Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | giraffe_lady's commentslogin

Hegseth is publicly just a huge fan of war crimes and this is probably the main reason he got the job he has now. The big thing he's been signaling, and not really even in a sly or dogwhistly way, is that war crimes are ok to do now.

If your goal is to do war crimes and enable others to do war crimes then removing the war crime reporting tool may not directly benefit you much but it certainly doesn't hurt you. And there is a certain idealogical alignment.


The most polite thing i can say about Pete is that he's the dimmest bulb among them, trying to imitate much more capable people. And everyone can see it.

He's broken the Peter Principle by shooting far above the level of his incompetence.


The nato phonetic alphabet one cracked me up. My dude you don't need that, call center employees don't know it, just say S as in Sugar like ur grandma used to.

The NATO alphabet is made of commonly known words that are hard to misspell and hard to mishear (at least the initial phonemes). The person on the other end doesn't need to be able to recite the words, they just need to be able to hear "november" and recognize that it starts with N.

Yes thank you that's a good description of what a phonetic alphabet is and how it's used.

The nato phonetic alphabet is still useful even if the other party doesn't know it, I've used it a bunch of times on the phone to spell out my 10- letter last name. Saves quite a lot of time and energy for me vs saying "letter as in word" for each letter.

Exactly. The listening party doesn't need to have knowledge of the NATO alphabet to still benefit from it since they are just regular English words.

I once had someone sound out a serial number over a spotty phone connection years ago and they said "N as in NAIL". You know what sounds a lot like NAIL? MAIL.

And that is why we don't just arbitrarily make up phonetic alphabets.


> saying "letter as in word" for each letter

Which often just confuses things further.

Me: My name is "Farb" F-A-R-B. B as in Baker.

Them: Farb-Baker, got it.


"M as in Mancy."

Right but it's not much more useful than any other phonetic alphabet the other party doesn't know, including the one you make up on the spot.

If you're me, it's still useful because the ones I make up on the spot aren't great.

"S-T-E-V-E @ gmail.com, S as in sun, T as in taste, ..." "Got it, fpeve."


I dunno, there's a pretty good chance that the one that people spent time and effort designing to replace earlier efforts with the goal of reducing potential ambiguity and for use over noisy connections with expectation that mistakes could cost lives is probably better than what you improvise on the spot

When I worked in customer service, I asked a teammate what I could do to spell back something the customer said, and she taught me that system, it helped me a lot.

I once had the customer service agent for Iberia (the Spanish airline) confirm my confirmation number with me using it.

It worked with me and I guess it must have usually worked for him in most of his customer interactions.


I've found the NATO alphabet fairly common at call centers, with globalization being a factor.

Yep I'm a moderate-to-strong LLM hater and this is one of like two things I use them for. Definitely a ground-leveler re: rails too it really had by far the best generators I had come across.

> It's also extremely macro heavy, and so it's its own DSL or collection of DSLs.

I mean this describes every full stack web framework right? Like sure if the underlying language doesn't have macros or macro-like tools that limits how perverted the syntax can get but the line between "DSL" and "API" gets really blurry in all of these massive frameworks.


That's true for languages that have macros. I just don't like macros, as they get over-abused in every language that has them. I'd much rather deal with just boilerplate and tedious syntax but still straightforward and completely in the language over macros, for the most part. Some macros are indeed useful, like in Rust with `println`, but they still get thrown everywhere.

Frameworks in langauges that don't use macros have this problem too that's what I was getting at with the DSL vs API thing. I don't want to litigate the worthiness of macros for a given purpose here. But if you don't use them for this you have to use something for this the problem doesn't go away.

Wherever rails or phoenix has macro-defined syntax to handle a specific task, laravel or whatever will have a collection of related functions that need to be used in very specific ways to accomplish the same thing. Whether this collection is a "class" with an "api" or whether it is a "language" defined around this "domain" you will have the abstraction and the complexity.

Having a preference for one approach of managing this abstraction & complexity seems fine but "a collection of DSLs" is pretty much what a web framework is so that can't be the problem here.


It really depends on how good your inspecting tools are. Using runtime methods and functions instead of macros mean the code is all right there, and what you're debugging is what you see in your editor (setting aside silly things like reflection shenanigans).

With macros, even language servers may need customization if they introduce new syntax. The code that runs doesn't exist until it runs, so you can't see it ahead of time.

This doesn't sound like too big a problem if you're familiar with the tooling already, but trying to figure out where some random method comes from in a rails code base when you're new to Ruby is somewhere between a nightmare and impossible without debugging and using the repl to tell you where the source is.

