Hacker News Reader

yewon EU criticises 'hasty' UK approval of Covid-19 vaccine

> Choose.

If I must. Not yet - not quite yet.

"Whoever thinks I'm with them or against them, I'm against them."

yewon Ok Google: please publish your DKIM secret keys

That seems less usable for the average email recipient. Most people who need to prove authenticity to a third party (eg of politically sensitive or offensive messages) aren't techies.

Too, it's easy to imagine not knowing you need proof until some time after you receive an email.

If it isn't usable and enabled by default, it won't be used in practice - for the same reason almost nobody uses PGP.

yewon Ok Google: please publish your DKIM secret keys

Sending death threats or racial invectives by private message is as much speech as sending them by Twitter post.

All private conversations shouldn't be published. That isn't necessary to hold people accountable for dangerous or violent speech.

Publication and repudiation aren't the same thing.

yewon Ok Google: please publish your DKIM secret keys

Now you're just spouting non sequiturs. Publication and retention are two separate questions.

And not being a politician, and certainly not the one currently trying to hold the White House hostage, I don't see the public interest anyway.

yewon Ok Google: please publish your DKIM secret keys

Speech has consequences. Given the good done in holding rogue "politicians" accountable, not seeing that as axiomatically desirable is at least a little bit suspicious...

yewon Goodhart's Law and how systems are shaped by the metrics you chase

Presumably the optimal solution would be to prepare fake but easily executed plans (tuned to appeal to whoever's on the committee) to go with your fake numbers. But probably no amount of regulating police will help if your regulators are also chasing metrics (say, to make themselves look better than their opponent for voters).

Random sampling is one effective (if adversarial) way to validate numbers. For policing I guess that looks like "secret citizens" reporting crimes and sending the results back up the chain? But that doesn't solve the second half of the problem.

yewon Zero-sum thinking on immigration will make America poorer

Increasing the size of the economy is in the interests of many people if wealth is widely distributed and in the interests of few if narrowly distributed?

yewon Losing the Narrative: The Genre Fiction of the Professional Class

> [A] sorting mechanism that elevates people who pay lip service to permissiveness, but don't fully participate - a preparatory performance of the fake counterculture.

Not where I expected to see that sentiment.

I do wonder where this is going.

yewon Reddit started banning accounts that voted for content “against their policies”

What seems to be happening with CTH looks like a positive sign. They're not really less toxic than the others getting the boot, and the admins kicking abusive buddies while they're cleaning up everyone else says they have a (somewhat) functional internal process. Less room for toxicity in the world!

yewon Changes to our content policy, our board, and where we’re going from here

> Maybe we should embrace the concept of an Internet License, after all :(

Likewise. Regulation of communication is beginning to look like the only way out of this trap.

yewon Dwarf Fortress: An actual look at graphical improvements

I always find this topic interesting, because it shows such a diversity of... aesthetic instinct? If you ask a dozen people why they don't like something that's known for being divisive, you can easily get a dozen different, incompatible answers.

People talk about the subjectivity of beauty, but I've never felt like the sheer polarity of opinion gets enough emphasis...

(For the record: Dwarf Fortress's controls never bothered me, and I've never been able to play without a tileset. The same for NetHack and other ASCII games.)

yewon On Resigning from Google

Meh. Tell that to the "cis gays" getting hate on Twitter. I had enough "it's for your own good" before I was old enough to stop going to church.

yewon UK drops plans for online pornography age verification system

Given that I've not heard a proposal that wouldn't have also helped my parents hide the existence of gay people until I went off to university (and they tried!) - I wouldn't.

I'm quite sure ulterior motives explain more than stated goals, here and elsewhere.

yewon No Son of Mine Is Going to Be a Benthamite

I would expect it depends on personal experience. All ideologies have schisms, as you say.

The first thing that came to my mind was the local liberal and "materialist" (that is, Marxist) contingents fighting over definitions. (And that does involve a few parents!) But it's equally reminiscent of childhood Catholic versus Protestant conflicts. I only have more recent experience of one to privilege it over the other.

yewon 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

Speech has consequences. It must have limits.

(As for "free-speech activists" and so-called pacifists who complain about actions against you-know-who more than violence by them - I don't see the value of their words.)

But better norms are developing, even if it should have happened faster. And not just in technology, but in education and writing and many other spaces.

yewon Revealing the content of the address bar in IE

Why do you think Microsoft implemented Bing suggestions by setting the window.location property?

It seems an odd choice...

yewon AdNauseam – Clicking Ads So You Don't Have To

The only thing you'll achieve with that attitude is convincing people that there's no point in slowing down or talking things over.

yewon DOJ Demands Files on Anti-Trump Activists, and DreamHost Resists

It's for the best. Now if they just learn to stay away from right-wing causes too, maybe they'll actually make the world a better place.

yewon Why Minds Are Not Like Computers (2009)

It certainly spectacularly fails to provide any advice on the practical problem of engineering AI [1]. The same is true of many non-constructive mathematical proofs, though - and I can't say I find such proofs any less insightful for that.

[1] Though, at least in my opinion, the cognitive science and AI research people have made great progress here - by studying real brains and the formalisms underlying computation.

yewon Why Minds Are Not Like Computers (2009)

. . . our ability to perform computation is not a valid argument to that computation, or the inner workings of our mind, being the same as digital computers performing computation.

No one [1] thinks that the human brain is likely to be a digital computer performing arithmetic on fixed-width binary integers and IEEE floating-point numbers. The argument for AI is simply that the mind appears to be a material object and the laws of physics appear to be Turing-equivalent. If that holds, the mind is provably equivalent to a Turing machine (or, less likely, some less powerful class of automaton). Arguing about whether in fact that does hold, as Penrose does, can be justified (though I personally think Penrose lost the plot years ago). Arguing about whether your preferred model for categorizing abstract ideas renders the argument inconceivable, with no reference to experimental results or formalisms, can not.

