cbs
Joined 16 years ago
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Recent submissions
Comment · 13 years ago
Comment · 13 years ago
I am starting to sense some elitism and bandwagoning from the design community.
Starting to? That's kind of what the cutting edge of design is all about. When a design advances past certain middle of the road thresholds of usability and tolerably it become more and more just a matter of personal taste. When a bandwagon (or pieces of it) has appeal, it becomes a wider trend. It's still a bandwagon though, styles in the 1980's are(/were?) the go-to example of things that appealed to tastes at the time but are laughable in retrospect.
Design is important in giving products pleasant appearances and interactions, but it's also capable of turning people insufferable. http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-57508907-71/at-apple-hq-ey...
Comment · 13 years ago
Sure, they're fair questions in and of themselves. That doesn't mean they're not used as part of unreasonable or just nonsense rhetoric.
Does the person asking them want to start a real discussion about skill- and merit-based hiring practices? I'm sure much of HN is familiar with the argument there is an over-reliance on formal education as prerequisites to employment.
Armchair quarterbacking someone's leak and escape plan is the same sort of story. There is a lot more to consider in that discussion too (maybe he's got a Chinese hookup for forged travel identification), but I don't think the blowhard on the radio actually wants to have either of those discussions.
Having questions is not the same as smearing character.
And 9/11 truthers would tell you they've just asking questions. Blowhard punditry relies on couching their ramblings in "questions" so much an entire south park episode was dedicated to it: http://www.southparkstudios.com/clips/255329/preview-im-aski... This might be a bit of an odd link for HN, but we're discussing conversational tactics couched as meaningful discourse and I'm always reminded of this as a quintessential example of the difference.
Comment · 13 years ago
I was surprised on the drive home yesterday when they interviewed his neighbor. He didn't win the local chilli cook-off, dude just revealed multiple gigantic surveillance operations. There's got to be someone more relevant to interview, right? Is this just a path of least resistance thing, where anybody with anything worth hearing about this story refuses to speak to the news?
Comment · 13 years ago
I assumed it was the work of the programmer tasked with installing the key for the NSA, not some self-deprecating humor.
Comment · 13 years ago
Why is it that IRS targeting is not important enough to merit a single post, but Verizon et. al giving the NSA access to all our data is?
One is a widespread systematic invasion of privacy. The other is a bit of red tape that unequally scrutinized 501(c)(4) applicants based on party affiliation. The scope of these two things are so incomparable that I don't even know where to begin.
It is important the IRS (c)(4) process get fixed, but if they had applied the same level of scrutiny to both left and right leaning groups the reaction would have been more of a murmur. Or maybe even a productive debate on (c)(4) review (lol, probably not). Its not OK that they targeted by ideology, but the fact the criteria was political means Americans are just going to use it as an excuse to be loud. American politicians act like their parties are such delicate flowers, I've seen more dives taken in DC than in Johannesburg 2010.
On top of that, Hacker News is more or less about tech and startups. Not only is the NSA is data-mining from 3rd party tech companies, security and privacy concerns have been large elements of tech culture for decades. A few items on the IRS scandal did get posted here, but didn't get many comments. If I had to speculate, I'd say that even if this this audience finds the actions wrong, they just don't have a whole lot to say on the topic of the burden faced by political organizations abusing (c)(4) classification to hide their donation lists.
Comment · 13 years ago
From what I understand, modern X applications run remotely are just painting a region of bytes to be shot over the wire anyway. I'll borrow X terminology for a second here, what functional difference is there between these two approaches:
X client -> (network) -> X server
Wayland "client" -> wayland intermediary "server" -> (network) -> wayland intermediary "client" - wayland server
I get the feeling that the pushback (not necessarily yours, but in general) might be rooted in the visual interface where an X server will manage and composite remote applications as if they were local but vnc and rdp (in most use cases) offer a window to the remote system. As I understand it, the former presentation style isn't precluded by wayland's approach.
Wayland's design for a client and server on the same machine doesn't do much more than pushing a buffer full of painted bytes to the server. So anything fancier than that isn't something they refuse to implement for just a network connection, they don't do it at all.
Comment · 13 years ago
Giving an inch doesn't mean you want to give a mile. Or perhaps more appropriately to facebook, giving a mile doesn't mean that any passerby who wants an inch is entitled to it.
Making privacy tradeoff decisions about facebook doesn't mean someone has given up on privacy all together, just that facebook has proven itself worth the cost of the information they give to facebook.
Not to mention the fact most people don't understand just how deeply facebook is datamining them in the firstplace.
Comment · 13 years ago
There are multiple pages to the article. I missed the navigation buttons at first too.
Comment · 13 years ago
Anyone with the legal knowledge to help you probably knows better than to do so. Find a lawyer, this type of thing is why they exist.
Comment · 13 years ago
The government doesn't do anything at market rates. They employ below market rates, and contract external companies above market rates. This is (unfortunately) by design.
They know their history. The possibility that their governments would do something as underhanded as hide a person with ulterior motive inside a humanitarian organization is not irrational.