wtbob

Would you please be so kind as to update https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html to indicate 'ideological talking points' the staff believe prevent thoughtful & informative discussion?

Otherwise I feel that there's a loaded gun pointed at my head and any random statement is likely to set it off.

sctb, I honestly don't understand why you are threatening to ban me.

It's not an ideological talking point that people who die earlier due to health problems don't cost extra in pension funds. It's just a fact: if someone dies at 55, he won't cost a pension system which starts paying out at 65 a penny. fpgaminer posted much the same thing.

Nor, I think, was my aside about taxes being enforced with violence an ideological talking point: it's a fact that any law is ultimately enforced with violence. I honestly don't see how mentioning a social cost in the context of cost-benefit analyses could be considered a violation of any of the HN guidelines.

I'm not trying to derail or be argumentative; I'm honestly trying to understand how a fair moderator could threaten me with a ban for my comment.

I'm not arguing that they don't reduce health costs: I'm arguing that a) they increase other costs (e.g. old-age pensions, since people would live longer) and b) they are an unjust imposition of force in order to change private behaviour.

Our problem is the cities, and how they have many more people. Representation in proportion to population is pretty kick-ass if you live in New York.

It's a little less kick-ass if you live in North Dakota, and wonder why a few coastal congressmen are able to pass laws which interfere with your lifestyle.

More seriously, our problem is a metastasised federal government. Very little should actually be a federal issue (read the enumerated powers of the United States in the Constitution!), and yet almost everything now is. As a result, every issue becomes winner-take-all: the entire country must comply with me, or the entire country must comply with you. There's no room to allow Massachusetts to go wrong and right in its ways, and to allow North Dakota to go wrong and right in its ways.

Well, I'd argue that you should grin

I've had much the same experience that the Mr. Marshall describes with many aspects of Common Lisp: repeatedly, I'll discover that something which annoyed me (CLOS, packages, pathnames — whatever) is actually remarkably well-thought-out and pragmatically useful. It really is an amazing language.

No, no he didn't. None of the information he released revealed anything criminal whatsoever. All he did was violate his oath and the law, and for what?

> They won't consume a lot of public resources (no need of school or of police repression).

Either the host country's end-of-life medical care is not great by American standards (in which case what you write is true, but many Americans wouldn't care to move), or it is, and a retiree would consume considerable public resources. Unfortunately, there's no way to have it both ways.

You're right, but I'd just like to plug Debian for servers — it's a really well-made distro, put together for sysadmins by sysadmins in large part.

And it's pretty wonderful on the desktop too!

Note that with the latest changes to Android, using mitmproxy to analyse the behaviour of apps has become impossible: apps refuse to accept personally-installed certificates.

In the future, we'll see less revelations about this sort of thing, not because it has become rarer but because Google have chosen a course of action which obscures it.

(it also breaks things like personal or corporate CAs, but that's a different problem)

I think a more properly-REST approach would be to PUT a representation of the resource with the action applied. That is, rather than POSTing to /resources/:id/close, one would PUT a closed version of the resource to /resources/:id.

Generally, people are not very good at determining if thoughtful design is worth the effort.

Yes, waterfall was a mistake, but design-nothing is mistaken too. Thinking before doing helps avoid waste & rework.

Another problem is that people want an RPC mechanism, when what they need is a state-transfer mechanism.

It turns out that the semantics of RPC — attractive as they undeniably are — are pretty poor for building real-world distributed systems, while those of REST as a pretty good (or at least better) fit.

> Except that - unless you're on a tiling WM on Linux - your window manager sucks

Isn't the solution to that to not use systems with poor usability? Linux exists; it's capable of doing everything many (maybe most?) people need — why not just use the superior system?

And a (short) discussion on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/plan9/comments/6a683b/fuchsia_the_n...

> I can't really think of an essential daily app (minus work / minus business related / minus intensive reading) that I use which has better UI and UX on a tablet.

For me it's TV. While I own a TV, I essentially never use it. A tablet has more viewing area than a phone, which makes it much more pleasant to consume TV shows on.

I think you hit the nail on the head re. how well relatively recent tablets work. At first I thought a tablet would be like a phone — replaced annually — but I find that I've had the same tablet for four years. It does its job, it's a nice size (and Google haven't come out with another 7" tablet since!); why replace it?

> There's remarkably little evidence that terrorists are making routine use of strong encryption.

