Recent submissions

Comment · 3 years ago
This is how Chinese citizens in China react if you ask them about it:

https://vimeo.com/44078865

Do you think Americans would react that way if they were asked about the Kent massacre?

Comment · 3 years ago
I don't get why that would be wrong. If law enforcement asked Binance about my account, of course I would want to know, and would choose an exchange that does tell me vs. one that doesn't tell me.

Maybe it's illegal, but then I prefer that over a legal exchange.

Comment · 3 years ago
> Most of what we believe separates men from women is learned behavior.

I haven't seen convincing evidence to support this.

There's the possibility that the differences we see in the higher echelons of chess arise from biological differences between men and women. But that possibility is not being explored for political/social reasons.

Comment · 4 years ago
There's isn't any evidence that there was any sort of "fraud" involved in the Bitfinex hack. It was just a hack.
Comment · 6 years ago
Your thesis is true, but we should keep in mind that outrage almost always comes from a perceived injuste in the world.

We have always and will always disagree about political issues. Issues that from our subjective appreciation are destroying many people's lives, so it's not surprising that we resort to all sorts of toxic behaviour in order to "help the cause", whatever it might be.

This emotional need for justice (even when misdirected) can not be discarded in the discussion about toxic behavior. Sometimes it takes the form of physical violence, sometimes it's an insult, a threat, doxxing, etc.

We should strive to channel these desires and differences of opinion in healthy ways. "just ban all heated political discussions" is a good enough workaround at the forum level, but not a noble solution to the root problem at a societal level.

Comment · 6 years ago
> Mac notebooks have a camera indicator light to let you know when the camera is on.

That's great, but we'll need the electronic schematics and the OS source code to trust that.

Comment · 6 years ago
In the same vein that "hate speech" means "political opinions we disagree with", "animal cruelty" really means "animal cruelty towards animals we don't like for reasons we don't like"
Comment · 6 years ago
I much prefer Facebook's relatively laissez faire approach instead of Twitter's politically biased approach where hateful things are allowed as long as they are from the left side of the political spectrum.

Drawing the line on what is hate speech is a hard enough problem already, and companies like Google, Twitter don't even try to be impartial, their execs have clearly taken a side. Add to that the weird times we're living in and how people's fundamental moral ideas have diverted so much in the last 10 years, and you have a perfect disaster.

Facebook's approach is less harmful than the alternative right now.

Comment · 6 years ago
> I don't want the government in my private conversations, but I don't want my kids in someone elses either.

Easy: don't let your kid join zoom meetings without your permission/supervision until he/she understands that there are bad people out there.

Comment · 6 years ago
I use Linux everyday, and it's a UX disaster. I have tried Gnome, Xfce, Cinnamon, KDE, I like none of them. The only DE that I somewhat liked (Unity) was discontinued.

Linux sucks, but I use it becuase it sucks less than windows, for programming at least.

Comment · 6 years ago
2. In the specific case of the College Board, yes. Keep in mind that maybe the license fee is based on number of institutions and every student would end up indirectly paying for the license.

But also think about independent educational institutions (primary, secondary, higher, etc), think about all schools and colleges in other countries (we're all in a similar situation). All of them would have to find a way to license HEIC, just because Apple decided that they wanted HEIC as their default format.

3. I'd guess that companies that implement HEIC pay for their license.

The legal situation of using open source programs to decode licensed and patent encumbered formats is uncertain to me, and I guess it is to most people, including software engineers and managers.

Comment · 6 years ago
1. I think both parties are at fault

The testing system for not using the <input> tag appropiately and Apple for using a closed, patent encumbered format as the default when most of their users don't know about software patents.

> It's also not clear to me that this patent license is actually an issue in terms of decoding and converting file formats on the backend.

It's reasonable to assume that it is.

2. Sure, the college could pay, but looking at the broader problem here, saying that colleges should accept closed formats would make it really hard for open source online testing systems to proliferate, and all colleges around the world would have to pay royalties to the HEIC patent holders.

Even if they were to implement an open source decoder, unless you have plenty of lawyers, the legal uncertainty of the situation could be unacceptable to many individuals/institutions.

3. If the format was open in the first place, maybe we would have lots of open source decoders and maybe the library that the testing system developer used would have support for it, and would have transparently worked without the developer knowing about the format.

Comment · 6 years ago

Live from the official Hacker News API

A modern reader for Hacker News · SvelteKit + Skeleton