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r-w

577 karma · joined March 25, 2015

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r-w··on The Story of Captain Midnight (2000)
Found this while Wikipedia-ing the history of HBO. Ended up learning some interesting stuff about satellite broadcasts and the history of TV service payment models—arbitrary, I know, but enlightening nonetheless. Enjoy!
r-w··on Liberal, Moderate or Conservative? See How Facebook Labels You
> Apparently I am targeted for ads related to bubble wrap.

Isn’t everyone?

r-w··on Liberal, Moderate or Conservative? See How Facebook Labels You
Just because they’re not showing you all the data and analysis capabilities they have doesn’t mean they don’t have them. Why would Facebook waste their effort making sure that all user data is exposed through their decrepit and intentionally hidden ads preferences section when they could spend that effort analyzing that data and making it available to their partners?
r-w··on The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority
> Aramaic is a Semitic language which succeeded Canaanite (that is, Phoenician-Hebrew) in the Levant and resembles Arabic; it was the language Jesus Christ spoke. The reason it came to dominate the Levant and Egypt isn’t because of any particular imperial Semitic power or the fact that they have interesting noses.

Well then.

r-w··on Codemoji
Yes, but the procession of emoji seems to be different from the order specified in Unicode, so it’s slightly more complicated than a regular Caesar shift.
r-w··on “Our primary goal is to un-fork the Tor Browser”
* squee *
r-w··on Show HN: Map of immigration to the U.S. since 1820
This is an amazing chart! I wish you’d used great circles (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_circle) though.
r-w··on Tor Browser and Tails Version Fingerprint
Cue them saying something along the lines of “our goal is to prevent tracing, not fingerprinting”. But I hope they’re hard at work on a fix regardless.
r-w··on In-Ear Device That Translates Foreign Languages in Real Time
Doesn't seem far from what Google Translate already does; it's just a matter of automatically dictating the translation.
r-w··on Japanese Words That Don't Exist in English
Same with German. But even there, there are connotations surrounding those compound words that are lost in translation to English.
r-w··on Japanese Words That Don't Exist in English
Well, it does, but nobody listens!
r-w··on Now Gmail on Android is forcing Chrome as web browser
Strange. 1.6 million clicks on Feedly; 5 points / 3 comments on HN.
r-w··on Lightroom $4K iMac VS $4K PC performance test
These kinds of posts attract the Reddit-ier crowd of commenters that already exists within HN, if you know what I mean. The title gave me that feeling; the article confirmed it; and the fact that there were enough comments to require scrolling, on an article about “Which computer is faster, Mac or PC???”, hit the nail on the head and sealed the coffin.
r-w··on Lightroom $4K iMac VS $4K PC performance test
Surprise, surprise. A custom-built, overclocked machine with more of its cost invested in its CPU was faster than one that wasn’t overclocked and is sold for looks and stability over raw performance. It’s not like the choice of almost all the components had absolutely no impact on the final result.
r-w··on Hillary PAC Spends $1M to ‘Correct’ Commenters on Reddit and Facebook
Maybe the real problem is that people in this country still think that the more they hear something, the more it’s worth hearing. If they’d only keep those little slivers of truth about Hillary in mind among the sea of lies—if there were any mental permanence to their observations about her—then maybe she’d stop being able to slip through the cracks like she has about the emails, the speeches, and (foreseeably) this Big Brother-esque move.
r-w··on Hillary PAC Spends $1M to ‘Correct’ Commenters on Reddit and Facebook
This may give her a stronger online presence in a naïve sense, but it also undermines all of her genuine supporters. Now every Hillary supporter on the Internet looks like they’re being paid off.

Really makes you wonder what kind of administration she’d run. Seems like money always turns up wherever she turns up; the direction of causality is up to your imagination.

r-w··on Effective Python › the Book
Subtitle should’ve been “The SQL to SICP”.
r-w··on Why doesn't any one talk about nim
Better link: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&date...

To be fair, I had to go back a year for other posts to overtake this one.

r-w··on I Hate Web Bloat – Please Remove Junk from Your HTML
A lot of this stuff actually does make the web better. If someone is having trouble loading a site, they can disable features such as custom fonts, images, and scripts. Alternatively, they can just use a text-based browser. I see no need for websites to disable features that most people in developed countries can access just fine from their local café and that anyone else can just disable themselves.

Bloat is something entirely different; I agree that most sites need to cut down on the injected scripts that load more injected scripts ad infinitum. However, it actually takes longer to find a given resource on a different site than to wait for the current site to load. No one’s leaving sites due to loading times unless they’re either really slow or really unimportant.

r-w··on Norway's Barnevernet: They took our four children… then the baby
1. Inform the parents and work out a plan.

2. If nothing changes, move the kids to the same foster home and work with the parents to create a better environment to the kids.

No one here is trying to raise damaged kids; the parents seem to just have a view of how to raise their children that infringes on their kids’ rights. If they break the law a second time after being informed that what they’re doing is illegal, then we know it will require more than just informing them. Taking the children away clearly should not be the first step unless we already know they are defying the law.

r-w··on Velocipedia
It’s a video game convention as well.
r-w··on In Science, It’s Never ‘Just a Theory’
I’m surprised they didn’t delve into the idea that theories aren’t seen as useful in the real world. It’s relatively easy to take the bait of exposing falsities that non-scientists believe and make an article about that, but I would have been more impressed had they tackled an informed misconception.
r-w··on Justice Scalia spent his last hours with members of this secretive society
I regret having had enough faith in HN to click on this. Try harder, sensationalist journalism. There’s no “deeper narrative”—it’s just a bunch of old men playing a cross between Dungeons & Dragons and Russian roulette.
r-w··on To Anyone Who Thinks They're Falling Behind in Life
> Humans are farmed like poultry - City humans are caged chickens, suburban humans are the "free range" variety.

…and rural humans are space aliens.

r-w··on To Anyone Who Thinks They're Falling Behind in Life
Transcendentalism!
r-w··on Uber driver kills 6
What does this have to do with Uber, other than a careless disregard for one’s appearance to others?
r-w··on Google.com scores 59/100 on PageSpeed Insights
*on mobile
r-w··on We Need a Better PC
Except what the hell, where’s my desktop-grade GPU!? ;)
r-w··on We Need a Better PC
That was a pretty quick dismissal of Lenovo, and a warped portrayal at that. As far as we can tell, Superfish was not intentionally installed by Lenovo, and any money it made didn’t go to them since it wasn’t their software. There’s nothing here to suggest that this is a sign of anything untrustworthy happening at Lenovo, any more than there is at any other major laptop seller. It seems like this was just a case of their software QA being not quite on par with their hardware QA. Also, all websites suck. Just sayin’.

tl;dr: “Picky, picky! wags finger”

r-w··on I Was the Most Wanted Man in China
I’ve noticed it becomes relatively easy to anticipate which articles will reach the front page once I’ve started reading the trending sites. However, I wonder whether there’s any way to anticipate which sites will begin to trend on the front page. My first instinct is that it’s just a matter of circumstance, of one person sharing one article from a non-trending site that trends on the front page. In practice, however, it’s hard for me to believe that such a small event could decide whether or not a story gets covered by a more mainstream site after a journalist finds it—I’ve been seeing quite a few references to Hacker News articles as of late in mainstream news articles. It could be that Hacker News really is the initial component in starting news trends.
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