Hacker News Reader

cobralibreon Beto O'Rourke's membership in America's oldest hacking group

> He named his BBS "TacoLand".

It certainly wouldn't have been unusual for a young Beto O'Rourke (or any other Texan) to have tacos on his mind for any number of reasons, but "Taco Land" was the name of a punk bar in San Antonio. It was well known to Texas punks and their ilk and was immortalized by the Dead Milkmen in the late 80s by their song "Tacoland".

cobralibreon Tim Cook: You Deserve Privacy Online. Here's How You Could Actually Get It

Whatever data Apple has on me evidently tells them that I have giant hands and inexhaustible disposable income.

cobralibreon Why a Pterosaur Is Not a Dinosaur

I doubt that specialists are keen to adapt their terminology to reflect popular usage and would much prefer things to work the other way around. It looks like the word we should be using is 'avemetatarsalians'?

cobralibreon Zephyrus – the forecast in hindsight

I love the name. I realize that the word appears in many contexts, but it invariably reminds me of the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales.

cobralibreon Looking for an open source project which needs some documentation

I had a lot of fun building a small app with Ratpack several months ago, but its online manual is full of TODOs. If you're comfortable with Groovy or Java, I'm sure they would welcome your contributions.

https://ratpack.io/manual/current/

cobralibreon Pig War

A probably apocryphal story claims Cutlar said to Griffin, "It was eating my potatoes." Griffin replied, "It is up to you to keep your potatoes out of my pig."

cobralibreon Using Neutrino to jump-start modern JavaScript development

Webpack supports the former if you use [hash] (or [chunkhash]) in the output filename. [1] This is what create-react-app uses. [2]

[1] https://webpack.js.org/configuration/output/#output-filename

[2] https://github.com/facebookincubator/create-react-app/blob/m...

cobralibreon Time to Take a Stand

> People have a right to their beliefs, even if their beliefs are stupid. If not, than what kind of country are we?

Politics is a process of conflict and negotiation between varied, competing interests. In a liberal democracy, "people have a right to their beliefs" is the starting point for that process, not the endpoint.

cobralibreon Track Trump: The First 100 Days

That's true.

http://www.economist.com/node/1897472

"Initiatives are also responsible for another feature that makes the Assembly unworkable: term limits. These may sometimes be desirable but in California they are simply too short. Proposition 140 set them at six years for Assembly members, eight for state senators.

"As a result, representatives do not have a good grasp of the details of bills, have little long-term loyalty to the institution they serve and can sometimes be unduly influenced by more experienced lobbyists. No sooner do people become head of the assembly, or of an important committee, than they are term-limited out. Legislative leadership becomes almost impossible."

cobralibreon Safari 10.1

"When the pointer is locked, users will see a banner explaining that the mouse cursor is hidden, and that they can get out of pointer lock by pressing the Escape key."

I beg your pardon — which key?

cobralibreon Streaming topped all forms of US music consumption in 2016

Comparing streaming figures with download numbers or CD/LP sales is odd. There's a difference between plays and purchases.

cobralibreon Lessons learned as a React contractor

> Has anyone written a guide or supporting tools for creating your own config as a reusable module from the beginning? It feels like there's a gap which needs filled there.

It looks like you did!

https://github.com/insin/ad-hoc-reckons/blob/master/Creating...

cobralibreon Screenshot of the page that spear-phished John Podesta

John Podesta.

@pwnallthethings provided good context for this on Twitter: https://twitter.com/pwnallthethings/status/81662155364329472...

cobralibreon Donald Trump could dismantle net neutrality

> In fact, the states backing the college were some of the most populous as long as you count slaves.

Worded another way: The states backing the college were some of the least populous UNLESS you counted slaves, who did not themselves enjoy rights of citizenship but were included in population counts to boost the political power of slaveholders.

cobralibreon MacBook Pro is a lie

I'm curious about the lack of a hardware power button. I wonder how one forces one of these new Macs to shut down when it hangs?

cobralibreon MacBook Pro is a lie

Many people were clinging on to their aging MacBook Pros in the vain hope of seeing a major spec and performance upgrade that simply didn’t materialize, and that's been frustrating.

This statement is worth pausing on. Many users with "pro" needs (developers, video editors, photographers, etc.) replace their computers on a 3-4 year cycle. It's reasonable to expect significant enhancements related to those pro needs at the end of that cycle.

Furthermore — and this is crucial — any new computer has to serve those pro needs for the next 3-4 years.

cobralibreon Ask HN: Interview tomorrow – How to learn whether an org is “healthy”?

