News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

Jd

Re:Some Command & Conquer games are now open source on Thursday February 27, 2025 @07:52PM (#43200381)
A bit challenging since none of the repositories I looked at actually compile.

EA says that if you remove (or refactor!) the dependencies it might work but I don't know if that's high enough confidence to dive in.

Re:A tool for learning languages via poems on Thursday January 23, 2025 @10:58AM (#42805187)
Today I built a service for learning languages via poems. Stores your progress in Dutch, German, Italian, Russian, Spanish, and Attic Greek. Also Allows you to add new poems beyond the basic set via a camera / OCR service.

Source is here: https://github.com/fractastical/poemlearner

Re:Buckminster Fuller on a long thin wire on Thursday January 28, 2021 @06:04AM (#25940485)
One aspect of Buckminster Fuller that many people don't want you to know is that he had a number of politically incorrect opinions which are in the archives but would tarnish his public reputation if they were easily accessible. I believe this is the main reason that certain aspects of his records are kept behind lock and key as it were.
Re:TikTok: All under-16s' accounts made private on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @08:53AM (#25761944)
Mine is full of fitness instructors showing of their fitness challenges,dancers showing of their synchronized dance routines, and oddball humour. I had a moment where some BLM stuff trended but on the whole it seemed to show both sides (albeit a bit the extreme versions of both sides).
Re:Setting up personal OKR (objectives and key-results) on Saturday January 02, 2021 @11:39AM (#25613974)
I have a pretty extensive personal system partially based on OKRs but I find the key element is doing the exercise as a group and having accountability partners.
Re:Netflix stops charging customers who never watch on Saturday May 23, 2020 @04:04AM (#23280976)
I started using privacy.com for this reason. You can spin up a separate card number for each transaction type with its own limit (e.g. $100/month or $200). You can also just turn them off at will.
Re:Crypto Fund II on Thursday April 30, 2020 @04:04PM (#23035454)
Having a forum where people discuss tech trends with an explicit commitment to reasoning from first principles would be very interesting, especially if it had cross over to physics and other sciences.
The source is gone.
Re:MakerDAO gets stress tested as ETH price plummets on Friday March 13, 2020 @10:21PM (#22572619)
There were a few products prior to MakerDAO that failed when their collateralized peg collapsed, most notably BitUSD and NuShares.

MakerDAO is somewhat more sophisticated and holds way more capital but the fundamental problem is that you can't exclusively collateralize a dollar peg from a highly volatile unit of account with elastic demand or black swan events can wipe it out.

Re:Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (January 2020) on Thursday January 02, 2020 @12:10PM (#21937238)

  Location: Moscow

  Remote: Yes 

  Willing to relocate: Yes

  Technologies: Javascript, Solidity, Ruby, Enterprise Stack, Haskell, Java

  Résumé/CV: https://github.com/fractastical/distributed-governance/blob/master/my_experiments.md

  Email: [email protected]
Re:I killed my teenager’s fancy college dreams on Friday December 27, 2019 @01:44PM (#21893299)
What online art communities do you think give critique as well as professional art schools?
Sometimes it has an easy explanation given typical information asymmetries and incentive structures. For example, you don't give away any of your external intel during a war (i.e. cold war) in the case that you are identifying something by your enemy that might be trying to hide from you. Letting them know you can detect them would be stupid. Also, for similar reasons, record and catalogue every strange phenomenon in case it could be something.

The natural correlate from a citizen perspective is that the government is hiding something (i.e. UFOs). Of course it is, that's the point. But then the point becomes less of a point the less justification there is for wartime behavior, which then leads to increased speculation that the government is hiding something which at some points boils over into widespread public sentiment.

Then at that point there is both incentive to do selective release and for the media to cover it since they know readers want to read about UFOs, etc.

I think that's the Ockham's razor here.

I track my time via 22 minute segments and typically do ~3 per day of vocab vs 9 per day of structured language learning and another 6 per day of reading and writing. So of the structured time I spent language learning it is a bit less than 20% of the time I spend. My target is about 100 words per day but my actual best time over an extended period is about 58 words per day on tracked words. Oliver is good but there are a bunch of features I'd add if I could. Will check out LingQ as well.
Turns out Gwern has a very well researched article on SRS: https://www.gwern.net/Spaced-repetition
Re:Duolingo becomes first VC-funded $1B Pittsburgh tech startup on Saturday December 07, 2019 @01:40PM (#21731818)
Seems like you pretty much contrast:

[1] SRS flashcard apps as an exclusive language learning system

[2] Extensive reading

While (2) is clearly better if those are your only choices, as you point out yourself SRS can easily be integrated into other curriculum or used as a supplemental tool. I'm not sure how many languages deep you are but I find getting through the first 1000-3000 words a real slog in the language and it is also quite hard to read in a language when you are at sub-3000 words unless you are reading especially prepared texts in a textbook for language learners.

My preferred method is to do the basic grammar of a language and first 2000 words as quickly as possible with a cram method and then work on speaking and transitioning from passive to active vocabulary. SRS is a nice tool, esp. if the SRS tool you are using also has included sentences in context (I mostly use learnwitholiver.com). Then usually I work to train for the state run test of the language that I'm studying at a reasonably high level.

Re:Duolingo becomes first VC-funded $1B Pittsburgh tech startup on Saturday December 07, 2019 @05:53AM (#21729585)
> I'm not a huge fan of using SRS for learning vocabulary. Extensive reading (and listening once you can) is a far better strategy

Can you explain your logic and how you measure success? FWIW I'm ~8 languages deep and started using SRS with my 5th language. For the last couple languages I've tracked my metrics extensively (i.e. words learned and retained per day). Also with the SRS tool I use I read sentences along side the words I'm learning so I get some context.

