Hacker News: DagAgren

New comment by DagAgren in "I Am Deleting the Blog"

DagAgren — Tue, 23 Jun 2020 21:13:38 +0000

> When people refer to racist views at SSC they don't mean that literally as a rule, they're just disparaging uncomfortable views about very well defined issues in social science and the like, that have zilch to do with superiority or supremacism of any sort, naziism etc. Shooting the messenger, basically.

Do please specify what those "uncomfortable views" actually are.

New comment by DagAgren in "I Am Deleting the Blog"

DagAgren — Tue, 23 Jun 2020 20:41:07 +0000

> it works because we as a society have a visceral negative reaction to some labels.

Do you know why we have that reaction? Because of millions upon millions of dead, innocent humans. That is what those ideologies lead to. We learned this lesson once, and we learned it very well. We don't want that to happen again. We don't want to let those ideas spread again. We don't want to see the mass graves again they lead to again. We learned that.

Some people have forgotten, though.

New comment by DagAgren in "Apple’s secretive AR and VR Headset plans altered by internal differences"

DagAgren — Sat, 20 Jun 2020 09:04:36 +0000

It's still unclear to me what the benefit is, though. The drawbacks are obvious - I have to wear a headset, I lost the physical interfacing, both in terms of input interfaces and in terms of being able to, say, just a put an e-reader down to stop reading it. What do I gain, after giving up all that?

New comment by DagAgren in "Apple’s secretive AR and VR Headset plans altered by internal differences"

DagAgren — Fri, 19 Jun 2020 23:51:42 +0000

It definitely will not have the relative resolution of a physical monitor.

New comment by DagAgren in "Apple’s secretive AR and VR Headset plans altered by internal differences"

DagAgren — Fri, 19 Jun 2020 20:10:06 +0000

Yeah, but all the things mentioned are things that require my full attention for longer spans of time. I don't need separate displays for them, I need one single good display.

New comment by DagAgren in "Apple’s secretive AR and VR Headset plans altered by internal differences"

DagAgren — Fri, 19 Jun 2020 18:34:08 +0000

> we're experimenting with the idea of an app that has a comic reader, book reader, Reddit client, art viewer, video player

Why? I have all of those on my computer without strapping anything to my head.

New comment by DagAgren in "Wirecard CEO exits as search for missing billions hits dead end in Asia"

DagAgren — Fri, 19 Jun 2020 13:07:24 +0000

Regulators were definitely not asleep at the wheel. They were apparently actively defending them, for instance by attempting to sue the Financial Times for reporting on the irregularities.

New comment by DagAgren in "For black CEOs in Silicon Valley, humiliation is a part of doing business"

DagAgren — Wed, 17 Jun 2020 23:53:52 +0000

It is, in fact, not useful for communication, because it does not honestly communicate anything. It exists only to undermine people who try to call you out on making bigoted remarks. It was coined by ESR, and is popular mainly with people with a strong affinity for bigotry, like him, and also libertarians.

New comment by DagAgren in "For black CEOs in Silicon Valley, humiliation is a part of doing business"

DagAgren — Wed, 17 Jun 2020 16:12:54 +0000

You really don't understand how logical fallacies work at all, do you.

New comment by DagAgren in "For black CEOs in Silicon Valley, humiliation is a part of doing business"

DagAgren — Wed, 17 Jun 2020 15:05:02 +0000

Feel free to provide me wrong by showing a non-libertarian source that takes this term seriously.

New comment by DagAgren in "For black CEOs in Silicon Valley, humiliation is a part of doing business"

DagAgren — Wed, 17 Jun 2020 14:46:13 +0000

Ah yes, Wikipedia, with one source form a libertarian propaganda rag. Very reputable.

Nobody but libertarians looking for excuses for racism use that term, deal with it.

New comment by DagAgren in "For black CEOs in Silicon Valley, humiliation is a part of doing business"

DagAgren — Wed, 17 Jun 2020 14:33:57 +0000

https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/general_writing/academic_writing/...

Still not seeing it.

New comment by DagAgren in "For black CEOs in Silicon Valley, humiliation is a part of doing business"

DagAgren — Wed, 17 Jun 2020 13:52:54 +0000

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/kafkatrap?s=t

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/kafkatrap

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/spellcheck/english/?q=kafka...

New comment by DagAgren in "For black CEOs in Silicon Valley, humiliation is a part of doing business"

DagAgren — Wed, 17 Jun 2020 12:57:20 +0000

"Kafkatrap" is a meaningless term, beyond "stop calling me a racist just for saying racist things".

Acting like it's an accepted logical fallacy is ridiculous. It's a term ESR made up because people kept rightly calling him a sexist and racist and he didn't like it and threw a tantrum.

New comment by DagAgren in "For black CEOs in Silicon Valley, humiliation is a part of doing business"

DagAgren — Wed, 17 Jun 2020 11:31:09 +0000

He also chose the word "kafkatrap", a word coined by a notorious racist.

New comment by DagAgren in "A difficult case: Diagnosis made by hallucinatory voices (1997)"

DagAgren — Wed, 17 Jun 2020 11:19:14 +0000

> The implication is that some external knowledgable entity communicated with the patient

The implication of the actual article, if you read it to the end, is the exact opposite.

New comment by DagAgren in "A difficult case: Diagnosis made by hallucinatory voices (1997)"

DagAgren — Wed, 17 Jun 2020 11:16:27 +0000

The article also mildly makes fun of the people who believe it to be a supernatural phenomenon.

New comment by DagAgren in "The Curious Case of Swift's Adoption of Smalltalk Keyword Syntax"

DagAgren — Sun, 14 Jun 2020 19:29:31 +0000

This was to more closely match the behaviour of Objective-C, and it has been removed as better ways of Objective-C interop were developed.

New comment by DagAgren in "The Curious Case of Swift's Adoption of Smalltalk Keyword Syntax"

DagAgren — Sun, 14 Jun 2020 19:28:47 +0000

> and Swift is particularly weird.

The way Swift does them is the least awkward and most robust I have seen in any language.

> As an example, the colon and the whitespace are sufficient to separate parameters. So is the comma. So we have...both?

Designing a language around what the minimum requirements of a parser is will not get you a good language. Human language is massively redundant, because humans find it more easy to communicate when there is redundancy. Computer code is also communication aimed at humans, and a bit of redundancy does not hurt there, and can often help.

> There is also the issue that, please correct me if I got this wrong, the label that's in the signature becomes the name of the parameter inside the function.

This is incorrect. You can optionally specify both an internal and external name for any argument. Unlabelled arguments are just a special case of this syntax, where you say "external name does not exist, internal name is this".

New comment by DagAgren in "The Curious Case of Swift's Adoption of Smalltalk Keyword Syntax"

DagAgren — Sun, 14 Jun 2020 19:23:45 +0000

This is already the case with the name of your function. And named arguments are basically just an extension of the name of your function.