Recent submissions

Comment · 5 years ago
Or we should make it so companies can't write an unrepealable law and then dump hundreds of millions of dollars into a disinformation campaign to get it passed.

Both are probably wishful thinking though.

Comment · 5 years ago
Comment · 6 years ago
I don't think Wikipedia fosters the kind of nihilistic hatred that lead to harassment campaigns and real world violence the way 4chan does. I get that not all of 4chan is pol and r9k, but that's still a decent chunk of the users. I can't think of a place on the internet with a higher concentration of incels and alt-right nazi types, besides 8chan.
Comment · 6 years ago
Comment · 6 years ago
Yeah. Worth noting that the Democrats helped make things significantly worse with the crime bill as well. Nixon and Regan got the ball rolling, but the Clinton admin doubled down on all of it.
Comment · 6 years ago
Couldn't we use that money to create jobs that have a more meaningful impact on people's day to day? Invest in alternative energy, fixing our infrastructure, improving public transit, etc... Put that investment in technology into technology that is more productive instead of the nth iteration of some piece of military technology that we'll never use.

I want that sweet high-speed rail, baby!

Comment · 6 years ago
> The two-dimensional variant of the theorem (also known as the pancake theorem) can be proved by an argument which appears in the fair cake-cutting literature

This is the first time that reading about math has made me hungry.

Comment · 6 years ago
>To be an open platform for free speech, no censorship.

Unfortunately this kind of rhetoric is frequently coded language meaning "Hey Nazis, we won't kick you off of our platform for threatening to shoot up a synagogue". I think people should still legally be able to create unmoderated platforms, but the majority of people won't participate in them because they quickly become cesspools of hatred and harassment. Gab is the newer, shinier tech startup version of this, but it's existed before in the forms of 4chan, 8chan, and probably other platforms that I'm not familiar with.

Comment · 6 years ago
I've gotten better service and respect for my privacy from USPS than any telecom monopoly like Verizon. If anything this feels like an argument in favor of municipal broadband. If the telecom industry is any indication, eliminating the USPS would just result in private mail carriers divvying up the country into a few regions run by monopolies, with lower quality service, and profiting at the expense of users. The point of a public good isn't to profit, but to serve a need that can't adequately be served by the private sector.
Comment · 6 years ago
I kind of agree, but it's hard to separate knowing that it's fake from my reaction to it. If this were presented without that context, I might feel like it's off, but not necessarily question it, especially if it came from a source I believed to be legitimate.
Comment · 6 years ago
Definitely felt a little off, but if I didn't know that this was a deepfake, I would probably accept it as real. As usual, I don't know if that fits more in to the "remarkable" or "disturbing" category.
Comment · 6 years ago
I'll do it. Building robots sounds dope. I'd imagine a good chunk of people on HN would love to live in a post scarcity society where they can spend their time building and repairing robots.
Comment · 6 years ago
Types in Haskell are generally used to describe the structure of the data. Defining a type in Haskell is like writing documentation and a test all in one. I can mentally offload certain concerns to the compiler, which will tell me whether or not the shape of the data in my head matches the code I'm writing. I pretty frequently use the compiler to guide my development, especially with a tool ghcid, which gives instantaneous feedback as I'm programming. It's also like a million times easier to refactor, I tweak a type signature and the compiler will basically give me a list of things I need to update. No need to hunt for and test every instance of that kind of input, the compiler just tells me where it is, and what is wrong.

You also don't have to write out type signatures 99.9% of the time after declaring a type, the compiler can infer them. People in the Haskell community tend to write out signatures for functions because it makes it easier to understand, but it's pretty rare to see a type signature in the body of a function.

That's not to say thinking in Haskell is always as natural or more natural than Python, but I'd argue that immutability and laziness more than types can require a lot more mental effort that can feel like fitting square pegs into round holes for certain problems. When it comes to types (at least Haskell vs. Python), I'd say it's much more a matter of personal taste.

Comment · 6 years ago
This is only tangentially related, but until now I never really thought about how I sum single digit numbers, but it's not by having memorized all combinations. I'd say I have all combinations that sum to 10 or less memorized, which adds up to 25 unique combos (plus the rule that number + 0 = number).

If I can tell it sums to more than 10, I break it up mentally into [larger number] + [smaller number] = [larger number] + ([smaller number] - remainder) + remainder, where [larger number] + ([smaller number] - remainder) = 10

You could break it down further by just memorizing what each digit less than 10 is when you add 1. Then you can do addition like 5 + 4 = 1 + 1 + 1 + ... = 2 + 1 + ... = 8 + 1 = 9. Then you'd only have to memorize 9 things (10 if you include 0). I guess this assumes that you know the order numbers go in though, whereas memorizing all of the combinations doesn't require that.

Comment · 6 years ago
It takes a lot of faith in law enforcement to believe they won't abuse that power, especially given they are the target of criticism by these protests. The argument that it is illegal for them to abuse / misuse this information isn't very compelling either, given that they are the ones responsible for enforcing the laws that they would be breaking. I might be okay with this info just ending up in the hands of the FBI, but I definitely wouldn't want it winding up in the hands of my local law enforcement agencies, who are known for harassing and intimidating critics.

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