bbitmaster

I never understood why it's considered strange to take time off to just stay home. We spend so much time away from home, and then when we finally take a week off, we're expected to go through all the stress of travelling just to return back to work when its over?

What if someone actually wants to stay home, and relaxing and relieving stress is playing a new video game or working on some personal project, or even just you know... resting? I did not think the work/life balance meant never having any time to yourself. Even on weekends, people ask "What are your plans?" as if "nothing" is the wrong answer.

If you had legally purchased DVDs and blu rays during mega-upload's time, and hadn't tried to decrypt them for backup purposes (thus circumventing copyright measures, also using tools developed mostly by "outlaws"), those discs would now be suffering from bitrot and becoming unplayable.

But now we're moving away from physical media, we're fast moving to a world where all you can even "own" legally is a DRM laden copy that can be revoked at any moment by the digital store front providing it. Your windows 11 upgrade requires hardware TPM (a form of hardware DRM that everyone used to really fear) chip support to even install.

And this seems to be the world the hacker news what and tech crowd really wants. I personally miss the old mid 2000's slashdot days when everyone knew better. I haven't changed -- they changed.

I remember just learning to code at a young age, but not knowing trig or seeing how it applied because I only knew it as being about triangles.

I had learned to use some game graphics library (specifically DJGPP with Allegro, coding in C) and I was trying to make a 2d spaceship game, think like asteroids, where you can turn the ship and apply thrust. I couldn't figure out how to take the angle the ship was facing and get a direction to move. Basically I needed to understand the unit circle. I eventually found what I needed probably on some old internet forums. From that point on, trigonometry really started making sense to me.

Alas! Didn't get the memo? We're In the era where AI tools are all "software as a service," and you must pay for individual inferences from the model. How could they charge for inferences if they gave you the model to download?

What a lot of nonsense, where is the executive order banning gain of function research?

I don't think I will ever understand how the freedom of separate IRC servers got replaced by a single platform that mistakenly calls each community a "server" when it's clearly all on the same server and moderated by the same company.

I personally got a warning threat from discord for (I assume) joining some server, but I joined a lot of servers I never said anything and I wasn't even sure what happened on the server to warrant such a warning since it was shut down and I couldn't even see anything.

I read at the link that yt-dl uses ffmpeg and doesn't endorse avconv. Just curious if this is the place to ask, Does anyone know what the differences are between avconv and ffmpeg? Do they still basically do the same thing, or is there any reason to use one over the other. I remember years ago reading that one was a fork due to a disagreement or something, but I don't know how things have come along currently. I've mostly exclusively used ffmpeg any time I needed to convert a video, or more commonly for my use case, converted a directory full of images to a video.

Assuming this is real, I would ask what could it possibly be. The whole popular culture "x-files" narrative doesn't make sense to me. If these are craft which are manned with some beings, why would they be leisurely flying around earth's atmosphere unless they have some destination. Why haven't we found the source or destination?

Perhaps it's actually Von-Neumann probes, or unmanned craft collecting data and observing. I would find this much more likely, but even still, why would they need to keep traveling on earth?

Personally, I keep an open mind about everything, regarding what is possible. I just imagine some civilization thousands or millions of years ahead of us could do things that would seem like magic. It certainly seems plausible in terms of the fermi paradox that we would be being visited. It's just incredibly odd that it would happen this way, and I have very basic questions as to the nature of what this phenomenon even is.

Most people don't get enough vitamin D. It's probably good advice for everyone to take a little. Above average vitamin D levels have been shown to correlate strongly with many beneficial things, including covid resistance. Low levels correlate strongly with many negative health problems. Correlation does not imply causation, but after seeing some data and studies, I think I'd prefer to be on the above average side.

I personally have a theory that our skin color evolved to reflect optimal vitamin D absorption. People living in tropical areas where they get more sun have darker skin, which blocks vitamin D but protects from the harmful affects of the sun, where lighter skin has the opposite trade off. If getting enough vitamin D was important enough to literally affect natural selection to change our skin color, it must be very important.

I also learned that furry animals like cats obviously can't absorb it through their skin since it is blocked by fur, but when they lick their fur grooming after sun bathing, they consume it orally from the oils in their fur.

Of course too much of anything is bad, 150,000 IU per day is an insane amount, that would literally be 150 pills of the 1,000 iu variety, which I personally take maybe 1 a day if I don't forget (as I was advised by a doctor).

What does CNN mean by this being a "cautionary tale for people who are considering adding supplements to their lives". Why don't we just encourage people to take some but not too much, and not treat people like they're too dumb to figure it out. To be fair, the article does point out that a daily dose is recommended for most people.

