hn thread: sed 's/entertaining/hilarious/g' - The Something Awful Forums

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Mr.Radar: Nov 5, 2005; You guys aren't going to believe this, but that guy is our games teacher.

dcolkitt 8 hours ago | parent | flag | favorite | on: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work

If you're in an area where discrimination against LGBT people is still widespread, then keeping politics out of the office most likely benefits LGBT workers.

In San Francisco, almost everyone expressing a political opinion will support gay rights. In rural Mississippi, many of those workers will be bringing out their anti-gay inflammatory baggage when discussing politics. I'm virtually certain that far more anti-LGBT vitriol occurs within political discussions than the average non-political conversation.

This isn't unusual either. Throughout history oppressed groups have very frequently found refuge in the apolitical world of commerce. Just look at the history of Jews in Europe. Even when surrounded by a bigoted culture, trade and business ties encouraged tolerance and cooperation. The worse periods always tended to be the points where some ruler decided that politics all of a sudden needed to be injected into every sphere of life. Just look at the Spanish Inquisition or the Nuremberg Laws.

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# ¿ Oct 17, 2019 13:37

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# ¿ Mar 28, 2023 01:58

Mr.Radar: Nov 5, 2005; You guys aren't going to believe this, but that guy is our games teacher.

The hackers discuss the decline of Christianity in the US:

quote:

gscott 17 minutes ago [-]

Joined with a rise in suicides https://www.nbcnews.com/health/mental-health/suicides-homici...

and mass killings https://news.wttw.com/2019/08/13/northwestern-research-shows...

and violent crime https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/25/us/violent-crime-murder-c...

and homelessness https://www.cbsnews.com/news/homelessness-on-the-rise-in-som...

What do Christian churches do? (quick Google search random).

https://www.uchristianchurch.org/mission-and-outreach/ https://www.diamondcanyon.org/missions https://www.newhopechristianchurch.com/missions http://northridge.online/about/missions

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In fairness, this was quickly downvoted. However, lets look at one reply to that comment:

quote:

claudeganon 8 minutes ago [-]

Yeah, it’s almost as if a Christian-backed conservative political coalition dismantled the welfare state and stopped new services from being put in place or something...

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This seems like a fair and reasonable assessment of the situation to me, but what about HN's moderators?

quote:

dang 11 minutes ago [-]

Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar, regardless of how provocative another comment is.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Arguably the second blow does more damage to the container.

Note: the moderators did not reply directly to the original comment at all, nor have they chosen to collapse that sub-thread by default (as they can do).

# ¿ Oct 17, 2019 17:55

Mr.Radar: Nov 5, 2005; You guys aren't going to believe this, but that guy is our games teacher.

jacquesm 4 hours ago | parent | favorite | on: The Not-Com Bubble Is Popping

SpaceX is real. Uber, AirBnB, WeWork and all the other 'lawbreaking as a service' and 'subsidizing transactions with massive VC' companies are not.

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Well, they're half right at least? :shrug:

# ¿ Oct 20, 2019 16:08

Mr.Radar: Nov 5, 2005; You guys aren't going to believe this, but that guy is our games teacher.

# ¿ Nov 14, 2019 17:22

Mr.Radar: Nov 5, 2005; You guys aren't going to believe this, but that guy is our games teacher.

can we post good hn quotes here?

goranb 2 hours ago | parent | flag | favorite | on: The End of the Computer Age

That introduction is a guillotinable offense.

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for context, this is the "introduction" they're referring to:

quote:

Paul Singer: Good evening, everyone, and welcome to the 33rd Wriston Lecture. This lecture has become an important night in America's intellectual life through the force and consequence of the ideas offered at this podium over the years. The formula for that success is simple. We invite extraordinarily bright speakers who offer bold perspectives, perspectives which rarely get a hearing in Manhattan ballrooms or progressive covens. Delivering the Wriston Lecture in 1995—that was a huge laugh line [laughter]. I mean, are we napping? Delivering the Wriston Lecture in 1995, James Q. Wilson asked why Americans were so unhappy with a country that was more prosperous and powerful than ever. Wilson drew attention to several insufficiently addressed signs of disorder: crime, failing schools, a coarsening culture, and deteriorating civic life. Wilson argued that these problems had begun with the dissolution of the family, then, as now, a controversial view.

Today, disorder is rising again. And I'm not just referring to Mayor de Blasio's much-lamented return from Iowa [laughter]. You're getting there. This disorder is the consequence of a nationwide effort to roll back many of the successful policies that MI scholars have spent their careers advancing. De Blasio's presidential campaign may have ground to a halt, surprisingly [laughter], but the preposterous policies he supports are moving full-steam ahead, carried on the platforms of less incompetent but equally radical candidates. Here in New York, but not just in New York, we face an opioid and single parenthood crisis overlooked for too long by the experts. America's labor market and civic well-being suffer from an education system that continues to prioritize bureaucrats and administrators as well as entrenched power over students. Not to mention the curricula, now ubiquitous throughout higher education that indoctrinates our students to be ashamed of Western civilization and to despise private enterprise and economic freedom.

