Hacker News: the_french

New comment by the_french in "Milan confirms new cycling network linking 80% of the city to bike paths"

the_french — Mon, 10 Jan 2022 14:46:13 +0000

> But we know how that goes and nobody actually will care about the scooter enough to return or take care of it.

Looking at countries like the Netherlands this is not true. Train stations have rentable bikes which are always available in sufficient quantities.

> So what do we do? Uber-Tesla-Subway pods. I call it by phone, it shows up to my house, either transfers me or lets me dock with the subway and then brings me the last mile just to leave me there for the next thing it has to do.

Individual 'pods' will just never be a sufficiently scalable & ecologically friendly solution for any real city. There's just no way that having several hundred kilos of metal & plastic per individual, along with the space requirements (esp for safety) works.

On the other hand, autonomous & shared 'cars' could replace individual vehicles for hauling / transporting as peak usage would be much lower than for transit.

New comment by the_french in "Indiana life insurance CEO says deaths are up 40% among people ages 18-64"

the_french — Mon, 10 Jan 2022 12:15:59 +0000

no, it isn't. Don't go around spreading FUD, the article makes no mention of causation for the deaths, extrapolating that to an entirely hypothetical (and unfounded) vaccine induced immunodeficiency is unjustified.

New comment by the_french in "Google fined €150M, Facebook €60M for for non-compliance with French legislation"

the_french — Thu, 06 Jan 2022 13:44:05 +0000

GDPR fines can go up to 4% of global revenue so the 62 cent comparison seems apt.

New comment by the_french in "Google fined €150M, Facebook €60M for for non-compliance with French legislation"

the_french — Thu, 06 Jan 2022 13:35:52 +0000

if I recall correctly, the fine scales up as time goes on up some (2?) percentage of company revenue. Like most people I would be happier seeing them get a several billion dollar fine right off the bat but so long as it eventually becomes unbearable that's good enough for me.

New comment by the_french in "In ‘learning trap’ experiment, adults leap to conclusions while children explore"

the_french — Sun, 14 Nov 2021 09:40:24 +0000

I don’t think most theoretical physicists are seeking wealth, they tend to have deeper intellectual motivations.

New comment by the_french in "Beyond inductive datatypes: exploring Self types"

the_french — Sat, 30 Oct 2021 17:58:40 +0000

This is an interesting idea but is there any description of the soundness of this approach? Any functionality capable of subsuming not just inductive types but higher-inductive types is going to be very subtle. I looked around on the repository but I can't find any formal description of the language or type theory, which is worrying for a proof tool.

New comment by the_french in "Where do type systems come from? (2017)"

the_french — Fri, 01 Oct 2021 12:10:00 +0000

> Some programs in the Simply Typed Lambda Calculus [^1] have no type—i.e. diverging programs.

Nitpick, because those programs have no type they are not members of the Simply Typed Lambda Calculus but only of the underlying untyped calculus

New comment by the_french in "As Amazon deforestation hits 12 year high, France rejects Brazilian soy"

the_french — Wed, 05 May 2021 22:10:29 +0000

The french government has actively promoted the growth of forests / their management for over a century. Today, there are more acres of forests than at the turn of the twentieth century for example.

New comment by the_french in "Initial M1 support merged into Linux SoC tree"

the_french — Fri, 09 Apr 2021 17:04:36 +0000

from the cursory read of the documentation on the openbsd site it doesn't seem to support TPMs. Setting up the encryption of a disk paritition does seem easier though.

New comment by the_french in "Initial M1 support merged into Linux SoC tree"

the_french — Fri, 09 Apr 2021 12:18:27 +0000

On some fronts it even feels like things have regressed. Trying to resize an encrypted partition is way, way too difficult. And it seems like GParted doesn't handle LUKS so you're back to manually typing block offsets on the command line.

If you wanted to use a TPM to store the FDE passphrase, well, you have the patience of a saint. Compare this to Mac or Windows where you click a single button and it's all setup, including TPM!

As much as I love linux for server environments, it remains a failure when it comes to modern desktop environments.

