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_ofdw

6,342 karma · joined July 31, 2012

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_ofdw··on Winamp 5.8 Release – First update in 5 years
An Electron wrapper?

Awesome. I can't wait to use 900 megs of memory to play an mp3.

_ofdw··on Why I’m done with Chrome
Marketing is in charge, of course. This has been abundantly clear for years if not from the outset.
_ofdw··on The advantages of an email-driven Git workflow
I seem to be in the minority of HN users that actually like Gmail and strongly dislike things like mutt or pine.

Nothing else syncs to my phone in a manner that "just works" and doesn't require excessive fiddling, or using k9mail which appears to quite simply not work at all.

So with that said, how does a person use git via email with the Gmail ui?

_ofdw··on Australian uses snack bags as Faraday cage to block tracking by employer
Because he hasn't been given a luxurious exit because he didn't start a monads-as-a-service startup with no business model other than selling my personal data and hasn't been acquired by a unicorn.
_ofdw··on EasyDNS refuses to host The DailyStormer domain
Wouldn't "actual Nazis" be members of the German National Socialist Party?

Pedantic, perhaps, but I think the proper term for these people is "racists" or "white supremacists" (edit: or even better, Neonazis) . I find the term "Nazi" to be overused in the modern discourse, often hyperbolic in nature, usually to refer to people who lean right of political centre.

Not sure why down voters appear to disagree : I prefer to call a spade a spade.

_ofdw··on JavaScript for People Who Hate JavaScript
You've conflated needless churn with progress.

They're not the same thing.

_ofdw··on Why Juicero’s Press Is So Expensive
You can squeeze DRMed bags.
_ofdw··on Typing the technical interview
I took it as a commentary about how stupid tech interviews are. The scenarios all present a company rejecting someone who is clearly more skilled than the interviewer.
_ofdw··on AdNauseam Banned from the Google Web Store
Ignoring your false equivalence:

If you already want something, then the ads are useless because the entire point of an ad is to manipulate me into buying something I didn't want to buy.

If I want to buy the book already because I am interested in the author's books then the books sell themselves without need for ads.

_ofdw··on AdNauseam Banned from the Google Web Store
I can't name a single online service that is supported by ads and that I couldn't live without.

>not all ads are inherently evil.

All advertising is manipulation. Advertisers are bad and should feel bad.

_ofdw··on Is democracy a failure? (1861)
Uneducated, ignorant people have always existed in democracies. Those democracies still exist.

Being "Highly intellectual" is therefore not a requirement to participate in a democracy.

Just look around you, man. There are stupid people everywhere.

_ofdw··on Is democracy a failure? (1861)
>Democracy is interesting because it requires you to step outside your own head, understand that there are people who hold different values and different experiences from you, and then mentally engage with them, holding your own doubt and revulsion at bay, until you can come to a consensus that's acceptable to everyone.

Objectively, it can be seen that this is completely untrue. No understanding or empathy is strictly required by democracy. Democracy only requires that you obstinately stick to your preferred viewpoints and shout down those who disagree with you. This can be seen in the legislative chambers of nearly every Western-style democracy on the planet. Specifically:

- in Canada, the hallmark of former Prime Minister Stephen Harper's rule was a complete rejection of anything outside his personal ideology, even when his ideology flew directly in the face of fact or public opinion.

- in the US, we are seeing someone who most certainly suffers from Narcissistic Personality Disorder not only excelling in politics, but may soon come to hold the highest public office and command of the world's most powerful military.

The days of good-old collaboration and working together for the common good back in the 1950s were a short-lived phenomenon created by the shared experience of surviving the deadliest conflict in human history.

Those days are over.

_ofdw··on Learning from Ada
Anything is more fun than java.
_ofdw··on Microsoft won't back down from Windows 10 nagware 'trick'
>I feel like Microsoft is trying to give people what they want, and all they get in return is kicking and screaming.

They're not giving me what I want. Windows 10 isn't what I want.

We wanted Windows 7 with modernizations, not Windows 8.1 with more spyware baked in.

>Until in a few years when they stop supporting older versions of Windows and your Mom gets infected with Randsomware. Then you'll still blame Microsoft, and won't be able to believe that they want to charge you $100 for the privilege of getting on a supported OS.

What planet do you live on where "supported" means "immune to malware"?

_ofdw··on Let’s ban elementary homework
>Clash of Clans? Snapchat? Call of Duty? Binging Netflix? 4chan...ning?

Why are these any less beneficial than homework that's been demonstrated to have no benefit to the child? Until high school, there's literally no reason for the kid to be practicing math after school.

_ofdw··on How my father gave me a terrifying lesson at 10
No, the ants all pay into the system, leveraging the economy of scale, so that everyone has equal access to health care, rather than privileged access for those who can afford it.
_ofdw··on How my father gave me a terrifying lesson at 10
Thankfully I live in a civilized country with socialized healthcare, so that my choices are more than "go bankrupt after surgery" or "be rich".
_ofdw··on A note on the argument about the 'morality' of adblockers
>I honestly don't see a difference except in degree

Well, that's pretty concerning.

_ofdw··on Ask HN: Why does XEmacs still exist?
Mostly what I got from these emails is that RMS is a real jackass.
_ofdw··on Why Racket? Why Lisp?
I sure hope the giant, hideous, obtrusive diamonds inserted into the text to denote a hyperlink doesn't catch on as a trend. It's a great way to break the flow of the text and irritate your readers.

As for the idea of Lisps, well, it sure seems neat. But I've literally never run across a situation where I needed my code to edit itself. I've never run across a situation where the lack of an everything-is-an-expression-is-a-list feature prevented me from doing what I wanted to do.

So I just don't really feel the need to get repetitive strain injuries in my pinky from reaching for the parentheses all the time.

_ofdw··on The Death March of Mechanical Engineering
As a mechanical engineer, I've always clung to the notion that I need to be multi-disciplinary. The days of being able to get by in Mech without knowing how to write code or work with some basic circuitry ended in the 90s, if not earlier.
_ofdw··on Andrews and Arnold is xkcd 806-compliant (2010)
I do this too, but I just lie about any windows-specific steps.

I always power-cycle my gear and run pings/traceroutes before calling tech support anyways, so when they ask me to restart windows I just tell them what they want to hear.

_ofdw··on Captchas are Becoming Ridiculous
Some 4channers tried that already. You can guess which 6-letter epithet for black people they tried to use.
_ofdw··on Aluminium: The metal that just keeps on giving
Well, french speakers are a minority of Canadians, so what I said remains correct.
_ofdw··on Aluminium: The metal that just keeps on giving
Our vocab is usually a mix of US (we're next door) and UK (Commonwealth represent) but in this case most of us use the American "aluminum".
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