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wtbob

6,614 karma · joined May 14, 2013

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wtbob··on Into the woods: how one man survived alone in the wilderness for 27 years
Over a decade ago, a thief broke into my car and stole some items. The feeling of violation still burns within me now. It's terrible to think that someone was in my car, my space, and took my things, and used them for some unsavoury end.

In the grand scheme of the universe, those things are pretty minor. But they still hurt.

I don't know that I'd want to hurt the person or people who stole from me; I think that I'd like to get to know why he or they did it, that I'd like to see why that seemed like the right thing to do at the time. But it does hurt, even now.

wtbob··on Why WebAssembly Is Faster Than Asm.js
> indexes are LEB128s

It's just a personal nit and beside the point of the (rather short) article, but I've long felt it sad that the more correct 'indices' is so rare and the correct-but-inelegant 'indexes' is so very common.

wtbob··on Reverse Culture Shock
> Why call it reverse culture shock? It's simply a realization that the United States not the best country in every regard.

That's completely not it at all. Culture shock is what happens when one visits another country and realises that certain things one takes for granted aren't, and other things one thinks are negotiable aren't. It's the same phenomenon which young historians have when they first read of a technologically advanced, trading culture which also casts every firstborn child into a furnace (e.g.).

Reverse culture shock is the same phenomenon, when one returns back home. It's caused by the fact that one has assimilated to one's guest culture to some extent, and upon returning home … one finds that certain things one had grown accustomed to taking for granted are not, and other things one had grown accustomed to thinking negotiable are not.

An example is the wide variety of cereals in American groceries, or the limited variety of organ meats. If one has grown accustomed to just buying 'müsli,' and one suddenly has a dozen different varieties, one claiming to be good for keto diets, one claiming to be vegan, another gluten-free, another paleo — that's a culture shock. If one has grown accustomed to making kidney pie, then returns to America and must make a conscious effort to source kidneys — that's culture shock. If one has grown accustomed to horse or whale, and returns to find that they are illegal — well, that's culture shock too.

It's not about better/worse; it's about different.

wtbob··on Reverse Culture Shock
> One of the hardest things for me to adapt to is how "liberal" America has become. It's not an objectively bad thing

One wonders, if the rest of the world is more cautious about this sort of thing, if maybe it's America that's in the wrong. Maybe other cultures deal with these things more sensitively or more rationally or just better.

My experience travelling abroad is that people seem more comfortable in their skins, which is sad given that America is supposed to be the place where anyone can make it.

wtbob··on The line is blurring between city and suburb
> Good urban schools exist, but there aren't enough of them

It's not just that — due to desegregation (itself a good thing!) one can't ensure that one's kids will go to either a good school or one nearby. Parents want the best for their kids, and will do their best to ensure their kids' success (note that Mr. Obama's kids went to Sidwell Friends, not to a public DC school).

wtbob··on Windows 10 Tip: Turn Off File Explorer Advertising
Are there ads on the web? I've not noticed … uBlock Origin is a wonderful thing!
wtbob··on Emacs org-mode examples and cookbook
Why use electron? emacs is already available. And it includes a pretty great news reader, mail reader, git interface, source-control interface, a thousand other nifty things — oh, yeah, and a text editor too.
wtbob··on When Factory Jobs Vanish, Men Become Less Desirable Partners
I think that you're misreading that: it states that: a different minimum wage (but still a minimum wage) applies to workers earning tips; and the standard minimum wage still applies if their wages & tips are insufficient to equal the minimum wage.

In other words, the minimum wage does apply, and even with tips the employer must pay at least some money.

Everyone I know who's ever worked for tips has tended to make quite a lot, considering.

wtbob··on Why I left Mac for Windows: Apple has given up
If someone wants a good development platform and is leaving the Mac, why not switch to Linux rather than Windows? Windows is IMHO not pleasant to use: the ads, the UI, the lack of speed. Linux is ad-free, pleasant & beautiful (with StumpWM anyway; Unity, GNOME & KDE aren't so great), and blazingly fast. Plus it's free software.
wtbob··on The USENET Cookbook: an experiment in electronic publishing [pdf]
And here's the only copy I could find (sadly in French units): https://www.rulingia.com/~jashank/misc/usenet-cookbook/Cookb...
wtbob··on Can tilapia skin be used to bandage burns?
Does the amount of tilapia consumed these days mean that this is basically free (modulo transportation & sterilisation costs, of course)? That'd be pretty cool. It'd be a real shame if it's effective, without negative side effects and our FDA prevents its use.
wtbob··on The Day the United States Blew Up a Reactor (2015)
The site doesn't resolve for me.
wtbob··on The first Go program (2013)
One of my backlog-projects is an implementation of Common Lisp in Go, which can be easily used to provide an embedded scripting language for Go programs (and, eventually, an excuse to write 'Go' code which is actually Lisp). It's one of those crazy ideas I'll probably never get to, but it sure would be fun.
wtbob··on Google and Apple have different innovation signatures
> "Over the past 10 years Apple has produced 10,975 patents with a team of 5,232 inventors, and Google has produced 12,386 with a team of 8,888," writes Wes Bernegger, data explorer at Periscopic. Those numbers are, frankly, pretty similar in terms of proportion.

Ummm, Apple's 2.0977 patents per inventor and Google's 1.3936 patents per inventor are pretty _dissimilar_, I'd think, unless many companies have yet more or far fewer.

wtbob··on How I discovered my left AirPod was bad
What makes you think people who buy AirPods would keep headphones after the warranty period? One doesn't want to be seen in last year's headphones^WAirPods, after all!

