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tessierashpoolon Show HN: Hacker News frontpage as a print newspaper that you can personalize

this is exactly how my 2009 version (in my previous comment) chose to size and space its headlines

tessierashpoolon Show HN: Hacker News frontpage as a print newspaper that you can personalize

I agree, but I'm biased. I built basically the same app as OP back in 2009 and it had different headline sizes like a newspaper:

https://github.com/gilesbowkett/hacker_newspaper/blob/master...

I kept it running for 5 or 10 years but eventually let it die.

edit: I'm not hating on OP btw. their version has pics, which mine doesn't. just agreeing that I believe the visual hierarchy inherent to newspaper title design is an important benefit of the format.

tessierashpoolon Trump wins presidency for second time

You're thinking like a progressive technocrat. You're thinking, how would I institute a fair, efficient, and effective program of mass deportation?

I'm really not.

tessierashpoolon Trump wins presidency for second time

that's also partly because of Fox News, which was explicitly founded to ensure that the next Nixon would survive his Watergate.

tessierashpoolon Trump wins presidency for second time

we're for all practical purposes immune to the awful policies that are being put in place.

this is probably not going to pan out. Trump's become the figurehead for an organized and motivated movement to completely dismantle the administrative state. nobody's going to be immune to the effects of that. Project 2025 includes shutting down the weather service, even to the point of privatizing tornado warnings. he's also talked many times about replacing the entire income tax system with hefty tariffs, which literally hundreds of economists say would be a disastrous move.

they're also talking about a national abortion ban. you might indeed be old enough for that not to affect your life any more, but if you have extended family, it will affect someone you care about, guaranteed.

last but not least, Trump's stated goal of mass deportation would require intense surveillance, broad leeway for law enforcement agencies, and drastically reduced civil liberties protections. once you've got that, you can target a lot of people. a site like Twitter is going to have a lot of data about political inclinations, and cultural factors like sexuality or race that can get you targeted politically.

the real problem that got Trump in office was normalcy bias. what we're dealing with is so bad that if you tell people who don't already know, they assume you're exaggerating.

tessierashpoolon Pushing the frontiers of audio generation

ah, like Al-Jazari's water-powered musical automata in 1206, or Athanasius Kircher's marble machine in the 17th century. or (for more modern examples) Raymond Scott's Electronium in 1959, and the Rhythmicon in 1931.

tessierashpoolon Pushing the frontiers of audio generation

Not longer than Steve Reich, John Cage, Philip Glass, or Ann Southam.

Nor for that matter Mozart, who wrote simple algorithmic compositions powered by dice. These were common musical games in his day.

tessierashpoolon Google CEO says more than a quarter of the company's new code is created by AI

Chinese-Americans, at least, call it a game of Telephone, like everyone else in the English-speaking world except for the actual English.

We call it “Telephone” because “Chinese Whispers” not only sounds racist, it is also super confusing. You need a lot of cultural context to understand the particular way in which Chinese whispers would be different from any other set of whispers.

tessierashpoolon Sabine Hossenfelder – This is why physics is dying [video]

obviously, my reply to this comment's sibling repudiates these factually inaccurate characterizations.

tessierashpoolon Sabine Hossenfelder – This is why physics is dying [video]

sure https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6Kau7bO3Fw

this is a debunking video. it addresses a video where Hossenfelder says that "normal people" think it's crazy to suggest that transitioning saves the lives of transgender teens.

but (as the video shows) the peer-reviewed evidence for this "crazy" idea that "normal people" don't believe is in fact overwhelming.

anyway, dismissing peer-reviewed evidence as "crazy" is not a legitimate way for a scientist to act. but it gets a lot of clicks for Hossenfelder, because lots of people want to hear that, even though it isn't true, and they really like hearing a scientist say it, even though that scientist is a physicist talking about a very different field (and dismissing reams of peer-reviewed research in that field without even a moment's consideration, or a base level of professional courtesy).

tessierashpoolon Google’s AI thinks I left a Gatorade bottle on the moon

this is a popular myth but never lines up with reality. studies pretty consistently find that kids are worse at understanding technology’s limitations.

maybe because they don’t have enough prior experience to compare “the new way” with any given old way.

tessierashpoolon Sabine Hossenfelder – This is why physics is dying [video]

she really isn't, though. her papers are mediocre, so she compensates by pandering to conspiracy theorists and transphobes.

edit: to be clear, my intention here is not to engage in ad hominem. instead I am saying that augmenting unimpressive research with social media is not a good model for the modern intellectual

tessierashpoolon Harvard students hack Meta glasses to compile dossiers on strangers in real time [video]

France 24 report describes it as "a surveillance nightmare" but it's arguably more a sousveillance nightmare. This would be an incredibly oppressive tool of surveillance, but in the hands of literally everyone, it's that plus a recipe for chaos.

