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koboll

4,148 karma · joined February 14, 2018

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koboll··on Ask HN: Why is everything in JavaScript changing so fast?
Yeah React in particular really feels like a settled frontend standard now. If anything, JavaScript seems to be changing more slowly than it did during the turbulent Angular/React/Vue days.
koboll··on A picture of me
That line revealed to me, as someone who has dealt with similar things, that his real problem now is depression. It's not just sadness, it's an inability to perceive a future where things get better, or even a future at all.

Sadly this mentality tends to make it more difficult to do the things you need to dig yourself out of a depressive episode. It's self-reinforcing.

koboll··on Supreme Court Overturns Roe vs. Wade
If he was to apply a logical framework to his reasoning then overturning Obergefell would mean also overturning Loving and dissolving his own marriage.

But he isn't particularly interested in that, because he is a political hack.

Thankfully, he is at least wrong about Obergefell, which was decided on different, and much firmer, grounds than the right-to-privacy cases. But carrying out the logic from this decision to others does indeed threaten Griswold and Lawrence, and especially Griswold, which was basically the direct precedential precursor to Roe.

koboll··on The Rise and Fall of Neumorphism
A web design opinion that has increasingly solidified in my thinking is that box-shadow should never be relied on to distinguish an edge.

Not only is it (obviously) less distinct than a border or an edge where color changes, it breaks outside the visual box model of the page due to spreading outside the element's grid placement, which makes everything look less distinctly part of a grid. box-shadow, when relied on to distinguish edges, is anathema to the human visual system in an unconsciously subtle way. It's fit for light touches that add onto an already clear and accessible design but never for relying on to achieve clarity or accessibility.

We realized this during the flat design era but then proceeded to overshoot things pretty far until exterminating shadows became a hot trend. Now there's a backlash, of which 'neumorphism' is the apex, which swings things too far back in the other direction. Just keep shadows light and use them sparingly, it's not too hard.

koboll··on Tell HN: Banned from LinkedIn for Reporting Wickr Drug Spam
Whichever social network doesn't sufficiently moderate is the one people will turn to when they want to sell drugs.

If you have a sufficiently popular CRUD, and you don't go our of your way to stop them, bad actors will leverage it to do crimes. It's that simple.

koboll··on Glucosamine significantly reduces risk of lung cancer and lung cancer mortality
Why exactly does glucosamine only having a minor effect on pain, collagen degradation, joint function, etc. preclude it from having an effect on cancer outcomes?

Obviously this should be replicated and if not replicable, should be dismissed. But it's perplexing to dismiss it out of hand because its effects weren't strong enough for an array of other totally unrelated health outcomes.

koboll··on No, DALL-E doesn’t have a secret language
Especially since his results confirm most of what the original thread claimed. A couple of the inputs did not reliably replicate, but "for the most part, they're not true" seems straightforwardly false. He even seems to deliberately ignore this sometimes, such as when he says "I don't see any bugs" when there is very obviously a bug in the beak of all but two or three of the birds.
koboll··on Ask HN: What game do you wish existed?
Voice-control Star Wars / Star Trek space command RTS game.

I want to be Admiral Ackbar shouting "GREEN GROUP, STICK CLOSE TO HOMING SECTOR MV-7" and for that to actually result in RTS units moving on a map. I want to be Captain Picard shouting "ALL POWER TO FORWARD SHIELDS" and for that to actually result in a change in resource allocation of the 'power' resource.

koboll··on Why is it traitorous to understand the people you disagree with?
> So, here’s a timeline: The 14th amendment was passed in 1868. For 135 years, it was perfectly consistent with that amendment for states to put people in jail for having the wrong kind of sex. Then, one day, it wasn’t anymore.

This is wrong. When precedent is overturned, it's because the law struck down was never consistent with the amendment(s) at issue.

