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OtterCoder

597 karma · joined July 6, 2016

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OtterCoder··on A final proposal for Rust await syntax
I'd tend to agree with you, except for the fact that Rust reserved words are reserved everywhere. Even if the syntax were changed, you still couldn't name a field "async" or "return". Since it's no extra burden on the namespace, I'm less opposed to it.

I'm on the fence about disambiguation via unique punctuation, vs avoiding Perl-like line noise.

OtterCoder··on Be wary of robot emotions
In fact, plenty of people in science and engineering are religious or spiritual. They just aren't as loud online, because of exactly these sorts of comments. Try to respect the beliefs of others, even if you don't share them.
OtterCoder··on Learn more programming languages, even if you won't use them
I've translated several mathematical papers into code, and I must strongly disagree. The very first thing I do is translate glyphs into names relevant to the domain I'm applying the math to. It makes the rest of the process immensely easier.
OtterCoder··on Rotating Black Holes May Serve as Gentle Portals for Hyperspace Travel
Even better, traveling at c, it would take exactly zero shipboard time. Space contracts infinitely for the sufficiently fast. Only outside viewers would see it take 4.5 years.
OtterCoder··on Gwern's Law: Ads cost you a tenth of your users
There's nothing ethical about the way advertising invades every part of society, every corner of your home, and every available minute of human attention. Blocking ads is eminently moral, because the only way to stop their encroach is to punish their purchase by blocking them.
OtterCoder··on Theory of self-reproducing automata (1966)
Yes, Puffers: http://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/Category:Puffers
OtterCoder··on Oregon expected to enact first state-wide rent control law
Massive housing price inflation relative to median incomes, for one, which the popularity of real estate and rental property ownership as an investment/speculation tool has greatly contributed to.
OtterCoder··on “Reverse location” search warrants identify all cellphones near a crime scene
In the real world, maybe 5% do the math. The rest are dazzled or browbeaten by apps and continuous demands for some permission they don't fully understand the scope of.
OtterCoder··on Things that are more inequitable than road pricing
Can I just mention how mind-bogglingly stupid a milage tax on car registration would be? No matter how efficient your new car is, it's less polluting to repair the old one and keep it on the road, than to manufacture a new car.
OtterCoder··on JMAP: Like IMAP but Not Really
IRC works pretty well. I really fail to understand why any tech project puts their chat on Slack/Discord/Whatever when IRC is easy and open.
OtterCoder··on 75% of med students are on antidepressants, stimulants, or both? (2017)
That's hardly the point. Point is, blanket statements are harmful and usually wrong.
OtterCoder··on 75% of med students are on antidepressants, stimulants, or both? (2017)
I don't. I have a vitamin sometimes when I remember, but I don't drink booze, tea, or coffee, smoke, take antidepressants, focus drugs, anything. I also don't play with essential oils, homeopathy, crystals, or other placebos. Heck, I don't even take painkillers or headache medicine unless I've got stitches. So, while I would agree that most probably do, you can't say 'everyone'.
OtterCoder··on The Baseline Costs of JavaScript Frameworks
See, that's the point where I usually wish I hadn't used a framework. As your design gets more and more convoluted, the amount of switches, toggles, and special cases that you have to build into the widgets tends to balloon. Most current frameworks make that an exhausting exercise in state drilling, and it becomes hard to reason about how any given change in application state will affect the view.
OtterCoder··on Ask HN: Have you ever regretted working on a product?
Exactly this. Network connections won't fire without a visible link? Fine. Save up user data for when they navigate around the site and send it as a batched query.

Heck, even if browsers always showed you the data they were about to send, split out by field, just base64 encode what you don't want them to know you know and give it an innocuous field name like, "session_id". Even better, piggyback off of legitimate fields with zero-width-character encoded data. Where there is any signal at all, there is a way to hide extra information.

OtterCoder··on Ask HN: Have you ever regretted working on a product?
Almost all people do, deep down. The Vikings, the Mongols, the Romans, the Aztecs, cannibals, headhunters, human sacrificers, they are us, and are not that far removed in time. To be human, really, is to be breathtakingly kind, selfless, and noble, but it's also to be cruel, bloody, and vicious. Christians call that bloody side of us the "natural man," a creature in direct opposition to the "spiritual man," who values life and goodness. Gandhi called this dichotomy the "animal" and "human" lives. Hobbes called the lust for physical power over others a, "perpetual and restless desire". If you want to create a safe and good society, you can't ignore either half of human nature.
OtterCoder··on Kids’ Apps Are Crammed With Ads
Cars represent $1.13 Trillion in consumer debt in the US on an asset that depreciates only slightly slower than fresh produce. Car debt contributes massively to the suppression of the middle class and is a burden many people take to their grave. Financial strain is a leading cause of divorce, and can often spur on depression, which has an immeasurable impact on both human lives and the economy at large.

Cars too are oversold and abusively advertised. And it really is psychological abuse, with horrific outcomes.

OtterCoder··on Kids’ Apps Are Crammed With Ads
> it were possible to solve this in 2000 years, we probably would have....

That's a terribly defeatist attitude, especially for someone who is writing a message on a colossal web of copper and forged glass, powered by lightning and runic commands, who probably doesn't live under the thumb of a king or suffer from polio, smallpox, or plague, and likely travels in a chariot drawn by elemental fire and oil extracted from the bones of the Earth, and who is far less likely to die from violence than at any point in history.

