taink (u/taink) - Readit News

taink commented on Whole Earth Index wholeearth.info/... · Posted by u/bookofjoe

curl-up · a month ago

Jobs called it "Google in paperback form" [1].

I wonder what obscure (probably online?) source of information of today we'll be comparing to the mainstream sources of tomorrow.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/oct/09/steve-job...

taink · a month ago

He specifically references the last page of the last issue, and concludes his commencement speech with its words "Stay hungry. Stay foolish." [1]

Pretty nice to see it context, next to all the other editions.

> I wonder what obscure (probably online?) source of information of today we'll be comparing to the mainstream sources of tomorrow.

Maybe this very website will be among them?

[1] https://wholeearth.info/p/whole-earth-epilog-october-1974?fo...

taink commented on Computer science courses that don't exist, but should (2015) prog21.dadgum.com/210.htm... · Posted by u/wonger_

zkmon · 2 months ago

> CSCI 2100: Unlearning Object-Oriented Programming??

People in tech industry, seem to have no idea how the systems in the wild work. Enterprise Java runs the backbone of operations for all of large business organisations such as banks. It is just as grounded as MS Office is. It is object-oriented software that is running the bulk of production environments of the world. Who is going to maintain these systems for the next few decades?

And in reality, there is nothing wrong with Java or object orientation. It has the best battle-tested and rich ecosystem to build enterprise systems. It mirrors the business entities and a natural hierarchy and evolution of things. It has vast pool of skilled resources and easy to maintain. Python is still a baby when it comes operational readiness and integrations. You might get excited about Jupyter cells and REPL, but that is all a dev-play, not production.

taink · 2 months ago

Unlearning OOP does not necessarily involve forgetting abstraction and the concept of an object. "Unlearning OOP" involves freeing yourself from the notion that all programming should be designed as an object hierarchy. There is/was a tendency in object-oriented programming to consider that it is the only way Real Software™ is made. You tend to focus more on the architecture of your system than its actual features.

Notice the prerequisite to unlearning something is learning it first. I don't think anyone proposes that the concept of an object is useless.

taink commented on Trump pardons convicted Binance founder wsj.com/finance/currencie... · Posted by u/cowboyscott

kalavan · 2 months ago

It's more likely a reference to France currently being the Fifth Republic.[1] The transition from the Fourth to the Fifth happened in 1958 without much violence.

[1] https://thegoodlifefrance.com/short-history-of-the-five-repu...

taink · 2 months ago

> The transition from the Fourth to the Fifth happened in 1958 without much violence.

Quoting from the article:

  Things came to a head in 1958 as France struggled to decolonize. There was strong opposition within France to Algerian independence and part of the army openly rebelled. Important generals threatened a coup unless de Gaulle was returned to power. They sent paratroopers to capture Corsica in case anyone missed their point.

The article even fails to mention Operation Resurrection. Hopefully we don't need coups every time we want a new constituent assembly.

taink commented on Google flags Immich sites as dangerous immich.app/blog/google-fl... · Posted by u/janpio

parliament32 · 2 months ago

> For mail, couldn't we come up with a mail-DNS, that authenticates senders?

So RFC 7672? https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7672

taink · 2 months ago

I have no knowledge of DANE but its reliance on DNSSEC makes me worried that it would be difficult for people to adopt it.

Also, I think it solves a different problem: it prevents spoofing/MITM but what about legitimate certificates? We would still need CAs that actually curate their customers and hold them accountable. And we would need email servers/clients to differentiate between strict CAs and ones that are used solely for encryption purposes.

I don't know that DNS should be applied to emails as is anyway but I find it could force spammers to operate with publicly available information which would make holding them accountable easier.

taink commented on Google flags Immich sites as dangerous immich.app/blog/google-fl... · Posted by u/janpio

gjsman-1000 · 2 months ago

> 2009 I could run Pidgin and load messages from AIM, FB Messages, Yahoo... Where did that go?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBcY3W5WgNU

But seriously; the internet is now overrun with AI Slop, Spam, and automated traffic. To try to do something about it requires curation, somebody needs to decide what is junk, which is completely antithetical to open protocols. This problem is structurally unsolvable, there is no solution, there's either a useless open internet or a useful closed one. The internet is voting with Cloudflare, Discord, Facebook, to be useful, not open. The alternative is trying to figure out how to run a decentralized dictatorship that only allows good things to happen; a delusion.

