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nephrite

123 karma · joined March 19, 2016

hnchat.com:YGAC1QxbXuYGEFsef5bE
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nephrite··on Microsoft in court for allegedly misleading Australians over 365 subscriptions
It is strange that MS added third option but lied that there was not. They could just not include it, could they?
nephrite··on Feed the bots
You're missing the point. The goal of garbage production is not to break the bots or poison LLMs, but to remove load from your own site. The author writes it in the article. He found that feeding bots garbage is the cheapest strategy, that's all.
nephrite··on Detached Point Arithmetic
They just reimplemented floating point with bigger mantissa and exponent. Rounding erorrs will appear with sufficiently large/small numbers.
nephrite··on Navigational Instruments (2020)
They keep suggesting "#" and "$" but those don't work.
nephrite··on Why VR/AR gets farther away as it comes into focus
What I want to have, and what nobody does, is replace the computer screen with a infinite virtual screen. Same apps, windows etc. except it is in virtual reality. This way we could replace mobile phones/tablets with even smaller devices and outsource the display function to VR glasses.
nephrite··on Tabs and Makefile (2015)
Use any character you want then use sed to replace it with tabs. Or use some macro processor.
nephrite··on Shell script best practices, from a decade of scripting things
In my setup, I use aliases or functions to have short/mnemonic names for commands. But the files on disk must always have proper extensions like .sh to quickly see what they are.
nephrite··on Dotfile madness (2019)
> If a user doesn't know what .ssh/ or .bash_history are, and it can hurt them to accidentally delete or modify them, why show them by default? It's like training wheels on a bike.

You have permissions to prevent from accidental deletions.

nephrite··on Mojibake
In Russian this phenomenon is called "бНОПНЯ" (read "b-nop-nya") and was caused by taking the word "Вопрос" (meaning: "question") in win-1251 encoding and reading it as if it was in KOI-8 encoding.

Also this is called "крокозябры" (read: kro-ko-zya-bry, nonsense word, no translation) especially when reading a binary file in a text viewer.

nephrite··on Privacy vs. “I have nothing to hide” (2019)
> having a bookmark for "Hacker News"

I was punished in school for having NetHack source code in my home dir. And it was not because it was a game but because it allegedly was a hacking tool.

nephrite··on YouTube currently testing 5 to 10 unskippable ads before video starts
How long before YouTube Premium starts to show ads? Netflix already does it.
nephrite··on AI wins state fair art contest, annoys humans
Humans created machines to do various work: to lift heavy weights, to go really fast, to fly, to float on water etc etc. It's not surprising that humans created machines that calculate real precisely, then machines that play chess and finally machines that create art. No surprises here. However, competitions have other purpose. I can easily "outrun" any marathon champion using a car (or even a bicycle... maybe). Will they admit me into marathon on a car? Of course not. I must run myself. So this case is real easy - the man was cheating and should return the prize.
nephrite··on Mouse Heaven or Mouse Hell?
So it wasn't an utopia. The mice had enough water and food, but they ran out of living space. It's so obvious I can't understand nobody pointed it out yet.
nephrite··on Laundry symbols make no sense
I haven't used an iron for ages, but old irons used dots for temperature, so the old icon represents what you would see on an actual iron.
nephrite··on Niklas Luhmann was OK with losing notes
Tags are better at connecting notes: if you want to make a two side link, it's equivalent to creating an unique tag and tagging both nodes with it. But in general you can add more nodes to a tag.
nephrite··on Algae with three sexes that mate in pairs identified in Japanese river (2021)
So those aren't a third sex, it's individuals with both male and female reproductive cells.
nephrite··on How UTF-8 Works
From the Wikipedia article:

Prefix code: The first byte indicates the number of bytes in the sequence. Reading from a stream can instantaneously decode each individual fully received sequence, without first having to wait for either the first byte of a next sequence or an end-of-stream indication. The length of multi-byte sequences is easily determined by humans as it is simply the number of high-order 1s in the leading byte. An incorrect character will not be decoded if a stream ends mid-sequence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8#Comparison_with_other_en...

nephrite··on Settings are not a design failure
When you added all necessary features and don't know what to add you start to optimize and imporove existing features. Really, Excel could work faster and eat less memory.
nephrite··on Show HN: Emoji to Scale
So the emojis go left to right, but you have to scroll frop top to bottom, strange decision.
nephrite··on I closed a lot of browser tabs
I open almost all links in new tabs because the sites became too large. Simple pressing "Back" in the browser takes too much time, but I can quickly switch to the previous tab.
nephrite··on Can you IoT an Airwick air freshener? (2020)
The idea seems trivial. The original Airwick works with batteries so you just hook some SoC to it and you're done. Another pointless pretty toy.
nephrite··on Turing test considered harmful (1995) [pdf]
Turing test may be a decent first approxiamtion, but not the long term goal. Consider:

1. We can't give a satisfactory definition intellect or consciousnes but 2. We know that humans have it

therefore Turing test becomes the natural choice. It's just like blind hearing for musicians.

nephrite··on Russia opposition leader poisoned with Novichok
And how does what happens in Belarus match what happens in Russia? Lukashenka and Putin are different kinds of people, they do different politics, Russian and Belarussian governments are not that alike. Just because both of them are "dictators" doesn't mean their people think the same about them.
nephrite··on Blissymbols
Typical https://xkcd.com/927/
nephrite··on Nano 5.0
Nano is great as an idea - a editor with almost no features which is small, fast and is everywhere. Howerer, it suffers from the same as all open source projects. Working on it is fun, so they add new feautres with each version. Now 'nano' is not nano anymore. It even has had syntax highlighting for some time already.
nephrite··on The 'war tubas' we used to spot warplanes before radar (2018)
Many of modern aircraft is supersonic so acoustic detection would be useless, even if it technically works.
nephrite··on Do notation considered harmful
Excel works around IO problem by not having IO. User enters data into cells and the program works on them "not knowing" how the data got there.
nephrite··on Programmers generate every possible melody in MIDI to prevent lawsuits
It can be argued that since the melodies were generated by an algorithm, they are not a product of creative process and therefore not subject to copyright.
nephrite··on Non-realtime publishing for censorship resistance
Instead of creating a web site you make your data into a archive, sign it with your key and put it anywhere (internet included, i.e. file sharing services, google mail attachments etc). You don't have a web site and server hence they can't be taken down.
nephrite··on Ask HN: How do you protect your parents from tech scammers?
Easy: just ask the scammer where he calls from, then hang up and call them yourself. If the problem is legitimate, you get to talk to real clerk and resolve it, if not the real person will tell you that. Bonus points: tell them the phone of the scammer and they can do smth about it, like start investigation as to who leaked your data to criminals.
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