New comment by the_french in "Breakthrough for ‘massless’ energy storage"

the_french — Tue, 30 Mar 2021 12:29:40 +0000

This may be rather naive but wouldn't using an energy storage mechanism for structural purposes be a bad idea?

That could mean that every fender bender now risks igniting the hood of your car.

New comment by the_french in "President of Mexico warns about Silicon Valley censorship"

the_french — Tue, 12 Jan 2021 10:38:18 +0000

a law which was democratically approved, with public oversight, a mechanism for undoing it and not at the whim of private shareholders.

New comment by the_french in "Apple's privacy labels show WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger hunger for user data"

the_french — Fri, 08 Jan 2021 13:23:25 +0000

I think that building a competitor on top of facebook is against their terms of service. You wouldn't be able to build an 'alternative facebook client', legally at least.

New comment by the_french in "WhatsApp gives users an ultimatum: Share data with Facebook or stop using app"

the_french — Thu, 07 Jan 2021 13:38:27 +0000

This approach ignores all the aspects that made whatsapp / chat services popular in the first place. A short list:

  - Contact Discovery
  - Group chats
  - History / Log
  - Shared message order
  - Communication beyond text (emojis / reactions / inline images) 
  - Ability to receive messages while offline 
  - No need for technical skills

These aren't trivial features, they are prerequisites for any replacement, decentralized or otherwise. Just because we as developers like / tolerate things like IRC doesn't mean the rest of the world will accept it.

New comment by the_french in "Paris to ‘get rid of 70k parking spaces’"

the_french — Fri, 04 Dec 2020 15:59:15 +0000

The vast majority of cars in the streets of paris are not from suburban commuters but from people in the 15th and 16th (read: wealthy) neighborhoods preferring to drive than to mingle with the rest.

Besides, removing cars from the road means that busses will be more reliable (less traffic jams) so you can avoid the trains in more situations.

New comment by the_french in "South Korea's fusion device KSTAR runs for 20 seconds at 100M degrees Celsius"

the_french — Tue, 01 Dec 2020 09:35:19 +0000

I think it's misleading to say ITERs technology is 30 years behind. A lot of the tech that has been going into the ITER design didn't exist 30 years ago! They didn't anticipate developments in super conductors but this is by no means a 90s machine built 30 years too late.

Part of the role of ITER was to fund the research to develop the reactor's components while giving everyone a concrete goal to work towards. The challenge with ITER is much more than construction.

New comment by the_french in "South Korea's fusion device KSTAR runs for 20 seconds at 100M degrees Celsius"

the_french — Tue, 01 Dec 2020 09:27:15 +0000

It's a design we've modelled and predicted should work. Since we've never actually built anything close to it, we have no way of knowing whether those models were even close. If ITER shows results that are even close to breakeven you can expect a rush of newer designs using technological advances to shrink scale and improve performance.

Besides, ITER is also meant to help develop experience in handling large plasmas for extended periods of time, that knowledge will transfer to other designs.

New comment by the_french in "Nvidia Announces A100 80GB GPU for AI"

the_french — Thu, 19 Nov 2020 11:06:36 +0000

the yt recommendation algorithm is probably the worst among all the major platforms. It will pigeonhole you into the same 10 videos, which you will never escape. I listen to music on youtube relatively frequently but then it will always go back to the same 10 songs its decided i should listen to, no matter what genres I play.

New comment by the_french in "Moderna Covid vaccine candidate almost 95% effective, trials show"

the_french — Mon, 16 Nov 2020 15:30:39 +0000

Part of that pressure comes from the lack of funding though. When you have to fight against 100 other applications for a grant showing you have a recent track record of well-cited papers helps you stand out.

If researchers had steadier access to funding there would be less pressure to constantly publish 'breakthroughs' to secure next years funding.

New comment by the_french in "We need less powerful languages (2015)"

the_french — Sat, 14 Nov 2020 14:16:43 +0000

I think you would be interested in Noether, a full language design based around this principle: https://tahoe-lafs.org/~davidsarah/noether-friam4.pdf. I've always been sad that an implementation was never created. It's one of the most unique designs for a language in the past decade.