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balladeer

847 karma · joined December 8, 2013

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balladeer··on Apple takes legal action against small company with pear logo
You mean "legal" system.
balladeer··on Alcohol as a social technology to check the trustworthiness of others (2014)
Then that's rather pretty shitty of rest of us. The rest of us should just have someone's "No" and bugger off.
balladeer··on WordSafety: Check a name for unwanted meanings in foreign languages
I think I am coming from the perspective that incessant trolling forced them to issue an official response and that's "snap enough" for me.

You seem to be coming from the point of view (that's my assumption based on our short comments; it maybe something else) that it doesn't meet the literal dictionary meaning so it's not a snap - which I disagree with.

I think that's all to it.

balladeer··on WordSafety: Check a name for unwanted meanings in foreign languages
So an admin at a university (probably a person who should be sensitive to PR) should have said "You #$&*^$ #^#%&%$#$@, stop doing this already!" to make it look like a true "snap"?
balladeer··on Microsoft is reportedly in talks to buy TikTok's US operations
To phase out TikTok usernames/handles and force users to move to Live/Outlook emails e.g tiktok-user@outlook.com. Then sit back and gleefully marvel at their own accomplishment.
balladeer··on WordSafety: Check a name for unwanted meanings in foreign languages
Since you mentioned Sweden

Sweden's Lund University admin snaps after being trolled by Indians on Facebook - https://www.freepressjournal.in/world/swedens-lund-universit...

balladeer··on A College Degree Is No Guarantee of a Good Life
What is that intelligence you’ve mentioned?
balladeer··on Ancient trash heaps reveal the Plague of Justinian’s economic toll
You meant to say dealing with

- indirect consequences such as a very late recovery of economy, social habits changed for ever,

- or literally keep dealing with this pandemic (resurfacing again and again),

- or direct consequences such has ravaging other parts of body in an unseen manner which would become seen later?

Of course there could be and would be all of these but anything that would be very pronounced kind of a single major consequence?

balladeer··on Facebook sues EU antitrust regulator for excessive data requests
What is it always com.au and not co.au, or just .au in Australia?
balladeer··on Remote work is not necessarily a good thing for the worker
I love that there’s no open office anymore which I hated. It had nothing good to offer other than saving rent for my employer.

I hate that meetings have already started to spill into Saturdays, Sundays, and beyond 6pm and attendance in those meetings are now being subtly demanded which began as requests because someone’s calendar would be “full”.

balladeer··on How to survive a ransomware attack without paying the ransom
Are there there similar but open and private solutions to Garmin/etc for h/w and Strava/RunKeeper/etc for software?

Some solution where I can track my runs, swims, cyclings, treks just like Strava (et al) does does but I can choose to keep the data wherever I wish - local, or sync to an app on computer or to a self hosted server.

Maybe not Garmin but I would love to use such an iOS Strava alternative with similar accuracy and detail.

balladeer··on How to survive a ransomware attack without paying the ransom
10 hours ago they linked a ridiculous and ridiculously short FAQ in this tweet https://twitter.com/GarminFitness/status/1287101514750754816
balladeer··on Ask HN: Are there any software jobs in nature/animal conservation?
Many would just need, at least me, a decent salary for sustaining comfortably (in my case that would be fine in just 50% of my CTC or even less) but a stellar medical insurance (yeah, I want that covered!) and work-life balance which also includes being treated and respected as a human being.
balladeer··on Ask HN: Are there any software jobs in nature/animal conservation?
A friend who has always worked in NGOs/charitable trusts shared an interesting observation about all this.

She said that people in the top at these NGOs and trusts are usually get paid filthy rich like a CEO/Director would get paid but it pretty much ends there. Everybody else down the line are expected to expect and accept pittance. She said a salary negotiation among rank and file is frowned upon, especially by the people who are high up on the ladder and they are the same people who crib about not attracting top talent.

Wish passion alone could fill the belly and pay medical bills.

balladeer··on macOS 11 Virtualization Framework to Run Linux in a VM
Most of the times when I face a problem on my Mac or iPhone I am surprised to find an official support article by Apple for that problem. But the answer is almost never in that article and then I have to anyway hunt for the answer on the Internet.
balladeer··on India, Jio, and the Four Internets
> I am sure they're at par if not better than their Googleplex counterparts

I have heard it's not.

