Hacker News: djexjms

New comment by djexjms in "Open-source communications by bouncing signals off the Moon"

djexjms — Sun, 09 Nov 2025 10:25:44 +0000

This is obviously incorrect. Latency is not the same as bandwidth. EME hobbyists will bounce voice signals off the moon.

New comment by djexjms in "OpenMW 0.50.0 Released – open-source Morrowind reimplementation"

djexjms — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 22:31:44 +0000

20 to 30 years would ensure that abandoned media that was formative to a person growing up will enter the public domain within their lifetimes which would be a nice thing to have in my opinion. It would also ensure that any work done by an artist during the early phase of their career (the phase where artists are most likely to agree to lopsided contract terms) would stand a chance of reverting back to the public domain before the end of that artist's career. Very very few works are making any significant revenue after 30 years. I think a system where initial copyright is free for 20 years, with the option of renewing for an additional 10 years for some fee, and then the option to renew annually after that would be fair. For the very small number of works that are still commercially viable after 30 years, the publishers can figure out how long it makes sense to keep renewing the copyright. Otherwise it really is in the public's best interest to have a robust public domain. Many fewer works would go missing that way.

The way the copyright is structured right now is the result of regulatory capture. The cost of these long terms of copyright is the loss of books, movies, music, games, etc. Millions upon millions of hours of creative labor have been lost. These costs are born by everybody that will never have to chance to have access to that media. The benefits of these long copyright terms are only the publishers. Having an annual renewal fee for copyrighted works published 30 or more years ago would be something that would be a visible cost in the books of large publishers. As it is it is too easy for them to ignore the downsides of long terms of copyright. I am not claiming that no media would be lost if we had no copyright, but the efforts of archivists are difficult enough as it is. Media that is no longer being copied is destroyed eventually. Obviously making it a felony to copy something will reduce the number of people making copies of it. That's the whole point after all.

New comment by djexjms in "NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission"

djexjms — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 10:19:54 +0000

Sure the SLS is a total mess, but from what I understand, there wasn't ever really a concrete plan on how to use SpaceX rockets to actually get to the moon. The following video is a presentation given at a NASA meeting explaining the issue.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoJsPvmFixU

New comment by djexjms in "The surprising geography of American left-handedness (2015)"

djexjms — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 08:54:13 +0000

Wait a minute, that doesn't sound right.

New comment by djexjms in "Show HN: OffChess – Offline chess puzzles app"

djexjms — Tue, 08 Jul 2025 11:03:54 +0000

For what it's worth, the entire Lichess corpus of puzzles (over five million positions with solutions and theming tags) is available for download in CSV format at https://database.lichess.org/#puzzles

New comment by djexjms in "ICEBlock, an app for anonymously reporting ICE sightings, goes viral"

djexjms — Thu, 03 Jul 2025 11:47:39 +0000

That's a nice ideal. I honestly kind of agree with you in the sense that I wish that was how things were. But in my view, it's easier to think about the police as a force whose primary purpose is to enforce the property rights of the capital holding class. In the United States there have been court rulings clarifying that police officers are never obligated to risk their lives.

If you look at the actual numbers, at least in the US, policing can really only be viewed as a risky profession from a white-collar point of view. According to OSHA, construction workers, truck drivers, farmers, and even pilots all have a greater likelihood of dying on the job.

New comment by djexjms in "ICEBlock, an app for anonymously reporting ICE sightings, goes viral"

djexjms — Thu, 03 Jul 2025 11:01:32 +0000

What about ignoring due process while doing so? Is that, in your view, in line with the constitution? If it is, what recourse does a US citizen detained by ICE (either accidentally or not) have? Also, how do you view Trump's efforts to end birthright citizenship via Executive Order? Birthright citizenship is in the 14th Amendment. If the president is allowed to arbitrarily redefine who is and is not a citizen, are constitutional protections anything more than ink on paper?

New comment by djexjms in "I will do anything to end homelessness except build more homes (2018)"

djexjms — Fri, 20 Jun 2025 10:23:49 +0000

Reading this comment thread was a fun way to start my day. Always funny to see people react to satire about them.

New comment by djexjms in "Google I/O '24 Puzzles"

djexjms — Fri, 15 Mar 2024 14:17:56 +0000

Things started getting tricky at level 7. I can see that level 8 is solvable, but I'm not going to have time to solve it before leaving for work. Neat little puzzle.