As for today's campus culture, let's just say that it welcomes a broad diversity of ideological viewpoints from Noam Chomsky all the way to Robespierre [laughter]. Wilson's remarks in 1995, and their echo and resonance today, are typical of the work and approach of the Manhattan Institute. MI scholars have never been afraid to challenge lazy, conventional thinking and offer bold diagnoses and solutions. We're persistent, and when we have a view about something, we do not back down under pressure from elites and cloistered cabals of holier-than-thou academics. MI adapts with the times, and also more so with the Journal [laughter]. But we've also stood for certain principles: rule of law, public safety, free markets, and the belief that culture is a key determinant of the welfare of societies. In investing, where I spend much of my time, this combination, the ability to adapt without losing sight of core convictions, is a necessity. You must be able to think independently and form strong contrarian views, while at the same time maintaining a good deal of humility about how much you don't know. When I first started investing, my dad thought that if his son was brilliant enough to get into Harvard Law School, then he must be smart enough to make money in the stock market. Wrong [laughter]. I learned the hard way that listening to the so-called authorities and blindly following the trend was no substitute for starting from a few core principals and applying them in innovative ways to the unique investing challenge that each new era brings.

It's the same in policy and politics. And the Manhattan Institute embodiment of this ethos is, I believe, what gives us our competitive advantage. It's embodied in the outlook of our new president, Reihan Salam. [applause] Back in 2008, Reihan and his then coauthor, Ross Douthat, was challenging the GOP to adapt its guiding principles to the new political realities. He's already bringing the same spirit to his leadership of MI, and we're looking forward to the leadership that he has in store. Our lecturer tonight is another example of this spirit of independence, persistence and innovative thinking. He's also one of the most effective critics of groupthink, whether in business, politics or philanthropy. Peter Thiel is an entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and in the words of economist Tyler Cowen, "one of the most important public intellectuals of our time." Peter has spent his professional life in Silicon Valley. He helped found PayPal, was the first major outside investor in Facebook, and more recently, cofounded data security giant, Palantir, as well and the venture capital firm, Founders Fund.

While Peter has been one of the most successful architects of the Information Age, he's also been one of the most incisive critics. Peter argues that our technological imagination has been too modest, too content to fiddle on the margins when what we need are transformational breakthroughs. The country that brought the world the automobile, the skyscraper, the airplane, and the personal computer has become enamored with kitschy applications that facilitate things like take-out delivery, late-night car rides, and being able to tell your friends that you liked what they had for lunch [laughter]. These are no substitute for the pathbreaking, world-changing innovation that America needs. Peter has distilled his argument into a Tweet-sized maxim worthy of our age. "We wanted flying cars and settled for 140 characters." At first, I didn't understand that reference, perhaps because I'm banned from Twitter [laughter], not by Twitter but by my internal communications team [laughter]. True.

Peter understands, as we do at the Manhattan Institute, that robust innovation relies on a system of free enterprise. Like so many philanthropists and scholars in the room, Peter has committed himself to preserving the policy framework necessary for experimentation, growth, and most critically, America's reputation for unimpeded inquiry, which has historically driven our culture of innovation and must do so again if we're to meet the unique challenges of this century. A society that censors challenging ideas may well be headed on the path to suicide. For those of us with the means and courage to not just speak out against the intellectual mob but to actually build something superior in its place, there is great and urgent work to be done. Tonight, that means providing a forum for the challenging ideas of our 33rd Wriston lecturer. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming Peter Thiel. [applause]

they're not wrong :thermidor:

Mr.Radar fucked around with this message at 04:31 on Nov 21, 2019

# ¿ Nov 21, 2019 04:27

Mr.Radar: Nov 5, 2005; You guys aren't going to believe this, but that guy is our games teacher.

this is more "crazy person with tech opinions" than the usual "tech person with crazy non-tech opinions" fodder for this thread, but i still think it fits.

pop quiz: which side has better text rendering?

according to this user on r/firefox the correct answer is the left one :psyduck:

to the point that they go out of their way to use an unsupported version of Firefox from over 2 years ago because it has a bug that lets them force it to use that style of rendering.

quote:

It's called the brainwash effect, you are used to seeing blatantly unsmooth text so you can't deal with seeing smooth text. I guess high dpi displays don't look nice to you either. A proper monitor would follow exactly the sRGB curve, and the GDI rendering engine would take the inverse formula to anti-alias in linear RGB and give the best results.

I am NOT upgrading, it is not worth it. Why would I eyestrain?

Here is another example. https://i.imgur.com/dqhD1q4.png Note that below the enlarged samples, there's a sample of what that size would look like at a higher resolution. I used hacks to have the exact same outline in higher resolution. Take a look from a distance. The GDI sample is as close as it gets to the reference, while the DirectWrite sample is too thick and distorted.

edit: they're still going. this is some legit timecube poo poo:

quote:

If you are used to seeing distorted text, you are going to have problems seeing smooth text. That's how it works. DirectWrite is a curse. DirectWrite is awful and will forever haunt me for life. It's one of the most overrated things on Earth.

[...]

I have viewed the sample image on several screens in pixel perfect size. Now this is where it gets controversial and subjective. I prefer classic GDI rendering, it is much smoother than DirectWrite. On every display. It actually looks like text, it actually resembles the font behind the render. DirectWrite is way too dark, it doesn't truly look like the actual font. But already we are seeing the problem. Now this is where it gets controversial and subjective.. controversial and subjective.. subjective.. The people who prefer text that's actually text are absolutely devastated by DirectWrite.

(emphasis theirs)

it's a good thing I don't know what "actual text" looks like because it's apparently enough to break my brain.

