of their abilities.
halpert··on How should net metering affect your electric bill?
But why conserve? If they find a use for that excess power then they could better their life or the lives of others.
halpert··on Postman Now Supports gRPC
Or you saved the response from a different curl request, or it’s checked into git, or a million different reasons.
halpert··on New material that can absorb and release enormous amounts of energy
It would be great if this material could help with brain damage in contact sports by making helmets better.
halpert··on Postman Now Supports gRPC
You can have curl read the request body from a file using --data @filename.txt.
halpert··on Postman Now Supports gRPC
Maybe it’s just me but I’ve never had those issues. Another benefit of curl is that you have an easily searchable history of every command you’ve run. So you can easily find old invocations and rerun them.
halpert··on Postman Now Supports gRPC
Doesn’t curl do this just as easily?
halpert··on Where did Omicron come from? Three key theories
The FBI did something similar once: https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2021/04/14/fbi-hacks-into-h...
halpert··on Zero-copy network transmission with io_uring (2021)
That’s not my take at all. Many people respond with hand waving arguments: maybe epoll is faster because the benchmark is wrong, or only one file descriptor is used (which wasn’t correct but said anyway), etc. Other people also respond saying they’ve been unable to match epoll performance when trying to add io_uring support to their libraries.
halpert··on Would you take free land in rural America?
Manifest Destiny was basically the belief that the US was destined to span coast to coast, regardless of the Native Americans or Mexicans that stood in the way. It’s a very imperial mindset.
halpert··on Controlling RGB LEDs with only powerlines: Anatomy of a Christmas light string
The video of the manufacturing process is quite interesting. A lot of human labor is involved.
halpert··on In quieter corners DAOs are forging a new ecosystem for digital startups
So I just created a company? How can I give you some ownership right now? Are we going to email contracts to each other or something? And how would you write an option on your ownership? You're just hand waving and saying "you could do that easily some other way." But how? Unfortunately, I don't think many people will trust a random option contract you write without some type of guarantee the contract will be executed.
halpert··on In quieter corners DAOs are forging a new ecosystem for digital startups
Sure you can transfer ownership by going to a company, getting approval from the board to update the cap table, and then executing the transaction via wire transfer. Or you could do it near instantly on the blockchain.

And how would you write an option on your ownership stake using conventional technology? That seems like it would be prohibitively hard.

How would you use your ownership as collateral in a loan? The illiquid nature of private stock may turn some lenders off. On a blockchain, the collateral can be part of the smart contract.

Many technological advances simply make already possible things easier. For instance, checks were around since the time of the Crusades. Functionally, checks transfer money from one account to another. We also have a postal service we can use to send checks almost anywhere in the world. So why do we have digital banking infrastructure and wire transfers?

halpert··on Former nuclear leaders: Say ‘no’ to new reactors
This isn’t convincing, sorry. While Fukushima wasn’t that bad, it could have been terrible. It had the potential to make a large region of Japan uninhabitable and poison the food supply. That is super serious. Just because nothing bad happened this time, doesn’t mean that we’ll be so lucky in the future.

The biggest issue with your argument is that you have inadequate explanations for the failures that have happened. Chernobyl: bad reactor design. Fukushima: under engineered. Obviously people don’t set out to poorly design or under engineer a nuclear power plant. How do we know that we haven’t missed anything significant and crucial to long term safe operation? Such a thing is unknowable, so all we can do is look at the evidence, and the evidence is that there is a history of poor design choices leading to events that border on calamity. Humans are fallible. Choosing a strategy that can go horribly wrong due to human error is not wise in my opinion.

halpert··on In quieter corners DAOs are forging a new ecosystem for digital startups
DAOs offering ownership interest via tokens is not an LLC with extra steps. It’s LLC++. An owner can easily sell their stake to someone else, write an option against it, etc. Sure, all those things were possible before, but now it’s much easier and generally programmable by anyone. That’s progress.
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