Hacker News: zyxley

New comment by zyxley in "The Invisible American"

zyxley — Wed, 21 Sep 2016 16:58:16 +0000

You seem to be doing that extreme-libertarian thing where you call taxes "robbery" while ignoring the negative economic effects of the general lack of safety nets in the US.

You may want to read up on the concept of the "tragedy of the commons" first.

New comment by zyxley in "MacOS Sierra"

zyxley — Tue, 20 Sep 2016 18:56:49 +0000

macrumors.com says there will probably be an update in October. They seem to usually be pretty on target with short-term predictions.

New comment by zyxley in "Consciousness Isn’t a Mystery, It’s Matter"

zyxley — Sun, 18 Sep 2016 23:00:58 +0000

> our human intelligence performs far more sophisticated operations than are possible given the number of neurons that exist in our brains

This only holds if you presume those operations are being performed in the same way as a computer, rather than the incredibly imprecise rule-of-thumb heuristics they actually use.

New comment by zyxley in "Newton inventor claims ‘Shark Tank’ is all a lie"

zyxley — Fri, 16 Sep 2016 16:26:39 +0000

> Fedoras used to be cool. Now they're weird and neckbeard-y.

Fedoras are still cool... if worn with a nice suit by a well-groomed person.

Fedoras worn with undershirts and untailored clothes were never cool in the first place.

New comment by zyxley in "Geekbench: iPhone 7 faster than all Macbook Airs in single thread"

zyxley — Fri, 16 Sep 2016 05:01:31 +0000

> Yeah, Macbook air really feels abandoned

The Macbook-with-no-suffix line is the implicit replacement for the Air anyway.

New comment by zyxley in "Show HN: I invented a caffeinated toothpaste"

zyxley — Thu, 15 Sep 2016 23:49:35 +0000

Anecdotes are not data.

New comment by zyxley in "The Doomed Mouse Utopia That Inspired the 'Rats of NIMH'"

zyxley — Thu, 15 Sep 2016 16:10:42 +0000

Calling it a "utopia" when there's limited space and nothing to do seems a bit inaccurate.

New comment by zyxley in "Fortress of Tedium: What I Learned as a Substitute Teacher"

zyxley — Sat, 10 Sep 2016 19:32:08 +0000

My high school was an interesting experience. It was a poor area and they expected few of the students to go to further education - but rather than use that as an excuse to treat the students like losers, the school tried to include some of the spread of college and vocational-school classes. I ended up taking lessons on archery, welding, video editing, and Latin, among other things.

New comment by zyxley in "1 in 5 Seafood Samples Is Fake, Report Finds"

zyxley — Sat, 10 Sep 2016 01:35:34 +0000

> What's the SI unit for suffering?

You could go with millihitlers. https://www.reddit.com/comments/dlu96/new_si_unit_one_hitler...

New comment by zyxley in "Google and Box Announce Partnership"

zyxley — Thu, 08 Sep 2016 03:01:35 +0000

Sounds like we need a startup to connect the services of all these other startups together.

New comment by zyxley in "AirPods"

zyxley — Wed, 07 Sep 2016 20:01:14 +0000

> just so you are dependent on yet another Apple product

The hardware requirements of a headphone jack put some very real limitations on phone design (waterproofing, interior space taken up by the digital -> analog hardware, etc).

Whether that was the driving cause or not is in the air, but "getting people to buy Lightning stuff" isn't the only reason to do it.

New comment by zyxley in "AirPods"

zyxley — Wed, 07 Sep 2016 19:32:31 +0000

What I'm wondering is if you can charge just one earbud at a time while using the other.

For a lot of uses (for example: podcasts, casual movie watching on a long flight, getting driving directions on a road trip), it'd be entirely practical to use one earbud at a time and so have effectively 24+ hours battery life.

New comment by zyxley in "AirPods"

zyxley — Wed, 07 Sep 2016 19:30:11 +0000

The closest thing out there right now would probably be the Bragi Dash, so owners of that would be the people to straw poll to get an idea.

New comment by zyxley in "iPhone 7"

zyxley — Wed, 07 Sep 2016 19:14:06 +0000

You don't need to buy a dongle - it comes with one.

New comment by zyxley in "iPhone 7"

zyxley — Wed, 07 Sep 2016 19:03:08 +0000

The only other company putting up a serious effort in the same niche is aiming at $150 (and releasing a month later than the AirPods) [1], so there's probably some lower bound here set by the complications of the hardware/R&D to seamlessly connect two separate earbuds through your head and to the phone.

[1]: http://www.theverge.com/2016/9/5/12798640/bragi-wireless-hea...

New comment by zyxley in "Booting the Final GameCube Game"

zyxley — Tue, 06 Sep 2016 17:20:39 +0000

There are plenty of first-party Nintendo virtual titles, though, and most likely plenty of people (like me!) who now refuse to buy them because they have to be bought over and over and over again for any new hardware.

New comment by zyxley in "Using molecular codes, plants cry for help, ward off bugs (2013)"

zyxley — Sun, 04 Sep 2016 03:22:18 +0000

> isn't evolution as we currently understand it computationally too expensive?

What? This question doesn't even really make sense to me in the first place.

Natural selection isn't a computational process. It's the consistent but basically coincidental result of constant subtle mutations and genetic inheritance.

> Now making a big jump from e.g. fish to a bird seems to me impossible in polynomial time (even in billion years)

It obviously isn't impossible, since it happened. If you believe otherwise, your perceptions and/or assumptions are wrong.

New comment by zyxley in "Strong Passwords"

zyxley — Sat, 03 Sep 2016 01:32:31 +0000

See: http://keepass.info/help/v2/sync.html

From what I understand, the encryption is done client-side per individual item (e.g. if you use a cloud provider, unencrypted data never touches them), but there's some generally questionable stuff in how it handles secure things: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9727297

New comment by zyxley in "Strong Passwords"

zyxley — Sat, 03 Sep 2016 01:12:23 +0000

One of the more persistent annoyances of the modern web for the tech-savvy is the experience of putting a long, randomly generated password into a site and getting an "invalid characters" error.

New comment by zyxley in "Transmission BitTorrent Client OSX/Keydnap Malware Incident Q+A"

zyxley — Thu, 01 Sep 2016 15:48:15 +0000

Time to switch to qBittorrent.