Recent submissions

Comment · 1 month ago
This revived a memory of my homework, saved from GW-BASIC on a Leading Edge Model D, being unreadable on the school's IBM PCs. I always thought it was something like line-ending encoding, but current Google results indicate that it should have worked. Maybe our disk drive was miscalibrated... I'm glad to now be living in the era of USB thumb drives and Dropbox.
Comment · 2 months ago
False dichotomies make for terrible conversation.

"Find your path forward!" he shouted with glee, as he ran toward the cliff.

Comment · 2 months ago
Call me crazy, but I think we need more Dropboxes and fewer Metas or whatever.

Make a product that solves a sufficiently common problem, and make it extremely high quality. Want more growth? Find another problem to solve and launch a product in that space.

As for Steve Jobs and selling out, Apple bought FingerWorks. That's how they ended up with excellent, multi-touch touchpads while the rest of the computing world suffered. Make great products (or "features") and never sell out to soulless megacorps.

Comment · 2 months ago
Comment · 2 months ago
What do you do?

Walk up and place him under arrest. He might have a bomb. He might have a trigger for it, or he might have a dead-man's switch. It might detonate and kill you along with bystanders. That's a risk you take.

Unless you know with certainty that he has a bomb and does not have a dead man's switch, you don't just take his life because you're concerned about what-ifs.

It's no different than cops killing a man because he was holding a wallet, which they imagined might be a gun (e.g. Amadou Diallo).

Police need to stop pretending that they exist within fiction, where the outcome is known by the author. Just because you're afraid of something doesn't mean it's an actual threat.

Since 2001, there's been a real uptick in confusing fear and suspicion for evidence and knowledge.

Comment · 3 months ago
And those groups still have lower rates of abuse than Schools

What evidence do you have of this? The only sources I can find that would even vaguely support your claim switch to talking about physical abuse in schools, or sexual assault committed by fellow students.

To be clear, we're discussing the sexual assault of children by adults here. We're not talking about physical abuse, nor are we talking about assault by fellow students.

Comment · 3 months ago
Comment · 3 months ago
Nearly everyone on HN would be aware of the great seal of the United States?

That thing I see on podiums and backdrops?

That all formal diplomatic letters are still sealed with to this very day, without exception.

Why would anyone here know this?

We've probably all seen media depicting a medieval king pressing a seal into wax, but it doesn't mean we're familiar with it as a modern legal or procedural thing. Japan has what I assume is the same thing: hanko, a personalized, carved stamp. It's always a subject of surprise and novelty for North Americans who go there to teach English.

Comment · 3 months ago
Only the rich can afford to own nothing/exert effort to have empty space without consequence.

Reminds me of the reason that grass yards exist: to show the world that one can afford land for the sake of owning it, rather than for growing crops.

Comment · 4 months ago
I can't speak to GP's intention, but I've personally witnessed a guy on my team who was trying to position himself as the go-to technical dude. He was jockeying for a management role. When QA or customer support had questions about our products, he'd always have an answer. I would say that at least 50% of the time, his answer was completely fabricated nonsense. He'd wildly misrepresent projects that his teammates were working on. I also saw several incidents of cargo-cult programming from him. Bizarrely, this never bit him in the ass and now he's a middle manager at a FAANG. This experience leaves me without much hope for the future of software development as a career.
Comment · 4 months ago
Years ago, an article in MCN said that something like 3/4 of all single vehicle motorcyclist fatalities involved alcohol. They also mentioned that Harley cruiser culture was wildly overrepresented. Hopefully, with Baby Boomers aging out of riding, bar-hopping biker culture is disappearing, too.
Comment · 4 months ago
1) Because of the low wages.

2) Pay attracts workers. "Happiness" is a separate and personal issue.

3) Anecdata.

4) The fact is that far higher wages would attract American teachers for short periods. It is a free market, until exploitable labor is introduced. Foreign teachers absolutely are suppressing wages, as evidenced by the fact that the wages aren't high enough to attract American teachers.

Comment · 4 months ago
the schools have to choose between giving these kids subpar teachers who are happy to live up there, or miserable teachers who are only doing it for the money.

1) Why is that the dichotomy?

2) Do you say the same thing about well-paid oilfield workers living in RVs, away from their families and social networks?

3) Do you think the foreign workers are happy to be in Alaska for the sake of the Alaskan experience?

For some reason, people are convinced that teacher salaries have to be suppressed, lest the "wrong people" take the jobs. As if stressing about making rent is a critical signal of virtue, exclusively for teaching.

Comment · 5 months ago
whereas Unixen have a core task context model of a bunch of threads that by default do not share memory.

How are those not simply child processes? I don't understand your use of the word 'threads' here.

Does the Unix world not distinguish between threads and processes? In Win32, threads exist within processes, and you can create new threads or child processes.

Comment · 5 months ago
Does his car even have an automatic transmission?

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