<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: harrumph</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=harrumph</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Sat, 18 Apr 2026 21:09:33 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=harrumph" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by harrumph in "Chris Hughes, a Facebook Founder, Is Working With the Government to Break It Up"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>>A lot can change in that period. It's hard to imagine Hughes providing a "smoking gun".<p>I see it the opposite way: any forensic examination of the business lines in an IT-only operation can benefit greatly from institutional memory such as Hughes can provide and few if any other cooperators could. The "why" of business processes are often quickly obscured/lost by successive operations and if the company is a candidate for breakup, old decisions often speak to demarcations where business lines can be reasonably separated. Of course, the company's counsel would never admit to any reasonable theory of separation, so old execs are kind of essential to the examination.<p>>Note: As I understand it, anti-trust litigation isn't based on stuff a company did long ago, it is based a company having and abusing a commanding position. What does someone who left long ago know about this?<p>They know the why and all of the how and the when, which allows anyone interested in breaking up the company to put their fingers on the hidden fault lines buried by successive layers of years of "new normal" at the company.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 26 Jul 2019 00:49:12 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20531332</link><dc:creator>harrumph</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20531332</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20531332</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by harrumph in "'I wash all my food like crazy': scientists voice concern about nanoparticles"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p><a href="https://pastrychefonline.com/take-a-cue-from-little-debbie/" rel="nofollow">https://pastrychefonline.com/take-a-cue-from-little-debbie/</a><p>I'm not sure what washing a Little Debbie snack cake will accomplish, outside of preventing its ingestion, which, now that I think about it, is an excellent outcome!</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 29 May 2019 15:55:32 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20041677</link><dc:creator>harrumph</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20041677</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20041677</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by harrumph in "“It’s hard to take risks if you don’t have a safety net”"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>>“Incredibly dangerous”!<p>Totally agree about how inane and insufferably out of touch this complaint is. As if today's now-totally-normalized tech company valuations, openly built on nothing more than cash bonfires, aren't dangerous at all.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 20 May 2019 14:16:21 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19960509</link><dc:creator>harrumph</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19960509</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19960509</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by harrumph in "Political radicals don’t evaluate their own errors–about anything (2018)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Thank you.<p>Weaksauce centrism: it's a helluva drug.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 29 Apr 2019 12:51:04 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19777859</link><dc:creator>harrumph</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19777859</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19777859</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by harrumph in "Political radicals don’t evaluate their own errors–about anything (2018)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>You are unsurprisingly incorrect on the history. I say unsurprising, because history is a humanities study, and HN is home to many who are effectively humanities-illiterate, and who tend to mistake a well-rounded education with their own abilities to operate and occasionally build technology.<p>Agitation for women's rights, including suffrage, first appeared formally in the US east in the 1840s.  Suffrage was radicalism of a historic part with abolitionism, a radicalism over which a giant and entirely justified civil war would be fought and won by the emancipators in twenty or so years.  Emancipation is the central theme of radical left thought, and here is no exception; while capitalism and imperialism went effectively unexamined theoretically until Marx in about the same decade, there is no left radical idea before or after that fails to hew to emancipatory ideals in the US.<p>Speaking of failure, it appears as if you've failed to "observe the real world" of historic occurrence, and have done so in pursuit of an ideology -- a weak, vacuous, change-nothing, injustice-friendly centrist ideology.  I suggest you heed your own advice.<p>To review: left radical ideas become mainstream and improve the society when they do.  The chief opponent of this mainstreaming is not the radical right, but rather the enormous, cowardly middle, whose political emptiness has always been the greatest friend and enabler to those who enslave us.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 28 Apr 2019 16:02:41 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19771844</link><dc:creator>harrumph</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19771844</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19771844</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by harrumph in "Political radicals don’t evaluate their own errors–about anything (2018)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> I believe you will find plenty which negate what you are saying.<p>No, there are no serious counterexamples to the claim "allowing women the vote improved society and made it fairer", nor to "ending official, normalized white supremacy improved society and made it fairer."  