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torbital

72 karma · joined March 12, 2020

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torbital··on Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard
sounds like AWS funding everything else Amazon does that isn't profitable, this isn't a new strategy
torbital··on Psychogenic death, the phenomenon of “thinking” yourself to death
> After all the mind is inseperably embedded into the body (first and foremost through the brain).

People will gloss over this, as this is the common western view, but it should be noted that this is not how it is.

Your body is contained in your mind. Your universe is contained within your mind. All of this is simply the contents of your mind.

torbital··on Ask HN: How to optimize your career for happiness?
But having kids is all-in: there is no turning back and no flexibility

I would feel so much more limited and bounded in what I can do in the world, because my own financial future and my own mortality would be way more relevant with dependents.

torbital··on The top-ranking HTML editor on Google is an SEO scam
I can't remember the last time I searched on Google without appending "reddit" to the end.
torbital··on A new ProtoBuf generator for Go
What are the proposed solutions to get better than that? C/Rust code? Assembly?
torbital··on Coinbase from YC to DPO
This. Both Coinbase and Stripe are were they are today almost entirely because they have mastered UX/UI.
torbital··on Coinbase from YC to DPO
Surely they made the decision to IPO back when BTC was half of what it is now.
torbital··on Microsoft in talks to buy Discord for more than $10B
FWIW, I probably hate Slack more than anyone else on Hackernews (because everyone somehow seems to like it). Keep in mind I also don't use the Slack desktop app but I do use the Discord desktop app, so right away this isn't a fair comparison but I'll continue with my rant anyway.

I mainly just find the user-experience to be terrible. I hate how each server is separated as if it is it's own isolated website or something. On Discord, I can switch from server to server in a click easily.

Playing GTA? I can join the GTA Discord server. Playing League? I can join that one. It's all right there.

It's also the weird SSO Slack has going on that just seems broken. When I open up Discord, I have one account, I log in and have access to all other things in the account. Basic software behavior we're all used to.

When I open up Slack, it does or does not want me to login again based on if I've been on this server before. It may or may not want me to make a new account depending on if I've made one on this server before. I try all of my emails with all of my potential passwords to see if login works, if not new account time I guess? I'm never sure weather to use my work account or not. Sometimes the @domain matters, so this creates even more of a mess.

Then don't even get me started with a lack of usernames and having intentionally hard-to-find ID. Again, why not do what Discord does and do Username#6789? Instead I have to search my friend 'John Doe' and hope it's the John I'm thinking of and not some random other John that I just invited to see all my business's internal discussions.

torbital··on Microsoft in talks to buy Discord for more than $10B
Is there an open source example of the actor model in use, particularly in Go or Java?

It sounds pretty cool but I can't build the mental model of it without an example.

torbital··on Microsoft in talks to buy Discord for more than $10B
> but it is also not >$10B of software engineering

Really? How did you come to this conclusion?

Discord is, without a doubt, 10x better than Slack, Teams, or Zoom combined. They've solved the problem of a communication in the non-business space. That's huge.

For comparison, look at Coinbase, who has a 100B valuation. What they're doing is relatively trivial. Is that >10x the value of Discord?

I don't even think Coinbase is overvalued. 10B for Discord is just a steal.

torbital··on Earth, Wind, and Solar Fire
I think there is tons of things aligning for something catastrophic this year. I suspect economic collapse due to loss of confidence in the USD.
torbital··on Apparent hackers behind Kia ransomware attack demand millions in Bitcoin
Was Kia using BlackBerry's QNX platform?
torbital··on Reddit valued at $6B on a $250M round
Pretty sure all conversations are public, so you can just scrape for free.
torbital··on Show HN: My multiplayer custom-engine game that loads in less than a second
Problem I have with .io is that .com is more familiar with 1/3 the cost.
torbital··on Scaling Kubernetes to 7,500 Nodes
> self-healing, service discovery

For a second I read that as self-discovery

Damn kubernetes is some good shit

torbital··on I looked at all the ways Microsoft Teams tracks users
Saying you and your wife find Slack superior is a bit lie preaching to the choir on these forums, no? Let me give a different anecdote.

When I open up teams, I have one account, I log in and have access to all other things in the account. Basic software behavior we're all used to.

