Hacker News Reader

airhead969on State Charges 77-Year-Old for 'Practicing Engineering Without a License'

In the US, there are a dozen or so legally-protected "engineer" title variants and professional designations like "professional engineer" (PE). My degree is accredited for the path of PE, but I would need a reason to go that route.

If it's unlisted, then it's fair to use by anyone:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_professional_designati...

airhead969on State Charges 77-Year-Old for 'Practicing Engineering Without a License'

IJ also helped here.

https://ij.org/press-release/oregon-engineer-wins-traffic-li...

airhead969on Why did we ever think a student's first programming language didn't matter?

The ethics of academia requires that computer science shouldn't become a factory pumping-out sausages by the millions by whatever means necessary.

Perhaps a prerequisite of the major would be demonstrable knowledge of 2+ programming languages that exist in nearly orthogonal domains.

I think low-level to high-level, with the right amount of history, is the best way build rather than relying on mysterious abstractions below. Microcode, assembly, C or Fortran, are the fundamentals CS graduates should be required to have or the accreditation bodies aren't doing their jobs.

Also:

If you can teach monads, you're a great lecturer.

If you're Sean Davis from UC Davis, you are/were a great lecturer.

A great lecturer of technical minutiae both has an expressive personality and explains concepts as simply as possible using learning aids such as analogies, examples, and diagrams.

airhead969on Where Did the Coronavirus Come From? What We Already Know Is Troubling

I remember I heard about something called Russiagate, but history never-ever repeats itself. EVER.

airhead969on Where Did the Coronavirus Come From? What We Already Know Is Troubling

On the next installment of speculative FUD, mainstream media, agenda-driven reporting:

Do the Chinese subsidize supervillains' labs to manufacture pandemics to kill themselves and the world?

Do the Chinese drink the blood of young children? If so, what does it taste like and what food pairings work best?Does the dog Fluffy get to have a taste?

What should we do to thwart the ascending Red Menace while America crumbles from within like Rome 2.0?

This isn't about news, it's about yellow (no pun intended) journalism to serve Western corporate interests.

airhead969on Go 1.17 is deprecating the traditional use of 'go get'

Lessons (not) learned: Go never worked well with semantic versioning or packaging, didn't mature and evolve as a language fast enough for productivity at scale in ways users wanted, became stuck in its ruts, and was overwhelmed by an influx of trend-following noobs. I bounced because its stiltedness never seemed to improve.

airhead969on List of Printers Which Do or Do Not Display Tracking Dots

How does new or used make it more or less "shady?"

airhead969on “Please don't waste maintainers' time on your KPI grabbing patches”

Second-stringers do this. They can accumulate all of the certifications, bogus "patches," and patents they want, but they'll still have zero street-cred. What's more, companies who promote and advance based on these factors are only fooling and embarrassing themselves with weak staff.

The other problem is a fair number of Eastern managers don't know or care about the business or management details, they all of want the prestige of a title with the least effort. A lot of no-name businesses in China are more BS than corporate ones elsewhere. After-all, why is there such a huge market for white business actors?

airhead969on Quad9 and Sony Music: German Injunction Status

1. Are you Carnak the Magnificent? Mind-reading much? What number am I thinking of?

2. You can't cure agendas, ignorance, or hate with a politically-correct dictionary.

3. You have no sense of humor. :)

airhead969on Quad9 and Sony Music: German Injunction Status

It's more compact than saying:

- "middle- and upper-classes taken together"

- "people earning over $80k unless they're filing jointly or have 3+ kids"

- "let all the shallow people against the poor reveal their true colors if they really want to jump to conclusions"

airhead969on Police Arrest Three for Posting 10 Minute Movie Summaries on YouTube

> Not to get into a pedantic argument about grammar and such, but ..

Everything before the word "but" is typically disingenuous.

> I would pronounce both of those the same out loud, I read both of those the same in my mind.

This is a bald-faced lie. :) Hyphenated words and idioms are often pronounced faster.

> Hyphens in places like that are a piece of punctuation that provide no real extra information or purpose, but clutter the sentence with symbols.

They're not symbols, they're punctuation. They indicate rate-of-speech and semantic boundaries.

if i write text like this it is very annoying also you cannot tell where one thought ends and another begins do you really want to live in such a shitty world

ifiwritetextlikethisitisveryannoyingalsoyoucannottekkwhereonethiughtendsandanitherbeginsdoyourreallywantoliveinsuchashittyworld

Hyphens also serve as affordances to cue the reader to the presence of familiar idioms rather than impose additional cognitive load onto them after the fact.

They also serve as affordances to cue the reader to the presence of familiar idioms rather than impose additional cognitive load onto them after-the-fact.

They also serve as affordances to cue the reader to the presence of familiar idioms rather than impose additional cognitive load onto them after. the. fact.

Perhaps users of a language should learn the rules and conventions before throwing them away simply because they don't understand them?

airhead969on No evidence that chance meetings in office boosts innovation

Brought to you by The Committee to WfH Forever Campaign.

Oh god. Here we go again. The academic "innovation"-measurers have reached a "conclusion."

Is "innovation" found on a napkin, a table, or a clock?

Does it need coffee?

