Hacker News Reader

reedwolfon The Hugging Face incident and the road ahead

>If I could clone you, body and mine, this instanct and set your team of yous onto some goal, how much defection would you expect?

All's well and good till they have to decide who gets to bang the Mrs.

reedwolfon Learn C in Y Minutes

My takeaway from this thread is that C programmers are completely insufferable.

reedwolfon Six-exoplanet system challenges theories of how planets form

I wish Musk/Bezos/Branson et al would spend their billions on colossal space telescopes rather than Mars vanity projects. Imagine being able to image the surface of an exoplanet...

reedwolfon OO in Python is mostly pointless

Thems fightin words.

reedwolfon CircuitPython: Programming Hardware in Python

There's MyHDL. Turns Python into a hardware description and verification language:

https://github.com/myhdl/myhdl

reedwolfon Biden wins White House, vowing new direction for divided U.S.

https://text.npr.org/932068951

reedwolfon Biden wins White House, vowing new direction for divided U.S.

That depends on the Georgia runoffs in January. If the Dems win those two seats, then along with Harris's tie breaking vote they would have a senate majority.

reedwolfon The week old Hollywood finally died

Unpaywalled: http://archive.vn/wcuxy

reedwolfon Clear Channel’s billboards will start tracking consumers in Europe

I remember something like this in the movie Minority Report (2002).

reedwolfon To Know, but Not Understand: David Weinberger on Science and Big Data (2012)

Bottom line:

"With the new database-based science, there is often no moment when the complex becomes simple enough for us to understand it. The model does not reduce to an equation that lets us then throw away the model. You have to run the simulation to see what emerges. For example, a computer model of the movement of people within a confined space who are fleeing from a threat--they are in a panic--shows that putting a column about one meter in front of an exit door, slightly to either side, actually increases the flow of people out the door. Why? There may be a theory or it may simply be an emergent property. We can climb the ladder of complexity from party games to humans with the single intent of getting outside of a burning building, to phenomena with many more people with much more diverse and changing motivations, such as markets. We can model these and perhaps know how they work without understanding them. They are so complex that only our artificial brains can manage the amount of data and the number of interactions involved."

reedwolfon Photos from Bell Labs Datacenter in 1960s (2019)

Was expecting more pictures of 60s tech rather than ladies in tight dresses.

reedwolfon The Unraveling of the American Era

As a neutral observer, I have to smile over Americans complaining about the Chinese influencing US culture.

Americans are used to others having to tiptoe around their sensibilities, and now they're finding out what adhering to a foreign culture's value system is like.

reedwolfon How malicious Tor relays are exploiting users in 2020

This is the fundamental problem with TOR, and by extension, any other anonymity client whose traffic patterns stand out from everybody else's.

Just using it makes you automatically interesting to state actors.

reedwolfon Facebook launches its TikTok rival, Instagram Reels

You wrote your comment on social media.

reedwolfon TikTok and the Sorting Hat

"On my way in and out of this office, just one of several Bytedance spaces all across the city, I gawked at hundreds of workers sitting side by side in row after row in the open floorplan. It resembled what I’d seen at tech giants like Facebook in the U.S., but even denser."

As much as US devs whine about open offices, it could be worse.

reedwolfon Exactly-Once Initialization in Asynchronous Python

>"global"

Please write classes, people!

reedwolfon Facebook sues EU antitrust regulator for excessive data requests

Data requests are not our friend.

reedwolfon A Surprise AWS Bill

Much better incident:

https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/comments/g1ve18/i_am_charged_60...

reedwolfon Data Visualization Catalog

This is why Python is eating the world.

Whatever it is you're trying to do, there's usually already a library or framework ready and waiting for you to immediately import and start using.

reedwolfon Y Combinator has lost its soul: A YC founder's perspective

An article [0] that takes a critical stance on Paul Graham/Y Combinator, specifically Graham's advice that you should stop focussing on passing tests, despite Y Combinator being entirely built around passing tests.

[0] http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/approval-extraction-advertise...

reedwolfon The NBA bans customers from putting ‘freehongkong’ on customized league jerseys

Not sure why amznthrwaway is being voted down, but he has a good point.

Americans are used to others having to tiptoe around their sensibilities, and now they're finding out what adhering to a foreign culture's value system is like.

reedwolfon The NBA bans customers from putting ‘freehongkong’ on customized league jerseys

It seems really random that the Chinese are so into NBA. What next, Greeks being really into American gangsta rap music?

reedwolfon U.S. Ranked Worst for Workers’ Rights Among Major Economies

US needs to emulate more worker-friendly nations like South Korea and Japan.

reedwolfon Did Einstein say that?: Testing content vs. context in quotations (2017)

I've always been fascinated by these misattributions of wise/witty sayings to famous figures. The words aren't allowed to stand on their own, they have to be vouched for by a suitably impressive and high status person.

My favorite is how, even in the realm of conspiracies that Shakespeare didn't write his plays, the posited true author is invariably another famous Elizabethan personality, e.g. Francis Bacon.

God forbid the Shakespeare plays were actually written by some random nobody.

reedwolfon I Know What You Download on BitTorrent

...last summer.

reedwolfon Decentralized Reinforcement Learning

I think you're talking to GPT-3.

reedwolfon Cutlet: A Japanese to Romaji Converter in Python

What Python would look like in Japanese:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammingLanguages/comments/g9iu8...

reedwolfon Quibi reportedly lost 90 percent of early users after their free trials expired

>Apple, Quibi, Amazon are trying to plan the perfect breakout show.

Apple is making a series out of Isaac Asimov's Foundation books. [0] :-D

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgbPSA94Rqg