Hacker News Reader

burgerbrainon Apple rejecting applications which use Dropbox

Speaking as somebody who enjoys intentionally mocking others (go ahead, check my comment history. Fuck, I picked this username just to make the then-popular diet discussions on HN more interesting), if he's honestly not trying it (and I have a hard time believing that, he is as far as I can tell a reasonably intelligent person and should be able to analysis himself objectively) then he is damn good at doing it by accident. Damn good.

I only wish I could convey such attitude through text intentionally.

EDIT (posted after jacobolus' reply):

When I first came here, I was annoyed at the entire HN attitude of "a better discussion board". Good clean discussion is great, but at the time it seemed too dismissive of the great conversation that happens elsewhere on the web; too arrogant if you will. Furthermore, I saw that attitude as a sort of challenge: could I game the system and be just helpful enough some of the time to allow myself to be an utter asshole the rest of the time without getting banned?

You see, somebody who is an asshole some of the time and useful the rest of the time is not a valuable community member. Even if most of the time is spent being useful that is still not a person that you want in your community; in short, the karma system is broken. Of course HN isn't quite as broken as a pure karma system would be, hellbanning still kicks in for people with positive karma, but it is broken nevertheless. It's pretty easy to keep individual comments at positive or at least neutral karma by picking your topic correctly, which gets you around (to my knowledge) all but manual banning. (I suspect an improved banning system would involve flagging people for manual inspection after they have too many comments with large amounts of up and down voting. I can't speak for the false positive rate of such a system except to say that my honest productive comments rarely seemed to swing)

But I'm done now. tptacek does a better job of what I wanted to do than I think I ever could.

I think I'm past due on closing this account anyway. I'm out; apologies for any grief I've caused. I probably owe a good number of you a beer.

burgerbrainon Apple rejecting applications which use Dropbox

I swear, it's like a few months ago somebody somewhere introduced tptacek to the concept of using "nerdy" as an insult (and to the debating tactic of attaching an insult to a position with the goal of forcing people to distance themselves from that position).

burgerbrainon Young File-Sharers Respond To Tough Laws By Buying A VPN

Oh. I thought they switched to stackexchange or something stupid like that. Whichever, I don't use the site much.

burgerbrainon Young File-Sharers Respond To Tough Laws By Buying A VPN

No idea. Last time I bothered trying Stack Overflow did though. (That was a while ago, when it was still called that.)

burgerbrainon Douglas Crockford: Why I removed comments from JSON

It would be an improvement because then I could count on comments in JSON doing nothing (instead of possibly not parsing).

burgerbrainon Douglas Crockford: Why I removed comments from JSON

To add to this, I suspect any non-English speaker would rather have English comments that they can at least throw at Google Translate, than no comments at all.

burgerbrainon Douglas Crockford: Why I removed comments from JSON

I have a hard time believing that the removal of comments would greatly simplify a JSON parser.

burgerbrainon Douglas Crockford: Why I removed comments from JSON

> "I saw people were using them to hold parsing directives"

What could possibly make somebody want to do that? Are there any examples around of people doing that?

burgerbrainon High Court: The Pirate Bay must be blocked by UK ISPs

Ah yes, I'm not sure there. I think maybe whoever compiled this collection scrapped it themselves. I'm not aware of TPB themselves making the proper database publicly available yet.

burgerbrainon High Court: The Pirate Bay must be blocked by UK ISPs

Regarding your last point: You're not the only one to make this observation.

burgerbrainon High Court: The Pirate Bay must be blocked by UK ISPs

Paste that link into your favourite (up to date) torrent client.

burgerbrainon Java creator James Gosling: 'Google totally slimed Sun'

Well... that seems fairly damning.

burgerbrainon Tumblr President Steps Down

Is it actually easier though?

burgerbrainon Tumblr President Steps Down

Presumably if he was adding periods manually, he wouldn't have skipped them at the end of paragraphs.

burgerbrainon Aspirin Really Is Kind of a Wonder Drug, Studies Continue to Show

All pills can do that? I thought many were designed to dissolve in your stomach like tums. Not sure why they should be exceptionally bad, unless tums cause issues too.

burgerbrainon Tumblr President Steps Down

That seems like a fairly sever oversight. Is there a reason for that behaviour?

burgerbrainon Tumblr President Steps Down

The inconsistent substitution of 'with' with 'w/' confuses me. Why do people even do that? On qwerty I know I find '/' to be much harder to strike than 'ith'.

burgerbrainon Do Kids Care If Their Robot Friend Gets Stuffed Into a Closet?

