HN user

aclissold

77 karma
Posts2
Comments44
View on HN

“Quarter” has a nice big plosive at the beginning, which really gives it an impact. The “th” in third pounder makes it sound kind of weak in comparison.

Bigger Burger is great! Aliterates, rhyming, and TWO plosives!

And the more you practice directing your attention, the better your skills of awareness become! You can choose positivity over negativity, joy over anger, love over hate.

Interesting point.

I guess whether it’s human error at the hands of the pilot/driver, or human error at the hands of the engineer/designer, we can never fully remove it from the equation.

Should we just give up? Seems the best we can do is try and mitigate risk, and automated systems condense this risk down into fewer points of failure (i.e., there are less engineers than users!).

It’s interesting to observe that, if this is indeed caused by a failure in the stall prevention system (and I say “if” since it’s certainly too soon to draw conclusions), the media and discussion around it seems to gravitate towards disabling the system or avoiding the aircraft entirely.

But when we think forward to the inevitable autonomous vehicle accidents that will occur, the conversation turns to how many lives they’ll have saved, and how much safer they’ll be.

Is there a known psychological phenomenon for “negative hindsight, positive foresight” that I can go learn more about?

For me, concocted stories (if done right) are an exercise in human creativity & ingenuity. The characters are an amplification of our own character traits, and the situations are metaphors for our own lives.

If done masterfully—this overrealization captivates me, and the emotions I feel at the end are real. And I can learn something new about myself for it.

Have you looked at the YouTube reviews on the iOS App Store? They're exceptionally horrible for what really is an A-grade app! I don't know for sure, by my assumption is it's mostly because of material design, but subconsciously to those writing reviews. The average basically plummeted the instant they updated the design.

The perceived "if you're keeping quiet, you must have something to hide" aspect of anonymity fascinates me.

Does anybody know if you might actually be safer from, say, a theoretical surveillance program by "blending in" as a typical Internet user vs. using Tor, where just one mistake might trigger a red flag?

I guess this technique wouldn't applicable if you do have something to hide, though... Hmm!

Abstraction and conceptualization are at the core of what makes us human. Some people think technology is cold and hard and inanimate, but when I look at it I see the exact opposite.

A great way to be motivated to write abstract code is to first understand how cool it is!

This is fascinating! They took a medium I had always classified as a cheap imitation of a real piano, and accentuated its strengths to make it something incredibly! Blocks of notes for percussion, impossibly fast trills for a different timbre of sustained notes, melodies that are detectable aurally but not visually... Awesome!

A fun alternative is to build everything yourself for free, from scratch, as an app! Shameless plug: [1]

Some resources for getting started down this path: [2] [3] [4]

If anybody wants to chat about audio synthesis on iOS, feel free to get in touch :)

[1] https://github.com/aclissold/twyst

[2] http://jackschaedler.github.io/circles-sines-signals/

[3] http://mkonrad.net/projects/ios_audio_synth.html

[4] https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/MusicA...

I've been using Swift for over a year now, which has had an Optional implementation from day one. I see a lot of people defending Java's implementation in this thread, can someone check my understanding? I did Java in a past life but am not super familiar with Java 8.

In Swift, types are non-optional by default. You can never end up with a null, the compiler makes it impossible. Optionals are out of the way until you need them, and if you use them properly (i.e. avoid the .get() equivalent), it's still impossible to crash from a null.

In Java 8, things can still contain null by default and you might not know about it, right? You can express that something is Optional in your API, but that's only marginally better than documentation, doesn't solve "unexpected nulls" whatsoever, and makes this only halfway to a solution and therefore broken entirely. Why not just use annotations?

Are my assumptions and understanding correct?

On the topic of boredom and attention lapses while driving, I wonder if it would actually be made safer by being made more difficult, in contrast to the never-ending search for ease of use. Something that's difficult, mentally stimulating, and requires actual skill like a video game or musical instrument. Would there be more or less mistakes (collisions) if people were forced to be engaged 100% of the time in order to operate the vehicle?

I'm not saying it's a good idea, because only a subset of people would be capable of it, but it's interesting to think about!