Impressive tech demo though!

tessierashpoolon Flesh-Eating Bacteria That Can Kill in Two Days Spreads in Japan

their “point” does not stand. they don’t even have a point. they cherry-picked an ideological hot button to be mad about for no legitimate reason.

it is absurd to suggest those measures were not a good thing, and factually inaccurate to say that the article expresses or implies any opinion about them whatsoever. it doesn’t.

it’s an article about a rise in cases. it mentions when the cases started rising.

tessierashpoolon API Shouldn't Redirect HTTP to HTTPS

yeah, the assertion is entirely false. there doesn't need to be any such tradeoff.

there's probably a term for the cognitive fallacy where you assert that however it happens to be is how it had to be. it's like normalcy bias, but retroactive.

tessierashpoolon API Shouldn't Redirect HTTP to HTTPS

as an old-school reader of the cypherpunks email list from before HTTPS existed, I'm still mad about this part:

Outside of actually developing cryptosystems, security tends to be a practical affair where we are happy building systems that improve security posture even if they don't fix everything.

there was a time in the 1990s when cryptography geeks were blind to this reality and thought we'd build a very different internet. it sure didn't happen, but it would have been better.

we had (and still have today) all the technology required to build genuinely secure systems. we all knew passwords were a shitty alternative. but the people with power were the corrupt, useless "series of tubes!" political class and the VCs, who obviously are always going to favor onboarding and growth over technical validity. it's basically an entire online economy founded on security theater at this point.

tessierashpoolon Anarchy in the US (The Revolution That Almost Happened)

this is not just an ad hominem, it is also senseless. "you can safely assume this person knows nothing of our history, because he finds our tourists annoying" is not a valid argument.

flagging for ad hominem

tessierashpoolon Cyclist hit by driverless Waymo car in San Francisco, police say

very surprising that Waymo would describe the accident in terms that blame the other party

tessierashpoolon Another Roman dodecahedron has been unearthed in England

Greek letters were used as numbers during the time of the Romans.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_numerals

also, sorry to be that guy, but D&D hasn't had a thief class since 3rd edition came out, in 2000.

tessierashpoolon A Writer's Ruby

DHH imposes this kind of cognitive dissonance on the Ruby community at a pretty regular interval.

it's generally worth it, but it's still a kind of brain tax.

tessierashpoolon Consumer Reports finds 'widespread' presence of plastics in food

easily disproven by reading the orignal Consumer Reports post (as opposed to the Reuters article that this thread links to)

https://www.consumerreports.org/health/food-contaminants/the...

tessierashpoolon Consumer Reports finds 'widespread' presence of plastics in food

Isn't there also limited to no evidence of harms from these in humans?

nope, tons of evidence of harm

tessierashpoolon Consumer Reports finds 'widespread' presence of plastics in food

nope, phthalate-free cans have been a selling point for a while now. standard for canned beans at Sprouts or Whole Foods

tessierashpoolon Consumer Reports finds 'widespread' presence of plastics in food

this is a fine idea in theory, but in practice, the responsibility for managing such an index would (in the US) be split unpredictably between the FDA and/or USDA. the agencies have wildly varying budgets, a Byzantine web of overlap in their responsibilities, and the GOP's trying to defund them both anyway.

indeed, the Supreme Court's agreed to hear a case next year which they may use to dismantle the entire legal basis for all the US govmt's regulatory agencies. arguments in that case begin on Jan 17th

tessierashpoolon InVision design collaboration services shutdown

yeah, but the point stands. that’s how Adobe took over the world, as well as Apple products like the iPad, the iPhone, etc. “by Mac users for Mac users” is historically a very strong opening position.

tessierashpoolon InVision design collaboration services shutdown

is there a way to reverse this trend? it seems to have decades of momentum behind it, but it should still be destroyed.

tessierashpoolon Software engineering salaries come from one of three budgets

flat fees fail for dev.

as soon as you encounter an unexpected problem, your margin suffers. since unexpected problems can radically alter dev time, your margin can be obliterated.

tessierashpoolon News85% of Americans Fear Job Loss in 2024

the number comes from "MyPerfectResume’s 2024 Workplace Trends Survey," and there's no information about its methodology on the page that I could see.

tessierashpoolon Quairading shire erects signs telling travellers to ignore Google Maps

it's horrifying how much software operates in defiance of consent.

huge overlap with how much software provides "conveniences" which undermine utility.

tessierashpoolon Granting pardon for the offense of simple possession of or use of marijuana

not what I said, but I will rephrase for you.

the law is inherently always complicated, because it, by definition, must provide general and categorical solutions to a wide range of particular instances.