jjslocum3's comments

jjslocum3 | 1 year ago | on: Google kills diversity hiring targets

The real metric should be how good looking they are. That transcends household income, race, and gender. /sarc

jjslocum3 | 1 year ago | on: Show HN: Tramway SDK – An unholy union between Half-Life and Morrowind engines

Yes! In programming speak, you're talking about levels of abstraction.

jjslocum3 | 1 year ago | on: Hitting OKRs vs. Doing Your Job

Are people still talking about OKRs? Dang that's so '00s

jjslocum3 | 1 year ago | on: All clocks are 30 seconds late

Plenty of nitpicking here, for me this piece was a fun and clever thought-ride.

jjslocum3 | 1 year ago | on: Insects rely on sounds made by vegetation to guide reproduction

If a tree is distressed in the forest and there are no insects there to hear it, does it make a sound?

jjslocum3 | 1 year ago | on: Show HN: Microtonal Piano

I knew a musician who once clicked on a "ring for customer service" bell at the service counter of a laundromat, and then told the arriving attendant "Your bell is a quarter-tone flat."

jjslocum3 | 1 year ago | on: Start presentations on the second slide

For me the real nugget is the first comment:

"Programmers have a pavlovian engineering response. Pose them a problem and they'll start trying to solve it."

jjslocum3 | 1 year ago | on: EU elections 2024 live: Macron dissolves French parliament [snip]

What exactly does this mean?

jjslocum3 | 1 year ago | on: Show HN: Every mountain, building and tree shadow mapped for any date and time

Doesnt work for the map around my home. While the buildings in my neighborhood generate shadows on the map, none of the trees do.

jjslocum3 | 1 year ago | on: A skeptic's take on beaming power to Earth from space

I really would love another sentence or two on this. I can't immediately think why that would be, e.g. don't Maxwell's equations apply at very large scales? Any ideas?

jjslocum3 | 1 year ago | on: Neuralink patient controls games by thinking during interview

Musk says "Blindsight is the next @Neuralink product after Telepathy."

Let's see, I think after that, the next product should be Magic Missle. Or maybe Sanctuary?

jjslocum3 | 2 years ago | on: Shields up: New ideas might make active shielding viable

Comical and Strangelovian perhaps, but also the only hope for humankind. How many years until the expanding sun's corona envelops the earth? Assuming we make it that long without first destroying ourselves or meeting an unfriendly asteroid, you can bet that all of humanity will be behind the effort. So while it's not on this week's scrum board, it's definitely a high-priority TODO.

jjslocum3 | 2 years ago | on: Launch HN: Onedoc (YC W24) – A better way to create PDFs

Does Onedoc retain any visibility into, or in any way use or reserve the right to use any content created using its API in any way? Obviously, calling an API means sending document contents to Onedoc.

jjslocum3 | 2 years ago | on: More than 2M research papers have disappeared from the Internet

I imagine this would be of great benefit to plagiarists.

jjslocum3 | 2 years ago | on: I Wrote What? Google's AI-Powered Libel Machine

Using Gemini, a former Rolling Stone editor discovers his involvement in past scandals.

jjslocum3 | 2 years ago | on: Why flying insects gather at artificial light

This seems like a pretty important finding, entymology's version of cracking Fermat's Last Theorem. I wonder if there's a Nobel category for entymology.

jjslocum3 | 2 years ago | on: How many CPU cores can you use in parallel?

I understand this is a Python-centric source, but without having done my homework I'd have thought Python wouldn't be a particularly great language for dealing with these low level concerns. Wouldn't it be much easier in C? In java it's as simple as Runtime.getRuntime().availableProcessors()

jjslocum3 | 2 years ago | on: Alameda lost tens of millions because of a fat fingering mistake

This description of SBF does evoke a Netflix "I was in a cult" documentary. A larger-than-life leader, with huge vision. I wonder how much of his success was due to his charisma and the ability to steamroll (and sidetrack) people with over-the-top world-changing vision.

jjslocum3 | 2 years ago | on: How many medical studies are faked or flawed?

So perhaps a competent biostatistician could get away with it?

jjslocum3 | 2 years ago | on: How many medical studies are faked or flawed?

> ...it would help if journals routinely asked authors to share their IPD

Why couldn't a bad actor just fake the raw data? Isn't that what Climategate was all about?