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

It's disappointing to read this thread. Even tptacek, a prominent speaker on Hacker News, exhibits bizarre ignorance regarding this topic.

Generally speaking, it seems to me that much sloppy thinking in the current debate involves the mixture of the following basic errors:

1) Ignorance about biology. Evolutionary biology has been an exceptionally fertile section of science for the last decades, and provided deeper understandings on many biological phenomenon, including human behaviors. The accusers' understanding of biology (e.g. condemning it as "genetic determinism") is at least 50 years behind.

2) Poor understanding of the due process. Calling a random petition to condemn a person publicly is exactly a witch hunt. History proves that it's a very error-prone way to punish someone, and no civilized country accept it as a proper procedure anymore.

As to (2) I'd recommend everyone to read DJB's "The death of due process". It is very important, because it may be you (or your family) to be hung by lynch mobs next time.

https://blog.cr.yp.to/20160607-dueprocess.html


> What's the source of this idea that "abstraction" means "combining duplicated code"?

It's coming from the tradition of Sir Francis Bacon's Empiricism. Some people believe that abstract ideas are mostly acquired thorough empirical observation a.k.a. carefully watching a series of repetitive events. The point here is that "to know" is a synonym of "generalization" for them. So OP naturally puts emphasis on duplicated code as a good opportunity for abstraction.

People from other camps have a very different view on human knowledge, and think that abstract ideas can indeed come from other sources, most importantly, from our reasoning function. For these people, the process of programming is to implement our innate idea into concrete code. For them, an actual piece of code is basically a "shadow" of our abstract concept.

Hell, someone really should write a book titled "The Logic of Programmatic Discovery" ;)


A really cool frontend for OSM is https://mapscii.me. You can try it out via:

    $ telnet mapscii.me
(Use arrow keys to move, and a/z to zoom in/zoom out)

I was totally blown away when I first connected to it.


In awe! You can also use the mouse to navigate around like on a gui map.


I only get this:

  $ telnet mapscii.me
  Trying 144.76.97.34...
  Connected to mapscii.me.
  Escape character is '^]'.
  _
Then nothing more happens. Arrow keys just get printed back out like with `cat`:

  ^[[A^[[D^[[B^[[C
Eventually I get "Connection closed by foreign host." This is on Arch Linux with telnet from inetutils. Am I holding something wrong?


That is rather wonderful but, of course, one typically can't use telnet at work "because security". I got left with it in a mode printing escapes afterwards, and needed reset(1), but I guess that's telnet's fault, unless TERM is wrong.


Right. And IIRC Arthur Andersen and Accenture had been kinda hostile to each other for a long time. It was funny because they seemed pretty much like brother companies from outside eyes.

The trouble was that AA kept trying to invade the turf (= juicy consulting gigs) and it made partners of Accenture mad.


Right. The original fork name was "GitHon" because hon == book in Japanese.

The author recently renamed "GitHon" to "HonKit" due to Git being protected by U.S. trademark law.


It’s absolutely begging to get an extension called HonKitOnk.


Hope they don't run into any problems with the "honk" memes.


Japan's "B5" originated from the official paper size in Edo-Tokugawa era. So it has quite a bit of history, and IMO it's handier than ISO papers.

A fun fact is that "letter" size is pretty much hated in Asian countries. Since many poorly-internationalized softwares choose "letter" as the default printing size, while its usage is virtually zero there.


Yet in Japan there is a crazy number of different paper size and color, especially all the various slips used for bills and by the administration. The "post card bill" is also particularly annoying since once opened they don’t get flat again.


"Letter" size is only used in the USA, Canada and (sometimes) Mexico.

It's not just east Asia that can be annoyed by American defaults, but the whole world.


It is also used in Guatemala,El Salvador,Honduras,Nicaragua and Costa Rica.

It gets interesting when we start mixing imperial,metric and colonial measures.


The major advantage of u2f is phishing resistance.

If you always use u2f for auth, you can be sure that you are not fooled by fake login pages. It ain't just matter whether secondary otp is available. (it's just a backup for when you lost a hardware token!)


Except those buying HTZ are not quite "buy and hold" people?

I assume most of them are just doing gambling. They are fully aware that HTZ is going to be worthless in near future, but they buy the share anyway because they believe they can sell it off to someone else before the last minute.

A funny thing is that if Hartz indeed issies new shares, it makes the game a lot less favorable for those gamblers...


There are A LOT of buy-and-hold types in Hertz. They are still gamblers, but their time horizon is long and they are influenced by the low share price. I have a few smart, well educated friends who fall into this category.


The average Silicon Valley-Er makes $150k/yr. putting $1k into 2021 LEAP options could be worth $30k if the company makes it out of bankruptcy. I’ll turn off my servers for a month and YOLO them odds


And putting 5 dollars into a lottery ticket could turn into 40 million.


> A funny thing is that if Hartz indeed issies new shares, it makes the game a lot less favorable for those gamblers...

These gamblers are irrational. They might double down, or manage to find new gamblers, or sell before this even happens. Nobody knows what will happen, and it doesn't really matter.


OP is not an empirical study, but model-based one.

The paper first assumes that facial mask prevents individuals from spreading covid-19, then tries to estimate how it is effective at lowering the mass reproduction number.

So this paper proves nothing about whether wearing mask is really meaningful or not in the first place. It is just assumed so.


Of course, Reuters does not mention that.


I think the lesson here is "don't be a commodity"?

In this light, PHP coders are real commodities. They are paid lowly, treated as expendable, and get no respect by peers. I think they're going down the same path of "HTML experts" which were once lucrative business in early 1990s.

Java/C++ programmers fare better because (I guess) there is some fundamental difficulty to be proficient at them. So, despite being old and boring, being good at Java or C(++) is still a good business.

Learning Go/Rust is another way to avoid being a commodity. Although they have a smaller job market, employers need to treat you with respect, because they can't easily find another worker with a matched skill in the market.


Java and C++ aren’t popular because they are difficult to be proficient at. They are popular because they fit the needs of enterprise software better than other languages, and enterprise companies committed to them a long time ago and have huge amounts of software written in those languages.


PHP devs make good money, maybe not what their peers in "good" languages make, but a good Senior PHP dev is making six figures in most markets these days.


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

Search: