Hacker News Reader

orbaton James Damore has filed a class action lawsuit against Google

> bigoted academic clique

Ah, everybody's a bigot but the actual bigots

orbaton Uber’s Driver Dilemma: Fare Hikes and Cuts Don’t Change Pay

Ahh, right, now I get your point

orbaton Could Rome Have Had an Industrial Revolution?

My point was that it sounds likely that something like the industrial revolution would happen after the abolishment of slavery, when there's more pressure on people to be inventive. Not that it has to happen immediately

orbaton Uber’s Driver Dilemma: Fare Hikes and Cuts Don’t Change Pay

What's ironic about it? The only real sources of income most sites now have are either ads, donations or subscriptions. Ads are often intrusive and usually make the site much heavier to load, donations don't usually work very well, and people are loath to pay for subscriptions either

orbaton How Firefox Got Fast Again

Telling companies that they can't terminate user accounts without a redress or data recovery mechanism (which is what my original point was) isn't a restriction on free speech any more than us telling corporations they can't sell you poisonous food is. This sort of American "reductio ad free speachum" is really peculiar, especially when it's stretched to fit corporate actions like this that aren't even remotely related to anything anybody would classify as speech

orbaton Could Rome Have Had an Industrial Revolution?

Started late 18th century, after several decades of European countries and US states abolishing slavery (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_abolition_of_slave...). Why, when do you think it happened?

orbaton How Firefox Got Fast Again

People seem to have the laughable idea that somehow only government censorship is bad, or that corporations aren't capable of censorship in the first place because they're private entities. I mean, yes, the world will look like that if you reduce everything to contractual relationships like libertarians seem to do, but personally I hope we could hold corporations accountable for actions like these. Like it or not, we've become extremely reliant on cloud services; Google closing someone's account without the possibility of appeal may not be politically motivated censorship, but it's still arbitrary censorship (even if you did click on the "agree" button on the EULA nobody ever reads).

Why shouldn't we hold corporations to the same standards as governments? If we don't want the government arbitrarily censoring people, why are we OK with corporations doing it?

orbaton Cagot: a persecuted and despised minority found in the west of France

So instead of actually reading the article that I linked to that explains the concept, you decided to argue semantics? I'm fine with you not wanting to educate yourself, but don't pretend your answer was somehow a good rebuttal if you didn't even bother with the actual meat of my argument

orbaton Leave your OS at home: the rise of library operating systems

And conveniently forgetting that docker is written in Go, so the binary also has the runtime and all used libraries baked in

orbaton From Prison to Ph.D.: The Redemption and Rejection of Michelle Jones

Claiming that private institutions aren't under any obligations for reasonable conduct seems to be a very uniquely American ideation; that somehow only the government is bound by higher ideals, and businesses can do what they please with whoever they please as long as someone signs a contract

orbaton Who Americans spend their time with

"There is no such expectation/pressure on women" is a bit of a blanket statement, and I highly doubt it's true; see e.g. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/womens-life/11406568/Why-wo....

We all, regardless of gender, face different types of pressures from outside. Women are often seen (and mystified) through motherhood, and men through stoic toiling. Women are supposed to be the emotional ones, and men hard and logical and impervious to emotions. You see it all the time in various forums when people comment on a sad article, with the "I'm not crying, I'm cutting onions schtick." A lot of this comes down to old gender roles born out of a confusing soup of evolution, Abrahamic social norms, and history. It's not just the men facing social pressures, it's everybody in the society.

orbaton Man charged after US gamer is shot by SWAT following hoax terrorism call

This sort of suggestion is usually countered by pointing out how big/unique/different the US is, hence things that work everywhere else in the world just won't cut it.

Which I understand to an extent, but often it sounds more like a cop-out than an actual analysis of the situation.

orbaton IBM Punched Card Typography

The point was that you should be be asking whether you should be doing something in the first place

orbaton CSS Grid – Table layout is back. Be there and be square

What, exactly, is the problem with the <table> tag in the first place? Been a long, long time since I last touched HTML

orbaton Hollywood as We Know It Is Over

Producing copies of an already existing digital good is, for all intents and purposes, free. Creating the original most definitely is not, and that's the issue here

orbaton Exposing high-end poker cheating devices

_coördinating_

Completely, unabashedly unrelated, but I honestly can't remember the last time I saw dieresis in the wild. Is this a regional thing?

orbaton Educating towards a circular economy

- how do you prove planned obsolencence? That sounds like a witch hunt waiting to happen

It's trivial to prove for for e.g. inkjet printers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence#Programme....

The Phoebus lightbulb cartel is probably the first group of manufacturers to actually do planned obsolescence http://spectrum.ieee.org/geek-life/history/the-great-lightbu...

orbaton On the wikileak-ed emails from Tanden on Lessig

If the general public was smart enough to draw their own conclusions about, well, anything, Trump wouldn't be a viable candidate

orbaton Why drug prices in America are so high

Would you actually want drug research to _not_ be regulated?

orbaton Principles of Calm Technology

Referring to people as "it" is fairly common in colloquial Finnish, and there's no sordid associations there

orbaton What I learned as a hired consultant to autodidact physicists

I can't produce the set of all humans on Earth either, but that doesn't mean they don't exist.

Both real and natural numbers can be reasoned about despite their infinite size (and we even know that e.g. there must be "more" real numbers than natural numbers, even though both sets are infinite)

orbaton Fear and Loathing in Linux, or Who Needs /etc/motd (2010)

Except it's not even that "simple", which was the whole point of the article

orbaton The driverless truck is coming, and it’s going to automate millions of jobs

It's not a question of whether they're buggy, but whether they are better than human drivers despite the bugs

orbaton What I learnt from being sexually harassed at Google

Do you, by any chance, often use the word "SJW" and not in an ironic way?

orbaton U.S. Bans Trans Fat

There are so many competing definitions of "eating naturally" that your sentence is more or less completely meaningless

orbaton Finnegans Wake: the book the web was invented for

My thoughts exactly. Gravity's Rainbow could really benefit from a more, uh, "hypermedia" approach.

orbaton German-designed ‘smart’ guns rerouted after cultural backlash in U.S

But then you're left with a smart gun that's unlockable with a simple RF generator