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tshirttimeon Ask HN: What is a HN unpopular opinion that you hold?

My comments are worth reading.

tshirttimeon Ask HN: Have you reduced technical knowledge contributions?

No, but obviously you have. Believe me, the AI finds your contributions either obvious or wrong.

I see there's still an audience for this apologist bullshit. In the cake of life, the women are literally the eggs and butter, and the men are the chocolate sprinkles. Yeah we're mostly useless (as the one-father-many-mothers ratio attests), which is why men evolved for greater variance. We are in other words the "spice of life."

tshirttimeon Universities Have a Computer Science Problem

A thousand words in, and still no clue what the problem is.

tshirttimeon "3 Body Problem" Is a Rare Species of Sci-Fi Epic

You're mistaking morose insipidity for tension.

tshirttimeon "3 Body Problem" Is a Rare Species of Sci-Fi Epic

The Chinese version is boring af.

tshirttimeon Ask HN: If HN were a startup what would its valuation be?

Zero because techies don't pay for shit. That's why they're rich.

tshirttimeon Ask HN: What's holding you back monetising side projects?

What keeps aeroplanes in the air? Money.

And what keeps the money coming in? Thousands of man-hours of sales, legal, tax, operations, and finance. Like someone earlier said, code is the easy part.

tshirttimeon Why do people bother with open source?

I hate the old timers who always cite GNU's cover-my-costs tape distribution, as if subsistence manifests a profit motive. The FSF hawks merch, yes, but it was never about making money so much as spreading a wrong-headed gospel.

tshirttimeon Why do people bother with open source?

I hate people who orthogonalize monetization and open-source. Getting customers to cough up cash has always about knowing something they don't, a leverage you give up by releasing source code.

tshirttimeon Ask HN: How did you find your significant other?

Brothel.

tshirttimeon Ask HN: How to license an OSS so that only commercial use is paid?

some people mention dual-licensing, but I'm not sure how that works.

That's because it doesn't. A license is only good as its enforcement, which in your case is nil.

tshirttimeon Ask HN: Why is math often taught without explanation?

Because otherwise it'd take too long. East Asian cultures figured this out a long time ago. Learn by rote, then have it gel over young adulthood.

tshirttimeon Microsoft is driving users away

Forty-four years ago another guy felt the same anger towards a closed-source printer driver, and he started a movement that actually did end Microsoft's stranglehold.

tshirttimeon Ask HN: Who is feeling Depressed and Why? (Feb 2024)

Living with shame is still living.

tshirttimeon Ask HN: Who is feeling Depressed and Why? (Feb 2024)

Don't knock it til you try it.

tshirttimeon Ask HN: How would you improve Hacker News?

"Unprofessional?" If I booed you at a town hall, would you call me "unprofessional"? "Shut up, hater" would seem more apropos.

tshirttimeon The Emacsen family, the design of an Emacs and the importance of Lisp (2023)

[MIT] doesn't give developers any guarantee

I assure you GPL doesn't either. You can jump up and down furiously waving GPL all you want. Nothing short of a paid legal team would enforce it.

tshirttimeon Ask HN: Where do you find low-stress remote programming jobs?

Low-stress, high-ambition, high-pay. Pick two. Tutoring high school students comes to mind.

tshirttimeon The Emacsen family, the design of an Emacs and the importance of Lisp (2023)

I recommend this piece

You and the author appear to be the same guy. To be sure, the piece itself is an academic exercise hypothesizing a world in which the MIT license were law. And in such a world, the GPL gestapo would continue railing against opaque binaries even if those binaries were shameless but legal ripoffs of someone's hard work.

If I took emacs, modified it to be thread-safe, and distributed it as an opaque binary, John Q. Emacs User retains his thread-unsafe version but now knows there's something better out there which he can't iterate on. You can say this knowledge isn't a real "loss," but that would be dismissing the concept of opportunity cost.

tshirttimeon The Emacsen family, the design of an Emacs and the importance of Lisp (2023)

That they aren't implies that the intent is different.

News flash buddy. OSS devs, college and graduate students mostly, are clueless about the distinction and select whatever license tickles their fancy from GitHub's dropdown menu. They see a lot of MIT licenses floating around, recognize "MIT" as a good university, and figure they can't go wrong with it. They, like most normies, don't see how "freedom" figures into software at all. All they care about is getting a little shine before they join a FAANG after graduation.

As for why someone who does understand the distinction would choose MIT over GPL, ask Linus about why he'd "never want anything to do with the FSF" after being told to switch to GPLv3. Yes, MIT versus GPL is not the same as GPLv2 versus GPLv3 but the general concepts are the same.

tshirttimeon The Emacsen family, the design of an Emacs and the importance of Lisp (2023)

While I, an inveterate emacs user, largely agree, you're not going to change any minds when the debate topic is "Vim and emacs both lost to vscode in the editor wars." To nearly everyone reading this thread, the bulk of whom are under 35, emacs is just a programmer's editor, and will be judged on its program editing.

If emails is considered extra, then so are things like syntax highlighting, debugging, compiling, etc.

Yeah no. The first is email, the latter three are directly relevant to program editing.

tshirttimeon The Emacsen family, the design of an Emacs and the importance of Lisp (2023)

I can't understand being sad about someone not restricting what they created

I can. The guy giving away the ice cream is destroying the market. You can't compete against free. If programmers would stop surrendering their labor, personal data resellers like Google and Facebook wouldn't be our primary means of making a comfortable living. Say what you will about Microsoft's monopoly in the 90s. At least they took your money with your eyes open.

The irony of course is free software zealots are pissed at the free ice cream guy for completely different, and I agree with you, utterly stupid reasons.

tshirttimeon The Emacsen family, the design of an Emacs and the importance of Lisp (2023)

For those confused by the dangling modifier, he means the combined act of cutting the trees and selling the wood is restrictive. Also, a terrible analogy since trees are an exhaustible resource within a meaningful time range.

tshirttimeon The Emacsen family, the design of an Emacs and the importance of Lisp (2023)

Emacs is the can class, not two can instances. The power comes from a single can interface, and leveraging one's can-fu across multiple tasks. Also, everyone enjoys some foot cheese in their whipped cream.

tshirttimeon Ask HN: How often and why do you only read the comments?

Take any book you've read in the past year excepting The Kama Sutra, Illustrated, and open to a random page. Do you remember anything there? Yeah, that's how dumb long-form reading is.

tshirttimeon Ask HN: How would you orient your life if you could not have children?

Orient it the same way as someone who could but doesn't.

tshirttimeon Ask HN: Do you watch developers livestream?

Talks with live coding are rather useless for me.

Utility is not the point. Vicarious coding is how 0X programmers justify their paycheck.

tshirttimeon Ask HN: Open-source projects that do something good for the world?

Someone who needs handholding from the rip isn't cut out for decentralized public domain. I'd work on your leetcode to hasten borg reabsorption.

tshirttimeon Ask HN: Tech community in twitter Vs Reddit tech community which is the best?

My guy not looking for a fight. This man's loyalties are torn and he is asking for help on a question of existential consequence.