I feel uncomfortable attempting to derive any conclusions from a comparison between these two groups. It seems to me that since technology and technology presence is advancing so quickly that the way children of different ages view technology could very likely depend on what sort of technology they were exposed to their entire lives. 15 year olds remember dumb-phones/feature phones; do 9 year olds?

An interview of the 9 year old children in 6 years that you could compare to the interviews of the currently 15 year old children would be very interesting.

burgerbrainon High Court: The Pirate Bay must be blocked by UK ISPs

Lets see: http://4chan.org

I'll let you know if I get arrested.

burgerbrainon IBM 1959 Job Post

No, I like it as it is. Why would I neuter my language for your sake?

burgerbrainon IBM 1959 Job Post

Do you naturally miss the point, or do you have to put effort into it?

burgerbrainon IBM 1959 Job Post

[1] I only recognize that a distinction could exist when we restrict the discussion to conscripted armies.

[2] I assert they do nothing of the sort.

[3] Call it what you like, telling people that they should be more respectful of the military when they express concern about being, by proxy, responsible for a loss of life, is... I don't even know how to describe it. Lets say "insensitive of the humanity of others".

[4] Cheerio

burgerbrainon IBM 1959 Job Post

The ethical ramifications of work that is military in nature that an engineer must consider are close enough to on topic for my taste. These are concerns I know are considered not only by myself but by several of my peers working on the east coast, where jobs with military contractors are a looming presence in the minds of any STEM major looking for work.

burgerbrainon IBM 1959 Job Post

So if the military does something and it is bad, then it isn't their fault because politicians made them do it. But if the military does it and it is good, then they deserve our praise and thanks....

Do you recognize the problem here?

Regardless, this whole thought that we should be "thankful" to the American military is absurd. They have billions of dollars to spend every year, why do they also require thanks? Do tanks run on thanks?

No. Thanks is needed because without the blinding effect of popular societal support, their actions do not stand for themselves. The military requires praise to be shovelled onto it like coal into a furnace 24/7 so that its hired guns can continue to lie to themselves and sleep at night. Listen, if you think they should have thanks, then do it yourself; however it is not your place to scold others who want nothing to do with it.

burgerbrainon IBM 1959 Job Post

Consider for a moment who that military decided needed killing en mass during the decade following the topic of discussion. Where all those communal farmers really threatening our way of life? When this army got it's ass kicked and left with it's tail between its legs a few years later, leaving those farmers to live their own lives as they chose to, did our society come crashing down?

Why didn't it?

There are no Mongol hoards waiting to invade, suggestions to the contrary come from those who profit from the fiction and those who buy into it.

burgerbrainon Your Bash Prompt Needs This

Actually, that's exactly why I switched. (more precisely, this could be said why: http://www.cs.elte.hu/zsh-manual/zsh_14.html)

If you don't want to use it, I don't see how that is any of my business. I was just trying to help out somebody who does, so there's hardly any reason to be an ass.

burgerbrainon Your Bash Prompt Needs This

Try:

  bindkey "^[[A" history-beginning-search-backward

burgerbrainon Cargo Cults and Interview Questions

"Some US police departments have set a maximum IQ score for new officers (for example: 125, in New London, CT), under the argument that those with overly-high IQs will become bored and exhibit high turnover in the job. This policy has been challenged as discriminatory, but upheld by at least one US District court. "

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient

If there are factual inaccuracies there, please point them out. However just going by the "whiff" of something seems like you're opening yourself up to rejecting parts of reality that do not fit your worldview.

Edit: better source: http://www.aele.org/apa/jordan-newlondon.html and here is an interview of the man by CNN: http://www.postroad.com/news/2000/20000912-new-london-police...

burgerbrainon Cargo Cults and Interview Questions

Interestingly, rejecting candidates because they score too well on IQ tests seems to be totally kosher in the US.

Who would do such a thing? Cops.

burgerbrainon "Gangbang Interviews" and "Bikini Shots": Silicon Valley’s Brogrammer Problem

Exactly. Everyone has worked themselves up into hysterics over the individual words that he used, while failing to recognize what he was saying.