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racer-von 20 Years of Crunch Take Their Toll on a Game Developer

It depends on the startup.

If it's well run, you aren't working late every night and every weekend.

If it's run by sociopaths who want to keep their employees in a state of perpetual crisis in order to maximize the value of their shares, it's pretty awful.

racer-von Twitter urges users to change passwords after computer 'glitch'

I keep all my passwords in a text file. I can't imagine remembering them all. I suppose I should keep that file encrypted and synced to multiple devices with rsync or so. Would a password manager give me any advantage over this scheme?

racer-von How Dyson Saw Feynman

Thanks for this correction! I had hurriedly checked Wikipedia bios for each participant and completely missed the main point of Heisenberg's wartime activities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_Heisenberg#1945:_Alsos_...

It makes the story even more interesting to see Bohr and Heisenberg participating on opposite sides.

racer-von How Dyson Saw Feynman

Actually this conference was largely from a previous generation of scientific thinkers. According to their Wikipedia bios, Niels Bohr was the only one of those 10 names involved in the Manhattan Project. Einstein wrote a letter alerting President Roosevelt to the possibility of a German atomic bomb which may have helped inspire the project. Heisenberg was also involved in the war effort but "knew little of the Manhattan Project, so, if he were captured, he would have little intelligence value to the Germans".

racer-von How Dyson Saw Feynman

Try the 1927 Solvay Conference on Electrons and Photons:

https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/87a8ea/1927_group_pho...

Schrödinger, Pauli, Heisenberg, Dirac, de Broglie, Bohr, Planck, Curie, Lorentz, Einstein... the number of Nobel Prizes here is left as an exercise.

racer-von How Dyson Saw Feynman

Some people at the time felt that C and Unix were a setback to computing compared with Lisp, in the same way that Microsoft Windows was a setback compared to Unix. Bell Labs is the canonical example of "Worse is Better", also called the "New Jersey Philosophy".

One could also argue that both Windows and Unix were necessary phases for general computing given limited hardware resources, and only now is the stateless functional paradise envisioned at MIT in the 1960's actually possible.

racer-von Everyone Wants to Go Home During Extra Innings, Maybe Even the Umps

Yes, and specifically in the case of Premier League it seemed to cause problems with needing extra stoppage time. There was a recent match experimenting with video replay, and one side's manager complained that more extra minutes should have been added because of the video review, but wasn't (presumably because of TV advertising scheduled).

racer-von Ask HN: Are there any reasonable alternatives to MacBook Pro for developer?

Absolutely buy an external USB webcam if this is the case.

racer-von Want to Be Happy? Think Like an Old Person (2017)

Yeah, experiencing a lot of "little deaths" makes it easier. These can be the death of a relative, a near-death experience, or a serious trauma that means you will never realize your previous dreams (e.g. a football player losing his legs). Your ego starts to dissolve, and you become less caught up in your ambitions. You accept that what feels like unending potential does in fact end.

racer-von Sl: a mirror version of ls

Thank you, I can't even keep track of the option names for long enough to properly curse them. I wonder if there could be a kind of POSIX schema for similar options across utilities, such as

-o fieldseparator=,

-o fieldkeys=2,1,3

which could be used by any program whose capabilities require such a specifier, could be parsed from config files and environment variables, and aliased for reduced verbosity.

racer-von Sl: a mirror version of ls

To me the difference between a script and an alias is too trivial to quibble over. I'm fine putting all of my aliases into one-line scripts, if that would really make them easier to manage across systems.

My basic philosophical disagreement is with the idea of avoiding interactive command shortcuts. This essentially limits you to only using command line features you can memorize, or be willing to look them up every single time. There are too many commands, with totally inconsistent argument styles, for this to be practical.

The result is that you're only going to use a small subset of the command line's power if you limit yourself in this way.

RANT: Yes, I agree alias ll="ls -l" is a crutch. But why does 'sort' use -t for separator and -f for field, while 'cut' uses -d and -k? The famously composable Unix tools really aren't very consistent. Radically improved tab completion and documentation (vs man pages and Info) might be a start, but in the end you have to evolve new syntax.

racer-von Sl: a mirror version of ls

Why do you think it's good to put a long command in a script, but bad to make it an alias? It sounds like you think shell dotfiles can't be managed across machines just like script files.

racer-von Will MySpace ever lose its monopoly? (2007)

Yep, that's why I am promoting custom filters. There are so many folks on Twitter who post awesome content but I have to unsubscribe so I don't get inundated with their politics.

racer-von Organizational Skills Beat Algorithmic Wizardry (2015)

Point taken, but I feel all those languages had good runs. Modula-2 might have had less commercial success but still holds some intellectual interest. I sort of got sick of the web treadmill in 2013 as it felt like "learn a new toolkit every 18 months" and am primarily interested in something with longevity in that niche.

