Hacker News: GuiA

New comment by GuiA in "Huawei 5G kit must be removed from UK by 2027"

GuiA — Tue, 14 Jul 2020 19:57:15 +0000

Ah yes dang. Users who are otherwise constructive members of the site break the rules only on CCP related threads. Not only that, but their rule breaking is only penalized in the minutes after which they post, only to slowly return to the mean over time.

Keep telling yourself that.

New comment by GuiA in "Deschooling Society (1970)"

GuiA — Mon, 13 Jul 2020 18:23:34 +0000

It always pains me greatly to read writers from times past about social issues whose voice rings distinctly true today still. Because it means that understanding the problem is completely uncorrelated to being able to do anything about it.

New comment by GuiA in "How to Understand Things"

GuiA — Sat, 11 Jul 2020 22:10:46 +0000

Check out Célestin Freinet too (also untranslated in English AFAIK)

New comment by GuiA in "Don't close your MacBook with a cover over the camera"

GuiA — Fri, 10 Jul 2020 19:56:41 +0000

The question isn't whether you can add a cover to the product after the fact, it's whether you can trust a switch on a product to do what the manufacturer says it does.

New comment by GuiA in "Don't close your MacBook with a cover over the camera"

GuiA — Fri, 10 Jul 2020 19:55:00 +0000

Yes, what you describe is trivial - and it would be similarly trivial to design a module that appears to respect the switch (regardless of Linux/Windows) and yet records things surreptitiously, only to offload it at a later date.

Remember the amount of effort VW was willing to expand to cheat emissions testing.

New comment by GuiA in "Don't close your MacBook with a cover over the camera"

GuiA — Fri, 10 Jul 2020 19:46:04 +0000

I had a laptop with a physical switch for WiFi/Bluetooth in 2006 or so (with a matching orange/blue light that would turn up when you toggled it). The problem was that this was actually all done by a software driver - when I booted into Linux with the laptop I was surprised to find that the bluetooth/wifi modules were on regardless of the switch's position.

At the end of the day, unless you have a really nice microscope, solid understanding of electrical engineering, and a few tens of thousands of hours ahead of you, you have to trust whoever you're buying the hardware from that it will do what they say it will. No amount of hardware efforts can solve the fundamental human trust problem.

New comment by GuiA in "Pinboard Turns Eleven"

GuiA — Fri, 10 Jul 2020 16:04:09 +0000

From a past update:

"I launched the site in July 9, 2009 from a small kitchen in Botoșani, Romania."

https://blog.pinboard.in/2019/07/i_cant_stop_winning/

I suspect that's the kitchen :) My own kitchen table during this confinement period isn't too dissimilar...

New comment by GuiA in "Can Archaeology Dogs Smell Ancient Time?"

GuiA — Thu, 09 Jul 2020 19:42:14 +0000

There are anecdotal reports of doctors/nurses able to pick up certain typical "illness smells" from their patients. Not sure if it's ever been studied more in depth.

New comment by GuiA in "Caffenol: Developing Photos with Coffee and Vitamin C [video]"

GuiA — Tue, 07 Jul 2020 18:03:19 +0000

Caffenol is a pretty popular technique, you can find many detailed posts online comparing it with other developers.

I've used it a few times in a pinch when traveling, it's nice. Unfortunately I've never been able to find a fixer formula that's as easy/off the shelf.

New comment by GuiA in "Algorithms Are Now Commodities"

GuiA — Tue, 07 Jul 2020 15:53:58 +0000

It all depends what kind of work you do. I do things that touch embedded hardware and graphics and frequently find myself doing exactly the sort of things you described. If you miss it, it's certainly not gone :) (and I made a conscious decision to build my career around this, rather than fishing for npm modules).

New comment by GuiA in "Personal computers: does everyone need to learn programming? (1984)"

GuiA — Mon, 06 Jul 2020 18:39:21 +0000

I originally posted this (in 2013! reposted today prompted by HN's second chance pool) because it struck me how, with very few modifications, this exact article could be republished today. I find it fascinating that we can be having the same arguments that people a half century ago were having, with little to no awareness that we're repeating the exact same things. It makes me realize that perhaps software is not as young a field as we like to sometimes pretend (it's common to read on HN that e.g. software is so young and immature compared to civil or electrical engineering, etc)

It's also interesting to dig into the author's name - apparently a half century ago he had some reputation in tech circles, but as far as I can tell he's mostly forgotten today.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/05/what-...