Do the employees hide their flasks in their desks and sip furtively and alone? Do they cry in the restroom before or after meetings? Is it a Dilbert cartoon on the fridge or is it XKCD? Are the only Pokémon to be found Rattatas? What is going on with the coffee?

cobralibreon If you care about privacy, you should not use Google Allo

All kinds of clever and subtle things become possible in human communication when you stop insisting on overt signposts to interpretation and instead rely on your wit, experience, and judgment to resolve (or accept) possible ambiguities.

cobralibreon Lyft and Uber to Halt Operations in Austin After Voters Reject Proposal

I agree that many Austinites were turned off by the sheer amount of spam sent by the Uber/Lyft-backed campaign. Others, I believe, were simply angry about the cost of a single-issue special election. [1]

Yet others, I believe, were furious that those two generously funded companies were attempting to insert themselves into local politics and override a regulatory scheme enacted by the local elected government. And if Uber and Lyft could buy this election, what next? It's been said that Uber and Lyft needed to make an example out of Austin, but the reverse is true, too: Austin needed to make an example out of Uber and Lyft.

[1] - $500,000. Source: https://www.texastribune.org/2016/05/07/early-voting-austin-...

cobralibreon Lyft and Uber to Halt Operations in Austin After Voters Reject Proposal

I'm curious about the wording of the petition. If it was anything like the subsequent pro-Prop. 1 direct mail/notification/robocall barrage, then the text of the petition may have been deliberately misleading.

Examples of the Prop. 1 campaign: http://www.burntorangereport.com/diary/32038/truthiness-abou...

cobralibreon Lyft and Uber to Halt Operations in Austin After Voters Reject Proposal

As it stands, it looks like neither side is willing to compromise.

Austin's mayor, Steve Adler, has specifically said that he would like to negotiate a mutually satisfactory solution with Uber and Lyft.

http://www.mystatesman.com/news/news/local-govt-politics/ele...

cobralibreon What Is Zero UI? (2015)

It does seem like "Zero GUI" would have better conveyed the key idea.

cobralibreon Argentina on Two Steaks a Day(2006)

Having spent a short amount of time as a pedestrian in both cities, I'll just say that way people drive the cars and buses in Buenos Aires could easily be described as murderous, though that's certainly not reflected by the murder rate.

cobralibreon The Key of Hell: An Enlightenment Sorcery Manual (2014)

I'm out of my depth in discussions about art history, but comparing the 18th century illustrations to the 15th century painting in the same article, I find it hard to infer a notion of progress as you do. Having said that, one could well imagine that the 18th century illustrator was deliberately attempting to evoke a medieval style.

Here are some links picked up from quick Google searches that might provide stylistic comparisons:

18th century - http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/06/09/charlie-charli... 14th century - http://io9.com/bizarre-and-vulgar-illustrations-from-illumin...

cobralibreon Bartleby, the Scrivener: An interactive, annotated story of Wall Street

A critical reading of an annotated text can always be one's second reading of that text, you know.

cobralibreon PyNES: Write NES Games in Python

A Google Images search for "nesticle icon" should clear up any doubt.

cobralibreon SSL tools we wish we'd known about earlier

Looks like the domain name is misspelled; the URL should be:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/xca/

cobralibreon Why Don’t the Poor Rise Up?

It's almost as if the rich have other means at their disposal of effecting change in their interests, whether those interests be in the pursuit of justice or otherwise.

cobralibreon Why Don’t the Poor Rise Up?

You're reading more into the question than can be supported by the wording of the question or by the article itself.

The assumption is that conditions were once such that popular movements or uprisings of the poorer classes were relatively more frequent in the past than in recent years. The article explores in perfectly sober terms how these conditions may have changed.

You may have ideological leanings that predispose you to find the discussion inherently inflammatory, but there are plenty of reasonable people who do not see it that way.

cobralibreon The strange expertise of burglars

True. It might be because the research has not involved empirical tests of any such practical information, as far as I could tell from the article.

My vague takeaway is that burglars rely on patterns of typical household layouts and homeowner behaviors so that they can do their work, as it were, at a higher level of abstraction than an amateur can. Anything that you can do to frustrate their assumptions of typicality, then, might lower their efficiency or discourage them from attempting a burglary in the first place. Perhaps some clever applications of home automation tech could be employed. Or if you're fortunate enough to keep an inconsistent schedule, that too could help.