These outcomes were mainstreamed only after appearing as left radical ideas, a plain fact that weak, doltish centrists don't wish to admit, believing as they do in "incrementalism" and "nuance", which in the context of historic change served only as codewords for "abetting and protecting the status quo, no matter how unjust".</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 28 Apr 2019 12:11:08 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19770680</link><dc:creator>harrumph</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19770680</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19770680</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by harrumph in "Political radicals don’t evaluate their own errors–about anything (2018)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> Claiming your opinion is absolute fact doesn't make it so.<p>Sorry, it's not an opinion: the examples given in the first paragraph of the article are nothing but left radical ideas that became mainstream.  Don't mistake plain, historical, uncontroversial fact for opinion. They are left radical ideas that, like others of their kind, became mainstream and made the society fairer and better. It seems you don't want to admit it -- probably because it would interrupt your pose of above-it-all detachment -- but the good thing is because we have a shared history, you don't actually have to admit it.  It's true anyway.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 28 Apr 2019 00:44:41 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19768600</link><dc:creator>harrumph</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19768600</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19768600</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by harrumph in "Political radicals don’t evaluate their own errors–about anything (2018)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>>I have political opinions also.<p>Good for you. The thing is, it's not a matter of opinion: radical left ideas do, in fact, improve the society and do, in fact, become mainstream.<p>>Incremental changes work. Radicals causing destruction very seldom do.<p>The only thing Rosa Parks destroyed was the unchallenged idea that she was rightfully subject to lesser treatment.  What she did was not incremental in the slightest, though, so, lame centrist chiding that would have her act "incrementally" is at best meaningless and at worst openly supportive of the unjust status quo of the time.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 27 Apr 2019 20:29:55 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19767457</link><dc:creator>harrumph</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19767457</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19767457</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by harrumph in "Political radicals don’t evaluate their own errors–about anything (2018)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> People think they are Rosa Park<p>Rosa Parks gives us a model for behavior, for bravery in the face of institutionalized injustice. We want as many of her as we can get, because left radical ideas make the world fairer when they become mainstreamed by people like her.<p>> So instead they look to make issues<p>No. If you had ever been on the receiving end of what radicals exhibiting bravery actually get as response, you would understand that nobody prefers that kind of abuse.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 27 Apr 2019 19:09:32 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19767099</link><dc:creator>harrumph</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19767099</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19767099</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by harrumph in "Visualizing Commodore 1541 Disk Contents"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Amazing, thanks for posting.<p>load "sysres",8,1</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 19 Apr 2019 14:38:50 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19699970</link><dc:creator>harrumph</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19699970</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19699970</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by harrumph in "US Workers Are Highly Taxed If You Count Premiums"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Markets such as the US health care market, characterized by ineslastic demand and secret prices, should never, ever be tolerated under any circumstances. This arrangement is here to benefit the supply side and screw the demand side and it has to be stopped. The only pathway out of this crisis starts with the federal government replacing private insurers, relegating them to selling supplemental coverage.  Such companies also should be legally compelled to run as mutual insurance companies, where any profit deriving from good risk management is sent back to policyholders.  It is long past time everybody in the US admitted that markets have completely failed in US health care.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 09 Apr 2019 15:36:55 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19615712</link><dc:creator>harrumph</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19615712</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19615712</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by harrumph in "VPN – Very Precarious Narrative"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Has anybody evaluated whole-network hardware filter+VPN solutions that filter cookies ( such as Winston <a href="https://winstonprivacy.com/" rel="nofollow">https://winstonprivacy.com/</a> ) in the context of this article?  I was planning on testing Winston at some point at my home, but Winston requires a separated modem and router as opposed to the combo box I have.<p>I think the declarations in the article do confuse the issue a bit -  some of the benefits of a VPN such protecting against DNS logging are real but are probably not as useful to VPN marketing people as a "pitch", because they're a bit tougher to explain to laypersons.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 08 Apr 2019 14:50:40 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19605715</link><dc:creator>harrumph</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19605715</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19605715</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by harrumph in "93% of Paint Splatters Are Valid Perl Programs"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> We therefore paid an unemployed person<p>> Such brutal honesty would be welcome in other papers.