Hacker News: taoistextremist

New comment by taoistextremist in "Ford CEO says the company 'overestimated' self-driving cars"

taoistextremist — Thu, 11 Apr 2019 20:37:56 +0000

Ford was working on autonomous stuff before Argo though, from what I understand. Argo was bought I think in hopes that they could significantly advance their tech with startup ingenuity. It's a bit disappointing because I think it's a good testing platform to develop these vehicles in Detroit given our variety of weather and road conditions that would be great for applying all of this in non-ideal conditions, but all I ever see in this city are May Mobility shuttles.

I don't think Waymo is really all that much ahead. Their testing is largely still in very ideal areas. Arizona has been attracting firms not just because they passed some permissive laws, but also because it's a place with lots of sunlight and relativity mild weather compared place like the Great Lakes or the Northeast. Same goes for California. Their progress however looks much better because they're really aggressively testing this stuff in ideal real-life conditions, but I think even they are a long way off from deploying those vehicles to places like Michigan year-round (a state that also has allowances for autonomous driving).

New comment by taoistextremist in "There is no reason to cross the U.S. by train, but I did it anyway"

taoistextremist — Thu, 21 Mar 2019 19:16:24 +0000

Amtrak isn't a government agency though. It's a public-private partnership AFAIK

New comment by taoistextremist in "Build Your Own ‘Medicare for All’ Plan. Beware: There Are Tough Choices"

taoistextremist — Fri, 22 Feb 2019 17:07:17 +0000

So, according to your article, 29% of Canadians had to wait 4 or more hours, whereas 24% of Americans did, so I'm not seeing much comparative improvements and I'd hypothesize that long ER wait times are not to do with which healthcare model you have, it has to do with misuse of ER. Meanwhile, France, Germany and the Netherlands all had outstanding numbers, and as far as I know they all have universal coverage.

New comment by taoistextremist in "Blood transfusion startup Ambrosia is now up and running"

taoistextremist — Thu, 17 Jan 2019 14:38:45 +0000

No, they have an actual product. It's just pseudo-science. It's a different sort of fraud that would attract a different type of buy-in

New comment by taoistextremist in "Libc on macOS invokes Perl as a subprocess for string processing (2017)"

taoistextremist — Wed, 16 Jan 2019 18:30:24 +0000

Yeah, but I think they have a point about the variable names. Really hard to tell the significance of anything there.

New comment by taoistextremist in "React create composable components"

taoistextremist — Tue, 15 Jan 2019 18:04:37 +0000

It's more convenient than pagination for the user. At least up until they want to share a specific section

New comment by taoistextremist in "Intro to NFC Payment Relay Attacks"

taoistextremist — Tue, 04 Dec 2018 19:52:28 +0000

Well, only if you unlock your phone, too.

New comment by taoistextremist in "Intro to NFC Payment Relay Attacks"

taoistextremist — Mon, 03 Dec 2018 17:09:30 +0000

How useful is the info gathered from an attack like this? Does it depend on the specific method (e.g., contactless card versus something like Google Pay) how compromising the information is? I was under the impression that by having virtual cards and the service itself to contact, Google Pay had something of a buffer from attacks like this.

New comment by taoistextremist in "Google Tried to Patent My Work After a Job Interview"

taoistextremist — Fri, 30 Nov 2018 16:49:43 +0000

Unfortunately, virtually all CS programs have become Software Engineering programs save for their names. The actually thinking and theory behind it is often more of a side note as educational institutions focus on teaching students how to use specific tools that are popular at the time, leading to many people having a good idea of these specific tools, but no idea on their actual design implications or how anybody actually realized how to do these things.

Sadly, if you want to learn proper theory (what I consider to be CS) you have to get lucky and find a mathematics program that has electives so you can focus on things like discrete mathematics and information theory.

New comment by taoistextremist in "Bitcoin trading in Venezuela is skyrocketing amid 14,000% inflation"

taoistextremist — Fri, 08 Jun 2018 18:49:43 +0000

Yeah, this seems pretty dodgy when they're showing just pure bolivar expenditure. I think cryptocurrency could probably be a good deal for Venezuelans right now, too. It avoids being subject to poor economic decisions by their government while still also avoiding being at the mercy of an economic hegemon. The more likely case though is that they're probably primarily using USD, along with other regional currencies, far more than cryptocurrency. They're a lot easier to use, too, than cryptocurrency.

