HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

lacksconfidence

896 karma · joined January 2, 2012

submissionscomments
lacksconfidence··on Can Nuclear Fusion Put the Brakes on Climate Change?
Sure, but how? What physical processes are being used? Most of us can understand how hot fision encased in water turns to steam and runs a steam engine (even if the reality is still quite complex). But how does the thin-plasma get converted to steam?
lacksconfidence··on Europe’s energy crisis is about to go global as gas prices soar
I realize you didn't invent these terms, but is kW/h the right metric? A plain reading of the units provided suggests 700 grams of CO2 is released every hour for every kW generated, but that seems unlikely. Where does the per hour figure in?
lacksconfidence··on Apple Will Not Reinstate Epic’s Fortnite Developer Account
I don't have links handy but Sweeny directly addressed this. Sony and Microsoft are willing to negotiate with Epic. They get to find a middleground that both sides are happy with. Apple does not negotiate, a developer that has $5 in sales get's the same deal as Epic. Sweeny stated that if Apple had been willing to negotiate similar to Microsoft and Sony then we wouldn't be here.
lacksconfidence··on GM tells some Bolt owners to park 50 feet away from other cars
As long as it included messaging and an admission of fault, that seems significantly safer for the general populace.
lacksconfidence··on Steve Wozniak announces private space company to clean up space debris in orbit
I'm no expert, but is that really a consideration for modern launches? I'm not aware of any space agency that is currently limited in what they can do by orbital debris. Maybe it changes the launch windows, or they adjust an orbit by a few km. But are missions actually being canceled such that they would fund someone to make those missions possible again?
lacksconfidence··on Mozilla has defeated Microsoft’s default browser protections in Windows
IMO the solution is at least releated to ranked choice voting, where people can vote for people that will never win (at least this time around) without their vote becoming meaningless.
lacksconfidence··on Mozilla has defeated Microsoft’s default browser protections in Windows
I'm sure I have a biased view, but i hear people care about privacy in the same way they care about leaving facebook. They would like to, in a purely theoretical manner, but they aren't willing to change anything about their life to get that effect. It seems like many people only care enough about privacy to click a button.

Sure some people actually remove facebook, but the overwhelming majority of people are voting that they prefer the services offered, even with the tradeoffs. Unfortunate, but seems likely to me.

lacksconfidence··on My Tungsten Cube (2019)
Gold bullion has a healthy market to sell back into though.I don't know the numbers, but i wouldn't be surprised if I could easily sell gold for 80% of "market" value, whereas probably closer to 20% for something like Iridium that has a very small adressable market unless I were to expend considerable effort finding someone willing to pay what it's worth.
lacksconfidence··on The Rise of Mobile Wikipedia
> it shows articles of places/features nearby

That functionality is likely the same data as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Nearby but with a better interface

lacksconfidence··on An Opinionated Guide to Xargs
i don't know if xargs cant, but i use gnu parallel to split an input pipe into N parallel pipes processing slices of the input stream.

Edit: To clarify, xargs usually wants to spin up a process per task. I have parallel spin up N processes and then continuously feed them.

lacksconfidence··on Benefits of Not Using an IDE
I mean, I think they are? Sure jumping to a generic definition like getId will give you more choices, but i know which one i want. Having to push space and then 9 to get the second page and choose the one i want isn't the end of the world.

Recently LSP provides exactly what you desire anyways with context sensitive jumps.

Edit: Regardless, perhaps our difference here lies around what the minimum specification is. My reading of this thread and the post i responded to is that people think moving around in code without an IDE means closing one file, navigating to the next file and opening that one. This is patently not how it works, and what i was adressing.

lacksconfidence··on Benefits of Not Using an IDE
> Relatedly, the ability to find all usages of a symbol and navigate between them is indispensable for me at this point.

I don't know if people just aren't aware, but vi and emacs have been doing this since at least the 90s. This isn't some fancy feature that requires an IDE. Recently the support has improved even more through LSP.

lacksconfidence··on Data-Mining Wikipedia for Fun and Profit
seems to depend on the query. I can issue straight forward queries that visit a few hundred thousand triples easily. But when i write a query that visits tens of millions of triples it times out.
lacksconfidence··on U.S. opens probe into Tesla’s Autopilot over emergency vehicle crashes
the lights are actually what cause the crash. Some drivers just drive straight into the lights. This is part of why police, at least around here, have particular protocols around how far they stop behind a car, and never standing between the cop car and the car they stopped.
lacksconfidence··on The Elasticsearch Saga Continues
It may not be open source, but it still offers much of what I think is important. Development is done in the open, very much following the bazaar model. Users of the software are free to read, modify, and release forks/patches of the source code. For the vast, vast majority of users that are not trying to sell elasticsearch as a service the terms of the license may have changed, but in practical terms all the things I care about are still there.
lacksconfidence··on Postgres Full-Text Search: A search engine in a database
Can you tell us about your scoring function? Selecting 40M results from a dataset of ~1B and returning the top 10 based on some trivial scoring function is easy, any reasonable search system will handle that. The problem is when you have to run your scoring function on all 40M matching docs to decide which 10 are the most relevant. It's even more of a problem when your scoring function captures some of the complexities of the real word, rather than something trivial like tf/idf or bm25.
lacksconfidence··on My Steam Game Revenue Stats
Sure, but I think it's more that it seems incredibly rare to write month/day without year in strictly numbers. In almost all cases i would write 15 Jun/15 Jul. I can't think of anytime i would intentionally write 15.06/15.07. We all know this is a global world. We all know conventions vary. We should aim to make things intuitive, not make people guess which convention 06.07 is using.
lacksconfidence··on My proposal for scaling open source: don’t
> I think what you’re implying by “dumbed down” technology is technology that is made easy to use.

