Hacker News Reader

huxleyon Django 2.0 alpha

I wouldn't worry that much about it, the differences between Django 1.11 and Django 2.0 aren't major ones with the exception of dropping support for Python 2.x and the new simplified URL routing syntax.

Django 1.11 is a LTS (Long Term Support) release so it will have security upgrades until 2020, so you are safe sticking with it.

However I'd go ahead with 1.11 and transition to 2.0 to learn how Django handles deprecation and how to upgrade a codebase, both very useful skills as Django has a steady release process and it's often easier to track Django than to do a multi-version migration.

huxleyon iOS 11 reviewed

It's going to be more than an annoyance in some case, but IMO, anything that has processor and access to the internet already needs to budget for ongoing updates to make sure it is secure.

huxleyon Face ID, Touch ID, No ID, PINs and Pragmatic Security

That was the way it was described in the Keynote

huxleyon What We Get Wrong About Technology

I found that the 1978 BBC documentary series "Connections" by James Burke really spoke to that as well as the interrelatedness of inventions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series)

huxleyon Ev Williams helped create the open web, now he’s betting against it (2016)

Compared to most Silicon Valley founders he was, his adoptive parents were blue collar with no college education. His dad made most of his money as a repo man.

Part of the agreement his biological mother made with the Jobs family to allow them to adopt was that Steve had to go to college.

huxleyon Apple’s AR is closer to reality than Google’s

FYI, Vuforia was sold off by Qualcomm about a year and half ago

huxleyon Study: Tesla battery production releases as much CO2 as 8 yrs of driving on gas

Tesla has pledged that the Gigafactory would be net zero: https://www.treehugger.com/renewable-energy/teslas-gigafacto...

If this is accurate and comes to pass, then assuming like the Swedes did that the batteries would have 50% fossil fuel sources for production wouldn't apply.

huxleyon Low-cost DIY electric car made from recycled parts

Haha there a couple of books in the 1990s that gave plans for how to do this, here's one I remember taking out of the library at the time:

https://www.amazon.com/Build-Your-Own-Electric-Vehicle/dp/08...

huxleyon Wikileaks Documentary Makers Accuse Assange of Censorship

Sigh. It's a representative democracy and a republic. The terms aren't incompatible.

Just because the dichotomy was James Madison's hobby horse and he scribbled it down in Federalist No. 10, doesn't mean that it is gospel. The US has been referred to as a representative democracy since its founding.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...

huxleyon Elon Musk Publishes Plans for Colonizing Mars

Most people have trouble naming more than 3 Apollo astronauts, I wouldn't hold out much hope for living in people's memories.

huxleyon A parking space in Hong Kong sold for nearly $700,000

Back in 2012, someone was asking $1 million for a 12'x23' space at 66 East 11th Street, NYC

http://nypost.com/2012/05/20/the-1-million-parking-space/

huxleyon The 2017 iPad Pros

Does it matter if a platform does the inventing? The web browser was invented on a NeXT Cube but that didn't limit its eventual use.

huxleyon It's Now Possible to Boot Android on I.MX6 Platforms Without Proprietary Blobs

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eisenhower_(surname)

It means Iron Hewer

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hewer

huxleyon The default Python version on Heroku will go from 2.7.13 to 3.6.1 on June 20th

I wonder if you'll still be able to set the Python version explicitly in the runtime.txt file

huxleyon Apple unveils HomePod smart speaker at $349

It wasn't an empty shell, journalists got to use and listen to actual Homepods

https://sixcolors.com/post/2017/06/ears-on-with-the-homepod/

huxleyon A laptop ban would be a disruptive privacy risk

Arthur C Clarke wrote a funny little short story called "Travel by Wire!" 80 years ago that speculated about a form of commercial teleportation

huxleyon Swift's Evolution

He mentions it: "The migration tool caused more issues than it automatically resolved, leaving a manual migration as the only sane path forward. How that migration tool ever made it through QA is beyond me, but I'd have felt better if Apple just said 'good luck' instead of offering a half-baked utility."

huxleyon If a nuclear bomb explodes nearby, never get in a car

I suppose building an "inner refuge" gives you something to do in the roughly half hour between an ICBM launch and its arrival on target.

huxleyon Apple Is Working on a Dedicated Chip to Power AI on Devices

The rest of the reply seems to be an answer (as far as you can get with Apple)

I don't think it's wild speculation to say Apple is looking for efficiencies they may not have been able to get with GPUs especially performance-per-watt since so many of their devices are mobile focused

huxleyon Babies from Skin Cells? Prospect Is Unsettling to Some Experts

We're at about 7.5 billion currently and we hit 1 billion in 1804. Population growth peaked in the 1960s and has been slowing ever since, we may not hit 9 billion until sometime between 2040 and 2050.

huxleyon Smartphones can be fooled by fake, digitally composed fingerprints

While the article does say that ... eventually, the headline and the first two and a half paragraphs undermine your point.

Since most people won't actually read and digest the full article, but instead go by the headline "That Fingerprint Sensor on Your Phone Is Not as Safe as You Think" and read the first paragraph or so, none of the caveats matter much, people will walk away with the impression that this is a verified fact.

huxleyon Windows 10 on ARM

I think you misremember.

Apple started with the Core Solo and Core Duo chips (Yonah), which were fairly fast but weren't remarkably faster than the PowerPC G5. A single core G5 iMac held up quite well versus the two-core Core Duo and thrashed the Core Solo. Aside from memory reads the G5 did quite well.

The strength of the Core Duo and Solo were in performance per watt and that's what Jobs was looking for.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yonah_(microprocessor)

huxleyon Why did Mac OS 7 perform poorly with virtual memory enabled?

I blew a thousand dollars (Canadian) to upgrade my new Mac Plus to 4 megabytes and the sales guy asked --slightly tongue in cheek but only slightly-- if I was doing CAD for NASA.

huxleyon Rod Dreher's Monastic Vision

They are rarer now than back in the 60s and 70s but PARC, Bell Labs, CERN etc might be good examples.

huxleyon Yad Vashem's database of Holocaust victims' names

Maybe it's true where you live, it is certainly not true in the English-speaking world. Fighting the Nazis was the primary way of describing the European war in contemporaneous popular and political writing.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=german%2C+nazi...

huxleyon Brain in a Jar

Perhaps it was a Java espresso? Would explain the teensy cups, Java beans are normally middle of the road when it comes to caffeine content.

huxleyon Toshiba Pares Losses on Report of Apple Investing in Chips

Toshiba has been having a lot of trouble lately thanks to Westinghouse, so the Abe's government might consider foreign control to be a lesser evil than massive layoffs or a bailout.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-04-11/toshiba-r...

huxleyon Monsanto Weed Killer Roundup Faces New Doubts on Safety in Unsealed Documents

This is a zombie lie that never ever stops. You can't trust whatever psycho-website you got that misinformation from.

DDT was NEVER banned for public health purposes in Africa or anywhere in the Developing World.

It was restricted for use in agriculture to ensure --in part-- that it continued to be useful for public health. As far back as the late 1950s it was known that mosquitos easily developed resistance to DDT and other insecticides.

huxleyon Robot Is A Hijacked Word

Apparently it first appeared on July 1952 in a story called "Robots of the World! Arise!" by Mari Wolf published in "If" magazine.

huxleyon Robot Is A Hijacked Word

True, for some definitions of "a long time ago"

Dorothy Vaughan and other "computers" were doing calculations by hand as a career into the early 1960s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_Vaughan