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etatoby | 6 years ago | on: South Korea's smartphone addiction camps

I'm not young by any stretch of the imagination, but I also consume content on my phone whenever I'm doing mundane tasks that allow for it, such as walking or riding public transportation. (Of course if I'm walking I look up every couple seconds to avoid bumping into people/things.)

I see it as a better use of my time: if I can walk from A to B and catch up on HN, that's better than walking from A to B and spacing out.

But I wouldn't call it addiction, because as soon as the mundane activity is over, I put the phone down.

If it interfered with my work, sleep, safety, or other important aspects of my life (such as for the teenager described the article) then it would be an addiction.

etatoby | 6 years ago | on: Ask HN: Feasible Alternative to the MacBook Pro?

I second a ThinkPad with XFCE (such as Xubuntu) as the best combination.

A few things which, although obvious in retrospect, I had to learn the hard way:

• Get a ThinkPad with physical buttons under the touchpad, if you like to track with your index finger and click with the thumb. I made the mistake of getting the kind where you push the entire touchpad, and it's very hard to use. Apple's was at least useable, this is not.

• Get a ThinkPad with a physical Ethernet port. USB dongles are finicky and unstable on Linux, and there are places / desks / offices where the WiFi is flaky.

• Choose the stable release of a well-supported OS (Ubuntu, Mint... whatever) because the beta / newest / testing version will make you lose time on bugs and freezes.

etatoby | 6 years ago | on: Ploopy: An Open-Source Trackball

I've been using the Slimblade for years. I even contributed a small change to Xorg evdev input driver (the Emulate3Button option) to work around the weird internal numbering of the buttons on the device.

On my couch / entertainment computer I use a Logitech M570, but for work nothing beats the Slimblade.

etatoby | 6 years ago | on: Nim 1.0

Today it's on sale again for $25. Just grabbed a copy!

etatoby | 6 years ago | on: Nim 1.0

Not (yet) a Nim user, but another post mentioned that GC is thread-specific, so you can remove all traces of GC-types from your real-time thread(s) in order to avoid deallocations at the wrong times.

A related question is whether you can disable GC on a thread by thread basis.

etatoby | 6 years ago | on: Dead Malls

I see your irony, but that's actually a specific case of a more general rule. Not speaking the predominant language of the place you live in will make your life more difficult and cut you off from the people and culture around you. It doesn't take much to see it as a precursor to crime, statistically speaking of course.

etatoby | 6 years ago | on: TSV Utilities: Command line tools for large, tabular data files

I recommend "gron"

https://github.com/tomnomnom/gron

> gron transforms JSON into discrete assignments to make it easier to grep for what you want and see the absolute 'path' to it. It eases the exploration of APIs that return large blobs of JSON but have terrible documentation.

    ▶ gron "https://api.github.com/repos/tomnomnom/gron/commits?per_page=1" | fgrep "commit.author"
    json[0].commit.author = {};
    json[0].commit.author.date = "2016-07-02T10:51:21Z";
    json[0].commit.author.email = "[email protected]";
    json[0].commit.author.name = "Tom Hudson";

etatoby | 6 years ago | on: exFAT in the Linux kernel

I've been using UDF formatted flash drives for a long time (10 years?) and they've been working on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X all this time.

etatoby | 6 years ago | on: Show HN: Wave-based non-line-of-sight computational imaging in Julia

> The detector elements of a camera could be made pretty sensitive, but they can't detect fewer than one photon.

Or can they?

If the detector elements were part of a quantum computer (or a quantum computing "chip", whatever that will turn out to be) they would be able to analyze all the photon paths (Feynman paths) bouncing back from the subject, even those that would decohere / collapse away in a traditional detector.

IANAP, but wouldn't a quantum chip be able to perform some amount of NLOS by analyzing the paths of even a single photon?

etatoby | 6 years ago | on: Ask HN: What are you learning in 2019?

1. Deep Learning. No immediate use for it, but I feel it's an important skill to know.

2. Powershell (on Linux.) I'm already proficient with the traditional shells, but I want to see if this is overall a better CLI and/or scripting environment than, say, Fish. (This was prompted by the recent post about a similar thing newly implemented in Rust.)

3. APL, getting back on it after a long time and potentially writing my own compiler and dialect, if I feel inspired.

4. Consolidating Japanese, mostly the spoken language, because I don't have the time nor will to memorize 1000s of characters. I'm already intermediate level, so at this point I mainly watch movies / shows every day, hoping some of the vocab will stick to my mind.

etatoby | 6 years ago | on: Write your own Excel in F# (2018)

Nowadays, wouldn't you just use org.apache.poi for such a task? It can load an Excel file, fill in the input data, and retrieve whatever output data you need, evaluatong and caching formulas as needed.

etatoby | 6 years ago | on: What’s the Difference Between Copenhagen and Everett?

I highly recommend Eliezer Yudkowsky's Quantum Physics Sequence (of articles):

https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/The_Quantum_Physics_Sequence

According to Everett / Decoherence interpretation, as explained by Eliezer, atomic or subatomic particles are not physically real—let alone macroscopic objects made with them.

What's physically real is the single amplitude distribution over the infinite-dimensional mathematical space of all possible joint configurations of all the particles in the universe. This distribution—as well as boggling the mind—is complex-valued, continuous, differentiable, and evolving with time according to the well known QM equations. Crucially, it may be more or less factorizable over any given subset of its infinitely many dimensions.

"You" and "me" are just two (more or less) factored subspaces of The amplitude distribution.

Therefore, the question of where do the Born probabilities come from (an open question in QM) is shown to be inextricably linked to an understanding of the physical basis of consciousness (another big open question.) The Born probabilities may represent the "amount of consciousness" (of "you", the observer) that is split among newly factored subspaces, every time "you" get further fragmented, aka. decohered, aka. "entangled" with new blobs of amplitude.

I cannot recommend Eliezer's series of articles highly enough.

etatoby | 6 years ago | on: Apple suspends Siri response grading in response to privacy concerns

> requiring explicit consent for otherwise innocuous things […] numbs people for explicit consent on actually important things.

I know HN is not the right place for tinfoil hat conspiracy theories, but that sentence gave me shivers, thinking it could be the real reason those cookie consent shenanigans were mandated in the first place.

It's probably not, it's probably just a power game between the EU government and US companies. But still.

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