Hacker News Reader

gemmaon Mastodon’s 2 Year Anniversary

https://mastodon.technology is chock full of geeks, so the local timeline is all people's hacks and bugs and side projects. It's one of the older instances, and it's maintained by this guy: https://ashfurrow.com/

gemmaon Keeping a plaintext “did” file

I love how many ways there are to do this. My version uses empty Git commits: https://github.com/ellotheth/dotfiles/blob/master/bash_funcs...

gemmaon Ask HN: Who are your favourite people to follow on Mastodon?

To tack on some more folks well-known in the outside world (some of these signed up last year and aren't active now):

- Michael W. Lucas, author: https://bsd.network/@mwlucas

- Amanda Rousseau, malware researcher: https://mastodon.social/@malwareunicorn

- Brendan Eich, creator of Javascript: https://mastodon.social/@BrendanEich

- John Scalzi, author: https://mastodon.social/@scalzi

- Jenn Schiffer, artist and dev at Glitch: https://toot.cafe/@jenn

gemmaon Developer Survey Results

I initially bumped on this one too, but "obligation to consider" doesn't mean "obligation to quit their jobs over". You consider the ethical implications, you push back against management, management tells you sit down. Are you now obligated to quit? If you decide to keep your job, knowing that the code will be written either way, are you now ultimately responsible for it?

(Completely unrelated but the first thing that came to mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKdgDX2dGh0)

gemmaon Developer Survey Results

> you can be labeled as sexist

You'd have to take those data points in isolation and conclude "men like money more than women" to earn that label.

I don't think anyone is surprised to see evidence that an exclusive workplace culture contributes to the pay gap. I'd posit that all else being equal, women value compensation and culture about the same as men. The priorities reflected in the survey are a symptom of the problem, not the cause.

gemmaon Liebster Jesu, wir sind hier – BWV 731 [video]

Nono, just the classical guitarists who play my music flawlessly with a minuscule fraction of the effort needed on violin. You with your frets and extra strings and inability to sustain. grumble

(But seriously, play the music that makes you happy! The sonatas and partitas are amazing on guitar!)

gemmaon Liebster Jesu, wir sind hier – BWV 731 [video]

As a violinist with a degree in performance: I harbor eternal bitterness towards you and the rest of your kind.

gemmaon Grace Hopper and Margaret Hamilton Awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom

Sure. Quoting from the History of Apollo On-Board Guidance, Navigation, and Control (David G. Hoag, 1976):

"Each of these later [complex manned] missions was assigned the responsibility of a senior engineer who assumed a more technical management role for the program....Names notable here are Dr. James Miller for the first Lunar Module program SUNBURST, Dr. Frederic Martin for the Command Module program COLOSSUS, and George Cherry for the Lunar Module program LUMINARY. These last two were the programs used for the lunar landing missions....

"Much of the detailed code of these programs was written by a team of specialists led by Margaret Hamilton. The tasks assignments to these individuals included, in addition to writing the code, the testing to certify that the program element met requirements."

gemmaon Grace Hopper and Margaret Hamilton Awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom

Cool. I'm going to go with NASA, MIT, Wired[0], and the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory History of Apollo On-Board Guidance, Navigation, and Control[1] as my sources of information on this one.

[0] https://www.wired.com/2015/10/margaret-hamilton-nasa-apollo/

[1] http://klabs.org/history/history_docs/mit_docs/1711.pdf

gemmaon Grace Hopper and Margaret Hamilton Awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom

NASA[0][3] and MIT[1][2] both agree that Apollo 11 ran her software (where "her software" means "software she and her team wrote", not "software she wrote entirely on her own"). The TechCrunch article echoes them, and I haven't seen anything in the article or this thread suggesting she did everything single-handedly.

[0] https://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2003/sep/HQ_03281_Hamilton_...

[1] https://news.mit.edu/2016/scene-at-mit-margaret-hamilton-apo...

[2] https://news.mit.edu/2009/apollo-vign-0717

[3] https://www.nasa.gov/50th/50th_magazine/scientists.html

gemmaon Grace Hopper and Margaret Hamilton Awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom

What are you balancing by pointing out that she was a junior programmer who relied on the real key people? Are there incorrect references to her achievements in this comment thread or in the article?

gemmaon Why metadata is bad – 3 minute video your Mom will understand

It's heartening to see this thread land so solidly on the intersection of sexism and ageism. You're right, assuming older generations are technically incompetent is wrong, mean, and unnecessary--just like assuming the same thing about women. When you combine the two with phrases like "so simple your mom could understand", you end up with a big bucket of nope.

My mom has a STEM degree, and her mom had a bleeding edge Thinkpad when the rest of my family was married to a beige box. My dad is a system administrator, and his dad is a chemical engineer. I have a postgraduate degree in software engineering. To assume any of us are technically incompetent because of our age or gender is insulting, and exclusionary.

Thanks for pointing that out.

gemmaon Why metadata is bad – 3 minute video your Mom will understand

Me.

gemmaon VCs, don't compare me to your wife

> if for a second you think (exceptions excluded) women, during pregnancy and first months of a newborn can run a business without sacrificing something

I'm not an entrepreneur, but isn't sacrificing something part of the deal, regardless of gender or life circumstances? If you're launching a startup and trying to get VC funding, doesn't it go without saying that you're sacrificing things to that goal?

