News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

lazugod

Huh. Would Ice 9 also make the moon crash?
Re:Redesigned Notepad for Windows 11 on Tuesday December 07, 2021 @10:57PM (#29481099)
How do the various Linux flavors handle this kind of thing?
Re:Why video game doors are so hard to get right [video] on Monday September 06, 2021 @04:10PM (#28437517)
> Minecraft does doors right in comparably simple way, and I think few if any players have a problem with it

Ha. This is an amusing claim given that redstone, the whole complicated circuitry used in advanced Minecraft machines, was arguably added for the purpose of powering doors. Years of work have gone into all of the community-made piston doors of various sizes and features. And all interactive components like buttons and pressure plates have to have their signal duration balanced against how long it takes to walk through a door.

Even ignoring redstone, though, doors are complicated to design in the exact same ways. Which way do they swing open? Depends how you’re facing when you place them… unless the game detects double doors, and reverses the second one to match. And each door has to have a corresponding vertical trap door, which can either be flush with a floor or with a ceiling. Which way do trap doors open? Well, whichever way works best with the ladder below them. Oh, which means trap doors must also act like ladders. In fact, you can climb a wall of nothing but trap doors in the game.

What about water? Trap doors can be waterlogged, and that’s a common way to hide irrigation. But normal doors intentionally aren’t. Why? Because doors are the most common early-game tool for scuba diving - a placed door becomes a free pocket of air. Does it seem realistic? No, and maybe they could fix it, but then that would affect anyone who uses doors as entrances to underwater houses, as well as make scuba diving more difficult.

Players argue about the use of doors for diving; they argue about whether they should be able to shoot arrows through the windows in doors; they argue about whether every new tree should bring a new type of wood, and thus a new type of door.

Doors are hard, no matter how simple the game.

I wouldn’t agree that Americans universally trust their military.
> In Norway pedestrians have the right of way on zebras.

Context for those who don’t know: zebras are crosswalks.

Re:Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story on Sunday October 25, 2020 @07:41PM (#24891216)
Or change the text itself to [flagged by users]?
Re:Is revenue model more important than culture? on Tuesday September 22, 2020 @02:23AM (#24551493)
A better law is that questions in news headlines have boring answers.
Re:We Still Need Howard Zinn on Thursday September 17, 2020 @06:17PM (#24510663)
Oh, I see, “contemporaries” is the opposite of what I meant to ask.

Who are current writers like him?

Re:We Still Need Howard Zinn on Thursday September 17, 2020 @06:06PM (#24510555)
Who are his contemporaries?
It’s possible that the answer is “there are no laws that can be passed”, at least at the national level.

https://twitter.com/JStein_WaPo/status/1267253355530858496

Can face blurring be regulated as a protected form of encryption?
It is... but it’s also something that web tech developers should probably pay a lot of attention to because it directly impacts what they build.

I’m very surprised how little discussion I’ve seen on HN about what this means for everyone here building public, community-building websites.

Re:Trump threatens to 'close' down social media platforms on Wednesday May 27, 2020 @05:35PM (#23330338)
It's not chilling random Internet commentators. It's chilling actions by large platforms to have or keep any principles.
Re:Bye, Amazon on Monday May 04, 2020 @06:24AM (#23066371)
He wasn’t directly involved with the response to the whistleblowers, people higher up at Amazon were (it sounds like he wasn’t VP of the entire company but of the web services section specifically).
Re:U.S. will suspend all travel from Europe for 30 days on Wednesday March 11, 2020 @11:22PM (#22553386)
Are you saying it is more accurate to call it a lie?
From this tweet (https://mobile.twitter.com/tomgara/status/122289759170208153...) which highlights the section that describes advertising inserted into medical software.
Re:Apple’s Ad-Targeting Crackdown Shakes Up Ad Market on Monday December 09, 2019 @06:19PM (#21747757)
I imagine it’s not that it’s harder to target whether someone is using Safari, but that it’s harder/less effective to try targeting demographics within the group of Safari users.
Re:Blizzard has blocked the possibility to remove account on Wednesday October 09, 2019 @06:47PM (#21209009)
Username of dang
Mueller concluded that he was forbidden from finishing that investigation and that a different means like impeachment would have to continue it.

And today’s announcement is due to misconduct that happened after the Mueller report was released (literally the day after).

Re:We Need a PBS for Social Media on Tuesday September 24, 2019 @05:02PM (#21064592)
Disingenuous in what way? Do you think the editorial author doesn’t actually desire a public space?
Re:Is the Political Novel Dead? on Friday August 30, 2019 @07:28PM (#20843639)
Could you describe what missing elements Vonnegut had?
The second reads as though there wasn’t even an insignificant increase, which is very different.
Re:On Jony Ive Leaving Apple on Friday June 28, 2019 @01:54AM (#20301826)
I don’t think Americans unanimously respect titles of nobility, and I think Gruber’s point is that he personally doesn’t respect them and wishes Apple didn’t respect them either.

Whether this is a consistent point of his, whether Gruber has always referred to the Queen as Elizabeth Windsor, I don’t know. But I wouldn’t conflate convenience with respect. “The Queen” is a very easy name to remember and use informally without necessarily supporting monarchy. Like, I wouldn’t call Captain Blackbeard “Captain Blackbeard” out of respect for piracy.

How does that change the problems in the article? You would still need people looking at questionable content to decide when to call the police.
This sounds like a fantastic example of basing moral guidelines around what is easy for a computer to detect rather than what is actually moral.

We know that FB has nudity detection systems, due to their past problems with banning breastfeeding discussion groups.

> Where do you draw the line? It seems pretty reasonable for the CEO to show up to hearings for the country where your company is headquartered... but to send lieutenants everywhere else, no?

What is the precedent in this case? I assume Facebook is not the only multinational corporation to ever exist or be called to testify to foreign congresses. What have other corporations done?

Re:Nancy Pelosi and Fakebook Dirty Tricks on Sunday May 26, 2019 @08:23PM (#20018540)
How is pinning the video not spreading it?

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