Mr.Radar fucked around with this message at 20:23 on Dec 27, 2019

# ¿ Dec 27, 2019 18:31

Mr.Radar: Nov 5, 2005; You guys aren't going to believe this, but that guy is our games teacher.

Mr.Radar posted:

i posted this when i thought this person was done, but they apparently spent another day asking how to break their browser and berating people who tell them it's not possible/ask why they would want to. here are the highlights:

they posted this screenshot with their "preferred" font rendering of a reddit post (it's eye-searingly ugly)
they got caught editing wikipedia to inject their nonsense about how directwrite is "broken" to "prove" their point to another commenter
they refused to answer any and all questions about what type of monitor they were using; other posters dug out that this person is using a ~10 year old laptop with a 1366x768 TN panel
they started blocking anyone who posted anything other than direct instructions on how to do what they want (which is literally impossible)
someone suggested they switch to the Pale Moon fork of Firefox which apparently does somewhat support this insane thing, and that's apparently not good enough either

they seem to be done now, though.

Mr.Radar fucked around with this message at 01:49 on Dec 30, 2019

# ¿ Dec 30, 2019 01:36

Mr.Radar: Nov 5, 2005; You guys aren't going to believe this, but that guy is our games teacher.

HN's moderation team, everyone:

Everything in this thread, and past HN threads, is fine. But a typo in a random comment halfway down the page of a story halfway down the page (which, BTW, has nothing to do with technology)? That's what's really deserving of their time and attention.

# ¿ Jan 26, 2020 01:12

Mr.Radar: Nov 5, 2005; You guys aren't going to believe this, but that guy is our games teacher.

Switzerland posted:

dang is Good People™, yo

my only direct experience with them was when they warned me not to use the word "racist" when calling out blatant racism posted by another user so I'm gonna disagree there. I understand they're entirely :decorum:

-poisoned but it still left a bad taste in my mouth.

# ¿ Jan 26, 2020 02:17

Mr.Radar: Nov 5, 2005; You guys aren't going to believe this, but that guy is our games teacher.

this is a bit late but

JawnV6 posted:

coutt 1 day ago [-]

This is a common way of thinking about it, but nobody really knows. It's purely a conjecture. There is no data to back it up, and it just appeals to common sense.
Should everybody drop C/C++/whatever and rush into the Rust train because Rust people has conjecture?
I ask the opposite question. What would happen if the only programming language left is C? Wouldn't we become better programmers and raise the bar so high that the bug count drops to 0?
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as someone who primarily works on a C89 codebase on a daily basis ITYOOL 2020 with a small team let me just say: :lol:

(i finally convinced management to let us move this code base to C++ and I'm counting the days until we can implement the switch)

# ¿ Feb 12, 2020 01:49

Mr.Radar: Nov 5, 2005; You guys aren't going to believe this, but that guy is our games teacher.

the hackers are discussing a study on universal basic income that showed people continue to work even if they receive ubi. here's the current third comment from the top:

sabarn01 1 minute ago [-]

People should fear being destitute its the natural human condition. Learning skills is the only way to make wealth.

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# ¿ Mar 5, 2020 16:40

Mr.Radar: Nov 5, 2005; You guys aren't going to believe this, but that guy is our games teacher.

sametmax 10 hours ago [-]

> Preserving their traditional alphabet and de-colonializing their culture is a good thing, no matter how I look at it
There are downsides to any situation. E.G:
- cost
- available resources for education and work
- adding one more obstacles for different cultures to be able to understand each other
I'm french, and in my country, language protection is a big thing.
It's also why we have such a terrible ability to speak english, which create way more problems than it solves.
Language preservation is overrated. Sure, it's nice. But compared to one day, having the entire earth speak the same language, be able to communicate and understand each other better? Small price to pay.
It get why they do it. Mongolia is a very peculiar culture, and I don't think it benefits much from mondialisation. Quite the contrary. And it's a way for their society to break from a painful part of their history.
But to me, it seems, at least on the long run, a step backward. Every time a language dies, like latin or summerian did, we gain uniformity. There are enough source of diversity in humanity to not need to add it to the very structure we use to exchange information.
Granted, the cyrillic alphabet is not very universal, but it is certainly more common than the traditional mongolia alphabet.
Now since I don't live there, I may be missing some crucial informations. Maybe the population still massively use the old alphabet unofficially and it makes sense. Maybe the use of the cyrillic alphabet brough problems I can't see.
So of course, I'm not the right peson to judge the situation.
But I wanted to bring a counter point to this the enthusiastic parent comment. We tend to react in a very emotional way when it's about culture, and I'm not sure it benefits our specie.
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# ¿ Apr 14, 2020 20:41

Mr.Radar: Nov 5, 2005; You guys aren't going to believe this, but that guy is our games teacher.

zerm778 10 hours ago [-]

Patreon became successful mostly because of the girls charging money for their nudes. Then they've started to ban these girls because they wanted a clean platform. Guess what, these girls have now moved to onlyfans and they won't come back. Patreon has lost the money bringing members thinking that failed musicians/youtubers would bring them the big bucks.

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# ¿ Apr 22, 2020 15:09

Mr.Radar: Nov 5, 2005; You guys aren't going to believe this, but that guy is our games teacher.

rjmccall posted:

i've definitely heard this from sex workers before. every "you can advertise and people can pay you" site ends up building their user base in large part based on sex work and then eventually kicking it off so that they can go mainstream

i don't doubt that, but as lancemantis said above those people getting kicked off the platform is definitely not the reason patreon is in decline (hint: the real reason is they took vc money and can't pay it back without massively scaling up which would have been nearly impossible even before the pandemic). anyways, here's a very smart person's take on music:

throw0101a 6 hours ago [-]

> Don't understand how people are happy to listen to the same old stuff - it must get so dull.

