Hacker News Reader

zorkw4rgon The Python Unicode Mess

I'm not so sure other languages do that any better (nodejs doesn't even support non-unicode filenames at all for instance). Modern python does a pretty good job at supporting unicode, very far away from being a "Mess" that's just very much not true at all. People always like to hate on python but then other languages supposedly designed by actually capable people do mess up other stuff all the time. Look at how the great Haskell represents strings for instance and what a clusterfuck[1] that is.

[1] https://mmhaskell.com/blog/2017/5/15/untangling-haskells-str...

zorkw4rgon Darpa Is Making Insects That Can Deliver Bioweapons, Scientists Claim

"Operation Popeye (Project Controlled Weather Popeye / Motorpool / Intermediary-Compatriot) was a highly classified weather modification program in Southeast Asia during 1967–1972. The cloud seeding operation during the Vietnam War ran from March 20, 1967 until July 5, 1972 in an attempt to extend the monsoon season." [1]

"After World War II, the U.S. military bombed dams in North Korea and North Vietnam to destroy the communist governments’ electricity and irrigation infrastructure. This was, until the Iran-Iraq War, the final occurrence of such soggy tactics. In 1977 the Geneva Conventions specifically outlawed the targeting of water infrastructure in wartime." [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Popeye [2] https://medium.com/war-is-boring/dam-warfare-3da6ee24518a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Vietnam%27s_dikes

zorkw4rgon Germans don’t do tech startups – more access to capital might change that

meanwhile there is not a single tech startup from germany worth talking about, but yeah sure not everyone has to do it the SV way of doing things, like actually being successful

zorkw4rgon PyQt5 Tutorial: Create a Python GUI in 2018

QML is actually pretty awesome, I got into it through KDE/Plasma widget development. I think it should be possible to get newest JS working using Babel in your build pipeline. I think it makes a LOT of sense in cases where you develop a UI and can't effort to embed webkit/chrome.

zorkw4rgon Zoho.com CEO says domain with 40M users suspended for abuse complaint

Its not like Zoho is known for their high availability anyways, their domain not being reachable is just par for the course.

Also since it said "suspended for abuse complaint", I would almost immediately assume the Zoho just didn't properly handle abuse claims and its their fault.

Needless to say I have a incredibly low opinion about their "service" based on having used their mail product for almost a year (switched to google afterward).

zorkw4rgon Show HN: Sublime Merge – A Git client from the makers of Sublime Text

Is there anything worse than having to develop with people who can only use Git via a UI? It pretty much by definition means they have zero grasp on the fundamental concepts of Git.

zorkw4rgon Apple didn't delete that guy's movies – what really happened

> the scripts are all written from the same manual anyway

I bet you mean "Save the Cat!: The Last Book on Screenwriting You'll Ever Need", its such a cancerous guide.

zorkw4rgon Apple didn't delete that guy's movies – what really happened

The insanity of international copyright law has turned a lot of people into basically just ignoring the laws which is 100% justified, reasonable and morally sound in my opinion. It is not the consumer's fault that politicans are too inept in understanding the current century we live in, it is not the consumers fault that politicans are too corrupt to bring copyright law into this century.

One of the creative ways of digital self defense is https://unogs.com/ it lists all content on netflix and in which region it is available. This way you can use a VPN service and actually fully use Netflix as the service it was intended to be and you've been payed for properly.

And for that matter it is not the corporations fault for exploiting all laws to the greatest extend possible either, don't anthropomorphize corporations, they are not moral agents, they are soulless thoughtless profit maximization machines it is the fault of politicians and the population who voted for them, to not regulating them properly.

zorkw4rgon Ultimate Hacking Keyboard

> Increase your productivity by never leaving the home row.

