Hacker News: baddox

New comment by baddox in "Ranked-choice voting will be used in Maine’s presidential election, court rules"

baddox — Wed, 23 Sep 2020 04:56:53 +0000

I think the suggestion is that states shouldn’t get to decide how to act depending on whether they would “harm themselves,” but rather that the people should get to decide.

New comment by baddox in "2020 Bundles"

baddox — Tue, 22 Sep 2020 21:38:48 +0000

I think that's less of a huge difference when a small number of platforms dominate online media and aggressively use algorithms to determine or strongly influence what content people see. Yes, you can still absolutely find beautiful niche content on YouTube, and I value that a ton, but YouTube still has immense control over people's viewing in aggregate. It's a little bit like traditional broadcast TV if there were a billion channels but after every 3 minutes of viewing the TV chose which channel to flip you to unless you were constantly diligent about manually choosing what you want to watch.

New comment by baddox in "How the oil industry made us doubt climate change"

baddox — Tue, 22 Sep 2020 21:25:46 +0000

The point is that the models and their accompanying scientific descriptions provide explanatory power that is a valid source of knowledge even though it is not empirical (empiricism is a false epistemology, but that's a topic for another time). If you have a bridge design produced according to good models, and another bridge design produced without using any such models or engineering knowledge, the epistemological status of the claims "this bridge design is safe" is different between the two bridge designs. That is true even before each bridge is actually built, and if it weren't true, then there would be no reason to have laws requiring bridges to be built according to certain standards (since "we wouldn't know if it's safe until we build it").

New comment by baddox in "UC Berkeley inappropriately admitted students as favors to donors"

baddox — Tue, 22 Sep 2020 21:19:32 +0000

You obviously have to balance the legitimate cost against the illegitimate costs people will incur to get kids admitted. I don't know if 3x or 10x is the right value, but it's definitely not "more is better." If you make it cost a billion dollars to legitimately buy your kid into the school, there will still be millionaires utilizing these sorts of bribes.

New comment by baddox in "How the oil industry made us doubt climate change"

baddox — Tue, 22 Sep 2020 19:39:19 +0000

What about, for instance, all the successful engineering that is driven by models of complex systems? We don't understand bridge dynamics at an atomic level, we have complex models that require a lot of specialized education to create, understand, and use. Same goes for microprocessor engineering. No human understands the design of a modern CPU at a transistor level, that design is also handled by computers (again guided by humans with specialized education).

New comment by baddox in "Is revenue model more important than culture?"

baddox — Mon, 21 Sep 2020 16:37:06 +0000

> It trumps favoritism, empire building, and intra-office rivalries.

Does it? I associate those things very strongly with endeavors that are primarily concerned with making money.

New comment by baddox in "I no longer build software"

baddox — Mon, 21 Sep 2020 16:10:42 +0000

So your argument is as follows:

1. People didn’t mind meeting with travel agencies.

2. Actually people hated meeting with travel agencies. Never mind number 1.

3. Automatic head scratchers are a waste of time.

4. Therefore online travel websites are a waste of time.

New comment by baddox in "I no longer build software"

baddox — Mon, 21 Sep 2020 16:03:55 +0000

I don’t really see it as an indictment that we don’t yet have a short list of things from science fiction. The reason authors wrote about those things is because the are so beyond our technological capabilities—that’s why they make for interesting science fiction!

New comment by baddox in "Woman dies during a ransomware attack on a German hospital"

baddox — Fri, 18 Sep 2020 23:39:34 +0000

> They got dozens of servers with patient data hacked and encrypted and had to shutdown their intensive care and reroute patients elsewhere.

> What do you think?

I don't understand why this apparently seems so obvious to you. I think I would need more information about the attack, the hospital's preparations for such an attack, and the legal and industry-standard security expectations for such a hospital.

The simple fact that an attack took down a hospital's computer systems is not sufficient to conclude that the hospital was negligent in its security. Surely a sufficiently sophisticated actor (e.g. a state) could take down the computers at most hospitals if they chose to.

