Hacker News Reader

indubitablyon Fight back against Google AMP (2018)

How so?

indubitablyon Project Stream

Further efforts to bifurcate the browser market. Keep it classy, Google.

indubitablyon Are interruptions worse for programmers than for other knowledge workers?

Helpful? It's just true.

indubitablyon Are interruptions worse for programmers than for other knowledge workers?

Programmers are just self-important.

indubitablyon Long Term Depression Permanently Changes the Brain

Well that’s depressing.

indubitablyon Introduction and Quick Guide to GraphQL for BackEnd and FrontEnd

Perhaps it's nitpicking, but what benefit is it to not make the GraphQL language be valid JSON?

indubitablyon Flexbox and Grids: your layout’s best friends

The standard is excellent, and has been rolled out much more effectively than previous standards (much more smoothly than flexbox, to cite a recent example).

The women involved in this project kicked ass, and continue to do so. What's to feel conflicted about?

indubitablyon Lessons of an MIT Education

It's also releveant that the author feels perfectly justified in making recourse to a hypothesis about history which far from easy to test: “The idea of genius elaborated during the Romantic Age (late 18th and 19th centuries) has done harm to education.”

Compared to what? Clearly he doesn’t know how to make a historical argument — perhaps he considers such arguments beneath him.

indubitablyon Berkeley Uses Optical Scanning to Recover Indigenous Voices from Wax Cylinders

It's not just dead people you're talking about, it's the families of those people. Keep in mind that in many cases the recordings of their ancestors are the only ones existing. It's not at all clear that a university or library should always be able to make those decisions without the involvement of the families.

There is often very private, very personal information in language documentation: even though it seems like the fact that the speaker should have been aware that making a recording was equivalent in some way to publication.

Plus, it's important to remember that before modern standards of informed consent were created, many linguists didn't have the speakers' best interests at heart, and were unscrupulous about recordings.

The ethics of legacy field recordings is a very messy business, with consequences ranging from legal measures to the unceremonious end of otherwise productive relationships between speech communities and researchers. I've seen cases where individual children of a single speaker have had differing opinions on what should happen to recordings.

indubitablyon Berkeley Uses Optical Scanning to Recover Indigenous Voices from Wax Cylinders

There are whole subfields of language documentation, language revitalization, language reclamation, etc. There are conferences (ICLDC, Breath of Life, Language is Life just to mention three), journals (http://nflrc.hawaii.edu/ldc/), funding organizations, archives, PhD programs around the world…

So, yes, there are efforts.

indubitablyon Berkeley Uses Optical Scanning to Recover Indigenous Voices from Wax Cylinders

Because you want to be nice?

indubitablyon Nuitka: a Python compiler

I don't understand why Python people aren't more intent on getting it into web browsers. Or are they?

indubitablyon Noam Chomsky Joins Faculty at University of Arizona

Could mean almost anything but what generativist linguistics (or whatever the latest label for the Chomskyan school) does, which continues to promote the notion that language is essentially algebraic, that "grammaticality" is binary, and so forth. It's simply not the case that Chomsky is "okay" with approaches to the study of language which are not in accord wiht his own. He repeatedly dismisses whole subdisciplines as "uninteresting," but in context those complaints don't mean "uninteresting to me," they mean "worthless."

indubitablyon Ask HN: Is coding like speaking another language?

I don't think so at all. Natural languages evolve with ambiguity built in — any sort of ambiguity is almost always an error in programming.

indubitablyon Ask HN: Is coding like speaking another language?

Could you explain what you mean by this?

indubitablyon GitHub was down

unicorns all around

indubitablyon Basque and Georgian – are they related? (2015)

What's impossible about that? Many languages have complicated inflection patterns like that.

indubitablyon CodinGame – Practice coding with fun programming challenges

codingame has destroyed my productivity because it is awesome

indubitablyon Structured Procrastination: Do Less and Deceive Yourself

Apparently nothing was ever more important than renewing the domain…

indubitablyon The Many, the Humble, the Ubuntu Users

"But despite the sneers, I kept hammering a theme in speech after speech and conversation after conversation that went sort of like this: “Instead of scratching only your own itches, why not scratch your girlfriend’s itch?"

Jesus. I am not a screaming social justice warrior. But really, is this trope of women being computational idiots going to last forever? Why does the community put up with it?

There are a MILLION other nouns that could fit into this sentence.

indubitablyon Why I’m thankful for JavaScript fatigue

Pretty rich coming from the complainer-in-chief of JS, the guy who advises not employing people who don't happen to agree with his personal take on how JS should be written.

indubitablyon Parsing JSON is a Minefield

But undefined is specific to Javascript… there are lots of other Javascript things that JSON doesn't handle either, like Set or Map objects. It's not intended to serialize arbibtrary JS objects — it's intended to serialize a useful least-common-denominator which has proven useful through experience.

indubitablyon How the Web Became Unreadable

p { color: hsla(0, 0%, 0%, 0.8); }

indubitablyon Don't Call Yourself A Programmer, And Other Career Advice (2011)

> (There’s nothing wrong with this, by the way. You’re in the business of unemploying people. If you think that is unfair, go back to school and study something that doesn’t matter.)

Good grief, what a lovely offhand comment that is.

indubitablyon North Korea claims success in fifth nuclear test

Why would NK do that?

indubitablyon Ask HN: What's the best library for making cross-platform UIs?

The internet.

indubitablyon Simple Ways of Reducing the Cognitive Load in Code

    Keep your personal quirks out of it

    Don’t personalize your work in ways that would require explanations.

    I like taking advantage of variables to compartmentalize logic.

indubitablyon On Chomsky and the Two Cultures of Statistical Learning (2011)

This is totally off-topic, but man, Norvig writes some miserable HTML.

indubitablyon Google Fonts Redesigned

It's not just Edge users, I get the same constant annoyances with Firefox.

indubitablyon Where Can a Ph.D. Take You? Back to School, Usually

Are you in HR?