<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: lifeonlars</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=lifeonlars</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Wed, 28 Oct 2026 16:46:04 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=lifeonlars" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lifeonlars in "Study finds billions of nanoplastics released when microwaving containers"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Obviously you don't have to "start experimenting on children". One can survey parents on whether or not they used microwaves, plastic containers, or not, look at the health of the children concerned in later years, and then work from that data.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 21 Jul 2023 14:49:24 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36814464</link><dc:creator>lifeonlars</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36814464</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36814464</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lifeonlars in "Hollywood movie aside, just how good a physicist was Oppenheimer?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I think this is actually evidence of what the poster above is referring to - the long-term effects of Oppenheimer being unfairly discredited. Fermi has streets, schools and subway stations named after him all over Italy. Oppenheimer doesn't (at least not to anywhere near the same extent), even in the US, because during the period when this might most likely have happened, towards the end of his life and shortly after his death, he was still widely regarded as being a traitor.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 21 Jul 2023 10:12:16 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36812067</link><dc:creator>lifeonlars</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36812067</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36812067</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lifeonlars in "Hollywood movie aside, just how good a physicist was Oppenheimer?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I don't think you studied either Klaus Fuchs or the Rosenbergs in much detail then. Whatever the merits of their actions or the cases against them, they were certainly dedicated Communists who did their best for a cause they believed in fervently.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 21 Jul 2023 10:08:26 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36812046</link><dc:creator>lifeonlars</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36812046</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36812046</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lifeonlars in "Hollywood movie aside, just how good a physicist was Oppenheimer?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Your evidence is a movie whose raison d'etre is to elucidate the viewpoints of an American citizen and military leader who is heavily implicated in this decision and in other American war crimes, and even that document does not support your point (McNamara openly admits that US bombing of Japanese population centers was a war crime.)<p>I'm not sure I would class that as 'heavily under dispute'.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 21 Jul 2023 10:05:03 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36812029</link><dc:creator>lifeonlars</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36812029</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36812029</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lifeonlars in "Hollywood movie aside, just how good a physicist was Oppenheimer?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Hard to argue that Einstein is not overrated when he is literally the archetype of 'genius scientist' for most people in the world. <i>But</i> in his annus mirabilis Einstein literally made world-tier steps forward in 3 huge areas of physics simultaneously. Any of these in isolation would have ensured his immortality. This is either the single most important short productive period of scientific work of anyone, ever, or holds that accolade in tie with Newton's plague year.<p>Of course, his later years did not live up to this stellar record - he both made mistakes and was less productive. But how could they?<p>Joseph Heller was challenged by a journalist in later years that "he hadn't written anything as good as Catch-22 recently". He replied "No. But who has?"</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 21 Jul 2023 10:00:01 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36811997</link><dc:creator>lifeonlars</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36811997</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36811997</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lifeonlars in "Hollywood movie aside, just how good a physicist was Oppenheimer?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>There are (in that era) no other geniuses 'like' Einstein or von Neumann.<p>Einstein was probably the most visionary scientist of the whole century at making huge steps forward in several key areas. John von Neumann made landmark achievements across pure maths, physics, engineering, computer science and economics.<p>To say that a basketball player is not comparable to Larry Bird or to Michael Jordan is no disparagement.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 21 Jul 2023 09:52:12 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36811951</link><dc:creator>lifeonlars</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36811951</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36811951</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lifeonlars in "Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>You obviously don't know much about Evernote.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 12 Jul 2023 21:21:00 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36701861</link><dc:creator>lifeonlars</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36701861</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36701861</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lifeonlars in "Privatisation has been a costly failure in Britain"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yes, BT was divided into two business units to enable this process. They unlawfully colluded with each other in order to stop any reseller from being able to charge less than the BT retail offering. Result: terrible infrastructure investment and no competition.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 11 Jul 2023 14:44:39 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36681715</link><dc:creator>lifeonlars</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36681715</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36681715</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lifeonlars in "Privatisation has been a costly failure in Britain"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>There were quite a few small energy co-operatives in the UK, mainly set up by municipalities.<p>When wholesale energy prices spiked last year, followed by a cap being applied to the prices that they could charge, they weren't hedged and several ended up going bankrupt.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 11 Jul 2023 14:41:51 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36681673</link><dc:creator>lifeonlars</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36681673</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36681673</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lifeonlars in "Privatisation has been a costly failure in Britain"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The 'funding for public unions' is 7% of the economy?