Hacker News: saon

New comment by saon in "Archive Team: A Smattering of Tweets"

saon — Mon, 05 Apr 2021 20:52:12 +0000

This kind of thing can never be materially accomplished though. Whenever you post something publicly to the internet, any recipient can back it up indefinitely, separately from the origin network. This is a fundamental material reality. No amount of legislation or centralized control of the content can overcome it.

Ultimately people will have to culturally/collectively get over everyone's internet past, change their own behavior after understanding this new reality, and deal with the consequences of their speech. Even if it were possible, having the ability to remove all copies of past speech would probably produce worse social outcomes. I think I'd rather deal with a person's complicated history, than a history that has been selectively revised to deceive me.

Private, perishable communication is only possible peer-to-peer, through a secure tunnel or network you own, with a person you trust to delete it. The same applies to verbal speech honestly, if you tell somebody something in confidence, it's up to them not to tell anybody else. People just need to accept that using twitter is like making a press release and not like talking to some friends.

New comment by saon in "An even worse anti-encryption bill than EARN IT"

saon — Fri, 26 Jun 2020 18:53:53 +0000

As a native born floridian, the claim that southern republicans are not good at critical and analytical thinking seems true to me. Surely they're out there, but I haven't met them yet, and I've met plenty of conservative southerners.

If your voting base prefers the blood of christ over a facemask to protect from coronavirus, you probably aren't writing bills based on, uh, informed analysis of relevant data.

New comment by saon in "Why Richard Stallman Doesn’t Matter"

saon — Thu, 17 Oct 2019 14:36:13 +0000

You're right. But you have to recognize it is because corporations recognized they can commodify tons of their code to reduce costs and improve code quality and security. The linux foundation has dozens of multi-million-dollar partner corporations, whereas the FSF has maybe 5000 contributing members globally. But those corporations have no reason to guarantee that your computer will do what you want it to do, and many reasons to guarantee that it will do what they want it to do. This is a pervasive norm now, especially on hackernews where the demographic is primarily entrepreneurial web-only devs.

Before deriding free software, ask yourself, who benefits from being able to read the source code of a program that restricts what ebooks you can read?

New comment by saon in "China’s 'Thought Transformation' Camps [video]"

saon — Tue, 18 Jun 2019 18:55:18 +0000

Going to jail or conversion therapy as ordered by a judge for the crime of being gay already has happened. The 'reeducation' camps already existed we just didn't call them that. Keep enjoying your imaginary future victimization though, I'm sure it'll make you super relatable to other oppressed people.

New comment by saon in "Nike Says Its $250 Running Shoes Will Make You Run Much Faster"

saon — Sat, 21 Jul 2018 16:37:58 +0000

Motorsport is sort of similar where manufacturers build cars and there are independent regulations about the cars that define a class. There are spec racing series confined to single cars with very limited additions (safety) that are more oriented towards the driver in terms of competition (spec miata and spec bmw come to mind), but any international world champion type of sport is probably going to require enough monetary backing that manufacturer and aftermarket sponsorship is required to even afford to compete in the first place.

New comment by saon in "Amazon device recorded private conversation, sent it out to random contact"

saon — Fri, 25 May 2018 22:20:02 +0000

I dont know if it does or not but even if it did, that wouldnt make it free software. You cant compile your own alexa, or modify it to remove code you dont want, or submit improvements to it. Android is open source (excluding drivers), but google play isn't, and neither are the apps on it.

New comment by saon in "Android P"

saon — Tue, 08 May 2018 22:55:33 +0000

this applies only to installed apps from the store, not system apps like googles or oem apps. you cant disable background activity of any apps. dont want an always listening ai helper from google? too bad for you.

New comment by saon in "The aging mind: neuroplasticity in response to cognitive training (2013)"

saon — Tue, 01 May 2018 00:52:59 +0000

As additional anecdata ive tried the gamut of piracetam, oxiracetam, aniracetam, pramiracetam, coluracetam, sulbutiamine, etc. Out of them all i found oxiracetam to be the easiest to use since it doesnt require rather large doses or extremely small ones. I did notice that racetams made it easier to sustain focus but gave me a bit more tunnel vision, it was easier to miss things that were obvious in a more relaxed state. After prolonged use (more than 5 days or so) I would become somewhat more emotionally blunted and irritable. Im also a smoker and would recommend not mixing nicotine with racetams since they both impact nicotine acetylcholine receptors which are involved in many places but specifically in muscle control. On higher doses combined with more cigarettes I noticed my muscles would be extra tight and stiff which caused me to eventually discontinue use. Using moderate doses every other day without smoking I didnt notice any ill effect physically and felt I got more out of it by alternating states. Its hard to pin the emotional aspect on it as it could have been due to other life factors, just made existing feelings more apparent.

New comment by saon in "Portugal electricity generation temporarily reaches 100% renewable"

saon — Tue, 10 Apr 2018 17:56:17 +0000

There are a few reasons including weight, safety, cost, package size, etc. A flywheel that can hold appreciable energy requires high speed or high mass as well as a low drag / bearing friction environment. The passengers must be protected from catastrophic failure of the flywheel by some strong casing ( more weight ) and cant be 'turned off' in an emergency. In race cars where heavy braking and acceleration are the norm and cost is not a factor, light, strong, fast flywheels can do a good job provided they run on active bearings in a low pressure casing. In a heavy road car the additional weight required makes the engine less efficient in terms of mpg, and probably less safe during a crash ( or if similarly safe, much heavier due to casing requirements ). Combine this with the inability to externally charge the flywheel and there arent really any great reasons to use it over electric energy storage

New comment by saon in "20 lines of code that beat A/B testing every time"

saon — Wed, 30 May 2012 15:50:30 +0000

This seems like a trivial thing to fix by presenting optimal with limited noise. Let's say it picks the optimal choice x% of the time (some really high number), and when additional changes are made or automatically detected, this percentage drops. If you pick the next most optimal down the line through all of your options, and make x proportional to the period of time since the last change, it should make it reasonably resistant to this kind of biasing in the first place, and can ramp back up at a reasonable rate.

Better yet, make x dependent in some way on time since the last change, and relative change in performance of all options from before and after the change.

New comment by saon in "Bartosz Milewski - The Downfall of Imperative Programming"

saon — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 03:09:46 +0000

I think the consideration (not addressed by the article), is that high power highly-multi-core systems have the potential to change the kind of computing experience we have, and harnessing the power of these systems effectively with the imperative tools available right now is really hard compared to using pure fp.