I'm kind of surprised modern Microsoft/Xbox hasn't leaned into their retro past and brought back some of these old entertainment pack classics. Like a modern 3D SSX style Ski Free, modern GORILLA.BAS (with full port of qbasic as an Easter egg of course), or a 3D Hover! remake but with top tier modern 3D visuals, etc. Heck I bet you could even make fun abstract games out of old Windows 95 screen savers and their visuals.
edit: A wario ware clone with frantic mini game challenges cribbed from old Microsoft DOS/Windows games is the ticket. Imagine blasting down a hill in ski free, getting eaten by the monster, then jumping to a round of GORILLA.BAS, smashing into Encarta and having to quickly find a specific topic, etc. and navigating it all through a Bob style home interface while CANYON.MID plays and it randomly glitches into hot dog stand colors if you fail a mini game. Poorly digitized Bill Gates in a trench coat with toy shotgun is the end boss of course. :)
Yeah, it's great as an intro tutorial. I wish ghidra fixed some of those issues, or at least surfaced the choices it made so they can be manually fixed. It's like the uncanny valley where it's typically so good that annoyances really stand out for me.
And we also have work, family, hobbies and other open source projects we work on. So unless you want to take over one of those for me, I don't have extra time to work on Ghidra as well.
Sure I'll take on your hobbies, maybe the family (if good) so you can work on Ghidra ;-) Ok, that's silly, I get your point but maybe put your feedback on their github at least.
It's a convoluted Java codebase that likely nobody outside of the NSA fully understands. Publicly released early 2019, 184 contributors according to GitHub but a signifigant portion of the contributors only have a couple of commits with most of them being typo fixes or minor bug fixes (likely the result c+p fails or typos in the first place - not major logic flaws). The regular contributors are likely NSA employees.
A detailed description of every step of the reverse engineering process! That's amazing. Ghidra is such an awesome piece of software. I found it to be much easier to use than radare2. I wonder if there are similar process descriptions for the latter...
I'm not sure why using 'them' is any worse. It's a nice identity-agnostic pronoun. Mixing pronouns with names is much more natural than repeatedly using the name. I don't get why it's an issue at all.
I'm saying that if you don't know a person's pronouns at all and you're not sure if they/them sounds right, you largely can avoid it altogether. And I don't mean by just repeating their name over and over (which I agree sounds weird), so if we take the original comment:
> Feel like it would be easier if he rewrote it from scratch and then copied the business logic
then using their name is totally pronoun agnostic as discussed:
> Feel like it would be easier if foone rewrote it from scratch and then copied the business logic
but you can also not use name, pronoun or anything:
> Feel like it would be easier to rewrite the app from scratch and then copy the business logic
or:
> Feel like it would be easier if the app was rewritten from scratch, and then the business logic could be copied
English is really flexible, and to be honest I think these look quite natural and don't sound like I'm nervously trying to avoid offending anyone.
I guess because "they" and "them" is plural, and it can confuse people to think that you're talking about a group of people instead of a single person? At least that's what confuses me (as non-native speaker) quite often when I read someone talking about "them"
Singular "they" predates singular "you" [1]. If someone tells you otherwise, tell them they are wrong. That use of "them" as in the previous sentence has been correct for centuries.
Not sure why this is downvoted? Only for the "If you don't care"-part? I usually check if any preferences were stated or what pronoun a person uses when talking about themselves, but use "they/them" as generic fallback as well - and am now irritated if that's wrong and for what reason?
(This would probably be a bit much for a HN comment, so feel free to link)
The "if you don't care part" was meant more as "you're being a dick but I know you'll keep being one anyway, so use this instead to not offend anyone", but the first option works better in a comment. I usually don't like provoking people like that, but I really don't understand the downvotes here.
Or else what? you'll be sending the gender cops my way? ;-)
I don't have the time or energy to search for everyone's favorite pronoun before talking about them. If it's someone I personally know or talk to on a regular basis, then I will certainly use their preferred pronoun out of habit. But I expect people to accept that some people just care less about their pronouns than they do. I know this is a hard to grasp concept in this day and age...
I don't want people to call me "buddy" or "bro" but I accept it when they call me like that because I respect their choice
I have never encountered a correction between "he" and "she", personally, because either the name or the appearance usually makes it very clear.
I admit that it's harder for some names ("Andrea" comes to mind, or "Kim") especially if you have never met that person, but these cases didn't come up in my experience yet, so maybe I just have a small circle of friends or something... ;-)
And you mis-read my comment, I didn't say I'm opposed to being corrected, but I expect people to accept that others might "mis-pronoun" them, and not expect everyone to first search their whole social media presence for the correct pronouns.