[1] Feel free to add your preferred qualifiers here. The existence of people who believe tobacco companies are run by lizard-people has no bearing on whether cigarettes cause lung cancer.

yewon Mmap(): Now you're coding with portals

This strikes me as being interesting primarily for the potential impact it has on interface design. There are applications of (this sort of) virtual memory manipulation beyond circular buffers. Performance is one consideration, but not the only one.

Also, this is a demonstration - of course it lacks synchronization mechanisms for multithreading! Any particular application of the principle would be adapted for the context in which it occurred (and hopefully be justified thereby).

(As an aside, that caveat only applies if you begin with a poll function that performs the copy itself. That implementation isn't the only obvious one, especially given a large buffer - though I suppose there's room for disagreement on that.)

yewon One Frickin' User Interface for Linux (2003)

Where did the idea of a "year of the Linux desktop" originally come from, anyway? I often see people joking about it or advocating it (Linus, even!), but I've never seen any sort of foundational essay or manifesto - does something like that exist?

yewon The Insurance Market Mystifies an Airbnb Host

If a Liberty Mutual policy's premiums specifically take said activity into account, their actuaries must have considered that activity in the process of putting it to paper, yes? At which point (it seems to me) calling it 'abuse' is begging the question.

If (and I think this more likely) Liberty Mutual, Ms Pfeffer, or both have failed to correctly consider the implications of their contract, then this becomes a question of civil law (perhaps of reasonableness?) that's difficult to answer without access to said document and a good legal opinion.

The possible implications for the homeowners insurance industry (and for the Airbnb ecosystem) might be interesting, but meaningfully (if tacitly) assigning fault is outside the practical scope of a public discussion, don't you think?

yewon Intel Underestimates Error Bounds by 1.3 Quintillion

IEEE floats are (nominally) deterministic in part, although that part [0] doesn't happen to include the transcendental functions.

You are right, though, that there's a lot of software out there that assumes determinism without being anywhere near sufficiently circumspect.

[0] http://randomascii.wordpress.com/2013/07/16/floating-point-d...

yewon The Man Who Smuggles Trader Joe’s into Canada

It's possible that someone might try to hold Trader Joe's liable for the actions of an unaffiliated reseller. I see no legal basis for considering that they would succeed in doing so - even under strict liability, demonstrating that modification of the product was the proximate cause of harm is usually a sufficient defense.

I imagine that spoilage in the hands of an unaffiliated reseller would be considered such a modification, but perhaps you're aware of some precedent that I am not?

yewon Food Babe’s Ingredient Attacks Draw ‘Quackmail’ Backlash

My problem with the "you can't pronounce it" argument is that it seems to have more to do with ignorance of chemistry [0] than with health. The idea that having industrial applications makes a chemical compound less likely to be healthy, or that chemical nomenclature has any impact on health at all, is just wrong - and while I'm not opposed to people making their own choices as to what to eat, I'm equally not going to ignore the effects of those choices (and of activism) on the wider food industry [1] (and by extension, on other people).

It probably doesn't help that I keep some of these ingredients in my pantry. What qualifies as an easily recognizable substance is very much a matter of background.

[0] http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2013/06/21/eight_toxic_...

[1] http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2014/04/30/is_that_food...

(I can't match Dr Lowe for eloquence, so I really do recommend reading him for yourself. The same holds for the rest of his blog, too!)

yewon Qtile – A hackable tiling window manager written in Python

Could you link an example? Some tiling window manager users just don't care much about appearances (my general approach to window decoration is to get rid of it), but it should be possible to approximate the appearance of windows under any desktop environment via configuration tweaking (eg Firefox themes, font settings, GTK/Qt themes).

You are likely to find that a stand-alone WM requires more manual configuration than a DE. Most DEs have more-or-less unified settings managers, but those settings are really for many disparate components of the environment that a WM won't even try to control. It might be possible to recover some convenience by using a third-party settings manager like the previously mentioned lxappearance (I find the Arch Linux wiki a useful resource in this regard even though I don't run Arch).

Alternatively, you can use xmonad with Xfce (or another DE). That's what I did before completely switching to xmonad and it does make settings management easier.

yewon Show HN: Chan – pure C implementation of Go channels

I can agree with that almost without reservation :)

yewon Show HN: Chan – pure C implementation of Go channels

The standard permits padding structures, but not reordering their members. That's why container_of is necessary (to avoid constantly-updated manual offset calculations or writing redundant code). Any implementation that reorders structure members is non-compliant (and likely incompatible with much existing code).

To quote the relevant section (C99 6.7.2.1.13, same wording present in C89):

Within a structure object, the non-bit-field members and the units in which bit-fields reside have addresses that increase in the order in which they are declared. A pointer to a structure object, suitably converted, points to its initial member (or if that member is a bit-field, then to the unit in which it resides), and vice versa. There may be unnamed padding within a structure object, but not at its beginning.

I'll repeat that I consider direct casts to be somewhat idiomatic. Macros are more traditional for offset members.

yewon Show HN: Chan – pure C implementation of Go channels

The container_of macro is intended for cases where contained objects are at some (possibly compile-time variable) offset into a structure. Eliding type-checking, it reduces to the simple cast in this particular case.

Not to say that it wouldn't work, just that it isn't really necessary - casting a pointer to a structure to a pointer to its first member (and back) is perfectly portable. Perhaps even idiomatic. (Though the casts in that gist seem to be backwards?)