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thraway123412

96 karma · joined November 21, 2020

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thraway123412··on Request for comments regarding topics to be discussed at Dark Patterns workshop
Sure. I think we mostly stand on the same line here.

I just tend to take hard stance against anything I find user hostile. Nagging, dark patterns, exploiting addictions, attempts at leeching personal information, lock-in, etcetra will quickly put you on my no buy list.

I think those things are evil at worst and a waste of time and resources (in a global, zero-sum way) at best, and long term we'd be better off if everyone rejected such behavior and put their money towards business that focuses solely on providing superb service without the abuse. Unfortunately these abusive practices tend to work as far as profit is concerned.. it's like tragedy of the commons, in a way.

I want to get paid too, and live in a nicer world.

thraway123412··on Request for comments regarding topics to be discussed at Dark Patterns workshop
That was not intended to be read as a literal quote or an attempt to make it appear as if you said something you didn't. That's a fairly common way of picking a message apart to make a point, on some parts of the internet. Sometimes people paraphrase instead of literally copying words (esp. if there's no good short sequence of words to borrow), but quote marks are still used. I wish we had a better notation for this. I'm sorry to have caused confusion.

Anyway, the point was just to express my disappointment in that people keep supporting a company even after complaining about their horrible dark patterns. And I don't really mean to single you out personally, it's everywhere: people complain and then keep using and rewarding the service(s) they complain about. IME this rarely leads to them becoming better over time, they just get worse over time because they can get away with it. Abuse users until the very end. It seems to work, we have so many users and more are rolling in!

Of course if you're actually giving them feedback, all the power to you. I respect your opinion too.

To give you an idea where I stand, a few days ago I was thinking of buying a keyboard for my workshop PC. I have a couple Planck EZs and they're decent keyboards. So I went over to the ZSA site, started reading about their new keyboard (Moonlander), and... MODAL POPUP ADVERTISING A MAGAZINE[1]! Now I remember the time when browsers started adding popup blockers built-in, and everyone (except scummy advertisers) rejoiced. So I find it disturbing, disgusting, and extremely disrespectful to bring back popups in the form of modals. I kinda try to put my money where my mouth is, so my reaction was to unsubscribe their magazine (the way they presented it when I bought my plancks wasn't so bad) and take my shopping elsewhere.

[1] https://i.imgur.com/9bCDNMl.png

thraway123412··on Cars are about to be a software platform, subscriptions and all
How about a bank account and a credit or debit card tied to it?
thraway123412··on Cars are about to be a software platform, subscriptions and all
I think legislation is the only way to fix this :(

Require owner's/user's consent to connect. If no consent, no connect. Device's offline capabilities must still work and it must not nag you or otherwise use dark patterns to force a consent out of you.

That would be a relatively minor extension to gdpr.

thraway123412··on Cars are about to be a software platform, subscriptions and all
Does yours beep if you don't open the lid in a minute after it turns off?

Mine does and that is super annoying. Annoying enough that I'm thinking of removing the buzzer or just buying another microwave. I do like the simple dual dial design though.

thraway123412··on Piano teacher gets copyright claim for Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata [video]
If you're a genuine claimant, you have little to worry about because you don't make false claims.
thraway123412··on “Shared libraries are not a good thing in general”
> Finally, dynamic loading isn't even the right surface for messing with the behavior of existing binaries.

Then what is? Dropping a custom library next to a binary tends to be way easier than modifying the binary.

thraway123412··on “Shared libraries are not a good thing in general”
I agree that shared libraries are mostly unneeded complexity, as far as free & open source programs are concerned.

I kinda like how they open up opportunities for fixing or tweaking the behavior of broken proprietary binary-only garbage without requiring you to RE and patch a massive binary blob. Of course, in a better world, that garbage wouldn't exist and we'd fix the source instead.

thraway123412··on Why programmers don’t write documentation
It's not that hard.

It just requires time, and I would be happy to spend that time (I love writing, whether docs or just thoughts). As long as there's no ticket for it (approved by a stakeholder and assigned to me by the micromanager), I can't clock hours on it, and if I'm not clocking hours on a ticket, I'll eventually get an angry call..