Segregation was not perfectly consistent with the 14th Amendment prior to Brown v. Board, it was never consistent with it, from the time of its passage. The court upheld it in Plessy v. Ferguson not because it was okay then and the 'living document' subsequently changed and it became not-okay, but because the court made a glaringly wrong decision in Plessy v. Ferguson.

koboll··on The impact of childhood lead exposure on adult personality (2021)
Very interested in this as well
koboll··on I stopped to watch kids playing at recess – security was called
>They drive their children everywhere, and thereby are (somewhat) alienated from the idea of a "local community" beyond the immediate neighborhood (which can only be entered or exited by car.)

I see your point, but I think it's broader than something that can be attributed solely to cars.

I've lived in apartments and condos in the hearts of major American cities my entire adult life, and I'm surrounded by the same phenomenon in different form. I know maybe 3 of my neighbors in the hall from walking past them and saying hi once in a while, but besides that, I have basically no contact with them.

My partner grew up in an eastern European country and she tells stories of how, on holidays, people would go out to the hallways of her apartment building to congregate and drink and hang out. This concept seems totally alien to me. I'm pretty sure if a resident tried congregating in the hallways of any of the buildings I've lived in, security would be called to clear them out.

I've only lived in urban well-off-millennial type places. Maybe this is something unique to the upper-middle class and above. But I don't think it's entirely about suburbia.

koboll··on Nature has enormous emotional and cognitive benefits on people
I wonder if this title isn't a bit backwards. We are creatures that emerged from nature; being in nature is baseline to us. A better way to phrase this might be "being constantly trapped in a world made of concrete and drywall causes enormous emotional and cognitive detriments to people".
koboll··on Tell HN: Amazon.com is limiting purchases of Audio CDs to four-per-week
Maybe to stop mass buying gaming sales rankings?
koboll··on twitter/the-algorithm
The tweet announcing it was captioned "watch this space":

https://twitter.com/willnorris/status/1518694675909013504

Which seems like a promise they intend to actually open source something there.

koboll··on Column – a chartered bank for developers
Would be nice to have a side-by-side comparison with the steps to starting and operating a bank to get a full picture of what Column abstracts away and what founders must still DIY. Currently you have to dig deep into the use case docs to determine some of these details.
koboll··on Beanstalk cryptocurrency loses $182M of reserves in flash ‘attack’
I'm not much for regulation of crypto/DeFi in general, but instant lending like this should absolutely, 100% be illegal. It's exclusively useful for exploits and MEV vampirism, and for nothing else.
koboll··on Beanstalk cryptocurrency loses $182M of reserves in flash ‘attack’
Not offhand, but if you want to find the discussions, you can go into the Beanstalk Discord and search "Ukraine" prior to the time of the attack, and you'll see people discussing the rogue measures.
koboll··on Beanstalk cryptocurrency loses $182M of reserves in flash ‘attack’
I'm not a technical expert, just someone who lost a couple thousand bucks of expendable high-risk gambling money yesterday and wanted to dive deep to see why.

>So what happens after that 24 hours? The way you've described it here, it sounds like there's an up/down voting system after the cooldown period to either confirm or block the proposed measure, but it's not clear to me how that works. Who has control over that final decision?

Anyone with at least 0.15% (IIRC) of voting power could propose a measure, at which point it would show up on the web app frontend with every LP token holder's vote defaulting to "No". It would have to accrue "Yes" votes from holders of >50% of LP tokens within a certain time period to pass. Alternatively, holders of >2/3rds of LP token could force pass a measure immediately, though this wasn't implemented on the web app frontend. But each of these was subject to a 24 hour period -- no measure that hadn't been proposed at least 24 hours ago could pass, even by supermajority.

koboll··on Beanstalk cryptocurrency loses $182M of reserves in flash ‘attack’
>There's probably things they could've done to reduce the likelihood of an event like this--e.g. requiring supermajority or unanimous voting for certain types of changes, for example--but they didn't, so here we are. The system worked as intended.

