Hacker News: sacrosancty

New comment by sacrosancty in "A basic guide to using Asian names"

sacrosancty — Tue, 19 Sep 2023 10:47:09 +0000

I think he's joking about the parent saying the name of that individual prevented the massacre.

New comment by sacrosancty in "Chicago’s parking meter disaster"

sacrosancty — Thu, 07 Sep 2023 07:09:23 +0000

Normal cities forego the revenue for themselves when they close parking spaces, so it's never free. If they payed those fees out of the billion dollars in advance revenue they got at the start of the contract, it wouldn't seem so bad. Perhaps the real problem is how they spent that money too quickly.

New comment by sacrosancty in "Geo Guesser identifies the location and seat number from an aerial shot"

sacrosancty — Tue, 05 Sep 2023 03:55:06 +0000

I'm surprised at people who can't imagine what's theoretically possible. I always assumed someone could identify my location from a photo if they tried hard enough, even many decades ago before I'd heard of geoguessing or AI. It's just obvious that there's usually enough information in a photo to do that. Even for a grassy field.

There's a simple solution - don't publish your private information. That's how to use the internet 101. If you already did, then maybe it wasn't a very important secret anyway.

New comment by sacrosancty in "How small is the smallest .NET Hello World binary?"

sacrosancty — Sun, 09 Jul 2023 20:35:52 +0000

Those 18 bytes aren't the binary, they're just the command to call the program. Don't count it just as you wouldn't count the length of the filename and its arguments for a regular executable.

New comment by sacrosancty in "Louis Rossmann calls community to leave Reddit"

sacrosancty — Fri, 16 Jun 2023 08:12:00 +0000

Before he was a right to repair activist, he was a complaining-about-Apple-making-life-difficult-for-independent-repairmen Youtuber, and before that, he was a showing people how he repairs computers Youtuber. He didn't just appear overnight to be an influencer.

New comment by sacrosancty in "Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid"

sacrosancty — Mon, 12 Jun 2023 05:57:30 +0000

With some of these controversial topics, there always seem to be people who prefer disinformation over truth for the reason that the general public can't be trusted with the truth since it might motivate them to do bad things.

The question then is, does it apply to yourself, or are you special? What knowledge motivates you to do bad things? Do you wish that was hidden from you so you weren't such a harmful person?

New comment by sacrosancty in "She Was Falsely Accused of Cheating with AI – and She Won’t Be the Last"

sacrosancty — Tue, 06 Jun 2023 20:22:37 +0000

You can detect it. You interview the student about their paper. If they don't know or understand what they wrote, then either they cheated or they may as well have cheated because they didn't learn anything. If you have enough money (they do), make the interview part of the assessment for all students.

New comment by sacrosancty in "She Was Falsely Accused of Cheating with AI – and She Won’t Be the Last"

sacrosancty — Tue, 06 Jun 2023 20:16:57 +0000

Yes. There's a power imbalance without accountability. Of course they're going to abuse it. This professor and his university are both clearly incompetent. Students shouldn't even have to defend themselves against a cheating accusation. Either prove it or assume it didn't happen.

I used to be a teacher and even when I strongly suspected a student of cheating, if I couldn't prove it, I wouldn't even mention it to them or anyone else. Weak evidence doesn't mean partial guilt.

New comment by sacrosancty in "Ask HN: Did students lose interest in electronics as a hobby in the early 80s?"

sacrosancty — Sun, 28 May 2023 22:50:16 +0000

I experienced that and enjoyed electronics because I had far more power to create physical things that I found exciting. If you're into making gadgets and machines and robots and all that, computers weren't enough on their own or even any use at all.

Nowadays, it's a bit murkier because you can use single board computers with pre-made modules for interfacing with the real world and assemble a gadget with almost no application of electronics knowledge and mostly just software.

It might have helped that I didn't have any of the latest computers and electronics in the 80s so it was empowering to see that I could make things at a similar level of technology to the old 2nd hand and cheap commercial products I had around. I remember being very disappointed with digital watches because they were so opaque having an inaccessible COB blob doing all the interesting work.

New comment by sacrosancty in "Supreme Court rules Andy Warhol’s Prince art is copyright infringement"

sacrosancty — Thu, 18 May 2023 21:46:46 +0000

I'm a bit of a broken record on this, but copyright lasting beyond the death of the author is important so that near-death authors can still sell their work. It would be near-worthless to a buyer/publisher/etc. if it was about to enter public domain. Imagine the headline "Famous artist diagnosed with terminal cancer - suddenly can't sell her work to fund her treatment."

