Hacker News: AstixAndBelix

New comment by AstixAndBelix in "SpaceX Starship rocket explodes minutes after launch from Texas"

AstixAndBelix — Thu, 20 Apr 2023 15:43:40 +0000

>There will never be a "cheap" version of a commercial rocket with an accepted less-than-perfect failure rate. Spaceflight is an all-or-nothing game.

substitute rocket and spaceflight with airplane and flight and see how that sounds

New comment by AstixAndBelix in "Developers should be force-fed state machines (2011)"

AstixAndBelix — Thu, 20 Apr 2023 10:58:44 +0000

Developers should be force fed nothing, because they "chose" to not follow a formal education. Almost everything I see in these blog posts is stuff I was already taught at college (or very adjacent).

If you want developers to know about this stuff stop encouraging people to go to code bootcamps and start making SWE curricula more palatable and end this idea that college is a scam that teaches you nothing

New comment by AstixAndBelix in "Hundreds of years after the first try, we can finally read a Ptolemy text"

AstixAndBelix — Wed, 19 Apr 2023 06:41:15 +0000

For some reason most online publications still think we're in the era of paper journals and stubbornly refuse to corredate their articles with references as if they had strict space constraints

New comment by AstixAndBelix in "I liked this simple calculus exercise"

AstixAndBelix — Mon, 17 Apr 2023 08:19:38 +0000

No, a trick is a shortcut with respect to the more tedious method. By definition anything that works also formally works, otherwise it wouldn't.... work.

New comment by AstixAndBelix in "Lithium battery ripe for disruption, inventor says"

AstixAndBelix — Sun, 16 Apr 2023 20:29:20 +0000

Battery tech is clearly a gargantuan problem.

The amount of industry that desperately wants better density is stunning and the fact that despite the billions spent we are still stuck with basically the same tech is a testament to its stubborness

New comment by AstixAndBelix in "Why classic gaming names like Atari are still going in on the blockchain"

AstixAndBelix — Sun, 16 Apr 2023 10:29:13 +0000

Imagine justifying a second hand card market for DIGITAL GOODS.

I'm sorry, I'm completely tired by this bullshit. If a multiplayer (and competitive) videogame does not have everything unlocked then it's just a scam and time sink.

New comment by AstixAndBelix in "Libreboot: HP Elite 8200 SFF support added (plus more desktops coming soon)"

AstixAndBelix — Sat, 15 Apr 2023 08:38:52 +0000

Why would someone run their proprietary server software on top of Linux?

New comment by AstixAndBelix in "Surviving Burnout (2015)"

AstixAndBelix — Sat, 15 Apr 2023 06:00:21 +0000

Because companies earn money by producing goods or providing services, but those goods and services are required by burned out people.

Let's say your company can build and ship a product in 2 years and none of the workers end up crunching. What if every single client is not in the position to wait 2 years (because they are themselves crunching) so they go with the company that builds it in 6 months?

New comment by AstixAndBelix in "Replying to comments about our web page design"

AstixAndBelix — Fri, 14 Apr 2023 10:23:52 +0000

>progressive

nothing progressive about this design. just call yourself peculiar instead of giving this veneer of betterment

New comment by AstixAndBelix in "YouTube-DL Hosting Ban Paves the Way to Privatized Censorship"

AstixAndBelix — Thu, 13 Apr 2023 11:08:47 +0000

And using services that need ads to survive by bypassing those ads does not help!

New comment by AstixAndBelix in "Mathematicians find hidden structure in a common type of space"

AstixAndBelix — Thu, 13 Apr 2023 06:41:32 +0000

An engineer, a physicist and a mathematician are sleeping in a hotel.

In the middle of the night a power surge happens and all three of their room kettles catch fire.

The engineer quickly locates the fire extinguisher and puts out the fire.

The physicist remembers from his college years that combustion feeds on oxygen, so he runs to the bathroom and covers the kettle with towels, putting out the fire.

The mathematician wakes up, sees the fire extinguisher in the corner and promptly goes back to sleep: he just proved that a solution exists.

New comment by AstixAndBelix in "What GPT-4 Does Is Less Like “Figuring Out” and More Like “Already Knowing”"

AstixAndBelix — Thu, 13 Apr 2023 05:33:52 +0000

It's funny how people on this website are always stupefied by the fact that the internet holds so much information and every time they search for something they always seem to find an answer somewhere, but when faced with a LLM trained on the whole internet they somehow get surprised when it knows about a truck load of minute things

New comment by AstixAndBelix in "AI Propaganda Will Be Effective and Easily Accessible"

AstixAndBelix — Wed, 12 Apr 2023 20:21:23 +0000

AI will just be like fake download buttons. Kids will instinctually learn while older people will believe anything

New comment by AstixAndBelix in "Intel Foundry Services and Arm announce collaboration on SoC design"

AstixAndBelix — Wed, 12 Apr 2023 15:30:04 +0000

It's solved by asking Dang for a charitable exception

New comment by AstixAndBelix in "The Free Software Foundation is dying"

AstixAndBelix — Tue, 11 Apr 2023 13:33:05 +0000

Richard Stallman was/is a grade A hacker and that's how the free software movement started as.

So, which kind of individuals would now be best suited for leadership positions in the FSF? An MBA? A lawyer? FAANG project manager?

New comment by AstixAndBelix in "Why don't we define “imaginary” numbers for every “impossibility”? (2012)"

AstixAndBelix — Mon, 10 Apr 2023 12:38:06 +0000

We didn't invent 'i' to "solve sqrt(-1)". This is an extremely common misconception about maths and how it progressed that unfortunately people get led into believing by lazy teachers every day

New comment by AstixAndBelix in "The One Thing I Can’t Stand About Teaching English in Japan (2019)"

AstixAndBelix — Sun, 09 Apr 2023 18:29:55 +0000

The author has correctly and rationally identified the problem. He knows exactly why and how his students behave this way, and yet he still takes it very personally. I'm glad he has at least found an explanation, but it would really help if he consulted with a mental health specialist as to which steps to take to stop feeling distraught every time it happens

New comment by AstixAndBelix in "Low and moderate alcohol consumption not associated with increased mortality"

AstixAndBelix — Thu, 06 Apr 2023 15:00:08 +0000

The human body can metabolize around 1AU (alcoholic unit) every 24h, which roughly corresponds to a can of light beer or a cup of light wine, without damage. This is why (very) moderate drinkers don't seem to have increased mortality

New comment by AstixAndBelix in "Google Drive does a surprise rollout of file limits, locking out some users"

AstixAndBelix — Sat, 01 Apr 2023 07:04:13 +0000

Why don't you look into AWS Glacier?

New comment by AstixAndBelix in "Italian privacy regulator bans ChatGPT"

AstixAndBelix — Fri, 31 Mar 2023 14:10:18 +0000

I bet your country is backwards and "medieval" in a bunch of places. What you said is a meaningless tautology