How many people are required for "innovation?"

If you whisper too loudly, does "innovation" evaporate?

Does "innovation" go on vacation?

Can you learn "innovation" in an MBA program classroom? Answer: Fuck off.

Does pointing at the sky as the innovators do (because that must be their secret to "innovation") make you also more "innovative?" (stolen idea from a late billionaire no one's ever heard of)

Can you buy "innovation?"

Any discussions of whether offices are "good" or "bad" inevitably reminds me of the Crimson Permanent Assurance. Office buildings do need more pirates and defensible offensive batteries.

airhead969on House committee approves bill that could break up Amazon, Apple, and Google

Yep. It's reform-washing. The problem is the symbiotic corruption of government, media, and extremely rich individuals who are acceleratingly-enriched by ownership of corporations as cash extraction leviathans. The problem Aaron Swartz identified to Larry Lessig cannot be "solved" by half-measures when powerful people can buy their ways out-of, around, and through any attempts to impose limits on their effectively-absolute power. The billionaires' money is the source of their power, as are the ruthless, callous, greed of the individuals themselves. If you want a just civilization, end the billionaires, one way or another because we're only facing a conflagration of several existential crises and billions of people put-upon with unnatural stress and misery.

airhead969on House committee approves bill that could break up Amazon, Apple, and Google

Let's hold a committee to propose which harsh words we shall scream at the Googleplex.

I vote for "bastards."

airhead969on List of Printers Which Do or Do Not Display Tracking Dots

Good luck finding a color printer old and serviceable enough to use that doesn't print tracking dots.

Also, they're so rare now that it would be circumstantial proof of use if a color page lacked tracking dots and readily matched with the printer.

Your best bet for printing something without being caught is a burner printer: pay someone else to buy a printer out-of-state in a store with cash, do your business, and toss it.

airhead969on List of Printers Which Do or Do Not Display Tracking Dots

Yep.

airhead969on Crazy Clock

Has HN become Engadget? Why is a for-profit link a story?

airhead969on Police Arrest Three for Posting 10 Minute Movie Summaries on YouTube

rule-of-thumb*

Eliminating hyphens is some linguistic fashion pandemic.

airhead969on Police Arrest Three for Posting 10 Minute Movie Summaries on YouTube

Why bother helping corrupt mainstream media or losers like TYT improve their (lack of) journalism?

https://twitter.com/TheGrayzoneNews/status/14072056487110123...

Why not just watch TJDS and Grayzone?

airhead969on Police Arrest Three for Posting 10 Minute Movie Summaries on YouTube

To be congruent: Better throw away all hip-hop music and anything that's ever been resampled. It's piracy, after all! Don't copy that floppy!

airhead969on Quad9 and Sony Music: German Injunction Status

That's not how activism works. No one will pay attention and writing White House online petitions doesn't do anything either.

airhead969on Quad9 and Sony Music: German Injunction Status

Sony BMG can talk a long walk off a short pier. They're blood-sucking, rent-seeking, cannibal vampires.

If people would watch it, they would pay homeless people to dance and fight each other in LA's canals during a storm, monetize it, advertise it on all platforms, and they would still sleep OK at night.

airhead969on Quad9 and Sony Music: German Injunction Status

Meh. Some service or another will pop-up to list the fun stuff governments and their corporate crook masters try to squash.

airhead969on Quad9 and Sony Music: German Injunction Status

The corporations own all elected officials (executive, legislative, and judicial) and MSM except some ostensible, powerless dreamers who think they can make a difference nibbling on the ephemeral periphery. The most rational and bravest voices in media (Hedges, Chomsky, Nader, Maté, Blumenthal) are currently ostracized as effectively-mute dissidents, conflated with conspiracy theorists and religious zealots for their crimes of factual, professional reporting.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." ― Upton Sinclair

The prevailing filter bubble of the bourgeoisie and the rich is intent on remaining secure at all costs, assassinations included. Just look around the world where journalists are murdered most and then where they are deplatformed.

airhead969on Quad9 and Sony Music: German Injunction Status

Yep. "Offend our commercial legal monopoly for exploiting creators, and the laws and legal precedents we bought order all cartographers to damnatio memoriae your IP and/or location."

airhead969on Quad9 and Sony Music: German Injunction Status

Sony: the surreptitious installer of rootkits, COPA violator, and payola bribers. Now, with 50% more suck through DNS censorship!

airhead969on Quad9 and Sony Music: German Injunction Status

Cloudflare's public DNS would need to be within this jurisdiction or be hit in a similar way in another jurisdiction.

Edit: whoops, I thought Quad9 was an ISP.

airhead969on High Court Delays as Assange Remains in Jail

This is how "civilized" governments kill people they don't like slowly and legally: invent a crime and delay, delay, delay.

airhead969on FAA releases TRUST: Free online training required to fly drones recreationally

"Basically non-existent [sic]" like backgrounds checks.

How would nanny state regulations work or be comparable when Americans already possess many guns? Cow / barn door.

airhead969on FAA releases TRUST: Free online training required to fly drones recreationally

Because most former British colonies tend to welcome education and regulation with open arms as a panacea instead of with suspicion of onerous, unnecessary drudgery and expense.