If that's the case, isn't the real problem that VCs are more comfortable with a man sacrificing his physical/mental health, family relationships, material belongings, retirement savings, etc. than with a woman sacrificing the same things? Or put another way, will VCs believe that a woman entrepreneur can balance her sacrifices against the good of her company as well as a man can balance his?

gemmaon VCs, don't compare me to your wife

> The guy was taken out of context and clearly said he was trying to explain why the number of female founders was less. His thoughts had to do with not many of them applying because they prefer to be mothers.

Out-of-context quote from the VC:

> I think mother's [sic] have more important things to do

> Be mother's [sic]

> But I'm old school

That's not a man saying "I think mothers have different priorities," that's a man saying "I have different priorities for mothers."

gemmaon Things every React.js beginner should know

> It is certainly possible to write a spaghetti component that would do everything.

So...like PHP, then?

gemmaon Things every React.js beginner should know

Right, your comment argued that "view logic, domain/business logic and database boilerplate code intermixed in a single file" is not "ancient history in the PHP world". Which it is, regardless of the `<?php` tag at the top of all the files. How a source file is processed has no impact on how programmers choose to model their applications.

gemmaon Pipethis

Author here, happy to answer any questions.

gemmaon A system for signed installers to replace curl | sh

Author here, just noticed this submission. Happy to answer any questions. (You may also be interested in the discussions on Proggit[0] and /r/golang[1].)

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/426zsv/pipethi...

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/4261he/pipethis_sto...

gemmaon A system for signed installers to replace curl | sh

Yup. It adds an extra identity verification layer, whether your script is served over SSL or not.

gemmaon Minecraft creator Notch shares the darker side of life after a big exit

Use your words, kind of like you just did. Throwing a disorder around as an insult is always the wrong choice.

gemmaon Facebook was down

It's about quality, not quantity.

http://wheresitup.com/results/54c732d88c3dcf8416232c91

gemmaon Show HN: Updown.io, a simple and cheap website monitoring service

Very slick! Reminds me of a slimmed-down version of the Where's It Up API (https://api.wheresitup.com/), but with monitoring.

(Full disclosure: I've done some work for the Where's It Up folks.)

gemmaon The Developer's Dystopian Future

Ithaca is full of hippies, it doesn't count.

/s (GREETINGS, MY ITHACAN BROTHER)

gemmaon Facebook emotion manipulation study: an explanation

I agree! I'd put unethical behavior like distortion and lying in a different category than Facebook's, but I agree. I was trying to kill the parallel between Facebook intentionally manipulating user emotions for science, and Budweiser intentionally manipulating viewer emotions for beer sales. Video games work here too: Amnesia scares the unmentionables out of me, but I'm ok with that, because I know that's the whole point.

Another missing component here is user control. I can turn off the commercial and stop playing the game. I'm currently working (in a minor capacity) on the National Children's Study, and our participants can walk away at any time. When the Facebook subjects on the negative side started feeling slightly more sad, they had no idea why, and no clue how to stop it.

gemmaon Facebook emotion manipulation study: an explanation

If your A/B testing is intentionally inducing a negative mental state in your users without letting them know up front, I'd say that's probably an ethical breach.

In general, A/B testing is studying the website. You're not testing us, you're testing the best ways to convince us to do stuff. On top of that, when users visit your website (which is presumably pitching something to them), they know they're being pitched. They know the website is going to try to convince them to do stuff--click over here, watch this video, sign up for foogadgetmcawesome. Same drill with advertising. Yeah, this commercial with the freaking Budweiser puppy made me cr--er, chop onions--in its attempt to get me to buy beer, but I know they're trying to sell me beer, and I knew as soon as the puppy hit the screen that I'd probably start sniffling.

gemmaon Facebook emotion manipulation study: an explanation

I can understand why some people have concerns about it, and my coauthors and I are very sorry for the way the paper described the research and any anxiety it caused. In hindsight, the research benefits of the paper may not have justified all of this anxiety.

Ignoring the classic "I'm sorry you were freaked out" non-apology here, this response completely misses the point, and tries to re-frame the concept of informed consent into an inconsequential piece of red tape that anxious people worry about.

People were made subjects of a scientific experiment without their knowledge or consent. It doesn't matter that Facebook took steps to make the changes as small as possible; it doesn't matter that the effect on the individual subjects may have been minor; it doesn't matter that the results were interesting. It was an ethical breach, and this tone-deaf response is fairly unsettling.

gemmaon U.S. Postal Service Logging All Mail for Law Enforcement (2013)

This is marginally tangential (because the Intelligent Mail tracking programs are completely separate from the tracking the article references), but tracking mail is hugely important to the USPS. Giant postal customers who individually mail millions of pieces every month want end-to-end routing metrics, and the USPS itself uses tracking for their own internal reporting. It's how they know quickly when a service facility is overloaded, and it's how AT&T knows your bill last month made it to your front door (or at least to your local Post Office).

Assuming you're in the US, check some of the mail you've received recently; do you see a jagged-looking barcode on the front? It can uniquely identify that specific piece, as well as the mailer and any special services applied--mostly requesting higher levels of tracking. The metadata for that piece lives in a big postal database in the sky, where mailers can request access at varying levels of detail. The USPS is way past just delivering mail at this point.

(Source: I was a developer in the postal mail industry for six years.)

gemmaon Comcast’s deal with Netflix makes network neutrality obsolete

> assuming competing broadband services are available to those users

You are hilarious.

gemmaon Girls and Software

It absolutely does. That feeling of abnormality is one of the things that helped push me into tech--I wasn't normal, so I went to a place where I hid my non-normalness in a way I never could (so thought my 15-year-old self) from real people.

Great end result for me, but painful at the time. I'm looking forward to the day when tech isn't something girls like me get punted into by accident.