Hacker News Reader

Nobody shouldn't not undisable the non-undepressing news inhibition disengagement mechanism neither.

> The JS ecosystem manages to have two tools, both of which can do all of this. I don't know how we keep messing up when we have good prior work to look at.

Agreed. You know you really blew it when even PHP does it better, and composer is unquestionably better than anything we've got in Python.

mawon The Awful German Language (1880)

> English grammar is far simpler than German grammar.

How do you negate in English? How does one eloquently and idiomatically combine English modal verbs? What are the rules governing when and how English deviates from SVO? Whom is still a word in English; how do its corner cases work? I could go on.

In other words, maybe English's grammar is simpler than German's and maybe it isn't, but it definitely isn't as clear-cut as you make it out to be.

mawon How Twitter poisoned politics

Let's just say that that's not exactly what happened in Alexandria.

mawon Hosting files in url minifiers

Yes, that's it. Thanks, and thanks too to pianom4n.

And, yeah, Mike ought to have paid.

mawon Hosting files in url minifiers

Could be a different story, but I have this vague recollection of someone who, by taking advantage of sloppy wording, won a bet against someone else who said he couldn't compress random data.

This was a long time ago, maybe as long as twenty years ago. I'd love to find it again, though.

mawon Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

If that were viable people would already be doing it. It's not, and so very few people are. I wish this weren't the case but it is.

mawon Microsoft’s failed attempt on Debian packaging

That obviously isn't how it should have been done, but the real problem here is that the packaging system makes it too easy to do this in the first place.

If you use pre and post and preun and postun (rpm terminology) it almost always is a sign of a deficiency elsewhere, especially when run against files outside of your package's bailiwick.

mawon How Children in a Maya Village Do Chores

Except that Islamic culture drew heavily on them too, especially the Greeks.

Those of us who consider ourselves Western are right to consider the Greeks and Romans among our cultural forebears, but we're not the only ones who can or should do so.

mawon Cloudflare Workers Recipe Exchange

I thought the same, and assumed that they'd made it public as a way to showcase positive corporate culture.

mawon Emacs 26.1 released

1) realize you may never “master this beast”

Damn, I've been using it for a bit over 21 years and was hoping that I'd almost gotten a handle on it! Oh well, might as well resign myself to it.

mawon Strange and maddening rules

Don't forget about the comments that read, basically, "why haven't you googled this, peon?" usually found in the first hit, often the first several hits, in Google.

mawon Show HN: “Is this loss?”: A TensorFlow Lite app to detect Loss.jpg

Not all things called "comics" are always funny all the time.

mawon The Makefile I use with JavaScript projects

Sort of related -- I'm sure this made it to HN when it was new -- is https://beebo.org/haycorn/2015-04-20_tabs-and-makefiles.html.

mawon One year of cycling to work

You're assuming that accidents are equally likely with and without helmets and ignoring OP's point that, on balance, you're better off biking without a helmet than not biking at all.

You might actually be right here. I do not know. Either way, don't expect "I really don't need to cite anything" to convince anybody serious.

mawon One year of cycling to work

Between where and where? A lot of the obvious routes are terrible, but you can go a long way in this city zigging where everyone else zags.

Avoid the bike lanes for the most part, though. You're probably in more danger in one of our bike lanes than out of one, due to all the morons blithely going the wrong way in them.

mawon One year of cycling to work

Citation needed.

(FWIW, I always use a helmet except when I use shared bikes, which is rare, only a few times a year. I get on one of my own bikes, helmeted, hundreds of times a year.)

mawon Can (a ==1 && a== 2 && a==3) ever evaluate to true?

Sure, that exact code is unlikely to be an honest mistake, but couldn't it be a distilled example of much more complicated code where that mistake -- unexpected or undocumented sideeffectiness -- was made honestly?

mawon Christopher Nolan: The power of people and why 2001 should be preschool viewing

Is it? I'm a fan, but my perception is that for most people their career started and ended with Creep, and not only that, but the "you're so very special" cut of Creep.

mawon High-Level Problems with Git and How to Fix Them

but if a VCS came along that natively knew about some languages it could unlock some really cool features

Absolutely, although hopefully it'll be implemented using langserver or similar.

Conversely, I think programming languages (and code- and configuration-generators) of the future will be judged in part on how VCS-friendly they are. A few smart decisions when designing syntax could make diffs smaller and conflicts easier to resolve. (This kind of change would, I am convinced, also make experimental changes to code easier--think rewriting SQL queries to make them faster.)

For now, I've been adapting my own coding style over time to be more VCS friendly. It's made my life easier and has indeed made making experimental changes easier to boot.

mawon A Map Showing How Much Time It Takes English-Speakers to Learn Foreign Languages

I agree that it's oddly phrased. Empirically, it is true that if you start from English you can probably learn Spanish more quickly than German, but it doesn't necessarily follow that Spanish is more similar. After all, Spanish doesn't have our weird Germanic modal verbs, rules about how to structure questions, separable prefixes, and so on.

mawon Yahoo Triples Estimate of Breached Accounts to 3B

Lots of programmers haven't, though.

I get addresses rejected as invalid when signing up for some service at least once a month.

mawon Average IQ scores seem to have been falling and population ageing may be why

Is "Is Google Making Us Stupid" making us stupid?

mawon Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?

The only kind of person who would say that is a na—Sorry. Never mind.

mawon 5800sq km iceberg breaks off Antarctica's Larsen C ice shelf

Where I live dudes on bikes do the last mile of a lot of Amazon deliveries.

mawon Redditors design worst volume sliders possible

One of those is basically the same as tilt to scroll, something that actually exists. Why anybody in the history of ever thought it was a good idea I'll likely never understand, though.

mawon How Thou Canst Maketh a Fine Program in Fortran

Yes, definitely thou dost.

mawon Less than 5% of Indian engineering students are fit for techie jobs, study finds

Probably "using machine learning" means a test administered with and graded by computers.

mawon PHP 7 Virtual Machine

On the contrary, I dislike PHP because I find it so difficult: its bad documentation, its badly designed standard API, the many badly designed and badly documented frameworks to replace the badly designed API, and the core language that goes out of its way to let buggy code through all combine to make writing medium-sized and above programs extremely difficult.

Supposedly it's better now. I'm skeptical.

mawon The JavaScript phenomenon is a mass psychosis

I think the reason was to work around too simplistic minifiers and concatenators.