New comment by djexjms in "New cognitive science tool to shed light on mental health"

djexjms — Mon, 12 Dec 2022 18:59:38 +0000

Even if it turns out not to be the perfect solution, it might turn out that this kind of measurement might be useful for things like estimating the effectiveness of medication and other medical interventions, or even lifestyle changes. Imagine if this kind of thing could be turned into a medical device. Many people who end up committing suicide have had previous suicidal episodes. Being able to have a technology that people with known suicidal tendencies can use to help keep tabs on their own mental health could potentially be as useful to them as blood sugar monitoring is to diabetics.

New comment by djexjms in "New cognitive science tool to shed light on mental health"

djexjms — Mon, 12 Dec 2022 18:50:35 +0000

That one take on it. The other is that it could potentially save literally tens of thousands of lives. Immediately classifying a potentially life-saving medical technology is a threat to the second amendment might not be the best look for 2A advocates.

New comment by djexjms in "Discovering latent knowledge in language models without supervision"

djexjms — Mon, 12 Dec 2022 18:26:21 +0000

I think more caution is warranted here. That argument seems to rely on our experience of reality being an accurate representation of objective reality. There are some ideas that are surprisingly difficult to dismiss that essentially state that our perceptions of reality do not have this property, and that in fact that any organism that is the result of an evolutionary process is really only ever incentivized to evolve a perception system that presents them with what is essentially a user interface. Spacetime itself may just be a data structure generated in the mind as a simplification of some much more complex and informationally overwhelming reality.

New comment by djexjms in "Discovering latent knowledge in language models without supervision"

djexjms — Mon, 12 Dec 2022 18:11:54 +0000

But that is actually a fairly accurate description of the paper you asked it to summarize for you. It's not the models fault that you don't like the argument of the paper.

New comment by djexjms in "Discovering latent knowledge in language models without supervision"

djexjms — Mon, 12 Dec 2022 18:09:57 +0000

Another way to look at it is that the fact that the rocket moved at all was due to the rockets. The fact that those rockets propelled the spacecraft into lunar orbit and then back to the landing zone on earth was due to the math.

New comment by djexjms in "AI unmasks anonymous chess players, posing privacy risks"

djexjms — Sun, 11 Dec 2022 15:48:04 +0000

Maybe the strategy here is to just not make any blunders.

New comment by djexjms in "Lichess on Scala3 – Help needed"

djexjms — Sat, 10 Dec 2022 22:32:10 +0000

In case you didn't know, this was the correct answer. Nice troubleshooting!

New comment by djexjms in "The Tesla Semi cab from the practical POV of someone who drives trucks"

djexjms — Sat, 10 Dec 2022 20:30:07 +0000

I am a CDL holder who used to do long haul trucking. I haven't had a chance to get behind the wheel of these vehicles yet, but the only criticism that I feel holds weight here is the one about not being able to get the light levels on the tablets to a non-distracting level during night driving. Hopefully that can be addressed with further development. The door being behind the driver's seat is a bit odd, and I anticipate it causing some confusion during traffic stops, but if these vehicles attain any decent market share, people will get used to it.

New comment by djexjms in "Hiding in plain sight? The argument for invisible aliens (2020)"

djexjms — Wed, 07 Dec 2022 15:48:23 +0000

Disclaimer: I'm not a physicist. I'm just some random internet dude who likes learning things. My understanding is that a single photon wouldn't count as an observer. It doesn't even experience time (from the point of view of the photon, admission and absorption are simultaneous). Now if that photon is entangled with another photon, that can then be considered an observer. Someone please correct me if this is not accurate.

New comment by djexjms in "In Solidarity with Library Genesis and Sci-Hub (2015)"

djexjms — Wed, 07 Dec 2022 12:28:54 +0000

If you want an educated and informed populace (the kind you need for democracy to be worth a damn), then access to information for as many people as possible is a necessary but not sufficient condition. I don't buy that people are dumber today than they were a century ago. People did some pretty dumb things then as well. If you think things are bad now, presumably you would like the situation to improve. I don't see how the situation improves if most people would need to take out a loan to read academic papers.

Something that is worth noting, is that what these kinds of sites are doing is fundamentally the same as what local libraries do. Local libraries get a pass only because there was a precedent for their existence before copyright and IP law got out of hand. Would you have as blase an attitude if this were the big five trying to shutdown all the public libraries?

New comment by djexjms in "NASA Awards $57M Contract to Build Roads on the Moon"

djexjms — Tue, 06 Dec 2022 21:14:26 +0000

You just need one piston. Load the robot up with some rock ballast if you want, but even without, a thumper style compacter would still work in 1/6 g.