It's not just lack of incentives, it's disincentives.

thraway123412··on Piano teacher gets copyright claim for Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata [video]
I don't think I'm ever going to approve of any sort of automated copyright claim system but if Google wanted to make it one bit fair, they should use the same concept of three strikes against the accounts that make false claims and ban them.
thraway123412··on Learn C in Y Minutes
For personal project my hard limit is 80 cols. For work stuff, mandated by employer, we do something like 120 cols with clang-format. Four or five columns of code side by side, so I can see hundreds of lines of code at once. I still prefer not to waste too much vertical space on fluff.

It doesn't sound like you understand the difference between block structured code with a function call syntax and assembly. Thanks for the attempted ad hominem btw ;-)

> Anyways, you might think you're making a point by repeating "it's all opinions anyways", but that doesn't mean your single opinion is equal to everyone else.

You keep missing the point. Did I say "that's just nasty and bad habits" about your preferred style? Nope!

All I'm saying is that it'd be nice if people stopped presenting their preference as objectively good style and telling that everything else is nasty and wrong. We don't need to share the same preferred color either.

The first comment in this thread would've been a lot more palatable if it just said "I don't like this style." That would also give the comment the right weight: it is just an opinion after all.

I don't think popularity of opinion should matter for discourse. Of course I know I'm in the minority, and that's why I think it's all that much more important to state my opinion. Or do you want to live in an echo chamber where only the popular opinion gets said and everything else is painted nasty and wrong and downvoted to hell? Well, that is pretty much what HN is today. I hope you're not contributing to that.

thraway123412··on Can My Water Cooled Raspberry Pi Cluster Beat My MacBook?
GB5 = Geekbench 5. It is a real world benchmark.
thraway123412··on Can My Water Cooled Raspberry Pi Cluster Beat My MacBook?
It absolutely would. These cores are in a completely different class.

If you care about benchmarks, a Pi4 will score around 200 points (1 core) or 550 points (4 core) at 1.5GHz on GB5. At 2GHz you can reach around 700 points multi-core.

Ryzen 2700 will easily go above 6000 points in multi-core bench without overclocking.

So even in a theoretical, embarrasingly parallel workload with minimal sharing between cluster nodes, the Zen will be faster than eight pies. It's not even a contest if you also need some I/O, shared memory, or heavy SIMD.

thraway123412··on Can My Water Cooled Raspberry Pi Cluster Beat My MacBook?
Yeah, nice. I just assumed Amazon is representative of what most people would end up paying for them.

For my region, the actual distributors start at 44 EUR for 2GB and 64 EUR for 4GB.

thraway123412··on Can My Water Cooled Raspberry Pi Cluster Beat My MacBook?
Well, he also needed to add a cooler and a bunch of tubes & eight mounts to get coolant running on each Pi, eight ethernet cables, eight power cables, a power supply with enough outputs, a 16-port ethernet switch, and (correct me if I'm wrong) eight SD cards, if only to store a bootloader that can do pxe.

So eight Pies alone do not make a complete cluster, just as one Ryzen alone does not make a complete computer. A few times eight times cheap can turn out to be quite expensive, depending on how much cheap actually is.

I haven't paid much attention to component prices recently but my rule of thumb for budget builds is to start with $80 for each component that isn't a GPU or CPU. Go with stock cooler, grab 80 for PSU, 80 for mobo, 80 for RAM, 80 for storage, see where you end up. In the same ballpark, but the real computer will pack a whole lot more punch (even if you had less RAM total).

thraway123412··on Can My Water Cooled Raspberry Pi Cluster Beat My MacBook?
2GB Pi is $55 on amazon. 4GB version is $62. That'd be $450+ for the eight pies.

Ryzen 2700 launched at $300 (and tapered down to ~$200) and would pretty much run circles around such a Pi cluster.

Just saying. These Pi clusters can be a cool and fun thing to build but if you're looking for compute power, you'd be better served by a mid-range desktop.

thraway123412··on Can My Water Cooled Raspberry Pi Cluster Beat My MacBook?
> Theoretically the combined horsepower of all these [4] Pi's should stack up and deliver better performance than writing code on my M1.

