Hacker News Reader

MartinCronon The ascent of "guy" (1999)

Someone who is upset enough about being being called out for using gendered language that they post a complaint about the interaction, on hacker news, I would bet real money that the OP is a straight male.

I would also bet that the straight male would say "no" to the question "do you fuck guys?"

MartinCronon Elizabeth Holmes 'gave me gobbledygook answers' back in 2014

Holmes made one single promise on which she couldn't (possibly) deliver while Musk makes dozens of promises and delivers well enough on enough of them that he'll never be fully discredited.

The whole "stepping on a single nail vs. sleeping on a bed of nails" metaphor.

MartinCronon TOTP tokens on my wrist with the smartest dumb watch

I always thought that the benefit of the physical device was that it was decoupled from the main device. If someone steals my laptop, for example, they won't be able to access my MFA secured accounts unless they ALSO steal my phone (and are unable to lock it).

MartinCronon It is time to legalise cocaine: The costs of prohibition outweigh the benefits

Thanks for sharing. Seems painful.

I've seen similar things where people seem to just lose their moral compass along with reasonable inhibitions and I've also attributed that to substance abuse, though not cocaine specifically.

MartinCronon It is time to legalise cocaine: The costs of prohibition outweigh the benefits

This is a side effect that I'm not aware of. Can you share more, please?

MartinCronon It is time to legalise cocaine: The costs of prohibition outweigh the benefits

So, it's nowhere near every street corner or playground, but I encounter a surprising amount of second hand smoke here in (legal) Seattle. Although it's not really much more than it was pre-legalization.

MartinCronon How to distort Scrum until it no longer works

I'm probably doing standups wrong...

And then you describe some of the healthiest standup culture I've seen...

MartinCronon Fandom Acquires GameSpot, Giant Bomb, GameFAQs, TV Guide and Metacritic

It was when Ryan Davis died that I realized just how intimate the podcasting medium could be. While I also loved the rest of the crew, I couldn't listen to Giant Bomb without him. It was just too sad.

MartinCronon Why “go nuts, show nuts” doesn’t work in 2022

The "uhhhh, this is a private venue, they don't owe you a soapbox" rhetoric rings increasingly hollow when we just went through a multiyear period when society collectively forced millions of people to work or go to school over the internet, often through big tech platforms.

That feels like a non-sequitur. People can both use mainstream platforms for work/school and create/find their own platforms for other parts of their life.

MartinCronon TLDR explains what a piece of code does

It's something run repeatedly, so small chances will occur. Amoung it's failure states are being very, very wrong in ways that are hard for a skilled human to detect without more work that writing from scratch.

Also makes for a great plot summary for the original Jurassic Park

MartinCronon Stop measuring community engagement

Lynch mobs are strong and engaged communities, after all.

MartinCronon AirPods Pro (2nd Generation)

I like to make the distinction between companies that treat software as a necessary evil vs. a competitive advantage.

MartinCronon Final thoughts on Ubiquiti

I'm using the TP-Link Omada access points and router along with the software controller and it's pretty great.

MartinCronon How DALL-E 2 Works

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

I wouldn't believe a masterfully crafted video of vaccines actually being implanted with microchips unless the video were authenticated by at least one reputable news source. Provenance matters, and just like we don't believe extraordinary things based on single out-of-context photograph, we shouldn't believe extraordinary things based on a single out-of-context video.

MartinCronon How DALL-E 2 Works

The cynic in me is wondering if that will make any difference. It's not like people need deep fakes or even the possibility of deep fakes to believe that the world is flat or that Obama was born in Kenya or that lizard people are running sex trafficking rings out the basements of pizza parlors with no basements.

People look at the objective reality, provided by the sources that should have the most credibility, and just shrug it off.

MartinCronon Jack Dorsey’s $2.9M NFT dropped 99% in value

There's something subversive about that... a display of things that other people are pretending they have ownership over.

MartinCronon Jack Dorsey’s $2.9M NFT dropped 99% in value

Nope, nope, nope, and nope.

He bought the bragging rights to say "that URL of that image of that tweet, if you look at this particular public ledger, you'll see that the ledger says that I own it!"

MartinCronon Jack Dorsey’s $2.9M NFT dropped 99% in value

> How does one view list(s) of NFTs?

A better question is "why" anyone would want to look at lists of URLs pointing to things that someone is pretending that they own by having an entry of their ownership in some arbitrary public ledger.

MartinCronon We don’t use a staging environment

I like hearing about different heterodox approaches.

MartinCronon Amazon workers on Staten Island vote to unionize

I guess that's good if you only care about you?

MartinCronon Madeleine Albright has died

I'll take moral guidance from... checks notes... anyone other than Orson Scott Card, thank you.

MartinCronon Amazon Corretto 18 is now generally available

Not a dumb question at all. JDK choice is intimidating when you're not in Java-land all day, every day.

IntelliJ lets you download + install + switch between JDKS really easily, which I've found indispensable.

As another person commented, the Liberica JDKs with JavaFX built in are my go-to for hobby type coding.

MartinCronon Why Don't You Use

Or even, "we've just upgraded to a new version of our health system and it has effectively shut us down"

MartinCronon CSS's !important was added because of laws about font size for some text

I actually remember it from the time. It was part of the discussion why the page's stylesheet would "win" over a user specified stylesheet when there were conflicts... sometimes things needed to be that way for legal reasons.

MartinCronon CSS's !important was added because of laws about font size for some text

I always read it as "NOT important" until I remember that CSS is its own kind of crazy-town.

MartinCronon Amazon moves employees out of downtown Seattle office due to crime

And in this case, the takeaway of “See? Exactly as I would have argued before I read this story, government intervention just doesn’t work!” feels so myopic. Plenty of interventions do work, you just don’t see them on 3rd Avenue.

MartinCronon Amazon moves employees out of downtown Seattle office due to crime

By "the kind of person who would have been homeless were it not for a government program" you mean someone who chose their parents badly and was homeless at 14, a literal child?

MartinCronon Amazon moves employees out of downtown Seattle office due to crime

People don't formulate policies from anecdotes, silly. They adopt policies that align with their existing world view and then anecdotes to back up these policies.

I strongly doubt it was the article from the Stranger's blog that completely turned around honkdaddy's thinking on this subject.

MartinCronon Amazon moves employees out of downtown Seattle office due to crime

That specific location for an Amazon office never made sense to me. It's like someone at Amazon was making late night impulse buys of real estate.

MartinCronon CD sales grow for first time since 2004

My older car has a 6 CD magazine, very fancy for the time. When my kid noticed the "eject" button on the dashboard, she thought that the car had ejector seats!