New comment by taoistextremist in "Emirates Planes Could Be Going Windowless"

taoistextremist — Fri, 08 Jun 2018 14:37:50 +0000

I get this feeling that the displayed images just won't be the same, not the least because they'd just be flat images instead of what you see when you normally look out. As someone who regularly requests window seats this doesn't appeal to me in the least, but I don't fly Emirates so I guess it doesn't really matter. I suppose I might be in the minority, though, of people who love just staring out the window, especially on takeoff and descent.

New comment by taoistextremist in "Show HN: Cannoli – A compiler for a subset of Python written in Rust"

taoistextremist — Thu, 17 May 2018 18:48:13 +0000

Well, it is a fun name.

Do you plan to support this down the line? I feel like compilers that compile down to Rust could become really good tools depending on how the popularity of the language goes.

New comment by taoistextremist in "Show HN: Cannoli – A compiler for a subset of Python written in Rust"

taoistextremist — Thu, 17 May 2018 18:09:21 +0000

This isn't a really important question, but why the name Cannoli? I feel like you missed an opportunity here to call it "PycRust". (c standing for "compiled to" of course)

New comment by taoistextremist in "John Carmack: My Steve Jobs Stories"

taoistextremist — Mon, 14 May 2018 20:51:42 +0000

I personally don't like relying on my browser for notifications. I like having native apps because usually fine tuning notifications for them is easier in that respect, things that while I imagine are possible through the web browser, probably aren't going to be done on a web app. It's also just an organizational thing since I don't like to have a list of a bunch of tabs, but having a handful of apps isn't too bad to navigate through.

Just because there's been a lot of progress in making web apps do things that were more natural for native apps, doesn't mean that it's the best way to go about something.

I get the wish for more support for web apps, though. I just switched over from a near 4-year-old phone that was replete with security updates and other un-removable stuff in the storage which prevented me from having a lot of apps installed (especially as so many insist on a large footprint in internal storage), so I increasingly used my web browser to access things. After the switch, though, you can bet I downloaded a bunch of apps I had deleted.

New comment by taoistextremist in "John Carmack: My Steve Jobs Stories"

taoistextremist — Mon, 14 May 2018 17:43:43 +0000

Yeah, there's certain things that native apps make a lot more sense for (e.g. messaging apps like Facebook Messenger where you want notifications to come up similar to text messages), but certain things really don't need anything more than the mobile website you look at (for example, at least for some people, mobile Wikipedia over the app).

New comment by taoistextremist in "Mobile phone cancer warning as malignant brain tumours double"

taoistextremist — Thu, 03 May 2018 17:13:52 +0000

Any cancer is related to age in the sense that the older a person is, the more opportunity they've had to encounter it. I suppose the best way to look at it is see how many cumulative years a population represents: if a population is getting older on average, then the cumulative years have risen, therefore there's been more opportunity to encounter this disease.

New comment by taoistextremist in "The Future of Software Is No Code"

taoistextremist — Mon, 23 Apr 2018 19:35:53 +0000

Yeah, but they were saying in math related contexts, in which orthogonal is almost equivalent to perpendicular.

New comment by taoistextremist in "The Future of Software Is No Code"

taoistextremist — Mon, 23 Apr 2018 15:50:17 +0000

Nah, that would be skew. Orthogonal crosses but goes in a different direction.

New comment by taoistextremist in "EU competition chief holds threat of breaking up Google"

taoistextremist — Mon, 26 Mar 2018 19:35:23 +0000

I think it would be more like Google couldn't sell advertising to European companies, nor provide other paid services like licensing and the sort.

New comment by taoistextremist in "In Search of Proofs from “The Book”"

taoistextremist — Fri, 23 Mar 2018 17:52:57 +0000

That's a different take on mathematics than many people I've met who study it. For me, mathematics is an extension of philosophy, geared towards finding intrinsic truth in a quantitative domain, and it just happens to have applications.