HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

sofayam

184 karma · joined November 18, 2015

submissionscomments
sofayam··on I restarted a 10 year old Xeon 174 times to delete 12 flags and gain 4 tps
Truly this is the autoexec.bat/xf86config tuning of our modern age. But how long will it take this time until all this painfully accumulated knowledge is obsolete?
sofayam··on Show HN: Hallucinopedia
Currently breaks if you try to create a page with a Japanese slug. Multiple languages would make this an even more valuable resource than it already is.
sofayam··on Ooh.directory: a place to find good blogs that interest you
Strange, I looked around and couldn’t find a single contentful or authentic site in your index, rather the opposite.
sofayam··on Recovering from AI addiction
I read somewhere that it is a consequence of the way these things work that they will naturally be more cooperative and helpful if you are nice to them, and if you order them around brusquely they will be less so. Maybe following the patterns of interaction in their training set (?)
sofayam··on What if no one misses TikTok?
Either it is a guilty pleasure and you are secretly relieved that the temptation is being removed. Or prolonged use of the service has turned you into an apathetic apolitical blob of mindless jelly with no agency and no energy to effect change on your environment.
sofayam··on Take the pedals off the bike
And now you’re all just being mean.
sofayam··on Take the pedals off the bike
This guy was not really trying to explain to hacker parents how they should teach their kids to ride a bike. As has has been adequately demonstrated in the comments they already know aaaaaaaall about that. His actual point, which seems to have whooshed past most people’s heads, is much more interesting: can you learn a thing more effectively by first simplifying that thing so radically that a seasoned user would find it useless? Also not exactly a totally new idea but, depending on context, just counterintuitive enough that you may miss it.
sofayam··on AI Decodes the Calls of the Wild
If we could talk to animals, then, on the positive side we could explain things to them like “watch for traffic when you cross this road” but we could also deceive them. A lot of what hunters and farmers have done since time immemorial has used our superior - or maybe just different - intelligence to exploit or trap animals, but imagine the chaos we could wreak if we could literally argue them into behaving against their best interests. Not everyone would use this ability responsibly, especially if there was money to be made.
sofayam··on Discarded delights: The joy of ex-library books (2021)
Sure. But while I can understand this approach for rare objects which are the result of great craftsmanship (I would rather not have a crack in my faberge egg) a book is generally a mass produced article with little individual character until someone has left their mark on it.
sofayam··on Discarded delights: The joy of ex-library books (2021)
If you are going to collect books as physical objects, rather than their much more convenient digital versions, then it strikes me you should actually find the signs of previous interactions with that object (library stamps, marks from other readers etc) make them more interesting than pristine copies that no one has read.
sofayam··on The Distribution of Users’ Computer Skills: Worse Than You Think (2016)
I know a suprising number of people 10-20 years older than me who regularly use desktop computers but do not understand what a window is e.g.: that windows can cover each other up, and that there are special places you must grab or click them to either resize or move them, that you can shrink them into a dock without closing the application etc.

Rather ironic considering that the operating system they all use is actually named after this, for them, inscrutable abstraction.

Those guys at Apple knew what they were on to when they created iOS with its one app at a time paradigm, even if it is slowly adding all that complexity back in to the more recent versions.

sofayam··on American Phrase Book
“works” as in “gets the other person to leave me alone”?
sofayam··on On the Pleasures and Sorrows of Life Without Screens
Fits nicely with the Southpark creators views on Pot: it makes you feel fine with being bored and it's when you're bored that you should be learning a new skill or some new science or being creative.
sofayam··on How to set your Google account to delete itself after you die
Good feature but the three month window they grant is way too short. Winding up someone’s affairs after they have died often takes longer. A year would make more sense.
sofayam··on To Remember Everything You Learn, Surrender to This Algorithm (2008)
The only difference in the eval version (i.e. not yet registered) is you can’t change the wallpaper, ... which is free enough for me
sofayam··on People in these countries work the longest hours according to OECD
Pretty much chased me away. Then I came here just so I could bitch about it. Content suicide.
sofayam··on The dots do matter: how to scam a Gmail user
Interestingly Gmail will let you filter in a dot sensitive way. Anyone missing my dot gets sent to a folder called “wrongguy”. Whenever I drop by to look at it it’s full of spam.
sofayam··on Free Range VHDL – VHDL programming book available for free
Actually yes - the H stands for hardware: that's any kind of digital logic. You just need a different "back end" and then in theory the same model can run on various targets - in fact there is a whole business model around getting a design up and running on an FPGA and then porting it to an ASIC once you can justify the volume.