mikeash

42 ms·

421.
by mikeash 7y ago
The phrase “old C# code bases” makes me feel incredibly old.
422.
by mikeash 7y ago
Autopilot is a driver assistance feature. You are required to keep your eyes on the road and your hands on the wheel while using it. Naturally, not everyone does that, although they definitely should. If they do choose to break those requir
423.
by mikeash 7y ago
I’m not saying Autopilot should have handled this. I’m saying the driver should have seen the potential threat sometime before engaging the system, and realized it was not a safe time to let it run unassisted. (It’s never truly safe in the
424.
by mikeash 7y ago
To me it sounds like a badly trained foreign spy. Which is actually pretty good if the goal is to sound human-like!
425.
by mikeash 7y ago
Neither did I! But it surely had to be a visible threat. A road where you can drive 68MPH is going to have enough visibility that you’ll see a truck that might cross your path at least that far in advance. Especially in flat-as-a-pancake Fl
426.
by mikeash 7y ago
Ten seconds from engaging Autopilot to ramming a truck, and he didn’t see it before he engaged Autopilot?
427.
by mikeash 7y ago
This is especially clear when you look at the special case of health care. So many people would like to start a business but can’t leave their job because they need the health insurance that comes with it. This was especially bad before the
428.
by mikeash 7y ago
It seems to me that older developers tend to fall into two groups. One group goes, “the old ways were better, this new stuff is crap, I can’t believe they make us use it.” The other group goes, “there’s a lot of good stuff in the old ways,
429.
by mikeash 7y ago
This seems reasonable, but a cell phone would be close to a voice assistant on this spectrum, or even in the same place.
430.
by mikeash 7y ago
How do you know you’re in control?
431.
by mikeash 7y ago
I don’t think battery life is a problem. I think the examples you mention were from much older phones with limited local storage, so they were basically just in a call the whole time, and burning power operating the radio. A modern phone ca
432.
by mikeash 7y ago
How do you know that phones don’t turn on their microphones outside of a call?
433.
by mikeash 7y ago
Even if your intentions are completely benign, you’ll lose the data in a security breach and then I’m depending on a bunch of criminals deciding I’m not worth their while.
434.
by mikeash 7y ago
And yet, tons of universities manage to have ethics classes and even ethics majors.
435.
by mikeash 7y ago
Microphones connected to power and internet 24/7 have been in people’s houses since the 1990s (or earlier, if you consider the phone network to be equivalent). Yet it only became “creepy” when they started talking back. This tells me i
436.
by mikeash 7y ago
Good point. Maybe I should try enabling VoiceOver next time I place an order.
437.
by mikeash 7y ago
Glad to be of service. It's not obvious if you don't already know about it, but once you do, you start to see how "accessibility" is so much more than "accommodate a few disabled people."
438.
by mikeash 7y ago
It's already solved on the web. Fancy use of "technology" is what breaks it!
439.
by mikeash 7y ago
Accessible design tends to be easier to read in general, helping everyone. Non-blind people may like to use a screen reader so they can do stuff by ear. I suspect a lot of HN readers like to navigate web sites by keyboard, something a lot o
440.
by mikeash 7y ago
I mean, it's super annoying for sighted people already, so it would just be on par with that experience.
441.
by mikeash 7y ago
For perspective, in the previous quarter Domino's reported revenues of over $800 million and profit of over $90 million. But I guess spending a couple of days' worth of profit on complying with the law is just too much to ask.
442.
by mikeash 7y ago
Accessibility helps everyone. All humans should be on the side opposite Domino's here.
443.
by mikeash 7y ago
It should be obvious that you can’t trust any political party with the power to decide who their own voters will be. It’s not a partisan issue. If Republicans are doing it more in recent years it’s only because they’ve had more opportunity.
444.
by mikeash 7y ago
This seems like a “perfect is the enemy of the good” sort of thing. Yes, drawing good districts is really hard. Non-partisan redistricting doesn’t solve everything. But surely it’s a hell of a lot better than allowing whatever political par
445.
by mikeash 7y ago
The contrast just serves to further emphasize just how fucked up some of these districts are.
446.
by mikeash 7y ago
Something in the neighborhood of 20 parsecs, according to: https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/questions/822/how-far-is...
447.
by mikeash 7y ago
Not necessarily. For example, if one app synchronizes with screen refresh and another does not, the latter will perform much better on this test but it’s not actually getting the changes to your eyes any faster. It would also just be nice t
448.
by mikeash 7y ago
Measuring the time between a simulated keypress and pixels changing in the framebuffer seems kind of inadequate, since it’s missing out on delays in the input and display hardware.
449.
by mikeash 7y ago
Commercial space systems are expensive because the rockets are expensive, though. When you spend a couple hundred million on a launch, everything has to be super lightweight and durable. There’s nothing that says a comsat has to cost hundre
450.
by mikeash 7y ago
They don’t really. Let’s say I choose to avoid the traditional credit system and go with one of these other things. Then some fraudster opens an account in my name with my info and suddenly I’m in Equifax anyway. Then Equifax gets breached

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