The only other solution is accountability, a presence tied to your physical identity; so that an attacker cannot just create 100,000 identities from 25,000 IP addresses and smash your small forum with them. That's an even less popular idea, even though it would make open systems actually possible. Building your own search engine or video platform would be super easy, barely an inconvenience. No need for Cloudflare if the police know who every visitor is. No need for a spam filter, if the government can enforce laws perfectly.

Take a look at email, the mother of all open protocols (older than HTTP). What happened? Radical recentralization to companies that had effective spam management, and now we on HN complain we can't break through, someone needs to do something about that centralization, so that we can go back to square one where people get spammed to death again, which will inevitably repeat the discretion required -> who has the best discretion -> flee there cycle. Go figure.

taink · 2 months ago

Why should curation be centralized? We do not need a "decentralized dictatorship" (what would that even be? that's antithetical) and we certainly do not need a centralized one. It seems crazy that your solutions to AI, spam, and "automated traffic" (I don't know what that is, I assume web crawlers and such) is that the police control every single transaction.

First off, we can simply let the user, or client software, choose. Why should we let centralized servers do that by default?

At scale, DNS is somewhat centralized but authorities are disconnected from internet providers and web browsers. They're the best actors to regulate this.

For mail, couldn't we come up with a mail-DNS, that authenticates senders? There could be different limits based on whether you are an individual or a company, and whether you're sending 10'000 emails or just 100.

Regardless of whether these are good solutions -- why jump to extreme ones? "TINA" is not a helpful argument, it's a slogan.

taink commented on Google flags Immich sites as dangerous immich.app/blog/google-fl... · Posted by u/janpio

LorenDB · 2 months ago

Was Pidgin TOS-compliant back in the day? I'm a young whippersnapper, so I don't have experience with it myself.

taink · 2 months ago

Well it did have to change its name from GAIM to Pidgin at some point because it infringed on "AIM" by AOL. And whether or not Pidgin was fully "TOS-compliant" (which it might have been depending on the service we'd be looking at) is not as relevant as whether these terms would have been actually legally enforceable or not.

taink commented on Compare Single Board Computers sbc.compare/... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

veegee · 2 months ago

This is actually pretty terrible. Apart from the things “okanat” said, the site is a nightmare in terms of UI and extremely buggy. I didn’t realize modern websites could get this bad.

taink · 2 months ago

How so? Where are the bugs you speak of? I don't find the UI to be nightmarish either. Can you point to specific issues the site maintainer can look at?

If this is the worst modern website you've seen, you're very lucky.

taink commented on Original C64 Lode Runner Source Code github.com/Piddewitt/Lode... · Posted by u/indigodaddy

viraptor · 2 months ago

This doesn't say who commented it and where the source code comes from.

taink · 2 months ago

Another comment by krajzeg points to this repository for more context: https://github.com/Piddewitt/C64-Game-Source-Code

taink commented on Original C64 Lode Runner Source Code github.com/Piddewitt/Lode... · Posted by u/indigodaddy

Luc · 2 months ago

This can't be the original source code.

https://github.com/Piddewitt/Loderunner/blob/main/Lode%20Run...

Original source, I imagine, would be very tersely commented, if only to fit in memory / floppy, and would have very short variable and subroutine names, and lots of mess and commented-out lines from experiments.

This looks like a very lovingly done disassembly.

taink · 2 months ago

From the repository's README:

  Commented source code of the C64 Lode Runner Game - Including the copy protection

taink commented on Doing well in your courses: Andrej's advice for success (2013) cs.stanford.edu/people/ka... · Posted by u/peterkshultz

tehnub · 2 months ago

Richard Hamming in his "You and Your Research" talk compares it to compound interest:

    What Bode was saying was this: ``Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest.'' Given two people of approximately the same ability and one person who works ten percent more than the other, the latter will more than twice outproduce the former. The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity - it is very much like compound interest. I don't want to give you a rate, but it is a very high rate. Given two people with exactly the same ability, the one person who manages day in and day out to get in one more hour of thinking will be tremendously more productive over a lifetime. I took Bode's remark to heart; I spent a good deal more of my time for some years trying to work a bit harder and I found, in fact, I could get more work done. I don't like to say it in front of my wife, but I did sort of neglect her sometimes; I needed to study. You have to neglect things if you intend to get what you want done. There's no question about this.

https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html

taink · 2 months ago

It's like exercise: if you can withstand more training, you will get better results. The most important thing is not how hard you train, but how consistent you are at training.

The advice given here can be dangerous to some people: one should be cautious of exerting too much effort because "working harder allows you to get more done".

The useful bit of advice here is the consistency, not the quantity of work.