HackerLangs
TopNewTrendsCommentsPastAskShowJobs

colechristensen

28,529 karmajoined vor 15 Jahren
Any opinions are my own and don't represent any employer past or present.

[email protected] Mountain View, Minneapolis, New York

https://reader.fangorn.io/

Submissions

[untitled]

1 points·by colechristensen·vor 6 Tagen·0 comments

Tell HN: Do not do business with Kraken I've had a support case open for 15 days

2 points·by colechristensen·vor 7 Monaten·1 comments

comments

colechristensen
·vor 1 Stunde·discuss
30 yard wide solar array from 300 miles away. There's a brief period of the day where they're visible but hardly a risk of making a dent in your view of the sky especially compared to ordinary terrestrial light pollution.
colechristensen
·vor 2 Stunden·discuss
The Dirac equation which is the equation for describing the wavelike behavior of electrons. It predicted the existence of antimatter and particle spin.

You start with the Schrödinger equation, add relativity to get the Klein-Gordon equation which is a mess because it's second order in time involving negative probabilities, if you in ways "take the square root" of it you get the Dirac equation.

Relativity has been part of the understanding of electrons since 1928.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirac_equation
colechristensen
·vor 5 Stunden·discuss
>I am sympathetic to a perspective that says this is not the responsibility of a mayor of a single city... But also; who else is going to do it?

With a population of 8.5 million if NYC was a state it would be the 13th largest so I'm quite all right with the city going beyond the normal purview of a city government.
colechristensen
·vor 12 Stunden·discuss
It matters when the heat stress continues when you're not at work. You can tolerate a lot more if your body gets actual breaks from the heat.
colechristensen
·vor 12 Stunden·discuss
Collective cultural delusion? Koreans think leaving a fan on while you're sleeping is deadly... people are weird.
colechristensen
·vor 13 Stunden·discuss
Stefan Zweig famously wrote a lot about it in his memoir, and he describes being in Austria and the general excitement in the lead up to and beginning of the war.

(one of many sources of this kind of information)
colechristensen
·vor 14 Stunden·discuss
>stupid decisions, catastrophic fuckups

The implication here I'm disagreeing with is that the war was the unintended consequence of mistakes. Instead of mistakes leading the continent down a dark path it was intentional, just waiting for an excuse to start fighting.
colechristensen
·vor 23 Stunden·discuss
>It triggered a cascade of some of the stupidest and costliest government decisions in history.

Eh. WWI wasn't an accident, a series of unfortunate incidents, or something that just got out of hand.

Countries and people WANTED the war, war was still thought about as a general benefit to the country, almost sporting. Everybody was feeling powerful with the new capabilities industrialization gave them and they wanted to use that to gain influence. (of course not literally everybody, but this was a prevailing force)
colechristensen
·vorgestern·discuss
They didn't develop ships suitable for crossing the Atlantic.

You and a group of your buddies would get together while you were young, build boats, and go be pirates for a while until it was time to settle down somewhere.

There isn't a straightforward transition to the larger amount of organization and economy needed to build the larger more sophisticated ships to cross the Atlantic and land somewhere southerly enough to meaningfully colonize.
colechristensen
·vorgestern·discuss
Rust attracts zealots because of the various kinds of safety guarantees. The speed means it can replace more or less anything.

People see the safety as a moral superiority so it attracts obnoxious zealots.

Other languages' features and syntax aren't nearly so easy for zealots to form behind. The perception of absolute safety it puts in some people makes them crazy.
colechristensen
·vorgestern·discuss
A quite similar horse species went extinct in North America ~10,000 years ago likely due to humans.

The horse ancestor species come from the Americas and migrated to Eurasia over the bearing land bridge.

Horses were only missing from North America for 10,000 of the last 50 million years.
colechristensen
·vorgestern·discuss
Cloudflare in particular has an enormous fingerprint of your online activities.

Attempting to distribute/acquire illegal things through Cloudflare is an exercise in how to get caught.
colechristensen
·vorgestern·discuss
"keep refining and testing it until we're really done or somebody else releases"

Maybe a little corporate espionage.

Probably more keeping an eye on the behavior of the competition and predicting what they might do and adjusting your own schedules.
colechristensen
·vorgestern·discuss
Competition. You don't want to lose your customers trying out the competitors updated and better product. Release on the same day and they won't be able to compare their new to your old.
colechristensen
·vor 3 Tagen·discuss
I wear some pretty thick glasses and my parents' car CONSTANTLY beeped at me to pay attention to the road.
colechristensen
·vor 3 Tagen·discuss
You can put various kinds of "poison pill" in the shareholder rights agreements which are binding contracts on both the company and its shareholders in response to events.

You can also make all sort of post acquisition agreements.

These usually take the form of making stock available at steep discounts in response to actions e.g. in the event of a 20% layoff any employee from the time of acquisition can purchase stock at $0.10 a share, any one laid off will get a million dollars severance, if acquirer shuts down the studio the original founders have the right to re-acquire all IP and trademarks for $1 -- those sorts of things.

This isn't a specific kind of entity, any business entity can have Shareholder Rights Agreements. It's a bit of a game to get the terms right so everything is in good faith and agreeable.
colechristensen
·vor 4 Tagen·discuss
why wouldn't they just sell it?

I'm deeply opposed to game distribution companies (console makers) being allowed to acquire game studios.

In the same way that theaters and streaming services shouldn't be allowed to do acquisitions.

Disney owning whatever ridiculous proportion of media by buying everything serves nobody's best interest.
colechristensen
·vor 4 Tagen·discuss
It's quite a bit more difficult with poop. A rather large proportion of the DNA in poop isn't from the creature that pooped it. (mostly bacteria)
colechristensen
·vor 4 Tagen·discuss
>By sampling/introducing the signal at a different physical position on the lens

Which is accomplished with active components (or multiple frontends). The word "active" is carrying a lot of weight in what isn't actually that important of a distinction
colechristensen
·vor 4 Tagen·discuss
>I have no idea what people are doing to burn so many tokens

Shepherded the writing of on the order of a half a million lines of code