New comment by sacrosancty in "Updating our inactive account policies"

sacrosancty — Tue, 16 May 2023 21:41:14 +0000

The concern is about the account that posted the videos being deleted along with the videos.

New comment by sacrosancty in "Contempt Culture (2015)"

sacrosancty — Sun, 14 May 2023 16:07:55 +0000

How is an executable permission more secure than a hidden .exe extension that also enables it to be executed by "opening" it, and is also hard to see by default?

New comment by sacrosancty in "The Ugly Truth Behind “We Buy Ugly Houses”"

sacrosancty — Fri, 12 May 2023 05:02:48 +0000

America is blessed with a low population density (10% of India's) and lots of rich people who recently decided to live crammed together in cities. So there's more than enough spare property for everyone.

New comment by sacrosancty in "Why are lithium prices collapsing?"

sacrosancty — Sun, 30 Apr 2023 21:04:16 +0000

I think there are two kinds of environmentalist - the purist kind you prefer and the practical kind. The practical kind has the arguments that appeal to most people with things like "let's not run out of oil because it's useful" and "lets not cause climate change because it'll lead to problems for people". But the purist kind is really more of a religious belief that you can't persuade people of in practical terms. That doesn't mean it's wrong - it's just that even adherents don't know why it's right, if it is. Just like religion. You see the purist kind extending to things like "lets not colonize the moon or Mars because we'll damage their natural state." Maybe in a million years, they'll turn out to have been right, but nobody knows that today.

New comment by sacrosancty in "Local License Key Verification"

sacrosancty — Tue, 25 Apr 2023 11:29:30 +0000

I do the last one and have never found a key on the internet but I have found cracks where they probably just decompiled the program and returned true from the function that checks the keys or some other simple bypass.

New comment by sacrosancty in "The Four Hobbies, and Apparent Expertise"

sacrosancty — Tue, 25 Apr 2023 11:13:18 +0000

Who says any of the quadrants is aspirational? The author presents them as equally worthy, and why not? They're hobbies, not work. The whole point is to do what you enjoy. No need to feel bad for having a "bad" hobby.

New comment by sacrosancty in "FBI is warning people against using public phone-charging stations"

sacrosancty — Wed, 12 Apr 2023 20:25:46 +0000

That's pretty much USB3-A isn't it? High speed data is separate from power and low speed data. You can have connectors with just one or the other.

Anyway, the world will be worse place with just incremental incompatible tweaks to the so-called "universal" connectors so that they're never universal because of churn. Hopefully USB-C is the end of the line forever, whatever its flaws might be.

New comment by sacrosancty in "Reading thermometer temperatures over time from a video"

sacrosancty — Wed, 05 Apr 2023 23:04:20 +0000

Except it will be a complete dead end if they want to read some other instrument. We have no universal electronic interface for this sort of thing but human-like vision is a universal interface.

New comment by sacrosancty in "SFUSD's delay of algebra 1 has created a nightmare of workarounds"

sacrosancty — Fri, 31 Mar 2023 03:27:56 +0000

That's more your parents' job since a career or hobby as a mathematician is extremely niche. School math is really a foundation to enable you do to all sorts of other things, as well as being directly useful. You can go a long way in engineering with only high-school calculus and engineer is a hugely popular profession and trade. Proofs are almost completely useless there. An engineer can usually "prove" something satisfactorily by testing it in a couple of cases and guessing that it generalizes to all real-world-scale numbers. That takes a kind of intuition about how typical equations typically behave which you get from doing all those tedious exercises at school.

New comment by sacrosancty in "The chat control proposal does not belong in democratic societies"

sacrosancty — Mon, 27 Mar 2023 03:45:23 +0000

I think people are generally happy when such systems get repurposed, because the new purpose is likely to be something they're happy with when it comes. For example, in New Zealand, a car number plate tracking system that was only supposed to be used for specific purposes like finding stolen cars, was improperly used during covid lockdowns to catch some people who had been given permission to travel to another region and were doing so legally but the government discovered the permission was a mistake and wanted to stop them. Everyone loved it because bogey-man covid was more important than whatever promises some politician seduced people with years ago.