There's been a lot accomplished in the last 2000 years, and plenty of that achievement is fairly recent, scientifically and sociopolitically.

OtterCoder··on Is Gutenberg the End or a New Beginning for WordPress?
No, it is a simple blog engine that has been stretched, shimmed, cranked, and jerry-rigged beyond all recognition and sanity.

The very idea that people try to host e-commerce on the platform is an embarrassment and a shame to security and safety.

It encourages the pattern of hiring non-technical staff to manage the blog-store-landing-page-franken-whatever site, who are in turn encouraged to install reams of untrusted code via plugins.

It is built on a frankly bizarre pattern of page and route management. It uses broken versions of a fairly broken language. It is enormously resource-hungry.

I could go on, but to sum up, my experience working with WordPress has been nothing but a repeated nightmare.

OtterCoder··on Copenhagen Suborbitals: The world’s only manned, amateur space program
Maybe that's not their primary goal? People have taken horrifying risks to push frontiers throughout history. The Oregon Trail claimed an estimated 21,000 lives.* Perhaps they are willing to accept a higher risk of death?

*Though, despite the horrific toll, the final odds of death on the O.T., once the dust had settled, were about 5% to NASA's ~4%.

OtterCoder··on 5G Got me Fired
Ads are always disrespectful of their victims. They are intrusive and manipulative by nature.

Self respecting marketers will often say that their goal is to inform, but without fail, that "information" is laced and inextricably woven with manipulative psychology, tangential to the product being sold.

Further, in any industry where it can be employed, it chokes out every other form of revenue. How can anyone compete with "free"? Then, inevitably, when ads enter a space, they quickly dominate and poison it.

OtterCoder··on The relative performance of C and Rust
Not so much with Rust in the driver's seat. Cargo, Rust's primary toolchain, only has weak support for pre/post build scripts. It's solely concerned with Rust's own dependencies and compilation. In the couple of projects where I've added Rust to a larger project, it's always been bash or node that coordinates the overall build.
OtterCoder··on Valley Forged: How One Man Made the Indie Video Game Sensation Stardew Valley
> objective style missions

I'm very curious what you mean by this. Are you talking about all the "craft this" etc. achievements in Minecraft?

OtterCoder··on Valley Forged: How One Man Made the Indie Video Game Sensation Stardew Valley
Not to mention the still-current terms: Roguelike and Roguelite (the second of which I find unnecessarily derogatory).
OtterCoder··on SETI spots dozens of new mysterious signals emanating from distant galaxy
You don't sound like you do a lot of distributed/network programming. The speed of light is achingly, infuriatingly slow.
OtterCoder··on LOLWUT: a piece of art inside a database command
No, they're making themselves feel righteous, at very little gain to the minorities they're ostensibly protecting. I'm Slavic. The name for my ethnicity literally means, and is the root of the word slave. Shouldn't I have more say than anyone how my ethnic identity as a slave gets bandied about? I say the master/slave terminology is effective, evocative, and useful.
OtterCoder··on Tolstoy’s ‘Resurrection’ is strikingly similar to how we treat prisoners today
What's so barbaric about insisting that rebels to the social contract learn how to work? Or demanding, even at metaphorical or literal gunpoint, that they work to support themselves, just as the rest of society must?

Now, I would like to say that this comment only applies to serious crimes. Murder, violence, kidnapping, theft. People who have proven that they cannot currently function in normal company. Labor and honest sweat can serve a great role in teaching a man the value and positive power of his hands, even if they were once bloody. In fact, you admit almost as much in the phrase "make their own sustainable living".

That said, the current system strays a little far from that script, for two reasons: overcriminalization and unregulated for-profit prisons. I have no problem with forcing a serious criminal to work, or work profitably, but a hard-working blue collar guy who was caught with drugs doesn't deserve to be forced through the same program that's designed to rehabilitate thieves! At the same time, the work they endure should be no more extraordinary, or less regulated, than what a person on the outside must do. The fruits of their labor should be mainly culled to offset the cost of their incarceration, just as most of our pay is taken by the bank and the landlord, but the wages should be fair, and saving some money should be allowed. The only option that should be denied them is laziness.

OtterCoder··on Pinterest Is a Unicorn, It Just Doesn’t Act Like One
Why would it? Thumbnail watermarks are usually too small to see, and when you click to the image to go to Pinterest, all you'd see is the 'signup now' modal, with another group of thumbnails greyed out peeking around the edges.
OtterCoder··on Whole Foods workers seek to unionize
Wow, I actually really like the French policy. It would make employers actually distinguish between a temp position and a full hire up front. Too many small businesses try to optimistically hire in good times, only to suddenly realize a few months later that they would collapse under the new payroll when business is normal.
OtterCoder··on Whole Foods workers seek to unionize
> North Korea

That's not terribly surprising, fascist ideologies are typically very family-centric, to the point of actual Darwinism/eugenics.

It's one more reason why I don't think the rising, bipartisan, hyper-capitalist, reactionary tide in the US can be accurately called fascism. It's a different creature in a lot of ways.

OtterCoder··on The Developer Coefficient: a $300B opportunity for businesses
I'm sorry, but you are almost certain to outlive your code, even the good stuff. Even a modest book on the bestseller lists will probably see more use than any program you will ever write.
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