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alphaalpha101

54 karma · joined August 20, 2017

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alphaalpha101··on Tell HN: 17 years on the same game
In the Witcher 3 you are playing a specific character created by the developers. It's a bit like a JRPG in that sense. Most western RPGs have you play as your own character.
alphaalpha101··on Swedes turn against cashlessness
I pay an inescapable 15% goods and services tax on everything I buy. So yes.
alphaalpha101··on 61% of “Entry-Level” Jobs Require 3+ Years of Experience
>However, some people find computers frustrating, stupid or boring. Such a person probably wouldn't enjoy a job working with them all the time - and it's difficult to build the skills that let you advance your career if you're averse to or bored by practising them.

It's funny really because I thought I was perfect for software development as a teenager. Already knew how to program, spent a huge amount of my free time on a computer, good at maths and sciences in general, etc.

Once I actually got into software development I found the whole thing rather irksome. The company I worked for was a great place to work full of really lovely people, free lunches, paid internships (yay NZ), etc. But software development? Nope. Awful industry. Computers are shit.

As soon as I got out of software, I immediately found my interest in programming as a hobby come back. Unsurprisingly people don't really like doing something as a hobby when they're paid to do it for 40 hours per week already.

alphaalpha101··on Elm changed my mind about unpopular languages
>I made it a hard and fast rule: if I found two technologies that could solve a problem, I would choose the one more people were using. I didn’t want to include an obscure graphics API and then discover that no one had ever called set_color() followed by resize_window() (resizing is hard) and somehow those two functions in sequence cause a segfault. I don’t want to be the guy that finds a bug in the compiler. I just need to ship the product.

Then he links to issues for Qt and Go. They're certainly not obscure. What kind of weird argument is this? If anything, the argument there is that it doesn't matter how popular something is, as even extremely popular things like Qt and Go will still have bugs.

alphaalpha101··on Facebook ordered to delete illegally collected data by Belgian court
>As a further point of fact, Facebook (and Google; Facebook is not alone here) stalks even people who _can't_ have a Facebook account. For example, children under 13 in the US.

Surely this is illegal, though? One way to get the laws to ban this sort of dragnet commercial surveillance of people would be to appeal to the 'think of the children' argument and ban companies from tracking information about anyone under 13. That would also stop them from tracking information about anyone that hasn't totally confirmed that they're over 13.

alphaalpha101··on Federal Judge Says Embedding a Tweet Can Be Copyright Infringement
>Consider older mediums; does broadcasting a TV show put it into the public domain? Or playing a song on the radio?

It certainly should do.

alphaalpha101··on Courts: Violating a Website’s Terms of Service Is Not a Crime
The one regulation that could save a nation from FB, Twitter and Instagram is to ban advertising. All of it. Ban all advertising anywhere for any reason.
alphaalpha101··on SoftBank Succeeds in Tender Offer for Large Stake in Uber
Uber is (in my opinion) a scam, and (objectively) not ride sharing.

'Ride sharing' does not even begin to describe Uber. There is no sharing going on whatsoever. It's a taxi company that just ignores the law on principle to gain an advantage, while also spending VC money like crazy in a very illegally anticompetitive manner.

alphaalpha101··on Fish: A user-friendly command line shell for macOS, Linux, etc
It's nice to be able to simply copy-paste commands from the internet sometimes. (obligatory: yes you have to be careful when you do.)
alphaalpha101··on We Can’t Trust Facebook to Regulate Itself
So don't say yes when they offer to purchase you
alphaalpha101··on Reviving the 1973 Unix Programmer's Manual
What else would you write it in at the time? When you have a TeleType you can't exactly use a visual text editor, can you?
alphaalpha101··on Ask HN: Why aren't there startups to disrupt high interest credit cards?
Interest rates aren't high for fun. They're high because credit card borrowing is unsecured and high risk. People default on credit card debt all the time, and they also pay it off slowly.
alphaalpha101··on Work on SQLite4 has concluded
Scaevolus, I recognise that name. #0x10c-dev on freenode? rmmh? skybot?