If that is the case, then M1 should be the slowest CPU Apple has used in the past 10 years.

thraway123412··on Ask HN: What was the biggest contributor to your happiness in the past year?
Half marathon (~21km or ~13 miles).
thraway123412··on Ask HN: What was the biggest contributor to your happiness in the past year?
It does not exist.
thraway123412··on Young female Japanese biker is 50-year-old man using FaceApp
Yes, I know exactly why these annoying naggers are being annoying. I don't like it.

And here I'm telling that maybe people should stop listening to annoying naggers and just dislike & close the tab, maybe block the channel too if it keeps coming up in recommends.

thraway123412··on Young female Japanese biker is 50-year-old man using FaceApp
What do I owe them?

Nagging and soliciting subs and likes is fucking annoying. If you want me to like a video, make a good video and stop nagging.

If I dislike those naggers enough, maybe Google's stupid artificial non-intelligence will eventually learn to recommend only videos from non-naggers. I try, even though I don't have much faith in Google's algorithms.

thraway123412··on Young female Japanese biker is 50-year-old man using FaceApp
> For actual enjoyment, if a video starts begging for "like subscribe share" I just turn it off.

I do too, but not without first hitting the dislike button. I only wish others would do the same.

thraway123412··on We found and fixed a rare race condition in our session handling
Also on GOG: https://www.gog.com/forum/general/warning_massive_security_r...

> Hello everyone! This is forum regular fronzelneekburm, posting from the account of some poor Chinese guy that gog randomly logged me into. I'll explain the situation in further detail in another post from my actual account once I logged out of this one.

thraway123412··on HN front page ranked using only votes from early users (2009)
I don't really want to be here. This account will be gone too as soon as I close my browser. I won't make another one unless something very urgent comes up.
thraway123412··on HN front page ranked using only votes from early users (2009)
It already is an echo chamber. Except that you have zero control over the content you see, so you're stuck in someone else's echo chamber. It can be really fucking frustrating, which is why I closed my main account after 8 years.
thraway123412··on The Waste of Daylight
Yep.. it's crazy how muricans seem to think everything has to be scheduled around taking and picking up kids to/from school.

Around where I live, kids take themselves to school or use a bus. School can start any time between 8:00 and 10:00, sometimes even later. School can end any time between 12:00 and 16:00. Parents don't need to schedule their work and life around it.

thraway123412··on Systemd 248 RC3: systemd-oomd is now considered fully supported
> Which problem?

Thrashing and becoming unusable for a long time.

thraway123412··on Systemd 248 RC3: systemd-oomd is now considered fully supported
This problem is there even if you have no swap at all, so I don't see different devices or zswap helping.
thraway123412··on TLA+
Yes, I saw your screenshots, and I think they demonstrate lack of understanding of how condition variables work.

Any use of condition variables where the lock is "never used" screams fundamentally broken to me. No amount of atomics and memory orderings or manually inserted fences/memory barriers can help you if you leave a race window open between checking your predicate and starting to wait on a signal. Condvar signals are not sticky. If nobody is waiting for a signal when you signal, that signal is lost. There is nothing between your atomics and lock & wait to prevent such loss.

Also your TLA+ (or rather PlusCal) does not model a condition variable correctly, so it would obviously not detect this issue. You have a sticky boolean variable and await, which blocks the procedure until the condition becomes true. This detects lockups of the class where the condition is never signalled at all, but it does not model the possibility of losing a signal because nobody was waiting for it.

I don't believe you discovered a bug in glibc and musl.

thraway123412··on Zig, parser combinators, and why they're awesome
The problem is that we have no idea what you're talking about when you say C/C++. For you it seems to be C++, for someone else it might be both or it might be "one or the other but I don't know which." For yet someone else it might be really just C.

If you were to think that Rust is a good replacement for C++, why not just say that Rust is a good replacement for C++? That makes it clear what you mean, and thus the obvious follow-up: a lot of people would like a replacement for C, which is arguably not what Rust is.

And this is very on-topic for a discussion where someone asked "why Zig over Rust?" Zig is arguably closer in spirit to C than Rust is.

When you say Rust is a good replacement for C/C++, a lot of people read it as if you were treating C and C++ as one language and that Rust is a good replacement for both. It should not be hard to see why this is very controversial, given that they are very different languages and people tend to like one and dislike the other. It's going to be very hard to please both camps.

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