I suppose it's kinda genius of Apple, turning a simple pair of headphones which can last for decades into a fragile piece of microelectronics with a life expectancy of years at best, months at worst. Not really what I'd call 'courage,' though.

wtbob··on Revisiting How We Put Together Linux Systems
Primarily because it means that ZFS will never be an integral part of the GPLv2-licensed Linux kernel.
wtbob··on Revisiting How We Put Together Linux Systems
> I'm at pretty much a loss as to why anyone who doesn't specifically need something that btrfs and btrfs ALONE provides (writable snapshots from the top of my head although I'm not sure how that's different from a zfs clone.. One command?... I'm sure I read something cool about 'cp' being faster or whatever; is there anything else?) wouldn't go with ZFS instead.

Licensing: the ZFS license is, last I checked, incompatible with the GPL. That makes it a non-starter for me at least.

wtbob··on The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy
> Of all the criticisms of UNIX, the singular one that strikes me as valid is the way that it accepts unquestioningly insane characters in pathnames.

In fairness, though, allowing non-ASCII characters is what enabled the (mostly seamless) transition to UTF-8 filenames.

wtbob··on The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy
Of note for folks who don't know it, Common Lisp treats pathnames as structured objects. It's pretty nice, although it'd have been even nicer had they more-fully-specified them with respect to e.g. POSIX filename conventions (e.g. is /foo/bar a directory or a file?). UIOP basically fixes all this, and it works.
wtbob··on Leaked Snapchat emails: Anti-gun group told to pay or NRA ads may appear
Only because it's impossible to trust the CDC to be professional in this regard.
wtbob··on Why Typography Matters – Especially at the Oscars
Could even title this, 'why UX matters' to catch the general case.
wtbob··on I am an Uber survivor
> I'm saying that regardless of if it's real or not, the point here is that if it was it wouldn't surprise us …

It would certainly surprise me. I simply cannot imagine working with the sort of folks Amy describes. I'm not saying that such folks don't exist — it's a big world — but that I have never in my almost two decades of work in our field run into them.

Now, maybe that means I haven't run into them. I can accept that. And maybe it means that Uber is particularly bad in this regard. I can also accept that.

I don't know if this story is true or false: I honestly don't. It's probably worth investigating; certainly, after Susan Fowler put her name on some allegations of despicable behaviour it probably is.

If there are pockets of our field where this is considered normal, they need to be eliminated. But it does not accord at all with my experience of trends in our field.

wtbob··on A solution for enabling UDP in the web
The more and more I reflect on it, the greater and greater a mistake JavaScript turns out to have been.

What's a shame is that there is a need for much of what it offers (and, if not a need then at least a desire for much of the rest). If only there were a sane, least-privileged alternative.

wtbob··on Reports of SHA-1's demise are considerably exaggerated
This year's bikeshedding is next year's SOP.

I remember when I first heard of git I wondered why it didn't use a member of the SHA-2 family (which had been out for several years by then). Even in 2005 I think that it was fast enough.

wtbob··on Reports of SHA-1's demise are considerably exaggerated
KFyFwOkYdQatN3ZVjB16K3aY4KoydUr54rgfux33PuliXjqhykKkCjw is quite a bit nicer, I think, albeit case-sensitive.

s2rn74v2dlho2gmu7xozvxbhmvlmpcoffu7f7cqxefydurq5igvu3xmvmmdv5cw5uy4cvde5kk7hrlqh53dx3t52lcly5kdsscuqfdy is at least not case-sensitive.

wtbob··on Reddit is being manipulated by big financial services companies
I'll often see a similar pattern: I'll post something which disagrees with the common wisdom here on HN, it'll get a flurry of downvotes, then over time it'll get more upvotes. I figure that it's probably just the result of a few folks who are HN addicts, and that over time more reasonable heads prevail.
wtbob··on Two Indian engineers at Garmin in Kansas shot, one killed
And oddly enough, while we see people in this thread arguing for the end of the fundamental human right to bear arms, we don't see them arguing for the end of the fundamental human right to intoxication.
wtbob··on Two Indian engineers at Garmin in Kansas shot, one killed
> Even a sight of people toting guns gives me chills.

That sounds like a psychological condition known as hoplophobia. I think it's best treated by familiarising oneself with weapons of all sorts.

In general weapons aren't, in and of themselves, scary. It's the intent of the people carrying them which can be scary or not. Drunken half-wit shouting slurs? Scary. Single mother buying groceries with her kids? Not scary.

A sidearm on a belt is as inherently scary as a knife clipped to a pocket: not very, IMHO. It's all about the person carrying it.

As for why folks need weapons, IMHO arms-bearing is the fundamental difference between a slave and a freeman. I'd love to live in a modern Western society in which every adult carried a weapon of some sort as part of daily life, although I'm not wishful enough to think that our current society could do so safely.

wtbob··on The Untold Secrets of Grand Central Terminal
Very cool article, but the images are extremely low-resolution and blurry if one has JavaScript disabled. Folks, please don't do this: HTML has an image tag for a reason.
wtbob··on PGP needs to be retired in honor
There's no reason why the Signal app couldn't allow you to register mailto:joe@example.invalid as well as tel:+18005551212; it just, currently, doesn't.

And of course the protocol in general is much higher-level than that.

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