I can't possibly be the only one who read "Increase your productivity by never leaving home.", But awww I'm so much more productive in the office though =)

zorkw4rgon EU approves internet copyright law, including ‘link tax’ and ‘upload filter’

Thats so depressing that we have to have serious discussions about technical countermeasures against our oppressive EU regime. Just because of some old ignorant evil assholes. Time to leave the EU I suppose.

zorkw4rgon I've mostly given up on making Ubuntu bug reports

In my experience its really bad for your mental health to read the source code of software you use, there is a troubling amount of horrific code in widespread use.

zorkw4rgon I've mostly given up on making Ubuntu bug reports

I think generally linux distribution bug reports aren't that important to most other types of software, since you can always do so much to diagnose and work around issues yourself. And if there is a bug in software I use like kdenlive or Gimp I'll go to the developers directly obviously.

Also most users are morons, it takes a lot of time to sort through all the invalid reports.

zorkw4rgon PyPy.js: Python in the web browser

I can't do:

a, *b = range(3)

which should be 3.5 i think.

zorkw4rgon Internal documents reveal the grueling way Tesla hit its 5,000 Model 3 target

Its one hell of a gigantic conservative industry Tesla is up against. When jeremy clarkson (top gear) did his hit piece [1] there were (probably still are) a lot of people who were completely convinced by it and who saw nothing wrong with it at all.

I think its quite prudent to admit to uncertainty instead of being foolishly opinionated in either direction and wrong. But people are so full of themselves, its rather disconcerting.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_Gear_(series_12)#Tesla_Roa...

zorkw4rgon Monsanto ordered to pay $289M damages in Roundup cancer trial

> This case and this verdict had nothing to do with GMOs

Over 80% of genetically modified (GM) crops grown worldwide are engineered to tolerate being sprayed with glyphosate herbicides.

zorkw4rgon Monsanto ordered to pay $289M damages in Roundup cancer trial

> Mr Johnson's lawyer, Brent Wisner, said the jury's verdict showed that the evidence against the product was "overwhelming".

Uhhh to say that is quite the stretch, a jury of layman should judge the scientific consensus? The referenced International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) report is anything but conclusive. That verdict speaks more to the widespread uninformed FUD against GMO.

https://www.iarc.fr/en/media-centre/iarcnews/2016/glyphosate...

zorkw4rgon Architecture of Mask RCNN – A PyTorch Implementation

https://github.com/wannabeOG/Mask-RCNN/blob/master/model.py

yeah dumping it all in a single 2098 line file, why not? Here is a clean documented implementation of faster rcnn for comparison: https://github.com/chenyuntc/simple-faster-rcnn-pytorch

zorkw4rgon New York Times Co. Reports $24M Profit, Thanks to Digital Subscribers

Weird why is that getting flagged/downvoted? Isn't that a legitimate topic of discussion? It should be possible to at least point out the facts of what happened.

She wrote some tweets in the past that some people interpreted as racist against white people, nyt responded by arguing that it was just a reflection of the hateful rhetoric she received as an asian person.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2018/08...

zorkw4rgon New York Times Co. Reports $24M Profit, Thanks to Digital Subscribers

I listen to the Daily as well, definitely recommended no shill.

https://www.nytimes.com/podcasts/the-daily

zorkw4rgon EPA is allowing asbestos back into manufacturing

Isn't that anyways now different, I mean asbestos is dangerous when its in the air but:

> The report states that the agency will no longer consider the effect or presence of substances in the air, ground, or water in its risk assessments.

Therefore if they don't consider effects from having it in the air asbestos is not dangerous anymore? This article must seriously misrepresent the facts, I can't believe that even post-Trump / GOP are this insane.

zorkw4rgon Intel patches new ME vulnerabilities

Maybe someone could clarify some things, because I think the impression that I got from reading about this vulnerability is completely wrong. Isn't vPro just something in server hardware? At least the CPU, Mainboard and NIC all need to be certified/from Intel to support this?

You could get the impression that every single computer with a Intel CPU is vulnerable to be hacked over the network. Which I really doubt.

> I want them to disable that thing by default!

When you say this is enabled by default, do you literally mean that they open up a HTTP server without you doing anything?

