Hacker News: pacala

New comment by pacala in "My dad launched the quest to find alien intelligence"

pacala — Mon, 22 Jun 2020 08:10:00 +0000

That's because sooner or later every species enters an equilibrium state with the amount of energy available in the ecosystem. In the process it may out-compete quite a bit of other species, and so we speak of 'invasive species'.

New comment by pacala in "Homelessness: The Problem That Even Silicon Valley Can’t Seem to Solve"

pacala — Sat, 20 Jun 2020 19:25:43 +0000

One reason for 'even'. Silicon Valley contains some of the richest zip codes, richest corporations and highest paying jobs in the country. Yet all this monetary wealth doesn't seem to help with a major humanitarian crisis unfolding on its doorstep.

New comment by pacala in "Dark Matter Experiment Finds Unexplained Signal"

pacala — Thu, 18 Jun 2020 16:06:19 +0000

Researchers say there are three possible explanations for the anomalous data. One is mundane, 99.98%. Two would revolutionize physics, 0.01% and 0.01%.

New comment by pacala in "Google faces $5B lawsuit for tracking people in incognito mode"

pacala — Wed, 17 Jun 2020 22:07:20 +0000

I don't understand. There are dozens, if not hundreds, or even thousands of bits to use to identify any given browser, but providing one extra such bit that politely asks 'Do Not Track' is now a problem because it makes tracking slightly easier?

New comment by pacala in "Google faces $5B lawsuit for tracking people in incognito mode"

pacala — Wed, 17 Jun 2020 19:06:10 +0000

It's not a black/white situation. It's a 'argue in front of a judge' situation.

With sign: Unassailable evidence that tresspassers are informed they are not welcome.

Without sign. Owner word vs tresspasser word.

The latter is a weaker stance.

New comment by pacala in "Google faces $5B lawsuit for tracking people in incognito mode"

pacala — Wed, 17 Jun 2020 18:31:16 +0000

Great point. There are 'No Soliciting' signs and laws.

https://banneradviser.com/no-soliciting-signs

> In a nutshell, no, door to door solicitation isn’t illegal. But if you have a no soliciting sign posted on your property, and the salesperson is refusing to vacate the property, they can be assessed trespassing fines and possible legal charges.

New comment by pacala in "Google faces $5B lawsuit for tracking people in incognito mode"

pacala — Wed, 17 Jun 2020 18:04:05 +0000

If everyone has a lock on their door, then people will just ignore it and break into the house anyways.

New comment by pacala in "Google faces $5B lawsuit for tracking people in incognito mode"

pacala — Wed, 17 Jun 2020 18:02:16 +0000

1 extra bit is the last of my concerns, there's plenty of bits to uniquely fingerprint a browser anyways. I'd gladly trade one inconsequential bit, which requires malicious intent to misuse, to keep my privacy safe when dealing with honorable entities like, I presume, Google.

https://blog.mozilla.org/internetcitizen/2018/07/26/this-is-...

What goes into one's fingerprint:

1. navigator.userAgent, 2. navigator.language, 3. navigator.doNotTrack, 4. screen.width, 5. screen.height, 6. screen.colorDepth, 7. Intl.DateTimeFormat().resolvedOptions().timeZone, 8. navigator.platform, 9. navigator.hardwareConcurrency, 10. GPU vendor and renderer, 11. isTouch, 12. storage types, 13. font-list, 14. canvas-hash

New comment by pacala in "Google faces $5B lawsuit for tracking people in incognito mode"

pacala — Wed, 17 Jun 2020 17:24:26 +0000

Does Google Chrome set DoNotTrack by default in incognito mode? If not, why not?

New comment by pacala in "Do Not Follow JavaScript Trends"

pacala — Tue, 16 Jun 2020 22:42:44 +0000

Having used both Python and Typescript recently, I largely prefer the consistency of Typescript. [Hey mom, I like cherries better than strawberries]. Having said that, I'd love to have named function arguments in Typescript. Props workaround is, well, a workaround.

New comment by pacala in "Do Not Follow JavaScript Trends"

pacala — Tue, 16 Jun 2020 22:38:42 +0000

One of the greatest boons of static typing is formal documentation of data structures and interfaces. Catching errors early is a bonus :)

New comment by pacala in "Do Not Follow JavaScript Trends"

pacala — Tue, 16 Jun 2020 22:36:29 +0000

Typescript greatest features are optional types and the extensive type inference. On small projects this can work well, but on larger ones I can see overly rigid style guides requiring typing everything explicitly in triplicate becoming cumbersome in an Enterprisey way. Curious what people's experiences are.