Specifically regarding this, I think what the poster is implying is that all of the options within a piece of software have been removed. The interface has been dumbed down until you can only do the exact couple tasks the team has designed it to do to, and nothing more. The options that allow us to fine tune the software operation to our needs, to flexibly use the tool have been removed to the point where all you get is a button to do the task, and if it fails you get a cute cartoon that says "omg, sorry!".

When using technology that hasn't been dumbed down, the development team can often be surprised at what users are doing with it, because they are doing all kinds of things we never thought of. Once the software has been dumbed down enough thats not possible, because the software wont let you do anything the development team didn't think of.

lacksconfidence··on How Intel financialized and lost leadership in semiconductor fabrication
Regarding the closing lines, focusing so specifically on stock buybacks is looking in the wrong place. Intel's goal was to give the money to the shareholders. Currently the most tax advantaged way to do that is with stock buybacks. If you pass some law that prevents buybacks they will just give the money to the shareholders in the next most tax advantaged way.

The only hope seems to be as they've done, hire on a CEO more concerned with innovtion than stock price. At least I hope this is what they've done.

lacksconfidence··on 'Most homes' in Lytton destroyed by catastrophic fire, B.C. minister says
I had a hard time getting an idea of the size of the fire or the town from the article. As an external point of reference, the population is reported as 249 in 2016.
lacksconfidence··on The High Cost of Keyword Search
I haven't used it yet, but https://github.com/semi-technologies/weaviate is a vector search engine that does embeddings and search. I don't know if they have succeeded, but the goal seems to be to make embedding and searching vectors easy enough to not need to be an ML expert.
lacksconfidence··on AMD 3D Stacks SRAM Bumplessly
Perhaps particularly interesting about this approach by AMD is that the typical memory on a CPU die isn't as dense as it can be, because of the processes they have to apply to the wafer to also build the CPU transistors. With AMD moving to separate chips they can use a process that builds denser memory than what is typically seen on a cpu.
lacksconfidence··on We are publishing the tax secrets of the .001%
The general idea is average people don't make 500k/yr. What they might do though is have a one time event that earns them 500k in a single year, like selling a small business or a house. In that one year where they finally did well the tax system comes in and hits them even harder with laws intended for someone who makes 500k every year.
lacksconfidence··on Google removes its head of diversity after 2007 blog post surfaces
Thanks for the commentary, it's a useful perspective. Perhaps it depends on many things, but i feel like this post is not attributing these actions to you, in any way. My reading of the actual actions being criticised in that there is no way the author could mean anything other than the jewish state of israel. Working backwards from there, it's clear to me that any reference to jew is simply because AIPAC and western media in general have spent the last ~50 years blurring the discourse to the point where Jew ~= Israeli.
lacksconfidence··on Google removes its head of diversity after 2007 blog post surfaces
Honestly, I have no clue what you are trying to say. Clearly we have different definitions of anti-semitism? To me anti-semitism is a form of racism. By definition being opposed to the political actions of a nation is not racism. It could have underlying racist motives, but you cannot ascribe those from the position that a nation state is doing inappropriate things.
lacksconfidence··on Google removes its head of diversity after 2007 blog post surfaces
I'm being as clear as i can, when I read the document I don't see anything about "the jewish race". What i see is commentary on the jewish nation of israel. I can only blame israel for bluring that distinction as much as possible.
lacksconfidence··on California Senate Approves Bill to Legalize Psychedelics Like Psilocybin and LSD
Those mean completely different things to me. To me legalize it means there can be no punishment for the substance. Decriminalize it means sales and distribution are still illegal, the profits are still going to organized crime.
lacksconfidence··on Ask HN: Did preparing for LeetCode type of interviews improve your skills?
Isn't this how most international competition works? I'm most familiar with the olympics and this is exactly how it works there. People from uncompetitive countries for their sport have an "easier" time going to the olypmics.
lacksconfidence··on Stacked Git – manage commits as a stack of patches
This is my way as well, but in part it's because we use gerrit instead of git(hub|lab) which explicitly allows for this workflow of separately reviewed patches that build atop each other. I'm curious, if you are using git(hub|lab), how does it work with their workflow?
lacksconfidence··on Show HN: Find Subreddits for Your Niche
> I don’t think they ever seriously invested in that, for whatever reason.

They have recently invested in it, switching to lucidworks[1] a few years ago. Sadly i don't think it changed anyones opinion of reddit search, but it might have saved them some infrastructure cost.

[1] https://lucidworks.com/customers/reddit/

← PreviousPage 4 of 10Next →