Hacker News Reader

sid0on Rob Pike: Dennis Ritchie has died

I meant "stories" in the journalistic sense.

sid0on Rob Pike: Dennis Ritchie has died

I'm merely citing the fluff that has occupied Hacker News recently such as http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3100278.

What sane, non-obsessed person gives a flying fuck what uniform someone wore and why they wore it?

sid0on Rob Pike: Dennis Ritchie has died

Yeah, that wasn't true when I made that comment earlier. I'm happy that the community seems to have come to its senses.

sid0on Rob Pike: Dennis Ritchie has died

Don't litter the frontpage posts on our heroes

Speak for yourself. Steve Jobs was not my hero. I respected him but did not like him one bit.

sid0on Rob Pike: Dennis Ritchie has died

let's not compare both.

Ah yes, the cognitive dissonance of an Apple fanboy developer who knows that C is far more important than anything SJ ever did yet can't reconcile that with their belief that SJ was god.

Shame on Hacker News's audience that the front page isn't filled up with Dennis stories right now.

sid0on Rob Pike: Dennis Ritchie has died

But Dennis didn't wear black turtlenecks everyday so obviously he's less important.

</sarcasm>

sid0on Steve Jobs Book Excerpt: Why he wore the black mock turtleneck uniform

However, that actually requires ordering socks, which as we all know is O(not gonna happen).

sid0on Dart language

Yeah, those aren't types, they're merely annotations.

sid0on Reducing runtime memory in Windows 8

2) A programmer who disposes of the idea of using memory efficiently has probably discarded the idea of algorithmic efficiently in any way whatsoever.

Space and time have to very often be traded off against each other in algorithms.

sid0on Reducing runtime memory in Windows 8

Well, multiple versions of code being loaded means that there are fewer common pages to share across processes. However I think it is the right tradeoff to make.

sid0on 3.5 Inches

I disagree, and I'm presenting as much evidence for it as you are (i.e. none). In which conference was Apple's finding published? Where can I download a PDF of the paper?

sid0on 3.5 Inches

Evidence? Citation? Or are you saying that on blind faith simply because it's Apple?

sid0on Jimmy Wales on Italian Wikipedia black-out

AKA door-in-the-face. Standard psychological trick studied since at least the 1970s.

sid0on Request PG: Could we please have the black bar out for Steve Jobs?

It's not just what he's saying, it's obvious objective fact. A device that I can't play around with and run my code on without paying my dues is merely a toy. I'm not universally opposed to toys -- my music player is an iPod nano, which is quite obviously a toy, but I'm not willing to support the toy-ification of general-purpose computing devices.

sid0on Steve Jobs has passed away.

They're Apple fanboys, what do you expect. Next they'll start quoting Ayn Rand.

Thankfully Steve himself had far superior cognitive capacity.

sid0on Steve Jobs has died

But does the peg's circle circumscribe or inscribe the hole's square?

Sorry, I couldn't resist.

sid0on Mozilla Firefox and silent updates

The service wouldn't give the browser elevated privileges. If you're worried about an update being compromised, then don't, since they're delivered over SSL and (I believe) are also signed separately.

sid0on I Think Your App Should Be Free

I'm not reducing anything to anything. I'm saying that the default, natural, rational position is for ideas to be free, and that any deviation from that position should be sufficiently justified.

sid0on I Think Your App Should Be Free

I don't see how my posts contradict each other. I do not think "buy an optical drive, pay through the nose and wait a month for an imported CD to arrive" is a reasonable condition when the trivial alternative of pirating it exists. It's up to content creators to set saner conditions.

sid0on I Think Your App Should Be Free

Of course I don't believe that morality is whatever suits you. Morality includes property rights, but I do not think the moral rights of the creator of some intellectual property, once his creation is released to the world, extend as far as to be able to impose arbitrary conditions on it. A creator is free to keep his creations private, but once he releases his creation to the market (presumably with the goal of gaining fame and/or profit), the market has a say too.

sid0on I Think Your App Should Be Free

Yep. The cost of waiting (up to a month for imports) and buying an optical drive especially for this is prohibitively high. I will not pay that high a price.

I also take moral issue to calling piracy stealing.

sid0on I Think Your App Should Be Free

Firstly, what are the current equivalents of a mobile App Store for (pirated) music?

What.cd.

sid0on I Think Your App Should Be Free

Since you're speaking in terms of entitlements, let's make this clear: the natural state of any idea (including large numbers such as the sequence of bits that make up an mp3) is to be free. Every human is naturally entitled through his consciousness to be able to copy and reproduce any idea he comes across.

Any restrictions imposed on them through legal or technical means are artificial and have to be justified when weighed against the costs of imposing them. For instance, protection against plagiarism has a very large benefit for not much cost so it's easily justified. For music it definitely isn't as clear-cut.

sid0on I Think Your App Should Be Free

I can't buy most music digitally (except via places like Bandcamp) where I live. I could buy or import CDs, but I don't like waiting and my computer doesn't have an optical drive. Pardon my French, but if you think I shouldn't listen to music at all because of that, you can fuck right off.

It's not as if I'm not willing to spend either. I buy plenty of games from Steam and other places. I buy them because they actually sell stuff in my country and offer me convenience at prices I'm willing to pay. If the music business did the same I'd start buying music instantly.

Let's stop guilt-tripping people into buying music through thinly-veiled and largely inaccurate allegories and start treating piracy as an economic problem.

sid0on CSS 3D in Firefox, demo

Until webkit becomes the only rendering standard

This shouldn't ever happen. We've been there before and seen how much it held back innovation. It is our duty both as individuals and as a collective to make sure it doesn't happen.

sid0on NaN does not equal NaN

Haha, "float is a monad" is the first thing that popped into my head when I read that.

sid0on It’s the end of the web as we know it

How is this any different from storing source code on GitHub, or using Campfire to communicate?

A very reasonable argument is that you shouldn't be using those either. GitHub is fine for open source projects but if I were involved in writing proprietary code I'd probably not put it up there.

sid0on Why Facebook's 'Frictionless Sharing' violates HTTP

But with frictionless sharing it isn't idempotent, right? If I refresh a page I'm reading it'll show up twice in the ticker.

sid0on Groupon Restates Revenue, Revenue Fell In Half, COO Exits

Fair enough -- you're correct.

Coming back to the original point (and not in response to you in particular), using "begging the question" to mean "raising the question" is very common now, and trying to object to that does no one any favours.

sid0on Groupon Restates Revenue, Revenue Fell In Half, COO Exits

I think your definition of descriptivism is incorrect. Descriptivism certainly doesn't mean everything anyone ever says is gramatically correct. Please read http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001843.h... .