Only if you listen to dull music. Perhaps pick higher quality stuff?

A good portion of my collection was originally written before 1750: Bach, Palestrina, Tallis, etc.† Some CDs I've had for >25 years and they are still as fresh as the first day I listened to them. And even a different take on the same composition can be illuminating: Glenn Gould vs Angela Hewitt, Tallis Scholars vs The Sixteen.

There's a reason why certain works regularly appear in those "Top 100" lists where they go out and ask experts: the order may sometimes be different, but the items in the top ten are often the same.

Edit: a quotation by Robert Bringhurst form The Elements of Typographic Style: With type as with philosophy, music and food, it is better to have a little of the best than to be swamped with the derivative, the careless, the routine.

† I have more modern stuff too: Led Zeppelin, Vampire Weekend, Arcade Fire, Pärt, Górecki, etc.

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# ¿ Apr 22, 2020 17:41

Mr.Radar: Nov 5, 2005; You guys aren't going to believe this, but that guy is our games teacher.

vmception 3 hours ago | parent | favorite | on: Unsubscribe: The $0-budget movie that ‘topped the ...

> Instead, he suggested that we all wait and purchase the book on the same day from Amazon. The strategy worked -- the book was #1 in its category that day.

In my instagram marketing last decade thats what we did.

While others were imagining that people "buy likes", or actually were dealing with bots, we were doing this for our clients.

Basically you get meme accounts to do a promotion of a profile that is currently private, and all the followers to a private profile get queued up, you can queue them up in the thousands or hundreds of thousands. when you unprivate the account, only like 100 of them get approved to follow you at once, so it adds up like a currency you can spend whenever you want. to mass approve you have to toggle private and unprivate over and over again, or approve the requests yourself or via API. either way you can only pull a list of 100 or so at a time, but you can keep them in the "requested" pool forever until convenient.

So you can grow an account with like a few hundred followers to a hundred thousand+ real followers very quickly.

But engagement is more important for the utility value of the account, and so you can also post an image with all the hashtags and location tags while the account is private, and let your new followers begin engaging with it. And then unprivate the account and even more new followers begin engaging with it, and then it becomes the TOP image in the hashtag.

In prior versions of instagram it would also be in the activity section in a large web of followers of followers.

For myself I have used one of the popular quickly and cheaply grown accounts to slide into the DMs of local women. In general on dating apps, women are funneling people to their instagram profile to ignore them. If you have a popular account its a night and day difference. I don't even attempt to match with them on the dating app, I just message them on IG straight away from the popular account (30K+ followers). Real dates and intimacy off of that, even in San Francisco. Skips the queue.

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# ¿ Jun 20, 2020 01:07

Mr.Radar: Nov 5, 2005; You guys aren't going to believe this, but that guy is our games teacher.

echelon 13 hours ago [–]

While many Redditors are changing their "avatar" to dancing rainbow cockroaches, I had the idea to set mine to the Digg logo as an act of protest. I'm hoping it catches on. I suppose Reddit's new userbase may not even know what that means.

Why the hell do we need avatars on Reddit anyway? Most of them are animated, strobing distractions.

Reddit has jumped the shark. If there weren't significant opportunity cost, I'd happily work on a replacement. It's become a low-signal, high-noise ad-laden dumpster fire.

Advertising is eating the Internet alive. I loving hate it.

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(note: this was the top comment out of 400+ for the submission)

# ¿ Jul 9, 2020 13:23

Mr.Radar: Nov 5, 2005; You guys aren't going to believe this, but that guy is our games teacher.

Antigravitas posted:

They aren't wrong…

They're not wrong that Reddit sucks and advertising destroys everything it touches, I mostly found the form of "protest" (and their belief that Reddit ever had a golden age) incredibly funny and childish.

# ¿ Jul 9, 2020 21:52

Mr.Radar: Nov 5, 2005; You guys aren't going to believe this, but that guy is our games teacher.

INTPenis 4 hours ago [–]

> The third-best approach is to join an instance that is (a) neutral in its content and (b) not overbearing in its moderation policies. Most of those listed on joinmastodon fail this test.

I don't advertise my instance, it also blocks registrations from anyone outside of EU, but I have the same policy.

I'm as left as left gets, my family and friends are made up of several activists. But I also am annoyed with how hate speech and right wing people are moderated.

My opinion is that they should first of all be reasoned with. And if you can't reason with them then each user may block them on their own.

But to just block their entire instance, or "Gab", is to sweep a bunch of HUMANS under the carpet and not even attempt to communicate with them. That goes against my core principles.

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# ¿ Aug 3, 2020 13:53

Mr.Radar: Nov 5, 2005; You guys aren't going to believe this, but that guy is our games teacher.

Uber and Lyft are pulling out of California due to a recent court ruling requiring them to classify their drivers as employees and the hackers are maaaaaad they'll have to pay slightly more for taxi service.

