HN user

zyxley

3,002 karma
Posts2
Comments814
View on HN

You seem to be doing that extreme-libertarian thing where you call taxes "robbery" while ignoring the negative economic effects of the general lack of safety nets in the US.

You may want to read up on the concept of the "tragedy of the commons" first.

MacOS Sierra 10 years ago

macrumors.com says there will probably be an update in October. They seem to usually be pretty on target with short-term predictions.

our human intelligence performs far more sophisticated operations than are possible given the number of neurons that exist in our brains

This only holds if you presume those operations are being performed in the same way as a computer, rather than the incredibly imprecise rule-of-thumb heuristics they actually use.

My high school was an interesting experience. It was a poor area and they expected few of the students to go to further education - but rather than use that as an excuse to treat the students like losers, the school tried to include some of the spread of college and vocational-school classes. I ended up taking lessons on archery, welding, video editing, and Latin, among other things.

AirPods 10 years ago

just so you are dependent on yet another Apple product

The hardware requirements of a headphone jack put some very real limitations on phone design (waterproofing, interior space taken up by the digital -> analog hardware, etc).

Whether that was the driving cause or not is in the air, but "getting people to buy Lightning stuff" isn't the only reason to do it.

AirPods 10 years ago

What I'm wondering is if you can charge just one earbud at a time while using the other.

For a lot of uses (for example: podcasts, casual movie watching on a long flight, getting driving directions on a road trip), it'd be entirely practical to use one earbud at a time and so have effectively 24+ hours battery life.

AirPods 10 years ago

The closest thing out there right now would probably be the Bragi Dash, so owners of that would be the people to straw poll to get an idea.

iPhone 7 10 years ago

You don't need to buy a dongle - it comes with one.

There are plenty of first-party Nintendo virtual titles, though, and most likely plenty of people (like me!) who now refuse to buy them because they have to be bought over and over and over again for any new hardware.

isn't evolution as we currently understand it computationally too expensive?

What? This question doesn't even really make sense to me in the first place.

Natural selection isn't a computational process. It's the consistent but basically coincidental result of constant subtle mutations and genetic inheritance.

Now making a big jump from e.g. fish to a bird seems to me impossible in polynomial time (even in billion years)

It obviously isn't impossible, since it happened. If you believe otherwise, your perceptions and/or assumptions are wrong.

Strong Passwords 10 years ago

One of the more persistent annoyances of the modern web for the tech-savvy is the experience of putting a long, randomly generated password into a site and getting an "invalid characters" error.

This but slightly more organized is pretty much the standard answer for anti-hoarding: put all your stuff away, keep track of what you actually use over the next week/month/year, and get rid of anything that hasn't been touched.

perhaps require renewal half way through to prove the work is still economical, etc.

This reminds me of one of the copyright reform ideas I've seen that has a tremendously practical approach to the power of the Mouse: an initial 20- or 40-year term, with an indefinite number of renewals of the same length allowed, but each renewal requiring filing with the Library of Congress and a substantial fee.

Arguably, the player is the performance, against the game as a backdrop. That could be argued as a transformative use.

I'd say that's absolutely the case for a lot of the most popular streamers and Lets Players. Jacksepticeye is an easy example: the distinctive parts of his videos aren't the games, they're his exaggerated reactions to whatever's going on in them. You could replace the actual game video and sound with a black screen, leaving just his voice, and people would still tune in to giggle at his silly behavior.