I created a logsql.py plugin for skybot, it just logs to the DB instead of to text files. Is that something you'd be interested in merging back in?

alphaalpha101··on Functional Programming Jargon
Correction: Haskell jargon. The continued conflation of Haskell and functional programming as a whole annoys me greatly. (The majority of functional programming is not statically typed! Clojure and the other lisps are far more widely used than Haskell and the MLs, not even to mention that basically every language has first-class functions now.)
alphaalpha101··on Go at Digital Ocean
This seems like an enormous amount of tooling complexity to simply have a few dependencies for your program.
alphaalpha101··on Go at Digital Ocean
The difference is that I don't want all my Go programs in a different place. I have my place where I put projects. I have ~/projects, ~/oldprojects, ~/defunctprojects. I have ~/contribprojects for things that aren't mine. I decide where my files go.
alphaalpha101··on The First Woman to Translate the ‘Odyssey’ into English
I've always felt similarly about Lord of the Rings. It feels so authentic and real. Every other similar fantasy novel just reads as if everything in the story was made up for the purpose of telling the story, which of course it was. In LOTR it feels like historical fiction, like Tolkien designed everything about the world down to the finest detail then wrote a story in it without making anything new up.
alphaalpha101··on Flatiron School settles for operating without license, employment/salary claims
You're assuming bootcamps have been valuable. They haven't. They're complete garbage.
alphaalpha101··on Tesla fires hundreds from headquarters, factory
If someone is disruptive or negative, then you should get rid of them immediately.
alphaalpha101··on Rejecting a candidate for over-qualification results in age bias
This is why you don't mention you have a disability...
alphaalpha101··on Hyperloop One Becomes ‘Virgin Hyperloop One’
That's been well covered elsewhere in this thread and other threads.

I'm not going to say the claim it's not viable is original, nor am I going to argue that claim. But it is on topic.

alphaalpha101··on Hyperloop One Becomes ‘Virgin Hyperloop One’
Which won't do anything, because you can't magically make tunnelling cheap
alphaalpha101··on Hyperloop One Becomes ‘Virgin Hyperloop One’
The viability of hyperloop is nil. It doesn't exist. It is literally physically impossible for it to be viable.

I think it's on-topic whenever hyperloop is on-topic.

alphaalpha101··on Will automation put an end to the American trucker?
Yeah the impact on roads increases with the fourth power of vehicle weight. Why doesn't the tax?
alphaalpha101··on IP Accounting and Access Lists with Systemd
Another systemd release, another bloating of the attack surface of the now-standard init system.

I'm sure this is useful but init is absolutely the wrong place for it.

alphaalpha101··on EFF: Stupid patents are dragging down AI and machine learning
Software is not mathematics. A web app is not mathematics. A compiler is a little closer, but still isn't.
alphaalpha101··on More Americans Are Falling Behind on Student Loans, and Nobody Quite Knows Why
When people can buy necessities and luxury items but depression is at an all-time high, they aren't doing well either.
alphaalpha101··on A “right to repair” movement tools up
The same way 'reasonable' is defined everywhere in the law: it's up to the interpretation of the court.
alphaalpha101··on More Americans Are Falling Behind on Student Loans, and Nobody Quite Knows Why
>You aren't entitled to a college education.

But you are. We have a right to an education. My parents paid literally $0 for their education, because university was free, in a time with much lower productivity and less wealth. The state could afford it then, so it can certainly afford it now.

alphaalpha101··on More Americans Are Falling Behind on Student Loans, and Nobody Quite Knows Why
Most of the time people calculate it as if all the current cost were just transferred to the state.

But of course in reality, when universities were free in the past they weren't allowed to just raise their prices to whatever they felt like charging, as they basically do now.

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