React has a JSX macro, and I love using it, so there's definitely room for them. There is a world of difference in developer experience when macros are used versus when not, however, and it is wrong to say that it is all the same.


The counterpart in Laravel or Spring Boot or whatever would be annotations. As I understand it, that's how they're doing things on the .NET side too.

It's kind of the standard way to paper over the protocol grit of HTTP and make people able to quickly pump out fresh plumbing between outbound socket and database.


> Frameworks in langauges that don't use macros have this problem too that's what I was getting at with the DSL vs API thing.

You mean in the sense that the language's built-in syntax and available abstractions get abused so much that it approximates a DSL?


Didn't pino palladino tour with him on that one? He's had an amazing career and is probably better known for other things but the hip hop/r&b studio work he did in the late 90s is some of the most influential by a single musician I think. It was basically him and questlove figuring out right there how to play j dilla's approach to rhythm programming with live instrumentation.

The recorded music from the sessions went on albums for erykah badu, common, and d'angelo but it ended up being basically the blueprint for an approach to studio & live rhythm for pop, hip hop, r&b, and also even jazz & gospel. Always fun to get to let old The Who heads know that palladino is also the best living hip hop bass player.


I agree with whatever fashion writer said the design would go hard if it were the size of like an og fiat 500 or a geo metro. As realized though it just Smacks of Gender.

What does smacks of gender mean?

Boomer here. I have worked with Gen Z and I think I can translate. I think it is a little masculine looking?

I think maybe more that it is masculine-insecurity looking. Like, just looking at one, one would be inclined to make unflattering assumptions about the owner.

In other words; to state it directly but politely, the truck just screams "small penis".

And a matching brain size is required to not realize this before making the purchase.

In other words, it repels rather than attracts the opposite sex. It's like wearing a t-shirt that says "Don't date me!"


There are now enough products marketed like this (I recently saw a product that was essentially being pitched as "coffee for men"), that I'm kind of wondering are people buying them ironically at this point. There can't be that large a market of totally un-self-aware men.

Excuse me, stewardess, I speak jive.

Randy: Oh, good.

Jive Lady: He said that he's in great pain and he wants to know if you can help him.

Randy: All right. Would you tell him to just relax and I'll be back as soon as I can with some medicine?

Jive Lady: [to the Second Jive Dude] Jus' hang loose, blood. She gonna catch ya up on da rebound on da med side.

Second Jive Dude: What it is, big mama? My mama no raise no dummies. I dug her rap!

Jive Lady: Cut me some slack, Jack! Chump don' want no help, chump don't GET da help!

First Jive Dude: Say 'e can't hang, say seven up!

Jive Lady: Jive-ass dude don't got no brains anyhow! Shiiiiit.


Satantango or the melancholy of resistance are good places to start. His books aren't all the same but there are some qualities they all share.

They're intricate, reference-heavy, postmodern novels with a lot of the emotional intensity purposely occulted behind the prose style. If you like Gass or Sebald you'll have fun.


His recent works are also incredible and very different from the early works. Try Seiobo There Below.

You can also appreciate him through his screenplay work on Bela Tarr's movies.


Oh good to know, I actually haven't read anything of his since war and war. Not for any particular reason, just there are a lot of books.


I also recommend the illustrated novella AnimalInside but you'll need to find a PDF, just found out only 2000 were printed and my copy goes for $300 now :0

Do you have a GoodReads that you'd share?


PHP too.


Nobody is constraining your beliefs or expressions of them. People are exercising their own individual right not to associate with people who express certain beliefs.


Ah. So just good old fashioned bigotry.


Generally, bigotry is bias based on immutable traits. Beliefs are not immutable.


[flagged]


Oh, of course.

To a right-winger, safety is bigotry and hatred is love. Of course, how else could it ever be.

Do you really care about freedom if you don't let white nationalists abuse everyone and everything in their power all the time?


> And what worries me is those (both on the left and on the right) who think that silence is a form of opinion or approval.

Definitely definitely. When a racist paramilitary is disappearing my neighbors my primary concern is whether people will consider me complicit for publicly stating that I have no duty to interfere.

You don't have to have an opinion on everything but you do have to have an opinion on some things. Or I mean, obviously you don't, but then you have to accept the social consequences of cowardice.


Are you neighbors illegal aliens?

If you believe we shouldn't have borders than just say so.


Consider applying for YC's Winter 2026 batch! Applications are open till Nov 10

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: