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LordWinstanley

208 karma · joined October 16, 2016

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LordWinstanley··on Root – Programmable bank account for software developers
A bank account you can programme in Javascript. What could possibly go wrong?
LordWinstanley··on How many times will the shoelace story be submitted?
You must be new here!

If [like I do], you browse HN by the "new" section, you'll see this time after time after time after time...

I don't know what's to be done about it. HN don't seem to care and it seems like a huge number of visitors to the site just can't be bothered spending a few seconds to check whether or not a story has already been submitted, before adding their own noise to the signal.

From the website management point of view one difficulty is that; on the intarwebs in general, the vast majority of these stories originate from a single news agency or press release and are then mirrored across countless other 'news' sites. So, in effect the problem increases exponentially: one story source is republished across 20 different websites and then each of those 20 website articles is submitted to HN by 20 different people.

LordWinstanley··on Alien life? NASA may announce 'habitable zones' on Saturn moons tomorrow
Could you not find a better source than the Daily Fail?

It has less credibility than a child's comic.

LordWinstanley··on Why Ubuntu Should Use KDE Plasma Instead of Gnome
You lost me at reason no.1
LordWinstanley··on My phone was searched at LAX, which apparently is the new normal
I know some people's online comments are pretty toxic, but I'm struggling to think of a scenario whereby a Twitter stream or Facebook timeline could be used to make a 'dirty bomb' --and I'm not having much luck.

Could you help me out here?

LordWinstanley··on My phone was searched at LAX, which apparently is the new normal
There's also a delicious irony in the fact the border agents would no doubt claim not to be stealing your data, but merely making a copy of it --while at the same time the US is extraditing people from around the world, to charge them with piracy, for copying music and movie files. In which case, it seems, copying data is theft.
LordWinstanley··on My phone was searched at LAX, which apparently is the new normal
5: Don't visit the USA. It's not compulsory to suck America's arse, you know.
LordWinstanley··on My phone was searched at LAX, which apparently is the new normal
>Especially if the pilot has gone rouge

What have you got against pink pilots?

LordWinstanley··on Mastodon's sudden popularity should serve as Twitter's wakeup call
What popularity?

All I see is a suspicious number of repeated submissions on HN, coinciding with pretty much the same recycled press release disguised as a news item, cropping up on a few tech sites.

I strongly suspect this supposed sudden "popularity" of Mastodon is nowt but the result of an ongoing viral marketing campaign.

LordWinstanley··on Ubuntu transforms your PC experience
WTF?! --am announcement, introducing Unity, from 2011. Why?
LordWinstanley··on Mastodon Is Like Twitter Without Nazis, So Why Are We Not Using It?
What I would like to see from any of these FOSS alternatives to Twitter is a way to import your existing Twitter archive.

I don't know if it's colossal arrogance, or colossal stupidity that makes so many developers launch their "Alternative to Hugely Successful Product X" without giving people any way of bringing across their existing "Product X" content, that they may have spent years creating.

LordWinstanley··on Mastodon Is Like Twitter Without Nazis, So Why Are We Not Using It?
Twitter seems to have become an alternative to Reuters or AP for most journalists the days. Even major newspapers and news organisations seem to 'back up' their articles with numerous quoted tweets —as if the half-baked shite spewing out of Twitter in response to World events was some kind of confirmation of a story's authenticity.
LordWinstanley··on Mastodon Is Like Twitter Without Nazis, So Why Are We Not Using It?
So, you complain about Twitter's inherent lack of freedom, then offer an alternative which "bans nazis"? Given the frequency with which internet debates end up invoking Godwin's Law, that sounds even worse than what it's trying to replace. Who decides who's a nazi?

I'm also confused by the distinction (or relationship) between this and GNUsocial. The article seems to suggest that Mastodon is an instance of (or at least compatible with) GNUsocial. The Mastodon FAQ seems to suggest it's a completely separate and incompatible thing.

FWIW, there are already several longer established GNUsocial-based almost-clones of Twitter out there, offering more than Mastodon seems to. Personally, I use Quitter, to scratch my FOSS 'twittering' itch:

https://quitter.no

LordWinstanley··on Samsung's Android Replacement Is a Hacker's Dream
Wow! --that is pretty damning stuff. If even a fraction of it is true, it looks really bad for Tizen
LordWinstanley··on Lineageos: New Mascot and Br0zip - a new era of ROM building
The unwritten rule of the painfully obvious corporate April Fool trick is that you try and trick your customers into believing you're about to do something really silly or strange. It's probably not such a good idea to promise things that your organisation would like to be able to do, but can't actually deliver. That only disappoints anyone naïve enough to fall for it and emphasises how far short of these aims lies your reality.