I don't know much about the Intel ME but the things people are saying about it just seem totally unbelievable.

zorkw4rgon A new digital divide: Young people who can’t use keyboards

I always thought the idea of the digital divide never went far enough. If you look at the work performed by regular people on a daily basis using computers and the work performed by skilled software engineers there is such an absurd level of difference in efficiency. Its no wonder that AI will replace most jobs people do.

AI will not be able to make those people more efficient, it will replace them. AI can't help them to be more efficient since they don't know how to think on any fundamental level.

> “Everybody in this country should learn to program a computer, because it teaches you how to think” - Steve Jobs

zorkw4rgon Jenkins pipelines as YAML

I guess rather than having to deal with the agony to move away from a sufficiently large and complex Jenkins setup, people rather delude themselves in that its actually good software.

Just the amount of obtuse setup that thing requires is crazy and always ends in a mess. I have no idea why there seem to be so many people praising that thing in this thread. I don't fault Jenkins though, its just old obsolete software that should be replaced.

zorkw4rgon British geologist Herbert Henry Thomas’ seminal study on Stonehenge was wrong

The number of 20 years is often repeated for the great giza pyramid, however its constructed using 2.3 million stones (~2.5 ton each) meaning they would have to place a stone every 5 minutes, for 20 years to make any sense. Traditional theories of egyptology fiercely defended by argument of authority are utterly useless.

In reality nobody has any idea how, when or even by whom (I would despute the cartouche as solid evidence) the great pyramid was actually built and egyptology certainly won't figure it out (at least not with its current systemic issues).

zorkw4rgon British geologist Herbert Henry Thomas’ seminal study on Stonehenge was wrong

The article even makes mentioned potential fraud: "[Thomas] was forgetful and sloppy, but at worst he was being deceptive" Without any further explanation.

Science "journalism" certainly has the reputation it deserves.

zorkw4rgon Police search homes of Zwiebelfreunde board members and OpenLab in Augsburg

There are also a ton of websites from german nazis (I mean common folk nazis, not institutional nazis like the CSU) that use webhosting in the USA to circumvent the more restrictive free-speech in germany. Not like thats pursued of course.

Unfortunately a common sentiment in germany is that left and right extremism is equally pernicious, or even worse people tend to be more annoyed by the left burning luxury cars than they are with nazis burning refugees.

zorkw4rgon PEP 572: Python assignment expressions has been accepted

How a language with nested list and dict comprehensions can ever claim to focus on readability is beyond me, or look at typing and the mess that leaves behind. One obvious way of doing things while simultaneously mixing oop and functions arbitrarily in their standard library even providing camelCase and snake_case aliases(!) for parts of it. And why does the base64/b64encode return bytes and hashlib/hexdigest str?

Python is designed in such a strangly arbitrarily inconsistent, hypocritical and opinionated manner.

zorkw4rgon Filezilla installer is suspicious again

Just reading the exchange with "botg" is really all the information you'll ever need to know about Filezilla, using it (bundled or not) would just be gross negligence after that.

Here is an alternative: https://winscp.net/eng/index.php

zorkw4rgon UPS’s $20B Problem: Operations Stuck in the 20th Century

we never had a boston dynamic robot doing a backflip though. But I guess that's kind of my point, advances in robotics/AI/AGI can't be compared with the invention of the car, but that's exactly the argument that's going to justify a never seen before degree of poverty of masses of people.

Stopping or even slowing automation is though of course completely pointless on multiple levels, if a company isn't going to automate, their competitor will (and drive them out of business), if a country decides to legislate against automation another country will not, in the global economy its a futile effort.

Furthermore there really is no reason for people to "work" at all, if machines can do the same why not let people do what they want to do, instead of pointlessly enslaving humanity forever, that sounds pretty evil.

zorkw4rgon UPS’s $20B Problem: Operations Stuck in the 20th Century

I assume people are against automation because it leads to more unemployed. In the future we will probably have most manual labor automated by robots and have massive amounts of people without jobs, no healthcare, barely surviving at all in terrible conditions.

But you know, its all their fault of course, they could've just learned to code!