New comment by baddox in "Woman dies during a ransomware attack on a German hospital"

baddox — Fri, 18 Sep 2020 23:36:51 +0000

It's pretty easy to establish the malware attackers' responsibility. But the extent of the hospital's responsibility is much harder to establish, especially across all types of potential attacks. Basically, it's not easy to establish precisely which types of attacks a hospital needs to be prepared for in order for them to not be considered negligent.

In this case, I don't see many details, but it does sound like they simply couldn't access patient data and thus were transferring patients. I find it hard to believe that they couldn't have continued to provide emergency treatments that don't require networked computerized machinery.

But I'd want to know more about the attack before I could conclude that the hospital was negligent. Surely for every hospital there is some attack with sufficient sophistication to disrupt service at the hospital.

New comment by baddox in "Apple Ending "Fortnite Save the World" Updates for Mac"

baddox — Fri, 18 Sep 2020 19:16:42 +0000

I agree that Apple lets too much crap into the App Store. But to be clear, that’s not an argument in defense of Epic. On the contrary, I think Apple should be much much more restrictive in what third-party apps they allow on iPhones.

New comment by baddox in "Nvidia Broadcast App"

baddox — Fri, 18 Sep 2020 06:34:00 +0000

Why do you suppose that? Surely there are many many more customers who can afford cheaper individual/student licenses.

New comment by baddox in "This electrical transmission tower has a problem"

baddox — Thu, 17 Sep 2020 18:51:02 +0000

But that’s not the full analogy. The full analogy would be that the government left oil barrels around the whole state, and you went around the state starting hundreds of small fires, and if you had not done that, there would still have been a few fires from other sources, but there would be far fewer fires overall.

New comment by baddox in "I overslept because iOS 14 disabled my alarm"

baddox — Thu, 17 Sep 2020 18:48:27 +0000

It’s probably a very rare combination of specific factors that caused this bug for this person. My iPhone alarm had no problems whatsoever this morning after installing iOS 14 last night. Your comment would be more applicable if we had reason to believe that they had simply completely broken the alarm feature and that no one at Apple had bothered testing it.

New comment by baddox in "I overslept because iOS 14 disabled my alarm"

baddox — Thu, 17 Sep 2020 18:46:30 +0000

It’s not awful at all. I installed it yesterday on my iPhone X and I’ve had no problems. I also have the exact same alarm setup and my alarm worked fine. It’s unrealistic to expect there to be literally zero bugs for zero people, and of course the people who do experience bugs will post about it online, but that doesn’t really give a statistically meaningful impression of how reliable iOS 14 is.

New comment by baddox in "U.S. Adult Obesity Rate Tops 42 Percent; Highest Ever Recorded"

baddox — Thu, 17 Sep 2020 18:10:09 +0000

Costco is a wholesale warehouse. They're selling things in bulk, which isn't exactly the same thing as "large portion sizes."

New comment by baddox in "This electrical transmission tower has a problem"

baddox — Thu, 17 Sep 2020 07:09:04 +0000

I mean, you have to be more careful when you’re in a more dangerous area. If you live on a remote farm you can hit golf balls from your back porch. If you live in a suburb, not so much. Is this unfair?

New comment by baddox in "Why is Apple acting like an asshole?"

baddox — Wed, 16 Sep 2020 22:05:53 +0000

If Apple had a dominant market position in smartphones then one could argue that end customers don't have much of a choice, but Apple only has at most 50% market share in the US and much lower globally. For my own smartphone usage I would much rather Apple choosing which features and APIs that third-party developers (of apps and websites) can use rather than those developers being able to do whatever they want. I think it's pretty clear that developers tends to have a much more hostile relationship with their end users than Apple does with their customers.

New comment by baddox in "Why is Apple acting like an asshole?"

baddox — Wed, 16 Sep 2020 21:56:50 +0000

That sounds like a great reason to not let every trashy website in the world to spam them asking if they want to enable notifications.

New comment by baddox in "Why is Apple acting like an asshole?"

baddox — Wed, 16 Sep 2020 20:27:38 +0000

Reasonable people can disagree about which features are and are not useful. And those reasonable people can purchase smartphones and computers which best cater to their own views about these features.