# ¿ Aug 20, 2020 20:14

Mr.Radar: Nov 5, 2005; You guys aren't going to believe this, but that guy is our games teacher.

firefox just added a new feature to allow you to block non-encrypted web requests. how are the hackers reacting?

at_a_remove 49 minutes ago [–]

Once this sort of thing is widely accepted, we'll see various blogs and websites silenced by having a certificate revoked. Not right away but soon enough.
It's a very exciting development. It's managed to use the geek "Everything has to be like this!" fanaticism to drag in a mechanism of control.
I wonder which of the Four Horsemen it will be used against first.

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edit: a bit further down the page

bullen 1 hour ago [–]

Not OP but:
HTTPS is not secure because it is centralized and it does not protect against MITM.
HTTP is the foundation of our civilization, it will never go away how much certificate sellers try.
But I would go one step further and point out that HTTP can be made secure manually selectively so that you only secure the things that need security!
HTTPS wastes energy by encrypting cat pictures, and we don't have that much cheap energy left!
But don't worry this will not kill HTTP only Mozilla/Chrome. Chromium will always allow adblockers for free and HTTP, because if they remove it, I'll fork it and add it back in, even if it takes 1 day to compile!
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Mr.Radar fucked around with this message at 15:38 on Nov 17, 2020

# ¿ Nov 17, 2020 15:34

Mr.Radar: Nov 5, 2005; You guys aren't going to believe this, but that guy is our games teacher.

this very non-political site is currently at the top of HN: https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ (but it's okay because it's about sound currency like bitcoin, you see)

Edit: someone managed to post an actually good comment on it:

ohyes 31 minutes ago [–]

This is clearly because 1970 is the Unix epoch when this version of the simulation began. It took about a year for things to get sufficiently out of whack so that stuff started to diverge in a noticeable way. I hope our implementors are proud of me for making reference to the simulation that we're all in.

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Mr.Radar fucked around with this message at 17:56 on Nov 23, 2020

# ¿ Nov 23, 2020 16:58

Mr.Radar: Nov 5, 2005; You guys aren't going to believe this, but that guy is our games teacher.

a good post??? (EDIT: this post was later flagged. :thunk:

)

jancsika 23 minutes ago | parent | flag | favorite | on: Statement of SEC Regarding Recent Market Volatilit...

A Moment in the Life of an HN Genius:

1. Reads a technical document outside their domain.

2. Feels dumb because they don't have a grasp on any of the concepts.

3. Too busy to use the very internet which some of them probably helped build to magically render learning materials to the screen in front of them at zero marginal cost.

4. Sees the word "manipulation"

5. Substitutes the laymen's definition of "manipulation"

6. Builds a fantasy World of Wall Street from first principles around that definition

7. Argues their fantasy first-principles Wall Street against other participants' fantasy first-principles Wall Street

8. Everyone leaves sync'd on the fantasy of feeling smarter than when they arrived.

Mr.Radar fucked around with this message at 20:36 on Jan 29, 2021

# ¿ Jan 29, 2021 16:06

Mr.Radar: Nov 5, 2005; You guys aren't going to believe this, but that guy is our games teacher.

artificialLimbs 0 minutes ago | parent | favorite | on: RMS addresses the free software community

It is great that RMS is trying to explore his emotional capacity and relate to others!

Shocking in these comments how many people believe that people are not responsible for their own emotions. No one can "hurt another" emotionally. It is up to each person to take the mature (and logical) stance that "I am responsible for my emotions". If something someone does or says "hurts me" emotionally, it is because I have chosen to allow that emotion, or I have not sufficiently dealt with the circumstances that have caused it to arise such that I am unable to process it in a manner which does not put the responsibility for its arising on another.

I'm not saying that if someone shoots your mother you shouldn't feel angry or sad, but that the anger or sadness is not CAUSED by another. It arises solely within you. You can see that this is true because people react wholly differently dependent upon the individual. It is within human capability to positively act from a place of clarity rather than negatively react from emotion.

It seems clear from this short page that RMS understands this.

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beep boop how can you possibly be offended just turn off your illogical emotions like any superior being :smugdroid:

# ¿ Apr 12, 2021 17:45

Mr.Radar: Nov 5, 2005; You guys aren't going to believe this, but that guy is our games teacher.

The current top comment on an article about the challenges of allowing multiple skin tones on the handshake emoji:

Thorentis 1 hour ago [–]

Why couldn't we just have stuck with yellow? Introducing skin tone provided no advantage and just opened a can of worms.

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# ¿ May 5, 2021 12:46

Mr.Radar: Nov 5, 2005; You guys aren't going to believe this, but that guy is our games teacher.

I disagree and think they are important. Here are a few good posts from that thread that explain why:

lucas_codes 1 hour ago [–]

Although yellow seems like it's good for everyone (since no one is actually yellow), it ends up still representing the majority. Just look at the Simpsons - all the characters are yellow, but not Apu.

Also skin tone options are extremely popular with people of colour - probably because they feel the default yellow doesn't represent them.

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FroshKiller 1 hour ago | unvote [–]

Thanks to white supremacy, what should not matter actually does matter quite a bit, and white people paying lip service to the idea that "skin color does not matter" without acknowledging the history of how it has been made to matter and taking the actions required to make it not matter again just perpetuates white supremacy.

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hnbad 1 hour ago [–]

It shouldn't matter. But it turns out being "color blind" (a term which I, a person with deuteranomaly, loathe) actually means you also lose the language to talk about racism that still exists for now.