racer-von Organizational Skills Beat Algorithmic Wizardry (2015)

I think the massive amount of churn in the web world is the exception rather than the rule. If you learned C programming 40 years ago it would still be relevant today. Even Android is almost 10 years old now.

racer-von Will MySpace ever lose its monopoly? (2007)

I feel like the missing step is "until you need the ability to create custom filters to see what you want".

racer-von Poland’s surprisingly beautiful cheese

People commonly think of cheese as tasting good but not particularly beautiful to look at.

racer-von The people owned the web, tech giants stole it. This is how we take it back

There's a tendency for too much money to ruin things. I agree that excluding all non-government and non-university participants from the Internet would be a bad thing. But there were some wonderful qualities to the Internet in the days before mass commercialization, and it's not a bad thing to want those qualities back.

racer-von The people owned the web, tech giants stole it. This is how we take it back

I would love to see some tools for decentralized mass moderation of RSS feeds.

racer-von Craigslist takes personals sections offline in response to FOSTA

> what if on some level, there is a motivation to hurt these people who they feel are inferior?

I think this insightful, and I suggest there is a motivation to hurt other people in general - but it's only feasible to do so when those others are relatively powerless. Hence the targeting of the defenseless.

This is not a popular opinion in the modern age, as it's become dogma that "all men are brothers". However from an evolutionary perspective, a tendency to get pleasure from causing pain (sadism) is a vital component in the kind of psychological makeup which thrives in a Darwinian world.

We shouldn't justify this tendency but recognize it and learn to work around it (perhaps by playing contact sports, for example).

racer-von Craigslist takes personals sections offline in response to FOSTA

It seems more likely that the lower classes can easily empathize with the rich because they want to be the rich, while the converse is not normally true.

racer-von The people owned the web, tech giants stole it. This is how we take it back

This comment is pretty wide of the mark. The article points out that consumers made a mistake in trusting Facebook and rejecting a decentralized Internet. It's valid to make that criticism without inferring that all software of the past 15 years has been a mistake.

racer-von The people owned the web, tech giants stole it. This is how we take it back

> And it’s that hope that Cambridge Analytica has shattered.

Seems more accurate to say, that hope was shattered when people gave up on decentralized infrastructure like RSS and email in favor of Facebook's walled garden. Now there's an opportunity to go back (to the future!) and do it right.

racer-von Startups that launched today at Y Combinator’s W18 Demo Day

if a given group has significant power to prevent another group from pursuing life, lib, and happiness.

Viewed from that angle, it becomes clear why antidiscrimination laws favoring AA in traditionally Cauc challenges are legal

I'm not sure it's a good idea to enshrine the idea that "Cauc" have an inherent power over "AA" into law. This seems close to running afoul of Equal Protection.

racer-von An employee whose job was to be sacked (2010)

The idea is that if you don't get good service, you don't have to pay the tip. People whose incomes consist mainly of tips can make absolutely crazy amounts of money if they're good at their jobs and work hard. It's not for everyone but it works for some people. I wouldn't want to rely on being tipped out because I really don't have the personality for it.

racer-von Startups that launched today at Y Combinator’s W18 Demo Day

I'm sure there are too, I just can't think of any.

racer-von WhatsApp co-founder tells everyone to delete Facebook

foreign money deciding their leaders

Again you assume that money directly decides who our leaders are. The best evidence says it works at least partially the other way around: the leaders most likely to win attract the most money. And as was pointed out already in this thread: the winning candidate in this election was the one with less financial backing.

Furthermore to the extent it is true that money influences elections, we need to solve that problem first - rather than suggesting, as you do, that our leaders ought to be "bought and paid for" by our own home-grown evil corporations and special-interest groups. What kind of improvement is that?

racer-von WhatsApp co-founder tells everyone to delete Facebook

We have to backtrack on Citizens United vs the FEC decision or else foreign countries and oligarchs will be deciding every election.

You are saying that the dollar amount spent decides every election. Do you really believe that democracy is nothing more than rule by whoever spends the most money?

racer-von CS is a field that hasn’t encountered consequences

Yes exactly. The direction he takes his line of thought in the postscript - expelling individual members of the engineering profession for unethical behavior - is fatuous. The big trends are driven by big money: which business models and technologies get funding.

It's not the engineer whose bug accidentally irradiated a patient that's the problem; it's the VC's investing billions in spying on and shaping human behavior.

racer-von CS is a field that hasn’t encountered consequences

Many computer scientists are working in the nascent field of home automation. Surely this technology, with its myriad Internet-connected sensors and voracious logging, has the potential to implement a perfect surveillance state - especially combined with data mining. I would like to think the companies building these systems are going to value user control over all else, but somehow that seems unlikely given current models of funding.