This is interesting. What about the Texas law makes it impossible for PH to comply if they were to otherwise decide that that they wanted to (which of course isn't likely)?
1,245 karma · joined June 16, 2011
Or even more accurately: it's complicated :)
My bleeding linguistic descriptivist heart dies a little every time I walk into a debate like this. Does it really matter what we call it, as long as we can all agree on what it is we're talking about? At which point we can have insightful debate about whether the concept to which the term refers is a helpful, or unhelpful, one to engage in.
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Personally I think it is; as another commenter already mentioned, "all models are wrong; some are useful". Any oversimplification of a real-world concept is bound to fall down at some point, and lots of oversimplifications are useful right up to that point.
Many times as a kid I asked for an explanation of a real-world phenomenon from a grown-up and received something that had way too much detail or nuance to hold my attention span, or for me to comprehend at the time. Usually I dropped pursuit of whatever had led me to ask the question in the first place, and as a result it would take years for me to accomplish something I could have accomplished much earlier.
Other times I asked for an explanation and received one that was oversimplified but perfect for what I needed, and was able to stay focused on, at that point in my life. Those were golden moments; more often than not they resulted in leaps in my education, and I was later able to "correct" the explanation I'd received once I ran up against its limitations.
And it's not just children; many adults who aren't subject matter experts get overwhelmed if you try to present things in a way that's as technically correct as possible. I honestly believe the ability to simplify to exactly the level one's conversant needs for their situation is one of the most underrated skills on the planet.
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(There's an undeniable irony to how long this comment is. Ah well; to paraphrase Mark Twain, if I'd had time I would have written a shorter comment.)
> How else would you deal with people who abuse the vouch system?
So I think what I'm curious about is what constitutes "abuse" and how it's enforced. Like, are we saying that dang and friends have the ability to manually revoke someone's ability to vouch if they vouch for unhelpful comments on a frequent basis or if it's determined they're a sockpuppet account or something, or is there some more automated system that revokes a person's ability to vouch after some number of comments they've vouched are re-flagged?
I suppose I'd always imagined that the (fairly high, in the case of downvoting) karma threshold you have to reach to obtain privileges like vouching and downvoting would do a reasonably good job at filtering out those who might abuse such privileges, and that other remedies would be used rarely - and certainly not often enough to merit your earlier comment:
> It’s not possible to vouch it in its current state, because [...] at worst I’d lose my vouch privileges.
and the sentiment of fear I read into it.
Huh. Am I to understand there's a mechanism by which someone's ability to vouch can be removed on HN outside of egregious circumstances?
I'm not sure how I feel about that.
I'm not an electrician by any means so take everything I saw with a grain of salt, but: in general, electricity flowing through a system has some amount of "inertia" (the technical term for this is inductance), and shutting off a circuit breaker will cause a brief voltage spike upstream of the breaker due to the flow of electrical current suddenly being forced to stop.
Have you ever unplugged a running appliance from the wall and noticed a brief spark at the plug? That's the same effect: motors in general have high inductance and try quite hard to fight changes in current.
It's bad enough that when designing circuits that switch power to inductive loads like motors, you have to include a flyback diode (read: one way valve) to allow a path for electricity to continue to flow internal to the load when the power is switched off, otherwise it will generate a voltage spike high enough to damage the switching circuit.
Put another way: it's not the "high amperage short circuit" that causes the voltage spike; it's the rapid stop to said high current that happens when the circuit breaker realizes what's going on and trips.
(I agree with your overall point though. There were speaker towers arranged at intervals down the mall and plenty of crowd control involved in getting people to and from the event in the first place, none of which had to have been cheap.)
A better comparison would be Canva. Can I do everything in Canva that I can in Illustrator? Not by a long shot. Is it still good enough for 80% of the things I need to do? Absolutely. Is it a delight to work with despite its comparative simplicity? You bet.
So I agree that time and pain saved is hugely important, but that's an orthogonal axis to how advanced a tool is. The two only really correlate when you're doing things that need that advanced tooling in order to avoid a lot of manual work.
I feel like there's this sort of reverse Dunning-Krueger effect where people who are sufficiently advanced in a particular subject area lose track of just how much can be accomplished without operating at, and using tooling at, that same level.
Case in point, it still blows my mind that HN runs on a single process on a single server. Surely one of the tech world's most well known news aggregators would have many servers behind it, with advanced autoscaling for when different time zones come online, a database that's sharded by discussion thread, some super advanced caching solution, ...
But no. HN hums along just fine without any of that fancy stuff.
The truly enlightened, in my opinion, know how to look at the world through the eyes of those less experiences than themselves - and to see how much there is to see when one takes off one's expert glasses for a moment.
> Anybody who needs real PCB features isn't using Alitum
and:
> 99% of companies are not doing anything complex enough for it to matter
in the same breath - it really doesn't do your argument any favors. I can't see a world in which only 1% and "anybody who needs real PCB features" are congruent statements.
The canonical way to solve this would be to pass the components of that command line through a function that escapes or quotes anything that needs to be escaped. In Ruby and when using bash for example we have [0].
Does Windows have something similar?
[0]: https://ruby-doc.org/stdlib-2.5.1/libdoc/shellwords/rdoc/She...
To see this in action, open a terminal, type:
touch test:file.txt
I'm not sure which is the native representation, but I do know that every API I've used to interact with the filesystem on macOS has used slashes as the path separator, so GP should be fine. But it's definitely a fun party trick to pull out around unsuspecting Mac users.
Where, if you don't mind my asking? This would make an excellent birthday gift for a good friend and I'd prefer to get her the print edition, but a quick search is failing to turn up anywhere that offers an actual hardcopy besides Amazon.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number-plate_recogni...
Why, I have no idea - they don't support any form of app-based control at the moment. Maybe they're intending to do so in the future?
I get that this royally inconvenienced a ton of people, but come on: the fact that this can happen in the first place, along with the fact that the expectation for most users is that it can't, is a clear failing on NPM's part.
I don't know what the solution is - maybe packages should be permanent after 24 hours instead of after they're depended upon, maybe there's a different solution - but it's disheartening to see the vitriol with which folks went after PatrickJS in the screenshotted comments in TFA.
For example: my parents have a truck, a van, and an SUV. Do they need all of those vehicles? No. Do they get used all the time? Yes: my parents are both avid gardeners, they generously lend their vehicles to those who happen to need a truck or a van for the day, and I have several younger siblings who occupy them the rest of the time.
And even if they didn't, I could well see my dad still owning a truck purely for the convenience of being able to drive to the local garden center and pick up a load of mulch on a whim - even if in practice that happened twice a year.
Emotions are strange things.
Like, I classify myself as an empath, and it's physically painful to think about using it and having to face the dolphin's sad face if it's been a while.
Looks like I need to hack mine to not get sad when I don't use it. Digital antidepressants, as it were...
(I'm American, for context.)
I am on Google Fiber though, so I probably use 8.8.8.8 without explicitly meaning to. Perhaps this is a problem shared by both Cloudflare and Google's DNS proxies?
(That depends on how much it adds to the purchase price though. $100? You bet. $300? Nah.)