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SixSigma commented on Ask HN: What're the best-designed things you've ever used?    · Posted by u/whitepoplar
i_don_t_know · 9 years ago
The ancient microwave in my first apartment. It had two knobs: one for time, one for power. It's immediately obvious how to cook something for how long, how to add more time, etc.

All other microwaves that I've used I had to have someone explain to me what buttons to press in what order to do even the simplest things. And I've never seen anyone use all of those fancy buttons.

SixSigma · 9 years ago
I shared an apartment with two 20 year old when I was 45.

They didn't know that knob 2 changed the power (despite it being labelled), they just kept adding more time and eventually giving up.

SixSigma commented on Google and Bing to deprecate piracy websites   theguardian.com/technolog... · Posted by u/atomwaffel
vcjohnson · 9 years ago
Google puts more positive search queries in all their recommendations...as was explained in the r/the_donald thread you got the idea from.
SixSigma · 9 years ago
That's a form of censorship
SixSigma commented on Google and Bing to deprecate piracy websites   theguardian.com/technolog... · Posted by u/atomwaffel
vanderZwan · 9 years ago
I'm not really getting significantly different results in any of them: a mixture of pro-refugee philantropist and nazi sympathiser links from websites with wildly opposing views, roughly 80% overlap in website links even.

Would it matter if one's filter bubble is more on the left or right here? I'm Dutch, living in Sweden and left-leaning - presumably the biggest contributors to any filter bubble that applies here.

Without getting into a discussion of politics itself, could people who do see a difference share their experience, and what they expect the search engines to infer about their political leanings?

SixSigma · 9 years ago
The suggestions, not the results
SixSigma commented on Google and Bing to deprecate piracy websites   theguardian.com/technolog... · Posted by u/atomwaffel
CommanderData · 9 years ago
Worryingly they did this completely voluntarily.

To me this is a form of censorship together with the recent removal of fake news sites.

The approved web is what we'll have eventually with little resistance.

SixSigma · 9 years ago
Try this one : open google.com, bing.com and duckduckgo.com

type "George Soros is " (with the trailing space)

Compare and contrast

SixSigma commented on Has There Been a Nuclear Incident in the Arctic?   thedrive.com/the-war-zone... · Posted by u/bootload
matt4077 · 9 years ago
I feel this vilification of the media is far overblown.

Specifically: I cannot imagine that a quality news site (say the NY Times, Atlantic, or WSJ) would not mention such uncertainty.

More easily provable: I challenge you to find a single article of about a disaster that includes unwarranted product recommendations (i. e. not "authorities are asking citizen to stock water and other necessities in preparation for the hurricane...")

I'd also like to point out that the "mainstream media" is doing an excellent job regarding these reports: not reporting on them. By now, they have certainly seen these reports. The excitement that grips HN and your comment speak to the fact that it would make for excellent clickbait. But there's nothing anywhere.

On the other end of the spectrum, there's alarmist clickbait with "nuclear incident" in quotes that make it appear as a euphemism for a meltdown (otherwise it'd just be a nuclear incident), posted in a series called "The War Zone".

Here are some other issues I find with the article. It's splitting hairs in a way, but I wish people had a bit of an appreciation for the work of professional journalists and editors:

- The article is tagged "nukes" and "atmospheric testing" when it's almost certainly not a nuclear test. Because that would be stupid. And it would have been picked up by seismographs.

- "Because of the low levels of concentration, there is no health risk to the public or the environment, at least on a wide scale." This leaves open the possibility of smaller-scale health hazards, falsely sensationalising the available data. OTOH, "Levels of concentration" is a phrase capable of inflicting some serious health effects among english language teachers.

- "The highly unique aircraft are specifically designed to respond to nuclear incidents—especially those that include the detonation of nuclear warheads." There is so much wrong with this sentence:

  - There's only one WC-135, so the plural is wrong.

  - Everything that's "designed to..." is "specifically designed to..."  

  - Which "nuclear incident that involves the detonation of nuclear warheads" is not described more succinctly as "the detonation of (a) nuclear warhead(s)"?

  - The latter half of the sentence seems designed to fuel speculation 
- "What are WC-135s doing up there?" There's still only one of these in existence (the plural form is used another 4 or 5 times).

- "There has been some talk about even the US restarting its nuclear testing under President Trump..." If this is speculation mixed with hyperbole, do not bring it up! Any mention, no matter how dismissive, just serves to legitimise such speculation. In this case the best argument against it isn't even mentioned: you don't set up a nuclear test in 3 weeks.