A supermajority was required. The attacker purchased enough LP tokens to secure one. At the moment of the attack they held about 70% of voting power.

Unanimous voting wouldn't have been particularly useful because it would never be used. You can't ever convince every last investor to log in and pay gas to vote on a governance measure.

There was a protection in place, which was that the measure must be up for 24 hours before it can be passed. But the critical flaw was that the contents of a measure can be swapped out by a supermajority token holder, even after the 24 hour cooldown period. The attacker threw up 2 measures, one pointing to a nonexistent contract address, and another dummy measure as a diversion that would have transferred $250,000 to Ukraine and $10,000 to a wallet they owned. The diversion worked, and everyone spent the 24 hour period discussing why someone thought they could hoodwink the LP token holders into swindling $10,000 from them, and more or less ignored the second measure. Then, during the attack, the attacker deterministically created the treasury liquidation contract at the formerly blank address and used the flash loaned supermajority to pass it.

koboll··on Ask HN: What book changed your life?
She Comes First.

Pretty much the sole reason I've been told over and over again for the past decade that ours was "the best sex [they've] ever had".

If you have sex with women, you need to read it.

koboll··on Light exposure during sleep impairs cardiometabolic function
I remember several twitter threads about this and the clear winner was usually the Manta Sleep Mask. Doesn't push your eyeballs in, plus the eye parts are velcro-attached to the strap so you can adjust them to your face.
koboll··on Heuristics that almost always work
This seems like the weakest example. I immediately thought of that Paul Krugman quote from the 1990s where he pooh-poohed the internet, something that's stuck with him forever and made him a laughingstock where futurism is concerned.
koboll··on Amazon more than doubles max base pay to $350k
Right, but Amazon isn't an early-stage startup. It's a tech giant that wants all the employee-squeezing benefits of being an early-stage startup: sacrifice your life and comfort for the sake of the company. It's Day One, after all.

The problem is that what makes that sacrifice potentially worth it at an early-stage startup is the potential for equity before hypergrowth. Amazon has virtually no chance of startup-like hypergrowth anymore; recently its stock has even started declining. So employees are being asked to provide outsized sacrifice for declining returns. Predictably, massive resignation and retention problems are the result.

koboll··on Evolution of the elephant depiction throughout the middle ages
You can almost hear the not-quite-accurate descriptions that inspired these. Like the (many) images that are almost accurate, except the tusks grow upward: probably the description called them "horns" and mentioned where on the head they grew from, but not the direction, so the artists simply inferred the horn-growth direction they were familiar with from other large mammals.
koboll··on 1Password Has Raised $620M
Pretty typical for people here to be zoomed-in on the b2c side of a business because that's what they use, and fail to see the b2b side, the underwater mass of the iceberg.
koboll··on NFT Replicas: An app to mint a replica of virtually any NFT
Neat. Is this the collection? https://opensea.io/collection/nftreplicas
koboll··on Web3 is going just great
I like how half of these supposed 'bad news' articles are something like "Some Famous Person made an NFT... and people on Twitter are mad about it!"
koboll··on Log4Shell Log4j vulnerability (CVE-2021-44228) – cheat-sheet reference guide
It's a bad idea because that would leak, and then you'd have bad actors exploiting a zero-day prior to day zero.
koboll··on Log4j: Between a rock and a hard place
If this survey is to be believed, as of last year, nearly everyone is using either Java 8 or Java 11, with Java 8 being the overwhelming favorite with almost 60% of respondents reporting using it.

https://www.jrebel.com/blog/2020-java-technology-report

koboll··on The trees that miss the mammoths (2011)
Avocados are another seedpod (technically a berry, believe it or not) evolved to be eaten by mammoths and giant sloths. Unlike the osage orange, however, it didn't adapt to their extinction and would likely have gone extinct itself afterward, except for one saving grace: Mesoamerican humans thought they were delicious and started cultivating them.
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