It also encourages you to think of yourself as enlightened and rational and not subject to racist biases that are woven throughout the culture you exist in. It creates a false dichotomy between "those racists" who do racist things because they have racist thoughts and "color blind me" who is not a racist because I can't possibly have racist thoughts and thus am actually incapable of doing a racism. This is a thought-terminating cliché that prevents changing "racists" (by essentializing their racism as an inherent trait of who they are) or reflecting on how your own behavior might feed into racist systems you exist within (because if I'm not "a racist", accusing me of doing anything racist is clearly an insult to the integrity of my character).

There's a reason MLK said he had a dream. A world where skin color doesn't matter is the goal. But you don't get there by just deciding skin color doesn't matter to you and declaring the mission accomplished.

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# ¿ May 5, 2021 13:14

Mr.Radar: Nov 5, 2005; You guys aren't going to believe this, but that guy is our games teacher.

A longitudinal study of the long term impacts of COVID infection on the brain recently made it to the front page and really brought out the anti-vaxxer crowd:

ekianjo 2 hours ago [–]

> You don’t want a tiny piece of mRNA but you want the whole organism reproducing in your body?

Rather than injecting yourself with mRNA which will create long-term antibodies in your organism which will be reactivated any time something like COVID19 appears again in the nature, it's probably safer to rely on COVID19 treatments are are short lived (as in, metabolized) and reduce the viral load swiftly.

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# ¿ Jun 20, 2021 18:05

Mr.Radar: Nov 5, 2005; You guys aren't going to believe this, but that guy is our games teacher.

Re: police quitting in record numbers over the past year:

tryingtogetback 24 minutes ago [–]

Maybe it's finally the time for private sector to step in?
Privately funded regional and/or local (HOA-funded) police departments that are immune to political games with funding that's independent from political trends. Private security startups must be working in this area, right?

Just take a look what amazon is doing to shipping industry, how well researched and optimized their deliveries are. Policing is no different (infinite potential for optimizations and innovations) given that private entities (not government) are managing it and (most importantly) are accountable for it.

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still upvoted as of my posting this :shepface:

# ¿ Jun 24, 2021 14:35

Mr.Radar: Nov 5, 2005; You guys aren't going to believe this, but that guy is our games teacher.

Re: youtube taking down anti-vaxx content:

crocodiletears 3 minutes ago [–]

At this point I'm not hesitant about the vaccine, but getting it would only validate the heavy-handed approach we're seeing wrt censorship.

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# ¿ Sep 29, 2021 15:09

Mr.Radar: Nov 5, 2005; You guys aren't going to believe this, but that guy is our games teacher.

More from that thread. I couldn't help touching the poop so I posted on a separate sub-thread how this was good, actually, due to algorithms sucking people down extremist rabbit holes and this is a reply I got:

mdp2021 0 minutes ago [–]

You have premised that some content recommender uses an algorithm that creates clusterization of positions, and you conclude that «the only way» is to eliminate one of the two positions.
Which /also/ means, the reasonable moderates of the censored position disappear. With consequences.

Which should contain the rebuttal to that first boutade: the "centrist algorithm".

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edit: and a different reply to that thread:

mypastself 1 minute ago [–]

Ultimately, I can’t fault a corporate entity for wishing to improve their customers’ experience by preventing dissemination of potentially harmful material. Perhaps I would agree with them if I had insight into their cost-benefit analysis. I still generally prefer to have all types of ideas out in the open.

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beep boop preventing the spread of misinformation is only worth it if it's profitable

Mr.Radar fucked around with this message at 16:18 on Sep 29, 2021

# ¿ Sep 29, 2021 16:15

Mr.Radar: Nov 5, 2005; You guys aren't going to believe this, but that guy is our games teacher.

kloch 6 minutes ago [–]

I don't think it's reasonable to compare cryptocurrencies to chain letters.
Chain letters' sole purpose is to enrich early adopters at the expense of later participants.

While early adopters of cryptocurrencies frequently do reap windfall gains, it is not necessarily at the expense of later users as it is with chain letters. The early adopter benefits for cryptocurrencies are no different than early investors in a business that goes on to produce a popular and successful product.

Unlike chain letters cryptocurrencies provide a useful utility of a medium of exchange coupled with consensus based algorithmic scarcity. This is an attractive alternative to centrally planned fiat currencies that are persistently and intentionally debased over time.

Whether the power usage is worth the utilitarian benefits to societey is certainly a valid debate and hopefully will lead to more efficient protocols.

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# ¿ Oct 14, 2021 14:42

Mr.Radar: Nov 5, 2005; You guys aren't going to believe this, but that guy is our games teacher.

hn thread: pg's (no) funhouse

# ¿ Oct 15, 2021 12:53

Mr.Radar: Nov 5, 2005; You guys aren't going to believe this, but that guy is our games teacher.

Juul-Whip posted:

did slashdot have upvotes and downvotes? i can't remember if they did but that seems to accelerate the death spiral everywhere it's used

They did, but it was an extremely weird system. Firstly, only like 1% of the users could vote at any given time (randomly selected on a weekly? basis), and you couldn't just vote up or down, you had to specify the reason why you wanted to up is down vote the comment, with the most-voted reason being displayed with the score on the comment. Votes were also limited to a range of IIRC -1 to +5. Co.ments from anonymous users started at +1 and comments from logged-in users started at +2.