- " The Russian submarine K-27 [...] is said to be literally a ticking time bomb." If the evil media conspiracy saves me from such uses of the word "literally", I think I'm ok with their control of my thoughts.

SixSigma · 9 years ago
> - Everything that's "designed to..." is "specifically designed to..."

I think there is a distinction between primary design criteria and secondary e.g. the difference between must and should.

Primary : must be capable of transporting fluid.

Secondary: should be red

SixSigma commented on Zuckerberg removed a line about monitoring private messages from his manifesto   mashable.com/2017/02/16/m... · Posted by u/mbgaxyz
snarf · 9 years ago
Facebook sat idly by during an election cycle as their platform was used to propagate fake news because blocking this stuff would amount to censorship, and now they suddenly have the moral imperative to police your private messages? I am so glad I quit Facebook a long time ago. They are the big tech company I like the least.
SixSigma · 9 years ago
> Facebook sat idly by

if you think that, you have been reading Fake News

SixSigma commented on Linus Torvalds: Successful projects are 99% perspiration and 1% innovation   theregister.co.uk/2017/02... · Posted by u/oska
tylercubell · 9 years ago
Chris Anderson: So you spoke to me last week about these two guys. Who are they and how do you relate to them?

Linus Torvalds: Well, so this is kind of cliché in technology, the whole Tesla versus Edison, where Tesla is seen as the visionary scientist and crazy idea man. And people love Tesla. I mean, there are people who name their companies after him.

The other person there is Edison, who is actually often vilified for being kind of pedestrian and is — I mean, his most famous quote is, "Genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration." And I'm in the Edison camp, even if people don't always like him. Because if you actually compare the two, Tesla has kind of this mind grab these days, but who actually changed the world? Edison may not have been a nice person, he did a lot of things — he was maybe not so intellectual, not so visionary. But I think I'm more of an Edison than a Tesla.

http://www.ted.com/talks/linus_torvalds_the_mind_behind_linu...

SixSigma · 9 years ago
The Edison quote was during a live radio debate between the two of them.

Tesla's response was : if you thought a bit more, you wouldn't have to sweat so much

SixSigma commented on Google’s not-so-secret new OS   techspecs.blog/blog/2017/... · Posted by u/techenthusiast
josefx · 9 years ago
I remember two issues with Java Applets:

* Java itself was slow for a long time

* The Browser would hang while loading an Applet

The first is no longer an issue. They can just use a modern just in time compiler and it wont run slower than Java on Android. Chrome already has one to deal with JavaScript powered Web 2.0 applications.

The second was as far as I can tell an API issue. Applets would block everything by default until they were loaded. A really bad idea in a single threaded environment when you had to send several MB over low bandwidth and the JVM itself took long to start. Just making the load async with a completion callback could have solved this issue and I remember a few Applets that actually used an async download to reduce the hang.

SixSigma · 9 years ago
> I remember two issues with Java Applets

I remember issue no.3 :

United States Court of Appeals,Ninth Circuit.

SUN MICROSYSTEMS, INC., a Delaware Corporation, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. MICROSOFT CORPORATION, a Washington corporation, Defendant-Appellant.

No. 99-15046.

Decided: August 23, 1999

http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-9th-circuit/1260682.html

SixSigma commented on India has banned disposable plastic in Delhi   globalcitizen.org/en/cont... · Posted by u/SimplyUseless
bendermon · 9 years ago
Even if you poop in your fancy bungalow toilet, it does end up in the rivers, along with detergent and toxic toilet cleaners.

Banning disposable plastic and non biodegradable detergents would go a great way in letting microbes and plants do their job in cleaning up the environment.

With plastics not clogging up the rivers and chemicals not killing all river life, the rivers would definitely run much cleaner. This move was incidentally meant to curb air pollution, so clean rivers or oceans are an added benefit.

SixSigma · 9 years ago
> along with detergent and toxic toilet cleaners.

don't forget corpses

http://www.planetcustodian.com/2015/10/19/8134/over-50-scary...

SixSigma commented on Steam needs to stop asking its customers to fix its problems   rockpapershotgun.com/2017... · Posted by u/smacktoward
kelvin0 · 9 years ago
Cool, but how is it different\better than Steam? Thanks for your suggestion.
SixSigma · 9 years ago
No login needed to play games once downloaded

All games DRM free

Games are tested before being listed

u/SixSigma

KarmaCake day2825January 24, 2014View Original