Hacker News: OtterCoder

New comment by OtterCoder in "A final proposal for Rust await syntax"

OtterCoder — Tue, 07 May 2019 07:48:55 +0000

I'd tend to agree with you, except for the fact that Rust reserved words are reserved everywhere. Even if the syntax were changed, you still couldn't name a field "async" or "return". Since it's no extra burden on the namespace, I'm less opposed to it.

I'm on the fence about disambiguation via unique punctuation, vs avoiding Perl-like line noise.

New comment by OtterCoder in "Be wary of robot emotions"

OtterCoder — Sun, 28 Apr 2019 06:21:08 +0000

In fact, plenty of people in science and engineering are religious or spiritual. They just aren't as loud online, because of exactly these sorts of comments. Try to respect the beliefs of others, even if you don't share them.

New comment by OtterCoder in "Learn more programming languages, even if you won't use them"

OtterCoder — Sun, 14 Apr 2019 07:48:00 +0000

I've translated several mathematical papers into code, and I must strongly disagree. The very first thing I do is translate glyphs into names relevant to the domain I'm applying the math to. It makes the rest of the process immensely easier.

New comment by OtterCoder in "Rotating Black Holes May Serve as Gentle Portals for Hyperspace Travel"

OtterCoder — Mon, 25 Mar 2019 02:45:23 +0000

Even better, traveling at c, it would take exactly zero shipboard time. Space contracts infinitely for the sufficiently fast. Only outside viewers would see it take 4.5 years.

New comment by OtterCoder in "Gwern's Law: Ads cost you a tenth of your users"

OtterCoder — Thu, 14 Mar 2019 19:53:46 +0000

There's nothing ethical about the way advertising invades every part of society, every corner of your home, and every available minute of human attention. Blocking ads is eminently moral, because the only way to stop their encroach is to punish their purchase by blocking them.

New comment by OtterCoder in "Theory of self-reproducing automata (1966)"

OtterCoder — Mon, 11 Mar 2019 00:31:01 +0000

Yes, Puffers: http://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/Category:Puffers

New comment by OtterCoder in "Oregon expected to enact first state-wide rent control law"

OtterCoder — Tue, 26 Feb 2019 02:15:06 +0000

Massive housing price inflation relative to median incomes, for one, which the popularity of real estate and rental property ownership as an investment/speculation tool has greatly contributed to.

New comment by OtterCoder in "“Reverse location” search warrants identify all cellphones near a crime scene"

OtterCoder — Tue, 19 Feb 2019 16:29:37 +0000

In the real world, maybe 5% do the math. The rest are dazzled or browbeaten by apps and continuous demands for some permission they don't fully understand the scope of.

New comment by OtterCoder in "Things that are more inequitable than road pricing"

OtterCoder — Sun, 03 Feb 2019 17:18:51 +0000

Can I just mention how mind-bogglingly stupid a milage tax on car registration would be? No matter how efficient your new car is, it's less polluting to repair the old one and keep it on the road, than to manufacture a new car.

New comment by OtterCoder in "JMAP: Like IMAP but Not Really"

OtterCoder — Fri, 25 Jan 2019 14:41:35 +0000

IRC works pretty well. I really fail to understand why any tech project puts their chat on Slack/Discord/Whatever when IRC is easy and open.

New comment by OtterCoder in "75% of med students are on antidepressants, stimulants, or both? (2017)"

OtterCoder — Sat, 05 Jan 2019 17:22:48 +0000

That's hardly the point. Point is, blanket statements are harmful and usually wrong.

New comment by OtterCoder in "75% of med students are on antidepressants, stimulants, or both? (2017)"

OtterCoder — Sat, 05 Jan 2019 15:57:09 +0000

I don't. I have a vitamin sometimes when I remember, but I don't drink booze, tea, or coffee, smoke, take antidepressants, focus drugs, anything. I also don't play with essential oils, homeopathy, crystals, or other placebos. Heck, I don't even take painkillers or headache medicine unless I've got stitches. So, while I would agree that most probably do, you can't say 'everyone'.

New comment by OtterCoder in "The Baseline Costs of JavaScript Frameworks"

OtterCoder — Thu, 29 Nov 2018 14:54:03 +0000

See, that's the point where I usually wish I hadn't used a framework. As your design gets more and more convoluted, the amount of switches, toggles, and special cases that you have to build into the widgets tends to balloon. Most current frameworks make that an exhausting exercise in state drilling, and it becomes hard to reason about how any given change in application state will affect the view.