Even if they were, we Americans have a fundamental right to strong encryption, protected under the Second, Ninth & Tenth Amendments to the Constitution. I'd go further still, and argue that everyone in the world (who's not a prisoner or otherwise unfree) has a right to strong encryption.

Astigmatism and severe myopia. They're easily correctable, but without glasses I can't see more than about three inches from my nose. At normal viewing distances I simply cannot even see things other people can see, like letters, small animals or children &c.

Without glasses I'd be severely crippled. I've conducted a few experiments trying to move around in public without them, and it's beyond frightening.

Requiring ID to exercise the right to vote is no more 'needlessly restrictive' than requiring it to exercise the right to bear arms or the right to drink. Canada, Germany, Switzerland & the Netherlands are among the countries which require ID to vote, and none of those is a dark dystopia of voter restriction.

That's actually something I worry about. I'm blind without my glasses, seriously, debilitatingly blind. With them, of course, I have better-than-perfect (for some value of 'perfect') vision. Should I have children? Is it ethical to do so? I honestly don't know.

Egad that XML is horrible! Whoever thought that could possibly be a sane format?

And to repeat it over and over — it's like a boot stomping on disk space, forever.

My problem is that many systems just use location — they don't let me override the defaults.

> No, no, a thousand times NO. Location should NOT EVER be used as a basis for things like units, currency, date format etc.

I completely agree. I'm located in the U.S. and use dollars and English customary units, but I prefer German-style dates and British spelling. Displaying metres and Celsius to me because I prefer to spell 'colour' properly is stupid.

I use tmux within my tiling window manager: it manages my terminal, and the WM manages windows. It works great for me, because this way I only have a single terminal to worry about.

You're right that emacs without any config is annoying. Check out Prelude (https://github.com/bbatsov/prelude); it's a really nice set of defaults for emacs.

I think emacs is the modern editor in its own spirit: none of the imitations come close.

> If there was one thing I could ask of Vim (or even emacs), it'd be a consistent high-quality default user experience.

FWIW I find both Prelude (https://github.com/bbatsov/prelude) and Spacemacs (http://spacemacs.org/) to offer pretty out-of-the-box experiences.

> Majority in what way? Not necessarily a majority of the people.

The people are irrelevant, because the United States is composed of the States, not of the people. The majority of the states, through their electors, elect the President.

> So those states represent the views of more people. Under your system, someone in South Dakota would have a 1/750,000th of a say in their state's choice, while someone in California would have a 1/36Mth of a say in their state's choice.

Why care about the number of people represented? California is free to petition the Congress to split into smaller, South-Dakota-sized states if it so wishes. More to the point, California and South Dakota are individual sovereign states which are each part of the United States. They are constitutional equals. It would be unfair to give California forty-eight times the voice of South Dakota.

Frankly, I think our Constitution has a good balance: the People are represented in the House; the States in the Senate (which is why direct election of Senators is a catastrophically disastrous mistake); and states determine how to choose their electors. I'm in favour of constitutional amendments revoking the 17th Amendment and mandating that state legislatures appoint senators & electors.

> Did you sleep through the 200 and 2016 elections, or are you confusing people with acres?

Are you confusing the states with the people? The United States are composed of the several States, and the States elected Messrs. Bush & Trump in those years.

> No one has allegiances to states.

They ought to.

> States are subordinate entities, that pretty much subsist on the largesse of the federal government. They're basically counties.

No, states are the sovereign entities which constitute the United States. The people did not ratify the constitution; the states did. Misconceptions like yours are why we should repeal the 17th Amendment, replacing it with one mandating that legislatures appoint their federal senators. Frankly, I'd love to see legislatures appoint electors, too. The people have a voice in the House; having voices in the Senate and in the Executive is too much.

> You're assuming that a majority of country should cede their right to having a say for the president, because acreage.

The majority of the country elects the President, because the United States are composed of the several States (not the people thereof), and the states elect the President. Frankly, I wouldn't mind every state having an equal voice, rather than unfairly privileging populous states.

> They also need to keep detailed log books, plan out routes, pass inspections -- and know how to talk civilly and constructively to DOT inspectors. An eighth grade education will not get you there. Especially on the last part.

I don't think you need a high school or college education to learn how to talk civilly and constructively with authority; decent parents should be sufficient. Ignorance need not automatically mean petulance.

> Isn't it just better to keep companies small?

That depends on what you're trying to achieve: the bigger the goal you're striving for, the more people you'll need for it. Yes, technology is an amazing lever, but it's not infinitely long: 5 people aren't going to make the next smartphone, electric car or rocket.