People who were not allowed to vote on the comments directly could instead vote whether they thought a given comment was over- or under-rated. This didn't change the actual comment score but instead acted as a way to rate how good the people who were voting voted which affected how frequently they would be selected to be able to vote. Additionally, participating in this "metamoderation" system increased the odds you would be selected to be able to vote.

# ¿ Oct 16, 2021 20:28

Mr.Radar: Nov 5, 2005; You guys aren't going to believe this, but that guy is our games teacher.

DaTroof posted:

This sounds right from what I remember, except I think anonymous started at either 0 or -1 and logged-in started at +1. Their scoring system is goofy in a lot of ways, but to be fair, any attempt at crowdsourcing moderation will probably be at least as goofy

That was all from memory from like 10 years ago so you could be right.

# ¿ Oct 16, 2021 20:45

Mr.Radar: Nov 5, 2005; You guys aren't going to believe this, but that guy is our games teacher.

I'm not sure exactly what this is, but there sure is a lot of it:

panick21_ 23 minutes ago | next [–]

I have been advocating for federated e-cash based on bitcoin for a long time. Interestingly I suggested this quite a lot to somebody who ended up working for Blockstream. The reason why I thought this was necessary requires some context.

I thought it was kind of like Free Banking. And just as warning, in US history, Free Banking has a different unrelated meaning. So do not confuse the concept of Free Banking with the historical Free Banking, the 'Free' referees to different aspects. In US what is referred to is the 'freedom' to open banks at all. Before that, in the US, each bank required a voucher from the state legislature.

What I am talking about is the freedom of issue, sometimes called 'Joint-stock banking'. Meaning a bank can issue bank notes (IOUs) without any restriction on how to back that IOU. This is relevant because historically quite often the state (and later federal) government would enforce a strict connection between outstanding notes and government debt. This is rather clear why governments would want that. This leads to a number of problems, historically most important that defaulting states would destroy its banking system at the same time. Other problems are that government with low or decreasing debt might not have enough debt to cover outstanding notes leading to a deflationary effect.

Broadly how this works is, you have a Gold standard and then you have a set of 'banks' issue IOU on top of that. These come in form of private bank notes (typical a standard of note amount emerged as well). You can think of a outstanding bank notes, the same way as money the bank has in a checking account. The important difference being that the bank gets the interest, and not the holder of the note. And the profit derived from this is what makes the bank want to do this in the first place.

The amount of IOU any individual bank can issue is limited by the consistence demand for clearance from other IOUs accumulated by banks. So I go to Walmart pay with an note. Walmart can check of course if the issuer is acceptable to them and then they hand that over to their bank to put in into their checking account. The bank then will bring those notes to the issuing bank, and demand reserves (ie gold) and transfer it to its own 'vaults'.

Once you have more then 2 bank pretty quickly 'clearing houses' develop. These would be sort of membership clubs where after each day/week/month you would do a clearing of everybody against everybody and figure out who has to pay how much and who gets how much. These clearing houses were often separate private institution.

The clever part about this is that this serves as a good indicator of who is abusing the system. So if you end up issuing to many notes, the reserve drain will be observed by other banks and they will kick you out of the clearing house as a default risk.

The other interesting aspect of this sort of system is that it has an implicit regulation of currency demand and supply. In modern economics sometimes considered as 'velocity'. So each bank has a minim reserve and how much reserve they have depends on how many notes they need to cover the clearing house demands. If demand to hold currency is high, and therefore less demand on reserves, the bank can safely expand the amount of notes it issues. However in the opposite situation, if people drop their requirements to hold currency, the banks has to pull notes from circulation. Typically in historical system the notes would be backed by a wide range of liquid commercial stocks and government bonds.

In a more standard economic way of saying this is that those banking system were adjusting the monetary base (M) in accordance of the monetary velocity (V) and this results in a relatively long run stable MV and therefore a stable PQ (Price level * real expenditures).

What this means is that once reserve stop growing, you would expect Price level to drop or rise depending on Productivity. So if the economy is growing and things become cheaper the average price level would drop accordingly (just like price of consumer electronics drops). Attempting to enact such a policy is sometimes called 'Productivity Norm'. Another way of saying it, it would approximate a stable NGDP. This is not the type of demand deflation that caused the Great Depression. What this means is that workers would not have to fight for adjusted wages every year along with inflation. You get slightly higher wages every year automatically.

Historically the most easy way to observe this is currency in circulation depending on harvest. During harvest there was a huge amount of currency outstanding, as everybody was paying workers, making deals and so on. When it turns winter, and there is far less economic activity going on, people much rather have more money at the bank so it can earn interest. Therefore what we should observe is the outstanding base of money being response to that requirement and we can actually see this in historical data from systems that were organized like that.

There were also banks that had 100% reserves, meaning the amount of notes they issued was always the same as the amount of gold reserves in their vaults, of course at those banks you would not earn interest, but rather had to pay a fee for the services. This sort of 100% backed system is what seem to be proposed here. Historically these sorts of banks were very unpopular, to the point where they basically didn't exist at all unless for some special circumstances.

My biggest issue with Bitcoin when people suggest it could be the backbone of a new economy, is that it does not have this feature. Bitcoin is like if you are trading on pure non-floating gold coins. If there is an increase in the amount of demand for Bitcoin, there is no corresponding increase in supply as to keep prices relatively the same. If you want to have a multi-level deep economy with labor, debt and so on, this is not tenable.

Of course many Bitcoin people I proposed this to were very much against this. Of course the Bitcoin paper starts out with:

> A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.

