Hacker News: dbsmith83

New comment by dbsmith83 in "Supreme Court upholds TikTok ban, but Trump might offer lifeline"

dbsmith83 — Fri, 17 Jan 2025 16:46:42 +0000

I agree that evidence would be nice, but let's not pretend TikTok is simply a 'speech platform' for 'The People'. It is an app on your mobile phone collecting data about you and making it available to a foreign adversary and feeding you content controlled by a foreign adversary.

New comment by dbsmith83 in "Why the weak nuclear force is short range"

dbsmith83 — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 01:03:26 +0000

Yet Einstein said something like "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough". So maybe Feynman didn't understand it "well enough"

New comment by dbsmith83 in "Preferring throwaway code over design docs"

dbsmith83 — Mon, 16 Dec 2024 17:29:41 +0000

True, I agree 100%, and that's why I chose to say 'irrelevant' to imply that there was nothing useful about it inherently for those cases. Most of the time, at least in coding, there was probably something useful that came out of it, even if you had to scrap the plan. At the very least, some sort of learning more about the problem space. In the case of war, however, if you lost the war because you over-planned (such as planning one thing very very intricately instead of having several rough plans that leave room for some improv), I'd argue that there probably aren't any residual benefits to celebrate

New comment by dbsmith83 in "Preferring throwaway code over design docs"

dbsmith83 — Mon, 16 Dec 2024 17:06:07 +0000

It is kind of an argument against overplanning though, because if your plan that you spent considerable time creating becomes irrelevant, you wasted a lot of time

New comment by dbsmith83 in "A visual proof that a^2 – b^2 = (a + b)(a – b)"

dbsmith83 — Sun, 15 Dec 2024 15:34:24 +0000

I think you could make it work for negative numbers. You would just shade the negative area differently to show it. For example, if you subtract 1000 sq ft from 100 sq ft, geometrically it means you are trying to remove more area than you have. So, to represent this, draw a rectangle of 100 sq ft. Conceptually "extend" this area by subtracting 1000 sq ft. The extra 900 sq ft that you try to subtract but can't "exists" as a negative representation. This could be represented by flipping the surplus 900 sq ft into a negative axis or shading it differently to denote that it's a deficit rather than an actual, positive area.

New comment by dbsmith83 in "A visual proof that a^2 – b^2 = (a + b)(a – b)"

dbsmith83 — Sun, 15 Dec 2024 15:14:54 +0000

In the first image on the left, you can see the large square has length and width of a, which would have an area of a*a, or a^2. There is then a little square inside with length and width b, for an area of b^2. Essentially, the little square is getting removed from the big one (a^2 - b^2). In the last image on the right, you can see that the length of one side is (a-b) and the top side is (a+b), which would mean the area is equal to the product of (a-b)(a+b). This means that a^2 – b^2 = (a + b)(a – b). The intermediate steps just show how to move the area around visually

New comment by dbsmith83 in "Scientific American's departing editor and the politicization of science"

dbsmith83 — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 01:17:45 +0000

Because people don't commute around the city? Or come into contact with other people who do? Also, you're assuming that the 'initial' cases were actually the first cases. You don't know that for sure.

New comment by dbsmith83 in "State of Python 3.13 performance: Free-threading"

dbsmith83 — Wed, 06 Nov 2024 05:50:16 +0000

Clearly, which is what I was showing. A poor design decision imo

New comment by dbsmith83 in "State of Python 3.13 performance: Free-threading"

dbsmith83 — Tue, 05 Nov 2024 15:57:01 +0000

There have been many breaking changes throughout python 3.x releases:

- standard library modules removed

- zip error handling behaves differently

- changes to collections module

- new reserved keywords (async, await, etc.)

You can argue how big of a deal it is or isn't, but there were definitely breakages that violate semantic versioning

New comment by dbsmith83 in "How to Train Yourself to Go to Sleep Earlier"

dbsmith83 — Fri, 01 Nov 2024 14:04:56 +0000

Similar to the journal idea, I keep a notebook by my bed where I can write down any thoughts or concerns I think of that needs attention the next day. This lets my mind relax so that I'm not worried about forgetting it or trying to solve it

New comment by dbsmith83 in "Jeff Bezos killed Washington Post endorsement of Kamala Harris"

dbsmith83 — Sat, 26 Oct 2024 04:35:26 +0000

I find it strange that people are so upset about the absence of an opinion piece from this newspaper. What is the reason? Either you want to be told what to think, or you want everyone else to be told what to think. I think it is the latter. Would there be any outrage here if Fox news decided not to endorse a candidate? I highly doubt it. Some people may like being challenged on what they believe, which is good, but that's probably the edge case

New comment by dbsmith83 in "Time is a dimension, but not like space"

dbsmith83 — Sun, 20 Oct 2024 16:05:04 +0000

A fidget spinner illustrates this for me--bear with me. When I spin it and it just stays at rest in my hand, it spins fast. But when I quickly move my hand carrying the spinner, you can see it slows down the spin rate, and then when I stop moving it, it speeds back up. While the mechanisms are entirely different (classical vs. relativistic) they both show motion can affect certain fundamental properties of a system, whether it be spin rate or the passage of time

New comment by dbsmith83 in "Apple Approves iDOS Emulator"

dbsmith83 — Sun, 25 Aug 2024 20:06:14 +0000

Look into Bleem. It was sued, but it won. Though the legal costs did hurt the company， it reaffirmed that emulators are legal and you can sell them. In fact, there currently are nintendo emulators for sale to this day (3dSen)

New comment by dbsmith83 in "Joe Biden stands down as Democratic candidate"

dbsmith83 — Fri, 26 Jul 2024 13:26:30 +0000

It still says nothing about an individual. That's why you get to vote.

New comment by dbsmith83 in "Joe Biden stands down as Democratic candidate"

dbsmith83 — Tue, 23 Jul 2024 23:27:57 +0000

Additionally, we all make decisions collectively in society even though many of them do not affect us personally. I'd argue old people do have interests in many decisions, but perhaps you are not aware of them

New comment by dbsmith83 in "Joe Biden stands down as Democratic candidate"

dbsmith83 — Mon, 22 Jul 2024 05:05:41 +0000

Decisions affect your children, and their children, and the future of mankind. I don't buy that argument that old people don't have skin in the game

New comment by dbsmith83 in "Joe Biden stands down as Democratic candidate"

dbsmith83 — Mon, 22 Jul 2024 04:57:24 +0000

Because you get to vote, so explain why it needs to be a rule

New comment by dbsmith83 in "AdFlush"

dbsmith83 — Thu, 30 May 2024 14:37:39 +0000

I don't. Are you talking about 'sponsored shortcuts'? You can turn those off in the settings. It's on the first page you see when you hit the settings button in the top right

New comment by dbsmith83 in "Instead of “auth”, we should say “permissions” and “login”"

dbsmith83 — Tue, 28 May 2024 14:33:56 +0000

Unix would like a word (file) with you :)

New comment by dbsmith83 in "OpenAI pulls Johansson soundalike Sky’s voice from ChatGPT"

dbsmith83 — Tue, 21 May 2024 03:10:12 +0000

Yes, I just saw this. Looks like the 'questions' did come from her and her legal team after all