Hacker News Reader

EdiXon Sex, honour, shame and blackmail in an online world

    And people wonder why feminism is important.
    It's not just a non-western phenomenon. (...) The last one closed in 1996.

That's 20 years ago.

EdiXon The “432 Hz vs. 440 Hz” conspiracy theory

9,192,631,770 is divisible by 441, why are we not using 441Hz?!

EdiXon How the Web Became Unreadable

GNOME employs professional designers and produces consistently the worst designs in open source: kill features left and right in the name of "simplicity" then add excessive padding to what's left all in service of achieving that "ugly but useless" state that everyone loves.

EdiXon Ecuador acknowledges it has "temporarily restricted" Assange's communications

I'm curious how you feel about the leaked Donald Trump tape.

EdiXon An External Replication on the Effects of Test-driven Development [pdf]

> In a graduate-level engineering class, the students were making similar statements about all the studies we read

Yeah, that's because they are all terrible.

EdiXon Peter Thiel, YC, and hard decisions

In what way a group of people that has the almost unanimous support of mainstream media, the current government and the (most likely) upcoming government can be called marginalized?

EdiXon Twitter Shares Slump After Report Says Google Won’t Make a Bid

Is twitter UX considered good? Because my impression is that it's one of the worst UX ever made and has been that consistently for years.

Just one example, trying to view an image on twitter: on the timeline images get cropped to some fixed aspect ration, if you click on them twitter will open its weird mediaviewer popup where the image is not cropped but it is resized to fit an even smaller rectangle. As far as I can tell the only way to see the image at its original resolution is to (1) click on it to open the mediaviewer pseudopopup, (2) right click on the image inside the mediaviewer pseudopopup, (3) select "copy image location", (4) select the URL bar, (5) paste the image URL.

And that's just one example that you would think is easy to fix but apparently isn't, there's many more (threading is shit, clickable areas are unnecessarily huge, sometimes keyboard arrows stop scrolling, there's no distinction between "talking about someone" and "talking to someone", two different "screen name" fields with one or the other being given prominence depending on context...)

EdiXon Gallium – Build Desktop Applications in Go and HTML

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EdiXon YouTube enlists volunteers to moderate site via “YouTube Heroes” program

This should be called YouTube Large Scale Stanford Experiment.

EdiXon Some bad Git situations and how I got myself out of them

The only way to lose work with git is either to (a) not commit it or (b) run a garbage collection.

EdiXon Some bad Git situations and how I got myself out of them

All of those things and more are way easier to do with gitk and git gui.

EdiXon People are still bad at gauging their own interview performance

Mmmhhh I would have drawn the opposite conclusion, most people estimate ±1 star away from the real result, it's not bad considering the actual performance is not entirely objective.

Glad to see that once again Dunning-Krüger proved wrong.

EdiXon Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names (2010)

    names are central to our identities

I have never experienced this.

EdiXon Inclusivity Is a Joke

> Although I don't think it's that new to also use "they" to refer to a specific person whose gender you don't know (perhaps because you haven't met them).

That's possible but I've never seen any historical example of this nor I have seen anyone do it (outside of a specific subculture) so I don't think it's true: after all it's usually easy to deduce the gender of someone you haven't met from their name and if you get it wrong nobody (outside of that same specific subculture) will get really angry because of that.

EdiXon Inclusivity Is a Joke

Only as a bound variable pronoun, it's use as a singular personal pronoun is very very recent and not very common.

EdiXon Inclusivity Is a Joke

This post is currently in page four where it's the most recent post of the page (by a large margin) and the third most upvoted post in the page. Sometimes it's weird how algorithms work.

EdiXon Response to “Literate programming considered harmful”

> For example, I consider this idiomatic golang code (from the standard library, no less) to be entirely unreadable

Really? It's a binary parser that's parsing data from a byte array and stuffing the results into a struct, it seems pretty straightforward.

EdiXon SRL – Simple Regex Language

Because if there was one thing regexp needed it was COBOL.

EdiXon The Glorious Horror of TECO (2010)

> Richard Gabriel and Guy Steele (MIT AI Lab) wrote the original Emacs

AFAIK the first version of Emacs was written by Richard Stallman and Guy L. Steele, both wikipedia and jwz give partial credit to Stallman.

[0] https://www.jwz.org/doc/lemacs.html

EdiXon Q&A with Jack Dorsey

I think he means the reduction of the number of things made with atoms. It's a weird way to put it and it's even weirder considering AR so far hasn't really been successful at all.

EdiXon Headphones Everywhere

Least interesting thing I have read this year. I'm starting to think that use of the word 'performative' is a dead giveaway for pointless navel-gazing.

EdiXon Go’s march to low-latency GC

    The rest of the runtime probably was already human-written in Go

find -name '*.X' | xargs wc -l in src/runtime says

Go 1.4:

    21701 .c  33348 .go 19160 .s

Go 1.7b2:

    3340 .c 77597 .go 33827 .s

The assembly growth seems to be attributable to the increased number of supported platforms

EdiXon How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters

What does this mean? How can an emoji not have an emoji presentation?

EdiXon How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters

Because Unicode is the Celestial Consortium of Benevolent Encoding.

EdiXon How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters

> So which is it? Does each code point represent a visual image?

Look it's pretty simple, every code point represents a semantic meaning, except for:

1. those characters who also encode the width of their visual image (U+FF00..FFEF)

2. the one that means 'unknown' (U+FFFD)

3. those characters that change their visual representation depending on their position in the word (U+FB50..U+FDFF,U+FE70..U+FEFF)

4. those that change the visual image of another code point (U+FE00..U+FE0F)

5. those characters that have a visual image as their semantic meaning (too many to list)

6. those that are designated to have no semantic meaning at all (U+FDD0..U+FDEF)

7. those that have a meaning only in pairs (U+D800..U+DFFF)

8. miscellaneous

EdiXon How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters

And yet still no klingon...

EdiXon Ten years on, revisiting YouTube’s first viral sensation

High production values, they even shot on location.

EdiXon Why Users Abandon Forms with Select Menus

    More users start forms than finish them

Imagine if the opposite happened!

EdiXon Peter Thiel, Tech Billionaire, Reveals Secret War with Gawker

Can't speak for nefitty (because I disagree with the parent comment) however wealth imho does imply a lower expectation of privacy since with wealth more of your private activities become a matter of public interest.

That said, I don't see why Thiel's homosexuality would be newsworthy nor why Hulk Hogan's sex tape is newsworthy (the racist rant was, but they didn't publish that)

EdiXon Peter Thiel, Tech Billionaire, Reveals Secret War with Gawker

Yes? Unless there was something newsworthy...