I think it has been confirmed by the courts that linking is not a form of copyright infringement and therefore legal. Asking people not to do so is at best going to those create a lot of anger from who don't want the Internet to devolve into proprietary walled gardens of content, and at worst is basically asking to be Steisanded.
There have been some funny attempts at trying to stop others from linking to one's site, e.g. by jwz. Then again, this person does use Twitter...
When someone asks that their Twitter threads not be posted here, anyone knowing that can either do then the courtesy of respecting their wishes, or not. That is not subjective.
sure, in the real world we're all going around checking everyone's respect earnings to know whether we should use their preferred names, pronouns, exempt them from our favourite slurs. Gotta earn that
You can reasonably ask an unreasonable request. If the neighbour politely told me that they don’t like me walking past their house on the public sidewalk, I will ignore such a request because I’m entitled to walk on public property. Just like how I believe it’s unreasonable to request people do not link to public web pages.
A reasonable request would be “I never published this publicly or have since deleted it, please stop reposting it”
The subjective part is they believe it is reasonable to request this while others do not.
Even if they did, it's futile. They can request mods to ban that account from being submitted, but otherwise there will always be someone who doesn't know about the request, and the threads are great tech content so they will surely be upvoted.
It’s already quite a stretch to expect every commenter to have read TFA, and it’s a much bigger stretch to assume that every random HN submitter will have any clue that this person once said they would like people to stop linking their posts on HN.
Really. Who cares. If you don't want people to link your tweets, why post them to Twitter in the first place?
They should delete them and put them on a blog and block HN traffic like what petulant characters such as jwz has done. Even then one can still screenshot and upload the whole page and paste the link here and they will still get upset over it.
In general, do what you want with the links you post here as long as they don't break the guidelines.
One of the reasons that they prefer not to have them linked here is that the discussion inevitably boils down to "why did they post this on twitter as a thread instead of making a blog post and writing it out long form." As well as complaints about them getting distracted.
It's just that the community here tends not to like twitter threads, but likes the content.
I feel like comments like that on HN are pretty easily ignored though, no? Unless people are seeing the article posted here, and then going to Twitter and replying or DMing @foone about it - which I would agree is a bit out of order.
Ah I see. There's not much to be done then, because I can guarantee that with the ~140k followers foone has on twitter and the number of people who submit on HN there's no way short of HN blocking URLs (which IMO won't happen) that would resolve this, except if foone individually blocks the bots as they show up?
Maybe this just comes with the territory of being popular on twitter :(
Just a little heads-up though, foone indicated their pronouns as "they/them" on Twitter.
Im just taking a wild guess, but here's a summary of a few bad behaviors here that have kept me from posting projects im proud of before...
most of the time someone posts something here, you get:
- this is wrong, they forgot to pump the xyz modulator in line 18
- I dont see why they didnt do it exactly how id do it
- why do this? so and so already did it, and its in rust
- you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.
and my favorite:
- this reminds me of this awesome startup xyzmodupump.co, it doesn't really do anything similar to this, but the name is similar, oh and by the way im the CTO full remote bay area free lunabars and dog sitter.
My experience of my stuff (rarely!) getting posted here was not nearly as bad as you describe but yeah this certainly exist. My suggestion would be to learn to ignore/brush off these parts.
Well this would not do the shattering-ago amount of damage but after repeated exposure I would probably get burnt out and quit.
Here is an anecdotal analogy: Friends repeatedly call me Internet Explorer every time I share any Tech article that is > 2 weeks old. After a month I just stop reading tech news altogether.
Are they joking ? Yes. It is serious ? No, but it just kills all the fun.
Well this would not do the shattering-ago amount of damage but after repeated exposure I would probably get burnt out and quit.
Here is an anecdotal analogy: Friends repeatedly call me Internet Explorer every time I share any Tech article that is > 2 weeks old. After a month I just stop reading tech news altogether.
Are they joking ? Yes. It is serious ? No, but it just kills all the fun.
Exactly. You can always ignore HN (or any other community discussing your creations) if you don't like what they have to say - much easier than making angry comments about them.
Contrary to what I expected, Twitter has provided a higher signal-to-noise ratio than Hacker News for me. If you just jump into Twitter and follow people at random that’s not the case, but if you use Twitter intelligently and curate your follow and block lists, you can actually get much more productive discussions.
HN is also famously critical, cynical, and overall grumpy. You can find golden comments here (why I come back) but the majority of comments are not great and a lot of the frequent commenters are relentlessly negative and cynical.
