Hacker News: dictum

New comment by dictum in "Why John Mearsheimer Blames the U.S. for the Crisis in Ukraine"

dictum — Fri, 04 Mar 2022 23:08:10 +0000

> friends have turned from dovish "can't we all just get along" types into rabid "Russia Delenda Est" types

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

Scam Without a Country (1996)

dictum — Mon, 31 Jan 2022 11:42:20 +0000

Article URL: https://www.dallasobserver.com/news/scam-without-a-country-6403710

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30146970

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by dictum in "Going mouseless"

dictum — Wed, 04 Aug 2021 20:28:11 +0000

Slightly more involved, but still serviceable:

- start typing the text on a link near the icon you want to click (for this comment, `thomasa`...)

- then press Shift+Tab to highlight the previous link

New comment by dictum in "App suddenly crashing on startup due to FBSDKRestrictiveDataFilterManager.m"

dictum — Fri, 10 Jul 2020 13:44:14 +0000

Why is the Facebook integration not lazy-loaded only for users who log in through an FB account?

New comment by dictum in "GitHub abandons 'master' and 'slave' terms to avoid row"

dictum — Mon, 15 Jun 2020 19:01:41 +0000

Docs are less likely to be broken if GitHub implements some automated, global way to rename the main branch: when this isn't done in an ad-hoc, per-repo way, they can implement logic to redirect URLs.

(Or, for a quick and dirty fix, always redirect master to the main branch)

When Futurism Led to Fascism–and Why It Could Happen Again (2019)

dictum — Thu, 16 Apr 2020 16:15:49 +0000

Article URL: https://www.wired.com/story/italy-futurist-movement-techno-utopians/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22890867

Points: 3

# Comments: 2

New comment by dictum in "How many jobs can be done at home? [pdf]"

dictum — Wed, 01 Apr 2020 18:19:39 +0000

> I think a key aspect of remote work being successful is for the distributed team to be in the same time zone or have less than 1 hour time difference

I think the exact time difference doesn't matter so much as everyone can be at work simultaneously at least 70/80% of the time.

New comment by dictum in "USA tried to pay Germans so coronavirus cure vaccine would be exclusive to USA"

dictum — Sun, 15 Mar 2020 18:34:47 +0000

I'm very obviously not a lawyer nor lawmaker, but I'm under the impression that anything can be classified as an act of war as long as another country is willing to treat it as such, and other superpowers/blocs are willing to sign off on this assessment, and back it militarily and through sanctions/incentives.

(Though this would all probably swept aside as soon as somebody reverse engineers the vaccine.)

New comment by dictum in "2020 Leap Day Bugs"

dictum — Sat, 29 Feb 2020 20:05:44 +0000

Random thought: we're now closer to 2038 than to Y2K.

New comment by dictum in "Don’t try to sanitize input – escape output"

dictum — Thu, 27 Feb 2020 18:24:03 +0000

Maybe I'm overengineering, but couldn't you store the sanitized version as the normal value, and also store and make publicly available the original unsanitized value in an ominously and obviously named key (say, dangerouslyUnsanitizedValue) that happens to be easily greppable/lintable?

New comment by dictum in "GitHub CLI is now in beta"

dictum — Wed, 12 Feb 2020 18:36:01 +0000

Hm... Features take some time to get to production. The stuff I use/appreciate most launched either before Microsoft acquired them, or shortly after the deal — so its development predates that.

New comment by dictum in "Building all of our new mobile apps using React Native"

dictum — Thu, 30 Jan 2020 02:16:52 +0000

In those places, old Apple hardware isn't significantly cheaper than new hardware. You might get a 25% discount for a degraded experience (security updates may end in ~3 years) or buy much older hardware (e.g. 9 year old models) that cannot run current macOS and Xcode, etc.

And yes, a local PC can work out to lower prices due to specific tax arrangements, sourcing components straight from manufacturers and assembling them locally.

Rain Follows the Plow

dictum — Sun, 12 Jan 2020 00:29:02 +0000

Article URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rain_follows_the_plow

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22023495

Points: 22

# Comments: 1

New comment by dictum in "Goodbye, Clean Code"

dictum — Sat, 11 Jan 2020 22:19:15 +0000

Leaving common knowledge undocumented is, in itself, a misguided attempt at DRY.

Your common knowledge isn't necessarily everyone's common knowledge; what you perceive isn't necessarily what it is.

Every day there are many people just starting to code. There are cultural and regional differences. They might not have hit the exact spot in which this information appears.

Knowledge also disappears, fades, gets censored or destroyed, gets mixed up and remembered incorrectly. You might take something as a given and misremember it 20 years from now. You might read your own code 5 years from now and not know why something's there — something that was taken to be obvious.

New comment by dictum in "Now using Zstandard instead of xz for package compression"

dictum — Sun, 05 Jan 2020 14:01:22 +0000

Brotli has wide browser support (https://caniuse.com/#feat=brotli) and comes closer to zstd in compression ratio and compression speed, but its decompression speed is significantly lower and closer to zlib.

https://github.com/facebook/zstd#benchmarks

AFAIK (I haven't looked much into it since 2018) it's not widely supported by CDNs, but at least Cloudflare seems to serve it by default (EDIT: must be enabled per-site https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/200168396-W...)

New comment by dictum in "NextDNS Joins Firefox’s Trusted Recursive Resolver"

dictum — Tue, 17 Dec 2019 19:16:04 +0000

It's also a lot bigger than the EU.

New comment by dictum in "Uber CEO calls Saudi murder of Khashoggi “a mistake,” scrambles to backtrack"

dictum — Mon, 11 Nov 2019 14:53:42 +0000

Not to gotcha this, but "I'm someone whose statements should not be taken to heart" is not a message I'd want to convey in an apology.

Then again, corporate communication is often a game of being as cynical as you can get away without getting arrested or having your business shut down, so maybe there's some meta-honesty here.

New comment by dictum in "Viral Tweet About Apple Card Leads to Goldman Sachs Probe"

dictum — Sat, 09 Nov 2019 23:30:39 +0000

I would love a customer-company relationship in which the customer gets meaningful information by privately contacting the company with a polite message, but in my experience this is rare. When an answer comes, it tends to misdirect rather than tell the whole truth.

Here you have a bank and a company known for secrecy.

But you acknowledge this;

> random CSRs don't get a pithy explanation

What the throwers of hissy fits are pointing to is that, by building blackboxes, you can get whatever result you want (which doesn't mean all results are expected) with plausible deniability.

New comment by dictum in "You’re easy to track even when your data has been anonymized"

dictum — Sat, 02 Nov 2019 19:07:55 +0000

For many Internet related phenomena, you can find an example where it already happened a long time ago with AOL.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_search_data_leak

New comment by dictum in "What Grace Hopper meant with “easier to ask forgiveness than to get permission”"

dictum — Sat, 02 Nov 2019 19:00:28 +0000

To put it shorter, with permission, liability stands with the organization; with forgiveness, liability stands with the individual. At worst, one or two levels up the hierarchy too.