New comment by pacala in "ZFS Removes References to Slavery"

pacala — Sun, 14 Jun 2020 20:59:27 +0000

The title right now: 'ZFS Removes References to Slavery'. Probably 95% of the commenters have not read TFA in sufficient detail to argue minutiae details. They see 'language changed in support of the dominant political current' and link it to Newspeak because that's the only frame of reference most people are aware of. It's not like it's an isolated incident, there is plenty of language redefinition, history rewriting and statues toppling as we speak.

New comment by pacala in "ZFS Removes References to Slavery"

pacala — Sun, 14 Jun 2020 20:47:02 +0000

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak

New comment by pacala in "Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone"

pacala — Fri, 12 Jun 2020 19:47:12 +0000

I'm somewhat confused about the TV media landscape, as there are cable news channels, Fox / CNN / MSNBC, but there are also the big 3 networks, ABC / CBS / NBC, which also air news and are also available on cable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_cable_news

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Three_television_networks

New comment by pacala in "Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone"

pacala — Fri, 12 Jun 2020 19:33:36 +0000

Seattle has 600,000 people. In a given year there are 30 murders and 300 rapes. One can collect 175,200,000 amateur camera footage of 'an hour in the life of the average Seattle-ite' until one encounters an hour with a murder, or 17,520,0000 such peaceful one hour videos until one captures a rape on camera.

Does the presence of overwhelmingly peaceful footage of average people going by their average days make Seattle at large an Utopia with no crime? Is that footage in itself sufficient evidence to abolish the police and the court system, because, look, there are 17,520,000 hours of peaceful footage before something terrible happens to someone?

It is incredibly difficult to build an accurate image of a large scale group of people judging by a few hours of direct experience. 1000 harder if through footage selected by people with their own agendas. Media coverage, especially audio-visual coverage, is wild because media coverage is simply an inappropriate way to depict such phenomena.

New comment by pacala in "Too Many of America’s Smartest Waste Their Talents (2018)"

pacala — Tue, 09 Jun 2020 22:27:03 +0000

That is almost right. Society has decided that, on average [or median if you prefer], every job is worthless. Income inequality is skyrocketing between automation, globalization and capital gains. The only jobs that are not worthless are top 10% jobs that increase the inequality gradient, mainly finance or automation.

New comment by pacala in "Twitter suspended Indian dairy giant Amul for call to boycott Chinese goods"

pacala — Sun, 07 Jun 2020 17:25:03 +0000

Wow. Building and operating a massive unaccountable automated system to deboost and/or silence undesirable speech is now OK because 'it was a mistake'.

Edit. At what point are the users and/or the public at large owed a detailed postmortem for those 'mistakes'?

New comment by pacala in "The Pitchforks Are Coming For Us Plutocrats (2014)"

pacala — Thu, 04 Jun 2020 17:28:26 +0000

There can be more than one truth valid at any given point:

* The wealth was not taken from those children. At the limit, those children can just fuck off and die in the street of starvation, it's not like they have too many useful skills to offer to society anyways.

* We have an ingrained tribal expectation that the tribe will take care of all its members to some degree, within the available resources. Driven by the game theoretical proposition that tribes that fail to do so will find their human resources and social cohesion depleted and be easily torn apart by rival tribes. By now integrated in our genetic heritage.

One only need look into the streets [or at Twitter] to see that we are incapable of having any nuanced conversation anymore. It's either 100% A or 100% B. If you dare explore a balance, both sides will rip you apart for lack of ideological purity.

New comment by pacala in "The Pitchforks Are Coming For Us Plutocrats (2014)"

pacala — Thu, 04 Jun 2020 17:17:53 +0000

> The low skilled workers are going to get paid very little because we choose to pay them very little.

I wish it were that simple. More reasons:

* Low skilled workers are paid very little because there don't have any higher paid options.

* Low skilled workers are paid very little because there are some many other low skilled workers willing to take their place, domestically, internationally, and through immigration.

* If there are 2 business using low skill labor, one paying low wages and another high wages, the latter goes bankrupt.

Cherry on top: the AWS project is to turn SWE cushy jobs into 'low skill' occupations. Bezos understands economics. He's building the ultimately efficient money making machine, which, by necessity, reduces the human expenses to the absolute minimum.