(Hence the general lack of "Cure found for Cancer" headlines amongst the April Fool press releases)

LordWinstanley··on Study finds genes involved in education are becoming rare
Care to explain what you mean by that?
LordWinstanley··on What’s gone wrong with democracy
Well. That's the problem with democracy. Sometimes the ordinary people don't vote the way their betters intended them to. That doesn't necessarily mean democracy is broken. Just that sometimes the majority of the populace want things which are not very admirable.
LordWinstanley··on The Samsung Galaxy S8 is the first phone with Bluetooth 5.0
Looks lovely. But, until someone comes up with unbreakable glass, I really don't see the point. Everyone who buys one will stick it straight in a case, to protect that edge-to-edge display.
LordWinstanley··on Once We Listened to the Beatles. Now We Eat Beetles.
This might, just possibly, be the worst headline of all time.
LordWinstanley··on [dead]
I blame all the "pimp yourself out" freelancer sites wherein talentless copy/paste monkeys underbid each other to offer their services for next to nothing --for devaluing this sort of work so much, that people can actually post requests like this, in all seriousness.

Mind you, at least the OP didn't stoop so low as to invite someone to do the job for free "but your work will be seen by lots of people, which will help raise your public profile" --which is what a lot of graphic artists get.

LordWinstanley··on Diversity Makes Projects More Successful
.. of course it does.

Doubleplusgood!

LordWinstanley··on I tried to get broadband from eir, in Ireland
I've had similar fun'n'japes with their cousins this side of the water, BT. But I don't think we descended quite that far into insanity.
LordWinstanley··on How I Found the Best Programming Language in the World [Part 2]
Two [very long] posts in and you've still not really got to the dénouement!

Still. It's an interesting read, nonetheless.

TL;DR: It's Nim[0]

[0]: https://nim-lang.org/

LordWinstanley··on Show HN: Test how mobile-friendly your site is. (New tool from Google)
I've used this tool before and, while it gives some useful pointers, I wouldn't get too hung up on the results.

One classic example is that it marks your site down if you don't minify your JS and CSS. On my sites, the CSS [and much of the JS] is hand-written and contains only what I need to style my pages. It's only a couple of hundred lines and just over 10k. Still it gets marked down because it's not minified.

If, on the other hand, I installed some bloated library like Bootstrap, I'd be given extra brownie points for it being minified, in spite of it being several times as big and containing huge amounts of 'stuff' that is not even used.

Also, anyone who's ever added Google Custom Search Engine to a site and had to customise it will bristle slightly at being educated in optimal web design by a company which uses several hundred lines of CSS to style a solitary text input box and 'Submit' button!

LordWinstanley··on [dead]
Can the Bot be made NOT TO SHOUT?
LordWinstanley··on Free virtual phone numbers
Should state it's for iOS only.
LordWinstanley··on I tried to get broadband from eir, in Ireland
Brilliant read. I hope enough time has passed now for you to laugh about it.

You seem to have an unfinished sentence, part way through though. [italicised]

>She tells me that it has been declared ‘non relevant’. I can’t even. She says it’s doubtful that they will issue a cheque for that amount

LordWinstanley··on 5 Innovative Linux Operating Systems You Should Try Today
Thanks for this. I'm on the lookout for a new Linux to try out, as a departure from my usual Debian and *buntu tinkerings. There were a couple of interesting ones mentioned there that I wasn't aware of—or wasn't aware of what made them 'different'—which I'll have to investigate further.
LordWinstanley··on Nigeria's nuclear plans
Surely you mean "nuklear"?
LordWinstanley··on US forbids any device larger than cellphone on flights from 13 countries
Whether I would trust baggage handling or not isn't really the point.

Almost every news outlet is headlining this story that these devices are being 'banned' from flights, which is simply not true. They're being 'banned' from being carried on as hand luggage. You might as well say that "changes of clothes" are banned from flights, seeing as most people's suitcases are not allowed to be carried on as hand luggage either.

I know the truth doesn't make for as interesting a headline. But it's irritating to see the [allegedly] quality press increasingly adopting the tactics of the click-bait trash pedlars.

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