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 11 Jul 2023 14:38:52 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36681623</link><dc:creator>lifeonlars</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36681623</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36681623</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lifeonlars in "Privatisation has been a costly failure in Britain"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Actually, the very widely replicated experience of most challenger utilities is that the entrenched utility <i>will</i> stop you, sometimes in collusion with the government or municipalities. Try getting permits to dig up the road to put your competing pipes alongside the current monopolists.<p>In Britain, British Telecom spent around 20 years making it impossible for other players to supply an internet service to consumers. They used various anti-competitive practices and had very good capture of the largely toothless regulator OfCom. This is all documented.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 11 Jul 2023 14:35:17 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36681564</link><dc:creator>lifeonlars</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36681564</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36681564</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lifeonlars in "Privatisation has been a costly failure in Britain"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>A "loss" here is just a politicized framing of the fact that government pays Amtrak to do something of use to society.<p>You might as well say that the US military makes a $1 trillion loss per year. No, they supply something which is required by the govt and which has a cost.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 11 Jul 2023 14:31:17 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36681498</link><dc:creator>lifeonlars</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36681498</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36681498</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lifeonlars in "Web servers should refuse requests for random, unnecessary URLs"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>How the web works has changed quite a lot since the early 1990s though.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 07 Jul 2023 08:29:11 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36628874</link><dc:creator>lifeonlars</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36628874</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36628874</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lifeonlars in "Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>You're contradicting yourself. Taking notes is a feature for many, but a product for people whose working style involves taking lots and lots of notes.<p>Call them "process cyclists" if you want, there is a bimodal distribution for how much people use notes apps, and the people near the high mode are prepared to pay monthly for something good, and tend to be extremely loyal.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 06 Jul 2023 15:39:29 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36617698</link><dc:creator>lifeonlars</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36617698</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36617698</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lifeonlars in "Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I paid for a subscription because I really liked what it did and I used it a lot. The Android app became so unresponsive that it was basically unusable. I stopped paying when I found myself making notes in email again to avoid opening the treacly app.<p>It has since got better but I haven't gone back to paying for it, despite using it a lot, and now I'll probably slowly migrate away as they progressively break and disable the free version.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 06 Jul 2023 15:32:42 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36617585</link><dc:creator>lifeonlars</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36617585</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36617585</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lifeonlars in "Web servers should refuse requests for random, unnecessary URLs"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Perhaps your hindsight is selective. After HTTP/HTML and related technologies such as JavaScript have become hugely successful following this principle, it's easy to look back and say "the technology stack which beat all others and became ubiquitous is now hard to develop against because it's too permissive".</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 06 Jul 2023 15:25:37 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36617479</link><dc:creator>lifeonlars</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36617479</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36617479</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lifeonlars in "Web servers should refuse requests for random, unnecessary URLs"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Almost any web server <i>can</i> be configured to provide a generic response to a specific request, for example by ignoring some or all of the url path, and in practice I would bet that a majority of actual instances do this for at least some sets of requests. (To confirm my theory in 20 seconds I checked if <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=nonexistent_user_1620">https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=nonexistent_user_1620</a> returns a 404 or a 200 - it's the latter.)<p>It's silly to pretend that the use of a 404 in this type of circumstance is either clearcut in the standards or ubiquitous in practice.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 06 Jul 2023 15:22:39 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36617417</link><dc:creator>lifeonlars</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36617417</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36617417</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lifeonlars in "Web servers should refuse requests for random, unnecessary URLs"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Well, the web has been very successful in the last few decades. Arguably at least part of this success has been due to Postel's law since, for example, browsers interpreting HTML on a best effort basis has allowed for both diversity and innovation. Comparing the rapid adoption of the web to the failures of numerous closed and strongly specified protocols provides some empirical basis for this.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 06 Jul 2023 15:13:00 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36617253</link><dc:creator>lifeonlars</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36617253</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36617253</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lifeonlars in "Web servers should refuse requests for random, unnecessary URLs"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>No it's not. Dealing with it on the server side means that all tools and servers in the world have to go along with this decision. Posting on a blog saying that people 'SHOULD' do something and actually making it so that this is a reasonable expectation are two very different things.<p>A vulnerability scanner having to implement hairy heuristics to decide what's a vuln and what's a common false positive is literally its whole job.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 06 Jul 2023 11:16:01 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36614149</link><dc:creator>lifeonlars</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36614149</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36614149</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lifeonlars in "Threads profile can only be deleted by deleting Instagram account, Meta says"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Obviously if there was a business choice that you should be able to do this the supposed technical obstacles could be worked around.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 06 Jul 2023 10:36:09 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36613877</link><dc:creator>lifeonlars</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36613877</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36613877</guid></item></channel></rss>