Re:Urbit on Sunday December 01, 2019 @07:45AM (#21675219)
My sense is that the project started in its inner sanctum and has been iterating gradually towards something that can be understood and used.

It actually can be explained simply:

Cross platform deployed VMs with their own primitives that also have the ability to network with each other via a custom protocol.

That's interesting and potentially very valuable.

Keep in mind this whole Hacker News and Ycombinator paradigm is effectively an outworking of the same process. Some savant Lisper with their own dialect making in a unique way that over time was re-coded and made more accessible.

Re:Twitter begins testing Reddit-style nested conversations on Saturday November 30, 2019 @11:21AM (#21670560)
All of the main social media platforms at this point have exactly the same set of skewed incentives (i.e. attention maximizing instead of value generating). I sense some sort of massive opportunity around campaign the formula but not the exact way forward yet.
I know Virgil. I was at the lunch in Palo Alto where he suggested "GAS" should be the name of the internal accounting unit for smart contracts. As with many of the early Ethereum adopters he was quite gifted, a bit eccentric, and leaned a bit in an ideological direction.

Offhand I can't see any reason why he would go out of his way to N. Koreans advice on how to evade sanctions, so I will look forward to some statement on his part. 20 years is a long time.

I know he was working for the Ethereum foundation recently but doubt that the foundation would go out of the way to anger the US government (although they reportedly have a lot of Chinese government involvement).

Here is his twitter: https://twitter.com/virgilgr?lang=en

Re:Cryptoqueen: A woman scammed the world, then vanished on Sunday November 24, 2019 @10:59AM (#21621145)
I had several interactions with governmental agencies and local police regarding cybercrime recently and in all cases each group said they had no resources to help. My local deputy sheriff was really nice though...
Re:Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later on Sunday November 24, 2019 @02:37AM (#21618994)
The original Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency was my favorite talk from Vitalik ever: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXRtJcNVfQE
Odd that the author never really discusses if it is fun to play. Thought that was one of the first things to do when reviewing a game.
Re:Pointless work meetings 'really a form of therapy' on Friday November 15, 2019 @10:58AM (#21545847)
Ever since I started ending time budgeting for each agenda item I've never looked back.

My agendas look like this:

(1) Two word emotional check in [Lead:Jd][budget: 5 minutes, actual: ]

(2) How did sprint one go? [Lead:Mark][budget: 7 minutes, actual: ]

(3) Should we have pizza or chinese food for lunch? [Lead:Francis][budget: 3 minutes, actual: ]

I send out the agendas in advance for anyone to PM me to add something.

Then I use a stop timer to track how many minutes were used per agenda and send it along with the minute meetings and action items post-meetings. Action items are almost always tracked some sort of issue tracker but I use different ones for different projects.

Re:GitHub Archive Program on Thursday November 14, 2019 @01:54AM (#21533365)
Obligatory XKCD citing: https://xkcd.com/224/
Re:I was an astrologer on Thursday November 07, 2019 @11:05AM (#21474385)
The problem with "psychics" is ultimately a more general problem about access to help, especially the field of psychological help.

The help anyone could do is entirely dependent on the ability of the person to get access to the help. For example, suppose that person A has problem C. Person B has solution D. Now, even if solution D is the perfect solution, one must figure out the access path to that solution.

In this case, the problem is how to create a process whereby person A is most likely to get to the appropriate solution. My guess is that for the most part people will prioritize a) trust in the solution provider b) ease of access and c) cost, not necessarily in that order. There probably is some bias towards an easy solution (e.g. take this pill) as opposed to a complex solution (e.g. get a B.S. in computer science).

It could be that a phone psychic, simply by being immediately available and inexpensive, could provide a better throughput of low level psychological issues than the higher barrier to entry of the traditional psychiatric industry.

The fact that someone self-describes as a "psychic" is in some ways just another form of marketing, one with a certain target demographic. Admittedly, this demographic might hypothetically be better served by a different set of solution providers (in the same ways that the demographic most keen on faith healers might be better served by licensed physicians), but it's not clear that they would go to them for all of the reasons mentioned above.

All in all, this is one of these areas that is extremely difficult to judge, both because of the difficulty in evaluation solutions to psychological issues and all of the cost and marketing issues.

Re:I Accidentally Uncovered a Nationwide Scam on Airbnb on Thursday October 31, 2019 @11:46AM (#21410024)
HotelTonight (sadly recently purchased by AirBnB) has a very robust review system and a very responsive customer support system. If you ever have a bad experience in a hotel room while booking through their app you can always contact them and they will contact hotel management and the problem will almost always very quickly be resolved.

Booking.com has way more properties but does not always properly vet them. Its easy to find that you've booked a property but the property owner is miles away and does not speak your language (i.e. English). That said, their customer service often resolves things.

In my limited impression Airbnb has gotten better at customer service but has basically pivoted out of their core business model (i.e. providing short term stays) and at the same time provided huge incentives for people to mislead people with respect to the listing. They are consistently the hardest to verify (i.e. that what you are reading or seeing is real) and I would really only use them for very boutique properties that can't be found on other platforms.

In some ways it just depends on how much up front time you have to do your own vetting and how much risk you are willing to tolerate for a potentially experience. AirBnb is high in both categories with results that very rarely are worth it to me.

Re:Hey Ho, GIFs Must Go (1999) on Saturday October 26, 2019 @03:26PM (#21365658)
Completely agree with and the sad thing is I don't even know where to point someone to learn about bout the roll that "government standards organisations, the military, and academic fields" play, except to talk to leaders of individual W3C groups.
I think that's only half true. If you were following the controversial social media engagement by the Trump campaign, it was clearly established that having two emotionally invested warring sides on either side of an opinion is a huge driver for platform engagement. So I think to some extent these platforms need highly contentious trending topics to be "relevant."

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