The discussion here about Foone's preferred pronouns and desires for linking is pretty bad by HN standards I must admit, but frankly I've never seen it done better on any tech forum. Usenet was and is an endless hostile flamewar ground. Larger Reddit tech subs talk about the same topics constantly. Lobsters is stuck in a loop of evangelism, gatekeeping, and pushback against both. Mastodon in its more toxic parts is just as bad, often worse, than Twitter. The same personality ticks that makes people wrong deeper in the comments here repeat in spades on every tech news site I've been on. Dan Luu says as much on his page about HN comments.
Tech people are neurodiverse, have a long culture of being strident (Torvalds, ESR, et al.), and often tend to be in their own heads. That combination is probably just what all of this is. But one thing I try to remind myself of is that busy builders often don't have the time, or desire, to write detailed HN comments about what they build all the time. So comments here are probably, disproportionately, written by people not building things.
There was a recent point in time where I could feel myself getting a headache from passing over all the regular cynicism in the comments. Every bit of negativity I passed my eyes over physically felt like poison, but I kept coming back because I was addicted.
This kind of routine sounds familiar - it's the same kind that's brought up when applied to other forums on this forum itself. I kept thinking I could escape that cycle by finding the place away from "the other mindless information hoses". The impression I got from reading comments here makes me want to believe this, but I don't think it's true. And the false sense of superiority that got into my head from thinking I'd found the nicer place led me astray.
There are a lot of comparisons of this site to others, but regardless of what HN is labeled, I think that despite the engaging conversations that do take place, the comments are not always a comfortable place for me to return to. It's to the point where I've seemingly overestimated the many pronouncements of better moderation, or that it's less toxic than that other place, or that there's insight to be found in lots of places. The catch is that all those things might be true, and yet one can still feel worn out by everything in this place besides the unequivocal good. I can count on one hand the times in the past five years where an article or comment I read on HN meaningfully changed my life.
Additive firehouse sites can still house valuable information, and said sites are unlikely to go away in the long term from scores of people bickering at them from a distance. The world is far larger than what a single orange site can encompass.
Except for some very technical topics, I find myself skipping the comments more and more, despite the fact that was one of my favorite parts of the site.
I'm just using this as "term of art". I would never want to use a non-preferred pronoun, that would be hurtful. If I offended, I'm sorry, I can't edit it now.
Honestly there are a few bad apples that show up around here, but I think that's just a reflection of our industry as a whole. If you have open signup and light-ish touch moderation, you're bound to end up with whatever HN is.
I see "the orange site" phrase used a lot over at lobste.rs, and they obviously followed a different path - you need to be invited or somehow known to get on board. So they've got less of what they think of as toxicity and everyone's supposed to be pals with each other. Except little conflicts and tantrums do happen every now and then, and there's less activity overall (current top story has 26 comments on it, 10 of the 25 stories on the front page have no comments at all).
For me it’s a lot more than a few bad apples. It’s the general state of discourse and empathy from a reasonably large chunk of the user base.
HN was never perfect (since I found it), but it’s much worse now.
To be fair this has happened in general to a number of sites/thing in the exact same timeline. It’s not an HN specific problem, other than the degree to which such people may be attracted to the usual HN spheres.
Twitter's blocking tools are second to none. Specifically the ability to block words is pure magic. I used to see tons of retweets of political garbage, but with a block list of political words it's all gone and all I see are interesting technical discussions.
It is difficult to make such suggestions. We do not know who you are, where you live, what your political preferences are, anything on which to base suggestions.
So, no.
All I can do is tell you some of the keywords I block that improve my Twitter experience.
Whenever you see a tweet you didn't want to see, pick a word directly from the tweet and add it to your block list right then. Don't worry about false positives too much because it's just Twitter, missing a tweet or two isn't the end of the world, and also I often only block words "from people you don't follow" so the blocks don't apply to direct tweets from people I know. Pretty soon you'll have a great block list and a clean feed.
1. Every time someone posts one of Foone's threads to HN, a Twitter bot that just reposts HN links will link to the thread, which notifies them, which is annoying. They always block all of them, but there always seems to be a new one. They've speculated that there's a "how to build an HN repost Twitter bot" tutorial out there that they're all copied from, and that's why there's so many identical bots.
2. People keep complaining that they write Twitter threads instead of blog posts, and they're tired of it.
People misgender them, or complain about their pronouns, and complain that they use Twitter instead of a weblog (which they do because they have ADHD and Twitter is the only platform they have the focus for.) And then eventually people get mad at them at having the temerity to complain at all.
Somehow, writing the exact same structured text that would go into a blog post in a thousand tweets is different? No, they just have a preference for publishing information in an inefficient way.