The old tech/nerd crowd I remember was very strongly against censorship of any kind. Thinking back to the slashdot days of early 2000s. Everyone used to talk about how bad it is to see the great firewall of China ( for example). Also the idea of companies controlling what music everyone had access to was appalling (another example). Most everyone was also very liberal. It's sad to see most tech companies turn into the thing I thought everyone was against. The justification seems to be that it's ok to do it to people we disagree with. It seemed to really start when all the tech companies decided to control what they deemed COVID misinformation. This is during a time when the truth we know was dynamic and changing -- that is what was misinformation before sometimes later turned out to be correct. Of course it all turned political as well. I don't know what to do about it but it's no wonder many people are losing all trust in tech platforms. I miss the old open internet when most people seemed to be against such things.

This brings back old memories. Amazing how it hasn't changed in 20 years. I was learning c and c++ and this provided a free full development suite comparable to others which were way outside my budget as a teenager.

DJGPP + Allegro was great in it's time

Nowadays I think there are much more recent versions of GCC that can be made to target DOS. I don't know the work involved, but a guy named bisqwit had some tools.

Ah, I personally preferred gotoblas to linpack as it was faster (keep in mind this was a few years ago when I did research, no idea how it kept up). I also enjoyed the story of how an unknown Japanese student ( Mr Goto - cool name ) outdid all the top linear algebra implementations by hand writing everything in assembly. It was an amazing story. This was when everyone said assembly was dead.

John McAfee claimed they were doing this to him before he "suicided".

Not the OP, but Mercari is a good one. (Maybe there are others?)

I had all of this information, most of it from a little known "quarantined" subreddit. Luckily reddit didn't outright ban it for so many users proposing the "misinformed" lab leak theory. There was a lot of random/fake info but there was also very accurate information which was outright banned everywhere.

and meanwhile I was watching the circus in the media, and wasn't allowed to even spread this "misinformation"

Seriously, if the tech companies are going to censor, they should at least get the facts right, over something serious enough to cost lives.

I'm always struck by the giant CRTs in futuristic 80's movies. Blade runner is one example where there are scenes with CRT screens that even look very blurry/dated compared to the screen I'm watching on.

Also, this is a recent one, but in Star Wars rogue one, I felt it was odd how they had what looked like an IT nightmare. Seriously, they had to physically fly to the base and deal with a robotic arm connecting hard drives (was it tape drives?). Sure they have humanoid robots that are way beyond any tech today, but their cloud storage was basically current and even old school tech. Why don't they have some tiny crystal that stores unlimited data or DNA storage in a small cylinder or something that you would expect in the future? To be fair it is a "long time ago in a galaxy far away" but still, are we technologically ahead of those death star builders in some way?

The issue I suspect caused this is all of the newer energy efficient washers/ dryers. The author tested a Samsung dryer. I recently lived in apartment with a similar model, and it was terrible. When visiting parents I was stunned at how well their older washer/dryer worked. The clothes came out much more clean too.

In my experience the newer energy efficent washers/dryers are almost total garbage compared to the older ones. I would love to see this experiment repeated with an older 90's kenmore or whirlpool or really any brand from the 90's or before.

I love the idea of saving energy, and energy efficient laundry sounds like a great idea on the surface, but what I think happened was the government put regulations in place without really considering the actual impact this would have on the quality of the washers/dryers.

Snopes is very quick to claim things as "False" if it goes against their left leaning lens of the world.

As an example arguments used by pro-gun advocates are marked as false. Here's a specific example:

They falsify a claim that doctors kill more people than guns https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/doctors-kill-more-people-t...

Yet this article linked on hacker news article states that medical error is the third biggest cause of death in the USA. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11627213

I used to have many more examples, but the reality is that the facts that they "objectively" check aren't necessarily unbiased.

Any idea the year this was published? I don't see a date, and I googled the title and found several references (even on wikipedia) without a date mentioned.

I disagree with the premise. Happiness with a transportation system does not correlate with the absolute speed you can go. Instead, I think it would correlate with "how many interesting/useful places can I reach with x effort". Most of the regions listed with fast transportation have things spread out much more.

If the grocery store is a mile away, and it takes 5 minutes to drive there it is equivalent to being a couple of blocks away and it taking 5 minutes to walk there. (This assumes walking and driving are equally as easy). Or likewise if I had to commute to work every day by car for 1 hour, it doesn't matter how fast the car moves. I lost 1 hour of my time and that hour is traded for transportation happiness.

I would argue that the faster regions have things spread out so far that it doesn't make up for the faster travel. I lived in both the Southern U.S. and now in San Francisco and I easily see this as being true. Travel by car in the south is MUCH faster than in SF, but it doesn't make up for way things are spread out.

Hey Gavin. Of course I remember you, it's been ages but great to hear from you. I would take this to PM but Hacker News doesn't seem to offer such a feature. I currently work in the bay area, in Machine Learning (I only mention it in case you happen to reside in the bay area). Anyway, feel free to e-mail me at my username at gmail.