He sadly seems to have passed a couple years ago:

https://www.legacy.com/obituaries/name/erik-sandberg-diment-...

Personal computers: does everyone need to learn programming? (1984)

GuiA — Mon, 06 Jul 2020 18:32:00 +0000

Article URL: http://www.nytimes.com/1984/01/17/science/personal-computers-does-everyone-need-to-learn-programming.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23751106

Points: 56

# Comments: 25

New comment by GuiA in "Kongregate closed to new games, shutting down forums and chat"

GuiA — Thu, 02 Jul 2020 19:22:44 +0000

You could theme your phpBB forum, install mods, add lots of fun flourishing touches (like custom ranks), etc. Some forums displayed avatars and post counts, others didn't . All that made every single phpBB forum feel like its own distinct community. I don't see that with Instagram.

New comment by GuiA in "MS will ban Forza players who add the confederate flag to their digital cars"

GuiA — Thu, 02 Jul 2020 19:19:36 +0000

I played similar games when I ran forums, but really you're just shuffling the problem around. Bored trolls/extreme ideologues will be delighted to play cat and mouse with your measures, and will feel particularly proud of themselves when they circumvent them creatively.

In the end, you have to decide what outcome you want - using half effective measures hoping that the racists will keep it down, or kicking them out and making it clear that they aren't welcome? You can't have it both ways.

New comment by GuiA in "Kongregate closed to new games, shutting down forums and chat"

GuiA — Thu, 02 Jul 2020 00:47:42 +0000

> I run an internet writing forum that has also suffered over the years despite being a relatively massive forum in its hey day. What changed? I think these are just the affects of the smartphone era.

I wonder what the phpBB of social media/smartphone apps would look like.

New comment by GuiA in "Lights and Shadows"

GuiA — Wed, 01 Jul 2020 19:26:52 +0000

https://distill.pub is such a platform for articles about machine learning

https://explorabl.es is a more general hub.

> especially when you can tell that the 'teacher' is also the UI designer and developer in one and there's a very high level of quality and polish. There's nothing quite like it for learning a complex subject.

Agreed. Unfortunately I think this is the inherent limitation to the explosion of such material (Bret's seminal essay [0] was almost a decade ago) - it takes an insane amount of skill, in mostly orthogonal disciplines, as well as a lot of time and effort to make it. Some tools attempt to make them a little straightforward to program, but due to the nature of it you can't really have a one size fits all solution that isn't just a general programming language + rendering engine.

And there is no "explorables industry" to fund the production of those (unlike say, textbooks), so it ends up being mostly side projects for otherwise gainfully employed developers.

It would be amazing to have eg. attempts at building an entire K-12 curriculum around explorable explanations. It's also the kind of work that probably loses in clarity and value when done by a team/committee rather than a single person dedicated to their vision.

[0] http://worrydream.com/ExplorableExplanations/

New comment by GuiA in "India bans TikTok, WeChat, and dozens of other Chinese apps"

GuiA — Tue, 30 Jun 2020 03:02:36 +0000

> Aren't they a source of pernicious American influence on this generation's youth?

Many countries have broadcast laws around a maximum amount of foreign programming (for one example amongst many, private French radios have to play French music for at least 40% of their programming).

New comment by GuiA in "Why we won’t be supporting Sign in with Apple"

GuiA — Mon, 29 Jun 2020 21:26:09 +0000

But you didn’t try anything to confirm/infirm this hypothesis?

New comment by GuiA in "Software should be designed to last"

GuiA — Sun, 28 Jun 2020 20:51:23 +0000

Craftsmanship is most visible in mature open source projects who have reached certain stability when it comes to features. The role of developers on those projects is more akin to stewards, watching over it for the current and next generation, rather than just shipping things out the door asap to meet the next milestone.

SQLite is a great example that was recently discussed on HN.

New comment by GuiA in "Progress Studies School"

GuiA — Sun, 28 Jun 2020 13:58:38 +0000

> we see that on average 57 percent, 64 percent, and 67 percent of children born survive to age 15 years among hunter-gatherers, forager-horticulturalists, and acculturated hunter-gatherers.

https://condensedscience.wordpress.com/2011/06/28/life-expec...

Still bad, but much better than 3 in 20.