> Somehow, writing the exact same structured text that would go into a blog post in a thousand tweets is different?
It's a very bold assumption to expect the exact same structure in a blog post (which can be edited at arbitrary places within the entire document) than in a twitter thread (where tweets can not be edited once sent). Editing - or not being able to edit, for that matter - has a massive influence on the eventual resulting text.
In fact, the incremental nature of twitter threads kind of caters to the ADHD brain because it completely defeats self-sabotaging perfectionism by removing the opportunity to revisit and rework previous sections of the text. If you follow Foone for a while, you'll see that they tweet their thoughts and works as it happens. They don't sit down and prepare the entire thread beforehand because doing so would make it a lot harder to finish, if not entirely impossible.
> Somehow, writing the exact same structured text that would go into a blog post in a thousand tweets is different?
Yes? A blog post is a commitment; you write out a bunch of text, and then you have the option to polish and edit it, so there's generally the expectation that you'll polish and edit it. But you don't want to do that, so you just write the blog post (or half the blog post) but never publish it.
On Twitter, you can just write half an unedited blog post, and then stop; and people will still derive value from that.
They were writing the twitter thread in real time as they were reverse engineering the program. In fact, when I clicked the link, they weren't even done yet.
Twitter is a better medium for this kind of thing.
Curious that you think blogging is more efficient than tweeting.
Writing many short pieces of content asynchronously and being able to GC them from your mental stack whenever you need is objectively a very efficient way to publish.
It's important to remember that not everyone's brain works the same as yours - for some people it's quite transformative to be able to document thoughts atomically.
They write the content, they get to decide the medium. They are not trying to sell us something. And neither you or me are paying them to publish for one of us specifically. It's like getting free beer and then complaining how we don't like that brand and it too warm anyway.
I suppose too many people made well-intended suggestions (or worse), so they're now pissed at the general HN crowd.
That said, I share the sentiment (especially when hitting the "login to enjoy twitter" wall) and also wondered how it can be less effort to create these tweets than producing for $alternate_medium. But I enjoy most of what foone puts there, so I just do a s/twitter\.com/nitter.net/ and get on with my life.
OTOH I'm just happy they don't do Facebook livestreams :P
> It's a pain in the ass for them to publish it like that
Foone repeatedly said they'd either publish the content like this or not at all because it is the least painful way for them to put content out. Not sure why you think you know better than them?
Also, even though the readership experience might be subpar compared to a blog post, it is hard to imagine that putting out a set of tweets would be harder to do than putting out a blog post in general. Anyone who has ever tried to write a good blog post I think will relate to this. Writing well is hard. Tweeting well is less hard.
Come on, typing a short description and uploading a picture 100 times is easier than typing everything in one block and adding a few connectors here and there?
Obviously that's their prerogative and they can do whatever they want but objectively speaking it is more work and I sincerely hope the trend will die.
Yes it absolutely is if you write the tweets while you actually do the thing.
Writing a blog post would require you to do the same, but not share while you are going through the experience (so no helpful replies from your followers etc), then having to edit (as blog def requires something a bit more polished) and post it on the blog that you need to run or have run for you some way. And then you would need to somehow get people to actually read that still.
So I totally believe them (besides believing them they are telling me their valid view in the first place).
foone has ADHD, and can't complete a blog post because of that. Asking them why they don't just write a blog is like asking a blind person why they don't just read normal text instead of braille, they literally can't.
I think literally can't is a little bit strong here, as Foone does also have a blog: https://foone.wordpress.com/
That being said, if using twitter is easier for them and it's a choice of either publishing this stuff on Twitter or not at all, then I'm glad they use Twitter.
Edit: I just noticed that the blog posts were originally published as twitter threads, so maybe my point doesn't stand.
I'm kind of surprised modern Microsoft/Xbox hasn't leaned into their retro past and brought back some of these old entertainment pack classics. Like a modern 3D SSX style Ski Free, modern GORILLA.BAS (with full port of qbasic as an Easter egg of course), or a 3D Hover! remake but with top tier modern 3D visuals, etc. Heck I bet you could even make fun abstract games out of old Windows 95 screen savers and their visuals.
edit: A wario ware clone with frantic mini game challenges cribbed from old Microsoft DOS/Windows games is the ticket. Imagine blasting down a hill in ski free, getting eaten by the monster, then jumping to a round of GORILLA.BAS, smashing into Encarta and having to quickly find a specific topic, etc. and navigating it all through a Bob style home interface while CANYON.MID plays and it randomly glitches into hot dog stand colors if you fail a mini game. Poorly digitized Bill Gates in a trench coat with toy shotgun is the end boss of course. :)