When I open up Slack, it does or does not want me to login again based on if I've been on this server before. It may or may not want me to make a new account depending on if I've made one on this server before. I try all of my emails with all of my potential passwords to see if login works, if not new account time I guess?

Instead of Discord were you can see all of your servers, Slack separates this all out that makes the entire user experience (at least for me) completely abysmal.

Then don't even get me started with a lack of usernames and having intentionally hard-to-find ID. Again, why not do what Discord does and do Username#6789? Instead I have to search my friend 'John Doe' and hope it's the John I'm thinking of and not some random other John that I just invited to see all my business's internal discussions.

To sum up my 2 cents:

Teams is about the same as Zoom with some text-based chat functionality thrown in and some neat Outlook calendar integration.

Slack is just Discord that is way, way worse.

Comparing the two doesn't even make sense, but at least Teams does better in it's respective category.

torbital··on Maximizing Developer Effectiveness
> I want environments to just work. I want code to just compile. I want containers to just run. Without me having to start digging through documentation, looking at thirteen Stack Overflow threads, and cobbling a solution that will inevitably break 3 months from now.

Sometimes I conjure up the inspiration to actually implement an idea that's been on my mind. Then I spend half a day trying to setup an environment that just fucking compiles.

I'll spend several days kicking at an open door before I actually write any code. In most cases I just give up before this point.

torbital··on Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?
I feel the opposite about chat-bots. It just adds to the clutter of the website (along with cookie notification, asking for email signup, etc).

If I need help, I'll go specifically to the "contact us" page.

torbital··on Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?
Speaking of academic papers, I'd love to see a focus on readability.

So many papers are just too dense for readers outside of the specific field. This can be because of the complexity of the subject matter, but I often notice unnecessary specific vocabulary and over-complicating concepts.

Because of this, it's impractical for the layman to go read academic papers outside of their field. This leads to reading some news article that attempts to summarize it, and we all know that majority of the time it's just the headline that gets read.

torbital··on Cyberpunk 2077: How 2020’s biggest video game launch turned into a shambles
First time looking at Cyberpunk 2077 stuff online, after having just beaten the game at ~50 hrs.

Super surprised it's not being praised, it's certainly the best game singe-player I've ever played.

I can't believe the reaction I am seeing.

torbital··on New Relic to open-source Pixie’s eBPF observability platform
Couldn't this just be called 'monitoring'?
torbital··on Reddit reveals daily active user count for the first time: 52M
Twitter is just a bunch of businesses, celebrities, and bots.

I don't know a single normal person that uses it on a daily basis. The fact that is has this many people is amazing to me.

torbital··on Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro
But now they are locking down their software hard. So there is really no free lunch.
torbital··on Mentat Wiki: exploring ways to become a better thinker
Just don't go to /r/nootopics. A better name for that sub would be /r/placebo.
torbital··on Bill Gates calls Microsoft’s TikTok deal a poisoned chalice
Given the opportunity though, it still seems like a risk well worth it.

Businesses rarely (if ever) fail because of an acquisition gone wrong. But a acquisition gone right can have great returns.

If Instagram flopped when Facebook bought it, Facebook would still be doing just fine. But since it did go well.. yeah.

So I believe that it's still probably in the investor's best interest if MS does the deal even if it's only like a 35% chance that it isn't a complete failure.

torbital··on Microsoft is reportedly in talks to buy TikTok's US operations
A company occasionally working together with the US government is very different than China's state-run companies.
torbital··on Do We Need a Theory of Everything?
I've been watching PBS Space Time since they started years ago. A lot of their videos build on previous videos, so to fully understand a concept you might need to go down some rabbit-holes. But it is worth it.

I'd much rather have channels like this that welcome actually getting into the details a bit, rather than the hundreds of channels that have broad, surface-level facts of a subject lazily combined with some stock-footage.

torbital··on Getting started with bare-metal assembly
I've always thought:

All possible abstraction removed = bare metal

torbital··on Formula 1 launches Virtual Grand Prix Series to replace postponed races
I'm surprised they didn't go with a more mainstream title like Forza, which has surprisingly accurate physics in it. It's not specifically built for F1, but maybe they could do a DLC for this.

The other huge benefit is that players can put themselves in the same setups as the drivers and compare speeds. That would be awesome.