I suggested that you could have different 'banks' cross signing each other and building a network of trust in the same way the clearing houses used to do. Banks and their costumers would only accept currency from trusted parties.

You could run around with your wallet, potentially being filled with a notes from a whole bunch of different 'banks'. Seems to me this would make tracking very difficult. It would allow lighting fast payments and unlimited amount of transactions between parties.

Our discussion often ended with the suggestion that he was not totally convinced but that it would be a great use-case for side-chains. This seems at least partly something like I suggest, just as a 100% reserve only system as I understand it. This might have some uses but for me, doesn't fix the underlying issue with Bitcoin when considering it as the reserve currency for a nation state.

I would love to see a warrant where the IOU are unlimited and backed by some portfolio of other assets. This would allow bitcoin to truly serve as the backbone of a modern economy. Just like gold combined with IOU based banking became backbone of modern economy.

P.S: It highly unlikely that my ramblings from all these years ago influence this project. I don't want to suggest that it did. I just found it interesting.

P.P.S: The person I used to argue this with also suggest I join Etherium crowdfunding and I refused. So clearly I am the idiot here.

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# ¿ Oct 28, 2021 03:23

Mr.Radar: Nov 5, 2005; You guys aren't going to believe this, but that guy is our games teacher.

It's not HN, but it is r/firefox which I think is close enough: (RE: Windows 7 EOL)

[–]n0rt0npr0 1 point 1 day ago
Migration to 8.1 is absolutely sensible if you are on win7 now. Linux will be completely viable btw December 2022 and June 2023 so upgrade installing 8.1 from 7 and using it & migrating to Linux after that. Sensible in that Linux is more reliable than Win7, Win8 & Win10 and thats what matters most. To all those still using Win10: Disable your Updates! My neighbors Win10 system crashed 3 days ago when the PC Health Check app installed! suck it microshits!

# ¿ Nov 1, 2021 14:19

Mr.Radar: Nov 5, 2005; You guys aren't going to believe this, but that guy is our games teacher.

lobsterminator posted:

Micro$haft Winblows, amirite!

it's not just that, it's the insane suggestion that linux will become a perfectly viable OS for all enterprise use-cases between the end of paid support for Windows 7 at the end of one year and the end of free support for 8.1 in the middle of the next, and that users should in fact upgrade to 8.1 to avoid Windows 10 (which will have additional years of support).

edit: I also forgot to mention that that is a new reply to a 9 month old thread.

edit 2: here's some actual HN:

cblconfederate 9 minutes ago | root | parent [–]

[a bunch of links "refuting" the previous post that banks would be fined for suspending all withdrawals even temporarily]

Anyway , i ve been burnt by banks enough in the past to know that binance is better than banks. I can't be preached about it.

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Mr.Radar fucked around with this message at 14:38 on Nov 1, 2021

# ¿ Nov 1, 2021 14:35

Mr.Radar: Nov 5, 2005; You guys aren't going to believe this, but that guy is our games teacher.

notTheAuth 9 minutes ago | parent | favorite | on: Complex Chips Make Security More Difficult

Security will play a huge role in obsoleting software development as a job.

Monkeys in chairs papering over generic CPU design is pushing chip makers to consider silicon designed to workload spec; input parameter set, let it go.

Chips are now undergoing their great decoupling like software. It’ll take a while as manufacturing process pivots but rather than 8 generic cores we’ll eventually have SOCs per application. Software will be pushed to the UI layer alone for users, and whatever industry needs to boot strap manufacturing.

Frankly I’m looking forward to it; I can’t think of anything software companies have provided humanity that will stand the test of time, except making us all learn their new preferences.

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# ¿ Nov 5, 2021 14:34

Mr.Radar: Nov 5, 2005; You guys aren't going to believe this, but that guy is our games teacher.

ketanmaheshwari 0 minutes ago | parent | context | favorite | on: The Decline of Unfettered Research

I recently proposed an idea to create a new data transfer protocol that involves drones to carry data in a medium with a prong attached to them.
When the drone lands on a platform atop a building, the prong connects to a computer connected to the platform and sitting inside the building triggering a mount action.

The data gets transferred to the computer. Now, whoever needs to transfer data from this building to another will use the same method to upload it.

I do not think this will be the best way to move data but if a protocol is in place it could be used as a basis for future intra-campus data movement.

The proposal was shot down. A schematic of the idea is drawn here: https://github.com/ketancmaheshwari/datadrone/blob/main/sche...

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# ¿ Nov 8, 2021 17:08

Mr.Radar: Nov 5, 2005; You guys aren't going to believe this, but that guy is our games teacher.

(cw: suicide/mental health)

SapporoChris 14 minutes ago | parent | context | flag | favorite | on: Daddy isn’t coming back

I have a black thought on this. I would be happy if someone corrected me. When something breaks, sometimes we repair it, sometimes we throw it out. The more valuable the item, the more we will spend to fix it. However even with the most valuable items, we sometimes reluctantly decide that it is broken beyond repair. Are people like this? Are some simply too broken to fix? I feel awful thinking this, but I wonder if there is some truth to it.

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# ¿ Nov 17, 2021 21:41

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ Mar 28, 2023 01:58

Mr.Radar: Nov 5, 2005; You guys aren't going to believe this, but that guy is our games teacher.

# ¿ Dec 2, 2021 15:42

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > YOSPOS > hn thread: sed 's/entertaining/hilarious/g'

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