New comment by OtterCoder in "Ask HN: Have you ever regretted working on a product?"

OtterCoder — Wed, 21 Nov 2018 16:50:30 +0000

Exactly this. Network connections won't fire without a visible link? Fine. Save up user data for when they navigate around the site and send it as a batched query.

Heck, even if browsers always showed you the data they were about to send, split out by field, just base64 encode what you don't want them to know you know and give it an innocuous field name like, "session_id". Even better, piggyback off of legitimate fields with zero-width-character encoded data. Where there is any signal at all, there is a way to hide extra information.

New comment by OtterCoder in "Ask HN: Have you ever regretted working on a product?"

OtterCoder — Wed, 21 Nov 2018 16:41:16 +0000

Almost all people do, deep down. The Vikings, the Mongols, the Romans, the Aztecs, cannibals, headhunters, human sacrificers, they are us, and are not that far removed in time. To be human, really, is to be breathtakingly kind, selfless, and noble, but it's also to be cruel, bloody, and vicious. Christians call that bloody side of us the "natural man," a creature in direct opposition to the "spiritual man," who values life and goodness. Gandhi called this dichotomy the "animal" and "human" lives. Hobbes called the lust for physical power over others a, "perpetual and restless desire". If you want to create a safe and good society, you can't ignore either half of human nature.

New comment by OtterCoder in "Kids’ Apps Are Crammed With Ads"

OtterCoder — Tue, 30 Oct 2018 21:01:31 +0000

Cars represent $1.13 Trillion in consumer debt in the US on an asset that depreciates only slightly slower than fresh produce. Car debt contributes massively to the suppression of the middle class and is a burden many people take to their grave. Financial strain is a leading cause of divorce, and can often spur on depression, which has an immeasurable impact on both human lives and the economy at large.

Cars too are oversold and abusively advertised. And it really is psychological abuse, with horrific outcomes.

New comment by OtterCoder in "Kids’ Apps Are Crammed With Ads"

OtterCoder — Tue, 30 Oct 2018 20:45:36 +0000

> it were possible to solve this in 2000 years, we probably would have....

That's a terribly defeatist attitude, especially for someone who is writing a message on a colossal web of copper and forged glass, powered by lightning and runic commands, who probably doesn't live under the thumb of a king or suffer from polio, smallpox, or plague, and likely travels in a chariot drawn by elemental fire and oil extracted from the bones of the Earth, and who is far less likely to die from violence than at any point in history.

There's been a lot accomplished in the last 2000 years, and plenty of that achievement is fairly recent, scientifically and sociopolitically.

New comment by OtterCoder in "Is Gutenberg the End or a New Beginning for WordPress?"

OtterCoder — Thu, 25 Oct 2018 14:24:16 +0000

No, it is a simple blog engine that has been stretched, shimmed, cranked, and jerry-rigged beyond all recognition and sanity.

The very idea that people try to host e-commerce on the platform is an embarrassment and a shame to security and safety.

It encourages the pattern of hiring non-technical staff to manage the blog-store-landing-page-franken-whatever site, who are in turn encouraged to install reams of untrusted code via plugins.

It is built on a frankly bizarre pattern of page and route management. It uses broken versions of a fairly broken language. It is enormously resource-hungry.

I could go on, but to sum up, my experience working with WordPress has been nothing but a repeated nightmare.

New comment by OtterCoder in "Copenhagen Suborbitals: The world’s only manned, amateur space program"

OtterCoder — Sun, 14 Oct 2018 14:16:59 +0000

Maybe that's not their primary goal? People have taken horrifying risks to push frontiers throughout history. The Oregon Trail claimed an estimated 21,000 lives.* Perhaps they are willing to accept a higher risk of death?

*Though, despite the horrific toll, the final odds of death on the O.T., once the dust had settled, were about 5% to NASA's ~4%.

New comment by OtterCoder in "5G Got me Fired"

OtterCoder — Sun, 07 Oct 2018 06:01:41 +0000

Ads are always disrespectful of their victims. They are intrusive and manipulative by nature.

Self respecting marketers will often say that their goal is to inform, but without fail, that "information" is laced and inextricably woven with manipulative psychology, tangential to the product being sold.

Further, in any industry where it can be employed, it chokes out every other form of revenue. How can anyone compete with "free"? Then, inevitably, when ads enter a space, they quickly dominate and poison it.