Twenty years after | Hacker News Reader

Twenty years after

esr.ibiblio.org

27 pointsjanvdberg24 comments

As a reminder, ESR thinks that women shouldn't be allowed around software engineers because they're part of a complex conspiracy to file false rape claims against them (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/11/06/linus_torvalds_targe...).

That's a bit of a stretch from what he actually posted. May as well link directly to the post, also.

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6907

Jesus, ad hominim much? I can't speak for you, but I've never met an idiot so completely useless I couldn't learn something from them.

It's actually the opposite of ad hominem - I'm addressing his beliefs, not him as a person.

I recognize that he's contributed value to the OSS community, but over the last decade or two I think he's done far more harm than good. A number of his beliefs and writings are extremely problematic, and turning a blind eye to it because of his contributions taints the OSS community.

Another example:

"In the U.S., blacks are 12% of the population but commit 50% of violent crimes; can anyone honestly think this is unconnected to the fact that they average 15 points of IQ lower than the general population? That stupid people are more violent is a fact independent of skin color." -Eric S. Raymond

I don't have the sociology or statistical analysis chops to thoroughly evaluate that statement, so I ask from a place of sincere curiosity - is the statement, or the numbers/sources, incorrect? If so, how?

> I'm addressing his beliefs, not him as a person

That is ad-hominem. What is a person? His beliefs - and actions - of course.

Well, I imagine that you could argue a person is the structural disposition of a bunch of atoms, but it easier to summarize that as "beliefs".

Ad-hominem attack means diminishing some actions/qualities of a person because of other actions/qualities of said person, and that is what the parent was arguing. Not that it is always inappropriate, but it is ad-hominem.

I used to own a copy of IBM Pilot. My primary school bought a bunch of JXs (Japan/Australia/New Zealand variant of the PCjr), and IBM had thrown in some software which the school had no idea what to do with. So, my computing teacher gave it to me. A copy of IBM Pilot, and a copy of the IBM EZ-VU Runtime Facility (EZ-VU was an attempt to port the mainframe ISPF dialog engine to DOS). I never had any practical use for IBM Pilot, but I at least got it to run. The EZ-VU Runtime Facility was useless without the Development Facility to go with it.

Rather stupidly, I threw both out years ago.

Here is the NEWS file: http://www.catb.org/~esr/ieee-pilot/NEWS

can someone explain to me what is interesting about this? If his name wasn't part of this story, would it still be?

Reviving an old and obscure language is always interesting :)

I would guess the answer is "no", not that it matters. If you don't think the story belongs here then just downvote it.

Stories are considered "interesting" or "uninteresting" based on how people vote on it, that's pretty much all there is to it. In my entire life, I have yet to see any good come from people who are not interested in something complaining to people who are interested in something that they shouldn't be interested in whatever it is that they've expressed an interest in. Which should not be interpreted as me being interested in this story, which I most definitely am not. But if other people are, good for them.

I think you are reading too much into my question. I am not complaining, simply wondering. Perhaps pilot is a lang that is interesting, or there is something else there that is interesting that I missed.

I'm not sure what the threshold is for being able to downvote stories, but it's pretty high.

Those that have that power have a great deal more control of the front page than those of us that don't.

We're relegated to trying to exercise our power through snarky comments and distracting meta conversations about the voting system.

Articles aren't down voted. They're flagged. I'm not certain the threshold for that.

The other way to get rid of content you don't want or want to bury, vote up content you do want.

The final way is to hide it. The article will disappear for a day or two for you.

There is no downvote on HN. There's a "flag" button, but using it as a downvote is an abuse and can get your flag privileges silently removed.

It's interesting to me. Call it niche, obscure, retro. I like old stuff like this. If the Xerox alto saga can have air time why not this?

Used pilot back in the 80's when I was at a college. We used it for some remedial math training and the drill and practice that went with it. It was pretty simplistic, but it was easy to get the professors (actually the TA's) to write the courseware.

Hacker News aught to auto-mod stories with "ESR" or "Eric S Raymond" down. His ntpsec project is an insecure joke and half his blog posts are unintelligible racist, sexist rants. Don't give him more air time.

Just half? Then he is better than a few newspapers.

Can't wait for tptacek's take. He's always a huge ESR fan and has some wonderful comments about him on twitter.

This code is pretty bad, but I don't have anything more interesting to say about it than that.

I didn't think it was that bad when you discount that yacc/lex is the front end for it. If you brute force parsing it the code is simplifier since the verbs are the first characters in a line with a colon (:) after them. The use of a real lexer and parser makes life harder.

To me, it's a ragdoll stuffed with strcats, sprintfs, and strcpys, with random integer casts and from what I can tell not a single defense against integer overflows.

It doesn't matter, because nobody is going to use this code, but as a reminder: this is the person ostensibly "hardening" ntpd.

Compared to the great openntpd from Henning Brauer of OpenBSD, which actually does secure ntpd.

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