Hacker News: ryusage

New comment by ryusage in "Why Don’t the Poor Rise Up?"

ryusage — Thu, 25 Jun 2015 17:57:29 +0000

I agree. As posted here, out of context, it sounds silly. But in context:

"For those in the bottom quintile, household income in inflation-adjusted dollars has dropped sharply, from $13,787 in 2000 to $11,651 in 2013. According to the Census Bureau, 64 million Americans currently live in the bottom quintile."

Seems like a perfectly reasonable statement.

New comment by ryusage in "Remote-First Communication for Project Teams"

ryusage — Fri, 30 Jan 2015 14:50:27 +0000

I like the idea; it makes a lot of sense. In practice though, there are a LOT of times that it's much, much faster to communicate verbally. I feel like trying to really stick to this remote-first style might be more difficult/frustrating than it sounds.

New comment by ryusage in "OAuth1, OAuth2, OAuth..? (2013)"

ryusage — Fri, 23 Jan 2015 19:22:58 +0000

My understanding from my research into OAUTH2 is that most of the vulnerabilities in it are only issues in a naive implementation. They can be made secure, but it's not easy and you have to know to do it in the first place.

Doesn't OpenID Connect address those issues? I know that's what Google is using now.

New comment by ryusage in "Google Glass sales halted"

ryusage — Fri, 16 Jan 2015 16:24:09 +0000

I tried out google glass last fall and this matches my experience of it. It really doesn't overlay info as part of your normal view, which for me removes the AR designation. It does place information in a place that doesn't require you to move your head or look down, which is I guess where the "heads up" description comes in...but it still requires you to divert your attention, like looking at a rear-view mirror in a car. Sure, you can still see things in front of you in your peripheral vision, but that still seems less integrated than I would associate with the term HUD.

New comment by ryusage in "By Making a Game Out of Rejection, a Man Conquers Fear"

ryusage — Fri, 16 Jan 2015 15:49:23 +0000

If someone is completely terrified of even attempting a free throw, then there's no sense in worrying whether they sink the shot. Until that terror is overcome, the fact that they try at all is a success.

New comment by ryusage in "Battlecode 2015 – AI Programming Competition"

ryusage — Mon, 05 Jan 2015 15:16:14 +0000

theaigames.com does this by running the game engine and bots as console apps and communicating by sending simple commands through their input and output streams. They generally provide some "starter bots" for a couple languages, in which the message parsing is already handled for you, but they accept bots in any language.

New comment by ryusage in "View hidden photos of anyone on Facebook"

ryusage — Tue, 30 Dec 2014 15:26:00 +0000

I'm more interested in how it works than to actually use it. I'm assuming it wouldn't be submitted here if it didn't work. Any details?

New comment by ryusage in "If money doesn't make you happy, you probably aren't spending it right (2010) [pdf]"

ryusage — Mon, 10 Nov 2014 23:45:14 +0000

I saw a good TED talk[1] a while ago about this topic, and the speaker made the interesting point that people use the word happiness to mean different things. You can ask someone how happy they are feeling at a given moment, or you can ask them how happy they are with their life in general. And we evaluate those two feelings in very different ways.

He mentions at one point that studies about how people feel in the moment were very correlated with money, but only up to the point that they didn't need to worry about it anymore. After that, it had little bearing on their experiential happiness. But when asked how happy they were with their lives, the more money, the better, with no limit. Which seems to me more like pride in an achievement.

I wonder if the happiness that wasn't "your own" was because part of you was happy when you thought about where you were in life, but you were also aware it wasn't really improving your day-to-day experience. Kind of a cognitive dissonance between the two ways you were evaluating your happiness.

I don't know, you think that's even close?

[1] http://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_kahneman_the_riddle_of_exper...

New comment by ryusage in "Notch programming a Doom-like in Dart"

ryusage — Tue, 26 Aug 2014 17:15:01 +0000

Oh, got it. Didn't realize "in the browser" specifically meant javascript.

New comment by ryusage in "Notch programming a Doom-like in Dart"

ryusage — Mon, 25 Aug 2014 20:01:59 +0000

We've played this off and on at the office for the last couple years: http://www.quakelive.com

New comment by ryusage in "Diaspora social network cannot stop IS posts"

ryusage — Thu, 21 Aug 2014 17:14:25 +0000

The whole point of their platform is that it's not controlled by any central authority and is resistant to censorship, control, breaches of privacy, etc. The fact that even some of the most horrific and undesirable content, that which people most adamantly wish to censor, CAN'T be censored, is a strong proof that their network works.

All they need to do to is say, "Censoring this is not possible", as they seem to be doing, and that promotes their software. They don't need to talk about, approve of, or even be aware of the horrific things that ISIS does. It's enough to know that people really, really don't like what they're posting.

On the other hand, by actively attempting to censor the content, as Diaspora also seems to be doing, they're also sending the message that they don't actually truly believe in openness as a value, deep down, even though they designed their software to provide it. That actually hurts them a bit in the long run, I think.

New comment by ryusage in "Safety Feature For Pedestrians Has Undesired Consequence"

ryusage — Tue, 01 Jul 2014 21:40:11 +0000

Weird. I wonder if this is primarily a problem in larger, more congested cities where people tend to drive more aggressively. I live in a smaller city where we've had these a very long time, and they don't seem to inspire the kind of behavior they're talking about here. But driving here is also significantly less aggressive than somewhere like, say, Chicago.

New comment by ryusage in "Words known by men and women"

ryusage — Thu, 26 Jun 2014 15:27:15 +0000

So, it's just a type of cheese? Is it special somehow? Or is it just really tasty cheese?

New comment by ryusage in "How Different Cultures Understand Time "

ryusage — Wed, 04 Jun 2014 14:35:56 +0000

Yeah, at least in my part of the US, that's very true. The roads do curve a bit of course, but they're straight enough that you drive 55 - 80 mph (88 - 130 kph) for almost the whole trip. And a lot of the time, there are at least two lanes to pick from -- common courtesy is that slower cars stay in the right lane so that faster drivers can pass them.

New comment by ryusage in "A vast hidden surveillance network, powered by the repo industry"

ryusage — Wed, 05 Mar 2014 16:01:03 +0000

I'm curious when we'll start seeing people dressing like this:

http://ahprojects.com/projects/stealth-wear

New comment by ryusage in "Isaac Asimov Predicts in 1964 What the World Will Look Like in 2014"

ryusage — Thu, 02 Jan 2014 18:06:30 +0000

Because it looks so much cooler. And you never have to worry about bumpy roads or rocks or any of that ever again. You can go over water like it's nothing! It's something that seems amazing but not completely impossible.

When people romanticize this idea, they're never thinking about efficiency or practicality. Only how cool it seems.

Video phone calls are the same thing. As someone else pointed out here, the idea of it seems really cool and amazing. But we've had that ability now for years, and it turns out: it's actually less convenient and efficient than just sending a simple little text message. So it doesn't get used a lot.

New comment by ryusage in "Edward Snowden, Whistle-Blower"

ryusage — Thu, 02 Jan 2014 15:51:38 +0000

I interpreted it as the latter, and I actually really like it. Since this whole thing started, there's been a lot of debate about whether he's a patriot or a traitor. Without even reading the article, I think that headline is the clearest, boldest statement the NYT could make about where they fall on that question.

New comment by ryusage in "Ender’s Game is Already a Reality for the U.S. Military"

ryusage — Wed, 20 Nov 2013 20:12:08 +0000

Ironically, after seeing the trailer, that poster, and even the comment above with the spoiler alert, your comment right here is the thing that just made me think, "Ohhh, the kids in the movie are fighting a war WITHOUT EVEN REALIZING IT?"

So, you know, whatever, but yeah I think it's a spoiler.

New comment by ryusage in "The anterolateral ligament: Wrong information on the Internet"

ryusage — Fri, 08 Nov 2013 22:50:02 +0000

Even the phrase "you were lied to" is bound to make some people defensive. People generally feel embarrassed when they've been conned or deceived, like it's a personal failing on their own part, and that statement is just bluntly calling them out for being a fool.

It's pretty tricky to point these things out without offending anyone.

New comment by ryusage in "Hands-on with the Xbox One: Kinect, interface, and OS impressions"

ryusage — Fri, 08 Nov 2013 17:04:04 +0000

That's a fair point. Personally, though, I see biometric data collection as an inevitable, uncontrollable future, so I figure the solution to it is going to have to be a social one. Why spend all my time being afraid of people collecting it? It's how they use it that I care about.