Hacker News: mrmonkeyman

New comment by mrmonkeyman in "Bringing Emulation into the 21st Century"

mrmonkeyman — Sun, 04 Jul 2021 14:56:52 +0000

Agreed. This is the way of the future. Is there a subscription model? I'd like myself a CPU-as-a-service. $50-100 a month seems reasonable.

Using these "efficiently repurposable" building blocks we can even create new software! Ultimate composability. I'll rent you a couple of instructions and you can create whatever turing-completeness your heart desires for the low, low cost of $0.01 per instruction. (I will have to send all your data to our headquarters in Russia and China, but only occasionally.)

Did anyone patent this already? Time to jump on this.

New comment by mrmonkeyman in "A single cell slime mold makes decisions without a central nervous system"

mrmonkeyman — Sat, 27 Feb 2021 17:44:55 +0000

You call it equal potential, like it is some obvious thing, but what if that is intelligence?

New comment by mrmonkeyman in "Falling sperm counts, declining egg quality, and endocrine disruptors"

mrmonkeyman — Tue, 23 Feb 2021 08:31:50 +0000

Anecdote: same here, but did not avoid anything on that list.

New comment by mrmonkeyman in "SolarWinds hack was 'largest and most sophisticated attack' ever: MSFT president"

mrmonkeyman — Mon, 15 Feb 2021 07:09:03 +0000

And if you ever ignore a red light, pay your taxes late or do anything other than your absolute best to be an upstanding citizen you should be put into prison for the rest of your life.

New comment by mrmonkeyman in "The Kotlin Foundation"

mrmonkeyman — Sat, 13 Feb 2021 18:03:54 +0000

This lacks nuance. You ignore the effect they have on the ecosystem as a whole. Mentioning the "Go community" and their "agreement" of Google's decisions without acknowledging this is disingenuous at best. They have already swayed and gatekept large swaths of the (web)development "community" by their decade-long dominance and no one can make an impactful, meaningful decision in that field without their implicit approval. Their dominance is felt best by the way they control the conversation i.e. what we don't talk about - i.e. the web among other things they touch sucks, continues to suck and it is going to get worse and less free and they are significant negative contributers. So yeah, I'd rather see them cut into pieces.

New comment by mrmonkeyman in "What you can learn about medieval Europe if you focus on peasants"

mrmonkeyman — Fri, 12 Feb 2021 08:24:26 +0000

But still lightyears off. You are dramatizing our priviledged existence. Billions (literal) would offer their firstborn son to be "cogs" working a "massive corporate enterprise". What you are describing is the good part of modern life, I suggest you don't look at the bad parts if this already disturbs your soul.

New comment by mrmonkeyman in "Future Plans for Autotools"

mrmonkeyman — Tue, 26 Jan 2021 10:24:11 +0000

I like the idea, but the reality is that it fosters extreme complexity on all kinds of axes for marginal benefit.

Sure, for hobbyists it is fine but professional use.. I disagree.

New comment by mrmonkeyman in "Ruby 3.0"

mrmonkeyman — Fri, 25 Dec 2020 08:17:55 +0000

As a computer engineer you need to focus on computers, not people. I know this is popular right now, but it sucks and it is wrong and leads to bad results. Yes, the current state of affairs is a "bad result", young ones.

We expect civil engineers to account for people, but they think about materials, planning, math, etc. Stay close to your craft or you might see it and/or your position in it evaporate.

New comment by mrmonkeyman in "M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness"

mrmonkeyman — Thu, 03 Dec 2020 14:25:06 +0000

> The longest battery isn't on an iphone, the best camera isn't on an iphone, the latest screen tech isn't on an iphone, etc. etc.

It is not on any single Android model either. Fragmentation is a thing.

New comment by mrmonkeyman in "Ask HN: How do you work through large ideas?"

mrmonkeyman — Fri, 27 Nov 2020 12:12:24 +0000

Take time off, go offline and have deep thoughts. Record everything.

In 90% of cases: you need to ignore these thoughts as they can be time-consuming. You are not going to solve anything worthwhile related to organizing a 100M democracy if you are not in that field. You will not just "pick it up" unless you are a freak of nature and you are not.

New comment by mrmonkeyman in "What would happen if computers never got any faster?"

mrmonkeyman — Fri, 27 Nov 2020 08:44:28 +0000

There is a new wave of games coming which use advanced physics, think destructible voxel worlds, like minecraft but having blocks of 1cm instead of 1m. VR benefits immensely from CPU/GPU overkill and can use any cycle it can get. The status quo you see now is caused by CPU stagnation not the other way around. Once tech finds a way to afford more cycles games and applications will find ways to use them (and not just by wrapping them with Electron :).

New comment by mrmonkeyman in "Apache OpenMeetings – Video chat, messaging, white board, doc editing and more"

mrmonkeyman — Wed, 25 Nov 2020 14:09:57 +0000

It's time to separate UI from logic (finally). Let the UI guys make UI projects that hook onto engines made by backend guys. Why one frontend? Let the community come up with a few and don't let a backend engineer and their practices and ideas anywhere close to a designer, the former will suffocate the latter with their total lack of vision and sensitivity.

New comment by mrmonkeyman in "The problem of prosocial lying in the economics profession"

mrmonkeyman — Wed, 25 Nov 2020 11:03:30 +0000

It's an old trick. Hand readers, mediums and various types of cold readers are really good at this. You can always be right using these techniques.

New comment by mrmonkeyman in "Nvidia Announces A100 80GB GPU for AI"

mrmonkeyman — Wed, 18 Nov 2020 22:55:30 +0000

I'm quite interested in what you suppose the word "man" means? I'm serious.

New comment by mrmonkeyman in "Origins of the youtube-dl project"

mrmonkeyman — Wed, 11 Nov 2020 07:21:26 +0000

In theory, yes. In practice, no.

New comment by mrmonkeyman in "Neurosymbolic AI – Combining neural nets and symbolic AI"

mrmonkeyman — Mon, 19 Oct 2020 05:40:58 +0000

Of course not. But executing it right is hard.

New comment by mrmonkeyman in "We deleted the production database by accident"

mrmonkeyman — Sun, 18 Oct 2020 12:03:44 +0000

It actually was. Shocking, isn't it?

New comment by mrmonkeyman in "We deleted the production database by accident"

mrmonkeyman — Sun, 18 Oct 2020 12:00:41 +0000

HN likes to downplay this, apparantly, but not everything can be boiled down to bureaucracy.

Yes, medical professionals use checklists. They also have a harsh and very unforgiving culture that fosters craftsmanship and values professionalism above all else. You see this in other high-stakes professions too.

You cannot just take the checklist and ignore the relentless focus on quality, the feelings of personal failure and countless hours honing and caring for the craft.

Developers are notorious for being lazy AF, so it's not hard to explain our obsession with "just fix the system". It's a required but not sufficient condition.

New comment by mrmonkeyman in "How I generated incomes as a web developer without working as a freelancer"

mrmonkeyman — Sat, 17 Oct 2020 14:30:16 +0000

Having a post to repost on HN is a prerequisite to "being lucky".. luck favors the prepared and all that.

New comment by mrmonkeyman in "Where Are All the Successful Rationalists?"

mrmonkeyman — Fri, 16 Oct 2020 21:17:44 +0000

This. Money is no hindrance. It can be set in motion for good. It's the only thing capable of producing real change.