Hacker News: iisan7

New comment by iisan7 in "Transparent leadership beats servant leadership"

iisan7 — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 23:12:39 +0000

I appreciated the parallels in this idea to the concept of wu wei (無為), or achieving by doing nothing. The idea appears in writing attributed to Confucius and Lao Zi, that regarding political leadership, the best leaders can order their group or society even simply by the strong example that they set and correct judgments that they execute. This isn't meant to be carried to its extreme of course, a leader doesn't do nothing all day, and may indeed pitch in to work, but they should be making time to think and reflect. I read it as an ideal (you know when things are good when you can do nothing), not as an instruction (do nothing).

New comment by iisan7 in "Meta Superintelligence Labs' first paper is about RAG"

iisan7 — Sun, 12 Oct 2025 15:49:23 +0000

It paid off for PARC, iirc the laser printer justified lots of other things that Xerox didn't profit from but turned out to be incredibly important.

New comment by iisan7 in "The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds"

iisan7 — Sun, 05 Oct 2025 16:11:29 +0000

Except for one thing ... Schools tend not to fail many people. When an entire cohort has a different level of ability, standards adjust. Possibly some proctored, standardized exams might be more comparable over time. I have read that, controlling for student demographics, SAT scores (frequently used for US college entrance) were increasing until the mid 2000s and then flat since then.

New comment by iisan7 in "How Israeli actions caused famine in Gaza, visualized"

iisan7 — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 15:40:30 +0000

Readers should be dubious of her moral authority on this issue. When given influence, her advocacy of the war on Libya resulted in endemic violence and showed that she was as misguided as anyone else in American politics when it comes to intervention in world affairs.

New comment by iisan7 in "Why is Venus hell and Earth an Eden?"

iisan7 — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 05:15:14 +0000

I think it's still brave to attempt a mission with significant chance of failure that risks resources, careers, and reputation. And had it been a _manned_ mission to Venus, the adjective that comes to mind is not brave but pointless, foolish, or sadistic.

New comment by iisan7 in "Racintosh Plus – Rackmount Mac Plus"

iisan7 — Fri, 12 Sep 2025 21:18:21 +0000

my understanding/recollection is that it was necessary for surveillance to note when decedents had COVID; it was listed as a (contributing or underlying, not sure of the jargon) cause, and so depending on how you cut the data you could count it either way -- tally all deaths with COVID as deaths from COVID (bigger), or only those where COVID was the main cause (smaller).

New comment by iisan7 in "Show HN: MBCompass – Android Compass App"

iisan7 — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 00:45:57 +0000

Would be great to have the option to input a major city and have it in a lookup table instead of requiring gps to be on and additional permissions.

New comment by iisan7 in "My favourite fonts to use with LaTeX (2022)"

iisan7 — Wed, 21 May 2025 03:10:22 +0000

VDQI explains why chartjunk is bad, and if it reduces the amount of chartjunk in the world, that is good. Many maintain a soft spot for VDQI probably because it's their first a-ha moment in terms of appreciating graphic communication. Certainly there are other directions one could go but most people are not designers. Although, I don't see the same contradiction between DOET and VDQI, I'm curious what you mean about that.

New comment by iisan7 in "Kerrick's Wager: On the Future of Manual Programming"

iisan7 — Thu, 03 Apr 2025 05:34:51 +0000

Unlike Pascal's Wager, those who take Kerrick's Wager (and it seems a good one) each contribute minutely to the probability of the outcome under consideration.

New comment by iisan7 in "Reflections on the origins of Altair Basic (with source code)"

iisan7 — Thu, 03 Apr 2025 01:22:08 +0000

straight to the source code: https://images.gatesnotes.com/12514eb8-7b51-008e-41a9-512542...