Good times :-)

I designed and coded the FCEUXD hex editor shown here. I did this back in 2004 when I was a teenager -- built it in C in pure win32 API. It's great to see it still show up when people are hacking NES games.

I remember on my 1.33Ghz AMD machine at the time, it could not draw all of the RAM values in real time without causing considerable slowdown. I rewrote the code so that it only redraws ram values that changed, keeping a buffer of old values and checking for changes.

I also worked on other parts of FCEUXD including creating code/data logger. Parasyte coded the debugger.

This is just what I was looking for, surprised I didn't find it already. Thanks.

I'm just going to take a moment here to vent about the nuisance it has become for me to deal with smartphone app notifications.

It isn't just facebook, although facebook is probably the worst. I live in a city and I pretty much need a smartphone to do anything, but it has become so annoying dealing with the myriad of notifications and advertisements from random apps, and trying to find settings to disable everything.

90% of the time when my phone buzzes it's because sprig is telling me I need to eat dinner. Messenger is telling me it's someone's birthday. Yelp is trying to tell me there's popular a new spot nearby. Hell, even youtube was sending me recommended videos and touching the notification caused this random video to immediately play, using mobile data.

It is getting out of hand. You have to figure out how to disable this stuff in each app independently, sometimes digging through confusing options menus looking for buried settings. Sometimes I haven't even found a way.

This has taught me to usually ignore my phone, but it's especially annoying if I'm waiting for an important e-mail or text. My smartphone has just become an advertisement line sending bullshit that I don't care about, that I have to wade through to get to important stuff.

Am I the only one? Is there a solution to this?

This is believable, the author points out some very real challenges that I think will make it impossible for us to travel to other stars in our present form.

Just some criticisms, the author doesn't seem to understand the idea of sending probes to survey a destination before loading up a huge generational ship. Instead, the author seems to think humans would just load up, travel for 200 years, and arrive at some unknown destination and hope that there's a habitable planet. This is nonsense. Could you imagine spending 200 years on a ship hoping that your destination is even hospitable to life?

In any case, some very good points are made about the challenges. Personally, I don't think we're going to be going to other stars as humans, in our human bodies. If we could someday build AI, and machines with brains that think like humans -- those could voyage across the galaxy.

As others have commented here, this is also exactly why I am not an organ doner. There are cases where people have went into cardiac arrest, where their heart stopped and everything, only to wake up and make a full recovery. "Is he dead?" is not always a well defined state with a binary True/False answer. The fact that this article is pushing for harvesting organs before death, and people who actually think this way, only serves to turn me off to it even more so.

Call me selfish, antithetical to society, or whatever. If I really was in a state where there was no chance I could recover, I would gladly give my organs to help save someone else. As it is, I don't think a random E.R. doctor should make that determination based on a note found in my wallet.

The reason you mostly see dog faces is only because everyone seems to be running the default code google posted. It optimizes layer 4c, which seems to be biased to producing dog faces. Running the code on other layers, or other networks produces other things. They also recently posted code where you can provide a "guide" image to guide it to producing features that are in that image.

I'm thinking that using CNNs to generate or change images could be a huge game changing technology. It could potentially be bigger for hollywood than 3d graphics. In 10 years, we could see this stuff everywhere, albeit in a more developed state. It would be used to actually transform or enhance images in a more directed way.

actually, that's not what happened at all. Read the response of the guy who rejected it here: https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015#issuecomment-29538...

Hi all, let me try to clear up a few things.

Why I rejected the pull request. Us maintainers tend to reject tiny doc changes because they're often more trouble than they're worth. You have to collect and check the CLA, it makes git blame less effective, etc.

That's why the usual approach to such pull requests is 'no, unless' - in this case the 'unless' should probably have applied. To me as a non-native speaker, the difference between 'him' and 'them' seems academic but hey, if it gets us scores of female contributors, who am I to object?

Why I reverted the commit. In hindsight, I should have given Isaac the benefit of the doubt because I don't doubt that he acted with the best of intentions. On the other hand, if another committer jumped the line like that, I would have done the same thing. We have procedures in place and no one is exempt from them.

To the people that felt it necessary to call me a misogynist: I volunteer in a mentorship program that gets young people - especially young women - involved in technology. How many of you go out and actively try to increase the number of women in the field?

I'm probably going to step back from libuv and node.js core development. I do it more out a sense of duty than anything else. If this is what I have to deal with, then I'd just as rather do something else. Hope that clears things up. Thanks.

Seriously? Fire someone over rejecting a pull request that modified comments of code to change pronouns somewhere?

Then go on a rant about how this person lacks 'empathy' and should not have a job at your company.

Don't get me wrong, I am for gender neutral pronouns wherever possible. But to advocate firing someone over such a trivial social issue is silly. Maybe this person was concerned with technical issues within the actual code, and could care less about the political correctness surrounding some comments.