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angersock

15,241 karma · joined September 21, 2011

Engineer, coder, and all around cheerful human being.

Strong opinions, weakly held--sometimes, held weekly.

Contact me at: username at angersock dot com.

"The modern social web is a miracle of progress but also a status-driven guilt-spewing shit volcano." --Paul Ford

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angersock··on “What Have We Done?”: Silicon Valley Engineers Fear They've Created a Monster
Did nobody read and understand Manna? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manna_(novel)
angersock··on What can defend against off-the-shelf drone weapons?
And that's why Britain is overrun with submachine guns to this very day!
angersock··on The world is losing the war against climate change
We have nuclear power, but people are bad at evaluating risks, so here we are.
angersock··on Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?
That sounds like Hostgator.
angersock··on The Stock Market Is Shrinking
Sarbox screwed up perhaps more than it helped.
angersock··on Is horror the most disrespected genre?
The are two types of people in this world: those who enjoy the music of RFAD, and those who have seen the movie.
angersock··on Things People Don't Get About the Homemade Gun Making Story
We already have instructions in widespread circulation about how to build your own nuclear weapon--the googling for it is pretty trivial.

We're not up to our ears in homebrew nukes because making them is expensive, and that doesn't change. People have been able to make zipguns for over a century with nothing more than a few bits of pipe and fittings.

It's queer that merely the idea of knowing how to do something should be so distressing to policymakers.

angersock··on Things People Don't Get About the Homemade Gun Making Story
I don't understand why this hasn't been all over the front-page of HN. This is huge. The article in closing summarizes it neatly:

> By eliding what's really at stake here—more a matter of free expression than any meaningful expansion of the already existing legal ability to make a gun at home—the states suing, and alas too much of the media, are ginning up unwarranted fear to expand the government's power to restrict speech, and alas those states have had at least a temporary success for now.

This is pretty clearly a freedom of speech issue. Knock-on effects of this would be, for example, removing all of the Wikipedia articles that talk about how compounds that the government Doesn't Like.

One error the article makes is that this isn't software, this is just normal CAD documents describing the objects in question.

If we as techies don't stand up for this, we're doing ourselves and future generations a huge disservice.

angersock··on Lisa Brennan-Jobs Recalls Memories of Her Famous Father
He was an ugly little goblin of a man, who made an empire by taking credit for engineering he himself couldn't do.

He was hopefully the last of the great con men.

angersock··on 3D-printed gun website yanks CAD files after federal judicial order
Yeah, this such a colossal mess.

The thing is, if Wilson is not allowed to publish this information, it is a huge blow against freedom of speech and common-sense.

angersock··on Why I Ripped the Same CD 300 Times
Touhou is, iirc, basically completely public domain. It's a gigantic, bizarre diaspora fueled entirely by dedicated fans.

Everybody who thinks that copyright is required should see the success of 2hu.

angersock··on Why I Ripped the Same CD 300 Times
But profits and copyright you see!

If we allow piracy like that to exist, how will the owners of the copyright be able to ensure that the works are kept accessible?!

angersock··on Elixir v1.7 released
Except, it's really not. Boring "MIX_ENV=production mix phx.server" works just as well, and you can trivially add the stuff to make logging into a node easier.

Everybody wants this tooling for deploying appliances when frankly we are almost all just doing boring webshit.

angersock··on Elixir v1.7 released
Time and timezones are basic functionality used in almost any app of substance.

A modern language should have first-class support for these things. :|

angersock··on Elixir v1.7 released
I used to be really bullish on Elixir, but having used it in production for over a year (and having worked on libraries since '13), I think people are overselling the daily experience.

The language itself is good, the tooling is pretty excellent, but there are issues for things like deployment, ops, and frankly a general excitement about neat things instead of focusing on bread-and-butter stuff like, say, timezones and timestamp formatting (something coming in a couple of releases, allegedly, but which was always an obvious absence).

angersock··on Ask HN: Reasons to stay in Software Engineering
The money is so damn good.
angersock··on San Francisco: Where a six-figure salary is 'low income'
SF ban in 2010 on Happy Meal toys, the overall pension crisis, the continuing debacle of the high-speed rail project there...

One that seems to have actually worked was the ban on plastic bags.

angersock··on San Francisco: Where a six-figure salary is 'low income'
And then they get hit with state income tax, which the state wastes on frivolous policies and nannying. No thanks.
angersock··on [dead]
I'd settle for the separation of douchey marketing/sales/MBA-chickenhawk bros from derpy engineers.
angersock··on Ask HN: Are there any programmers here?
No, none at all.
angersock··on FWD:Everyone
It's called CSS3 mate.
angersock··on Ask HN: What's your favorite movie because it makes you think?
Empire of Dust (2011), about a Chinese construction crew trying to get a road built. It made me reflect a lot on senior engineering and the zen of dealing with subideal circumstances.
angersock··on Harlan Ellison has died
One of the only writers in the genre whose stories had both bells and teeth.

And man, he worked, making many screenplays as well as stories.

Rest well you magnificent bastard.

angersock··on Harlan Ellison has died
THE!!TEDDY!!CRAZY!!SHOW is remarkably prescient.
angersock··on MongoDB 4.0 will add support for multi-document transactions
There are some things I really like about it. The pattern-matching-esque syntax for queries, for example, is quite neat. The ability to do certain type of data munging, the easy use of JS to handle certain things, all good.

But, the bread-and-butter business stuff has continually left me disappointed and sometimes working way harder than needed.

angersock··on MongoDB 4.0 will add support for multi-document transactions
Most products don't trash data and ignore almost every real-world usecase.

MongoDB is a marketing meme that slowly has had a database built around it.

angersock··on MongoDB 4.0 will add support for multi-document transactions
> Automatic cancellation rather than actual deadlock detection is going to be one hell of a footgun.

Well, this would be in keeping with MongoDB's track record, sooooo

angersock··on JSON5: JSON for humans
Literally the only things actually "wrong" with JSON (as opposed to complaints about developer ergonomics) are the lack of proper support for floating point special values (e.g., +inf, -inf, nan) and not having a date literal (RFC3339 would be ideal).

Maaaaaaybe removing tolerance of duplicate keys.

Possibly, a binary literal (hex64 bytestring, maybe like << base64 encoded>>) syntax.

angersock··on Ask HN: Is anyone else living this depression cycle?
They don't have to be stressful if the companies weren't practicing slash-and-burn methods at the behest of greedy investors and callous founders.
angersock··on The SEC Will Leave Good ICOs Alone
If she doesn't say no it's a competitive advantage to other suitors, right?

That's literally what you're advocating for.

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