<p>To say nothing of the commitment to employment fairness!</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 04 Apr 2019 22:49:07 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19577876</link><dc:creator>harrumph</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19577876</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19577876</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by harrumph in "YouTube’s Product Chief on Online Radicalization and Algorithmic Rabbit Holes"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> after it had finished, all those garbage recommendations showed up for everyone to see, making it look like I am secretly some lunatic.<p>This is kind of my nightmare!  Condolences.<p>YT, wtf.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 01 Apr 2019 11:38:04 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19542316</link><dc:creator>harrumph</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19542316</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19542316</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by harrumph in "YouTube’s Product Chief on Online Radicalization and Algorithmic Rabbit Holes"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> it also seems to massively favour what you have watched once - if that is something especially controversial or perhaps otherwise ‘special’.<p>This is my experience as well. YT thinks I love Jordan Peterson. Four or so months ago, I didn't know who he was, and clicked one clip, found it ridiculous and never clicked another one.  But my recommendations are lousy with the guy.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 29 Mar 2019 20:55:59 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19525600</link><dc:creator>harrumph</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19525600</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19525600</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by harrumph in "Oil traders are watching workers’ phones to spot problems at refineries"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>>taking a number from the firm's name<p>I'm lost as to what is meant here by "number".  Are you saying the target firm was randomizing its iceberg order's component order sizes using the same seed? If yes, how could the target firm's usage of that seed be known by the "attacker" here?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 28 Mar 2019 18:31:20 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19515131</link><dc:creator>harrumph</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19515131</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19515131</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by harrumph in "Facebook Accused by HUD of Housing Bias Over Use of Targeted Ads"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Facebook ads in the residential real estate space absolutely allow violation of the 1968 Fair Housing Act on the part of real estate agents, sellers, marketers and brokers. The mechanism of FB ad targeting inherently grants permission to exclude groups from ad targeting by way of discriminating on the basis of demographic detail. The FHA was passed to redress the widespread and normalized practices of racial and socioeconomic exclusion from home ownership, and as such FB's practice is a major step backwards in fairness and transparency for persons participating in housing markets.<p>Does anybody know if FB's practice has been attacked in court sooner than this?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 28 Mar 2019 14:40:17 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19512619</link><dc:creator>harrumph</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19512619</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19512619</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by harrumph in "Facebook to ban white nationalist content"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>>Hey, you're the one who failed to think things through.<p>No, I'm the one who corrected an utterly insane equivalence drawn between a commercial figure who drives grieving fathers of murdered kids to suicide and a man who was literally killed for his demanding equal treatment for all people.  Again: if you bring up history, you are now forced to deal with historical results and categories. Deal with them. Don't just pretend you are.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 28 Mar 2019 13:26:00 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19511925</link><dc:creator>harrumph</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19511925</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19511925</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by harrumph in "Facebook to ban white nationalist content"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>>And people should be okay with his persecution by the people who had the political upper hand in that era? No? Then why should anyone be okay with deplatforming Alex Jones (as bad as he is) by whoever has the political upper hand at the moment?<p>Because one was a indispensible paragon of civil rights and an avatar of anti-racism and the other is a shrieking whackjob entertainer peddling freeze-dried survivalist food while spreading lies, mental illness and grief to families of murdered kids.<p>Hey, you're the one who brought up history.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 28 Mar 2019 12:59:31 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19511718</link><dc:creator>harrumph</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19511718</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19511718</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by harrumph in "Facebook to ban white nationalist content"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> I can’t imagine fainter praise.<p>Thanks for correctly identifying “good people” as praise (for a vehicular murderer plus a guy firing a pistol into a crowd).</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 27 Mar 2019 20:09:14 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19505457</link><dc:creator>harrumph</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19505457</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19505457</guid></item></channel></rss>