Hacker News: ry454

New comment by ry454 in "White noise as sleep aid may do more harm than good, say scientists"

ry454 — Mon, 19 Oct 2020 05:07:26 +0000

I won't be surprised if FFT of tinnitus, if we could make one, reveals a very accurate picture of the patient's health.

New comment by ry454 in "He Married a Sociopath: Me"

ry454 — Sat, 17 Oct 2020 01:40:41 +0000

Ha, that's a good one. I wonder what a marriage of two high ranked VPs looks like.

New comment by ry454 in "Zeptoseconds: New world record in short time measurement"

ry454 — Fri, 16 Oct 2020 20:48:51 +0000

They should switch to logarithmic scale and just say "an order-21 time interval". These "zepto" prefixes are gibberish.

New comment by ry454 in "Will SARS-CoV-2 become endemic?"

ry454 — Fri, 16 Oct 2020 20:42:10 +0000

Luckily, we won't have this problem with "SARS-CoV-2".

New comment by ry454 in "Why 4,998 died in U.S. jails before their day in court"

ry454 — Fri, 16 Oct 2020 20:40:53 +0000

This reminds me of what the Lincoln character said in the same named movie about the 13th amendment: "what you will be to our nation after this I don't know." Well, now we know.

New comment by ry454 in "Will SARS-CoV-2 become endemic?"

ry454 — Fri, 16 Oct 2020 20:20:00 +0000

Eh.. this will cost me some reputation points on HN, but I have to say this.

Why "Spanish flu" and not H1N1-A-18? That flu is called "Spanish" only because Spain's newspapers openly talked about the epidemic. The actual origin, according to wikipedia, was "likely Kansas".

New comment by ry454 in "Section 230 Explained"

ry454 — Fri, 16 Oct 2020 20:13:02 +0000

I believe that the debate around Section 230 is a sign of the growing consensus among the ruling class that Project Internet is complete, that it's successfully deployed a world wide surveillance framework, and that no further growth for the sake of the growth, which could destabilize the said framework, is needed, and thus it's time to close the gates and fortify the site from competitors. One fact supporting this stance is the rapidly growing popularity of the so called "end-to-end encryption" idea, that could crack the foundation of surveillance, unless hard measures are taken right now.

New comment by ry454 in "Manifest V3 changes are now available to test in Microsoft Edge"

ry454 — Thu, 15 Oct 2020 03:21:16 +0000

Brave's business model is also about ads.

New comment by ry454 in "Eric Yuan's Visa Application Was Rejected 8 Times"

ry454 — Thu, 15 Oct 2020 03:13:22 +0000

Well, for a founder of a $40 bil company, the American dream is real and even got HDR colors.

New comment by ry454 in "Eric Yuan's Visa Application Was Rejected 8 Times"

ry454 — Thu, 15 Oct 2020 03:10:20 +0000

That's a rhetorical question, right? In any company, employees don't get to capture any value. In Cisco, even if he turned his unit into a $50 billion business, he would be lucky to get $50 million and a promo to SVP. Even Google's CEO gets "only" 200-400 mils and I suppose that a VP at Cisco is a much smaller role.

New comment by ry454 in "Manifest V3 changes are now available to test in Microsoft Edge"

ry454 — Thu, 15 Oct 2020 00:58:35 +0000

Troy citizens also believed that if something is called a horse and looks like a horse, then it's obviously a horse and can't be anything else, especially when it's given for free.

New comment by ry454 in "Manifest V3 changes are now available to test in Microsoft Edge"

ry454 — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 21:12:18 +0000

Mozilla is almost entirely funded by Google.

New comment by ry454 in "Manifest V3 changes are now available to test in Microsoft Edge"

ry454 — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 21:11:15 +0000

We'll have to run our own fork of Chromium, just to run uBO. And that makes sense: it's strange to call a browser supplied by an ad company a "user agent".

New comment by ry454 in "A 3D sculpting web application"

ry454 — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 20:29:17 +0000

In fact, it's a really simple app: a height map on a sphere approximated with triangles. With a bit more extra complexity, the app could do raymarching on a interpolated height map: this would remove triangle artifacts around "cliffs" on the height map. It would still be real time 60 fps even on smartphones.

To do something like this, you need to know a bit of WebGL and a bit of JS. No frameworks really needed at this level. The best guide to WebGL I know of is this:

https://webgl2fundamentals.org/

Complexity starts when the height map isn't enough and you want to make arcs or otherwise arbitrarily shaped structures. This is where you'd need a framework, unless you want to implement all the math and glsl yourself.

And as always, the idea is really the 1% of the work. Anyone can say "it's just a height map on a sphere". 99% of the work is materialising the idea, debugging glsl, fixing ugly bugs on smartphones and esotheric browsers, dealing with partial WebGL API and so on.

New comment by ry454 in "Scientists find upper limit for the speed of sound"

ry454 — Sun, 11 Oct 2020 05:45:10 +0000

We can go even deeper and ask how we'd call sound-like gravity waves in spacetime? Some sort of oscillating system of heavy stars can produce a periodic gravity wave that we'd call sound probably.

New comment by ry454 in "Scientists find upper limit for the speed of sound"

ry454 — Sun, 11 Oct 2020 04:15:08 +0000

Here's an experiment. One cubic mile of space in a gravity free region is filled with tennis balls that freely float around and bounce each other from time to time. If we produce a wave in this medium by oscillating one of the walls, would we call this wave "sound"? If not, what makes atoms "better" than tennis balls? What if we replace atoms with electromagnetic balls exhibiting similar bouncing properties, would it be good enough to count waves in this medium "sound"? Getting back to the original experiment. Now, the tennis balls float not in vacuum, but in a gas, e.g. argon. In this case, both gas atoms and tennis balls would transmit waves induced by the oscillating wall. What makes one wave more "sound" than the other? What if we don't know for sure that the gas atoms are real atoms and not some atom substitutes? At what point does sound become not really sound? My point is that if we can substitute the medium carrying the waves, than we may as well remove the medium from the definition of sound.

New comment by ry454 in "Scientists find upper limit for the speed of sound"

ry454 — Sun, 11 Oct 2020 02:35:42 +0000

Isn't it the same as the speed of light? If sound is an abstract wave-like signal, then it can be transmitted equally well with radio waves or molecules in the air. The paper should probably mention that it's the upper limit of sound in a atomic based medium.

New comment by ry454 in "How tech workers at Kickstarter formed one of the only unions in the industry"

ry454 — Thu, 08 Oct 2020 08:32:36 +0000

"management has been more receptive" - that's a corpspeak for "nothing has changed", i.e. a bunch of vague statements with no substance that lazily nudge the reader to attribute something (severance pay) to someone, without saying that explicitly because that would be a lie (with potential legal troubles). If there were meaningful changes, they would be attributed to the union explicitly: "thanks to our union representative, we've come up with a revised agreement that gives all employees 8 weeks of vacation, 40% higher pay and eliminates the non-compete clause."

New comment by ry454 in "How tech workers at Kickstarter formed one of the only unions in the industry"

ry454 — Wed, 07 Oct 2020 20:39:34 +0000

Except that unions will bring their own non-compete non-negotiable agreements.

New comment by ry454 in "How tech workers at Kickstarter formed one of the only unions in the industry"

ry454 — Wed, 07 Oct 2020 20:37:01 +0000

So long as the software industry is expanding, the salaries are growing and software engineers have freedom to jump ships, I don't see unions coming. The recipe to make a union is to lock thousands of grumpy software engineers in a bureaucratic company with stagnant wages.