PS. Amazon's work-life balance is is non-existent in most teams.

balladeer··on Coronavirus: Oxford vaccine triggers immune response
> One way is heard immunity

Without a vaccine - wouldn't herd immunity just be letting the virus spread and then let Darwin take over, more or less?

balladeer··on Tired of note-taking apps
FSNotes isn't subscription based. I am not yet paying or Bear and I don't think I'd go for it either.
balladeer··on Tired of note-taking apps
Other than a combination of fiddling inside ~/Library and some more SQLite circus there's really no way to make Apple Notes notes portable (across platforms) and even such circuitous hacks might break in any update or upgrade. That's a big enough no for me.

This is one of those instances when the perceived Apple's walled garden convenience just falls flat. I personally prefer FSNotes (it has a long way to go but it's FOSS) and Bear. I am moving from Simplenote.

balladeer··on Twilio Acquires Electric Imp
OT, but as a non-American I have always wondered what are the origins of those "smiling, teeth slightly showing" corporate mugshots? And I've started to see these from other places as well (like in my own country), of late.

An example (this stuck with me as I had seen it in an article years ago): https://www.linkedin.com/in/sanjay-jha-a91240b9

Then, there's this aspect that creeps me out is when you pass someone and you get that fake, as if it's mandatory, "pulled cheek" smile (My HRs do that as well). It just reduces the value of a smile to nothing.

I liked it that when I was backpacking in Europe nobody usually gave me that mandatory non-smile smile.

balladeer··on The global fertility rate is falling
Yes. Pretty much everyone I talk to would happily go to their small town, or village close to their homes and families but they don't. They say they can't.
balladeer··on Laziness Impatience Hubris
Shorter code block doesn't mean unclear code.

Besides, in your very implausible example (unless there's some underlying library - or an esoteric language maybe?) 1 line of that code (apparently) replacing 1000 line of clear code can have a comment to explain itself.

balladeer··on The AirPods Pro “Rattlegate”
Is there an iMessage support for Apple? I never knew that. I only see website chat and phone (call back) options in India.
balladeer··on WireGuard as VPN Server on Kubernetes with AdBlocking
EULAs and T&Cs should have a layperson readable maximum characters limit.
balladeer··on The growing short case on Facebook and Google
I am sure OP meant it hypothetically.

Besides geopolitics might shift quite fast. If, and that's a gigantic if, China lets go of is habit of looking at a map and declaring "yeah, that region is ours!", or Pakistan gets rid of its shadow deep state (that'd be ISI + military) India could have way better cooperation with them than it had ever had with USA, or will ever have. This again, obviously, is hypothetical.

balladeer··on Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?
iCloud sync. It's broken and it has been broken since a long time. Considering it's run by a company as wealthy as Apple (on their closed ecosystem) it's an utter disgrace.
balladeer··on Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?
That happened to me few months ago when a new submodule was added that gets updated regularly (old ones are some legacy libs just lying there). I literally had to beg some colleagues to not forget to commit the changed submodule ref to host/main project. None of them even understood why it was needed since "it would anyway be solved by `git submodule update --init --recursive` anyway".

Also, of late I have turned to "a lover of git GUI apps" form a full "git in cli is the best evangelist". But that has happened for most other tools as well. I guess I am kind of done with cli.

balladeer··on PG: The biggest source of stress for me at YC was running HN
Thank you, this looks nice. Do you know something similar for /r/worldnews? Something that's more like what you shared and /r/askhistorians.
balladeer··on The Gay Marriages of a Nineteenth-Century Prison Ship
On-topic guideline essentially allows everything, rendering off-topic guideline moot. Could have been avoided by defining "a good hacker" but that's missing as well :)
balladeer··on Tell HN: Google drops blogspot.in, breaking hundreds of thousands of permalinks
My firstname.com domain gets renewed by a lawyer every year. Last 12 years. Through a local web host/domain registrar whose customers are mostly the people who where their customers two decade ago (because they were probably one of the 2-3 companies back then) and don't know better to move elsewhere.

He doesn't even reply to emails. Not sure he checks them. The domain is not being used for anything. Mails, forwarding, websites - nothing. Nada!

It's not even his name. Let's say the domain is "johnsonmon.com" and his name is "John Mark". I wonder whether it's for some client of theirs.

Every year it gets renewed for one year at a price that's around twice the second highest price among local registrars here (guessing based on that registrar's current renewal price).

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