Reflections on the origins of Altair Basic (with source code)

iisan7 — Thu, 03 Apr 2025 01:22:08 +0000

Article URL: https://www.gatesnotes.com/meet-bill/source-code/reader/microsoft-original-source-code?WT.mc_id=20250331100000_Microsoft-50th_MED-MED

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43563670

Points: 4

# Comments: 2

New comment by iisan7 in "Grim Fandango Puzzle Document (1996) [pdf]"

iisan7 — Wed, 19 Feb 2025 21:56:01 +0000

and the music! I remember saving snippets of the music that were posted online well before the soundtrack was available (and taping some of the background music). Great stuff, capitalizing on the San Francisco music scene. Great wikipedia page on it now (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_of_Grim_Fandango)

New comment by iisan7 in "Government planned it 7 years, beavers built a dam in 2 days and saved $1M"

iisan7 — Wed, 05 Feb 2025 00:00:11 +0000

True if the process of selection favors projects that produce the greatest social value, which is far from certain. Specifically in the case of projects with significant environmental impacts, I suspect you are right -- because Earth doesn't usually get a chance to present its counter-argument.

New comment by iisan7 in "CISA broke into a US federal agency, and no one noticed for a full 5 months"

iisan7 — Fri, 12 Jul 2024 21:19:35 +0000

I generally agree that the government often hamstrings itself. But consider also that you can't terminate state employees easily, and their benefits packages often cost more than 100% of their salary. The salary itself and the working conditions often don't attract the best talent. Thus it's not always so cut and dry in terms of what's the best outcome for the public interest.

New comment by iisan7 in "The Elusive Byzantine Empire (2019)"

iisan7 — Fri, 31 May 2024 16:44:03 +0000

I would argue it continues to be elusive, because it's hidden from plain view. For example byzantine ruins are often not restored, and not in demand by tourists. They are often removed to get to the classical bones beneath, or restored to a pre-byzantine state because that's where the interest lies. Western European funds and institutions have played a large role in archaeological activities in the eastern Mediterranean, and the byzantine period has little resonance with the philhellenes.

New comment by iisan7 in "Geometry for Entertainment (1950)"

iisan7 — Thu, 30 May 2024 20:28:10 +0000

Also "Jmmortel" in the following sentence (unless that J character was chosen for stylistic reasons).

New comment by iisan7 in "Martin Scorsese's secret life as an obsessive VHS archivist"

iisan7 — Wed, 27 Mar 2024 16:20:07 +0000

Right, my language was sloppy but I meant two things-- the quality will still be dependent on the hardware chain, and I should expect that a 'bit perfect' capture of a VHS tape will usually be inferior to one captured from a vintage pro deck. And then regarding processing, I'm not a professional, but I've done several successful restorations using virtualdub and avisynth, and on some degraded tapes I couldn't do nearly as well as whatever magic was going on in the vhs to dvd section of the JVC SR-MV50.

New comment by iisan7 in "Martin Scorsese's secret life as an obsessive VHS archivist"

iisan7 — Wed, 27 Mar 2024 16:10:47 +0000

No, I'm thinking of proprietary hardware or software in the decks that perform tbc, noise reduction, filtering of artifacts, etc. If given a choice of a perfect copy of a spotty VHS and all the virtualdub and avisynth filters, or the mpeg2 output from a JVC SR-MV50, my experience has been that the latter is better. However, I grant that a video preservation professional might get better results from treating a direct capture than I.

New comment by iisan7 in "Martin Scorsese's secret life as an obsessive VHS archivist"

iisan7 — Tue, 26 Mar 2024 01:08:54 +0000

Best at capture/preservation, but only theoretically best at playback someday. Currently the best software processing algorithms are imo not on par with video playback quality from the best hardware of the era, especially for damaged tapes. It's hard, although certainly not impossible, to imagine that changing. I'm 100% glad it exists though.

New comment by iisan7 in "Brain waves appear to wash out waste during sleep in mice"

iisan7 — Tue, 19 Mar 2024 01:03:09 +0000

no problem -- it was just a throwaway comment to the effect that "Phenibut" in reference to the other drug mentioned the parent comment sounded much more like a gay D&D centaur to my ear.