<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: ohbtvz</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=ohbtvz</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Thu, 23 Apr 2026 10:58:07 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=ohbtvz" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by ohbtvz in "MIT faculty adopts “Statement on Freedom of Expression and Academic Freedom”"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Supporting free speech doesn't mean that you support absolute free speech without any limitation. We all have a lot of rights, and exercising those rights can impinge on the rights of others. Why would freedom of speech be somehow special and trump every single other right?<p>I don't know in English, but in French we have a saying: the freedom of some begins where the freedom of others ends.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 26 Dec 2022 05:47:50 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34134976</link><dc:creator>ohbtvz</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34134976</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34134976</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by ohbtvz in "MIT faculty adopts “Statement on Freedom of Expression and Academic Freedom”"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Tell that to Iranians...</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 26 Dec 2022 05:26:20 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34134854</link><dc:creator>ohbtvz</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34134854</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34134854</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by ohbtvz in "Introduction to Homotopy Type Theory"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> I do not understand why homotopy type theory posts are so popular on this website.<p>It's easy. When you don't know a lot of math beyond college, but you see a post like this one, voting it up lets you pretend that you're in-the-know. "Oh yeah, I'm competent enough to upvote this. I know math." You may even end up fooling yourself into believing it. Same thing happens with physics, chemistry, linguistics... posts.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 25 Dec 2022 08:38:25 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34125443</link><dc:creator>ohbtvz</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34125443</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34125443</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by ohbtvz in "A simple guide on words to avoid in government"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Modern IQ tests are normalized with mean 100 and standard deviation 15. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 23 Dec 2022 14:54:49 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34106457</link><dc:creator>ohbtvz</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34106457</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34106457</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by ohbtvz in "A simple guide on words to avoid in government"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I don't think anyone is saying otherwise. It's clear that the discussion is about general public-facing government websites. Something for which the intended audience is a large portion of the population.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 23 Dec 2022 14:48:16 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34106384</link><dc:creator>ohbtvz</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34106384</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34106384</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by ohbtvz in "A simple guide on words to avoid in government"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The sentence "seems ... to me" already carries that meaning.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 23 Dec 2022 14:47:29 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34106377</link><dc:creator>ohbtvz</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34106377</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34106377</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by ohbtvz in "A simple guide on words to avoid in government"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>If I understand you correctly, the issue is that the Swedish government used jargon masquerading as a common word, and as a result people didn't understand the meaning. That's another example of jargon being a problem!</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 23 Dec 2022 14:46:01 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34106353</link><dc:creator>ohbtvz</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34106353</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34106353</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by ohbtvz in "A simple guide on words to avoid in government"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I don't have the book at hand. Do you have a more precise quote?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 23 Dec 2022 13:44:50 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34105697</link><dc:creator>ohbtvz</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34105697</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34105697</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by ohbtvz in "A simple guide on words to avoid in government"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Your examples are not jargon, they're metaphors.<p>Jargon exists because specialists in a subject want to communicate quickly among themselves, instead of paraphrasing all the time. I'm a mathematician, if I had to use plain-English words instead of jargon in my papers, I would go insane. But my papers aren't meant for the general public (although they're welcome to read them), they're meant for a specialist audience. This is not the case of government websites.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 23 Dec 2022 13:41:29 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34105655</link><dc:creator>ohbtvz</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34105655</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34105655</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by ohbtvz in "A simple guide on words to avoid in government"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Well, what's the difference between a "strong non-legal mandate" and a "helpful tip"? Either it's mandatory or not.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 23 Dec 2022 13:40:34 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34105648</link><dc:creator>ohbtvz</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34105648</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34105648</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by ohbtvz in "A simple guide on words to avoid in government"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Using fewer words introduces less cognitive load and drives your point better.<p>For example, you wrote "The advice [...] seems somewhat pointless to me." Well, are you saying that it is pointless, or not? I don't know you, so I don't know what your scale of pointlessness is. I don't know what "somewhat pointless" corresponds to. Is it a tiny bit pointless, is it a medium amount of pointlessness, something else? I don't know, but I have to think about it because you wrote a meaningless word in your sentence. And even once I have understood the sentence, I am left thinking: "well, if it's only somewhat pointless, maybe it's not pointless after all!"<p>The same thing happens with "key stakeholders": now I have to think about a hierarchy of stakeholders. What scale is being used? Who's key, who's non-key? Does the sentence apply to all stakeholders, only some of them?<p>Multiply this by a hundred occurrences in a long document, and you obtain something that will be more difficult to read. But government documents have to be readable by everyone: people whose native tongue is not English, uneducated people who have trouble reading simple texts, etc. And for what? Sugarcoating your text so that it's less assertive? Showing literary prowess?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 23 Dec 2022 13:32:08 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34105564</link><dc:creator>ohbtvz</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34105564</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34105564</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by ohbtvz in "A simple guide on words to avoid in government"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Please don't link to that website. Would you link to stormfront to make any kind of point here?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 23 Dec 2022 13:19:55 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34105462</link><dc:creator>ohbtvz</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34105462</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34105462</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by ohbtvz in "A simple guide on words to avoid in government"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This is not the reason jargon exists. What made you say that?<p>> It's the reason that the speaker used all of the tech jargon (launching a website). If they didn't do that then we would think they didn't know about websites.<p>To "launch" something is jargon?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 23 Dec 2022 13:17:11 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34105432</link><dc:creator>ohbtvz</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34105432</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34105432</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by ohbtvz in "UnifiedPush: A decentralized, open-source push notification protocol"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> However, the main cost is developer-effort involved in keeping track of keys and implementing encryption.<p>As soon as you need encryption in at least one place in your software, it's going to happen.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 22 Dec 2022 20:25:14 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34098170</link><dc:creator>ohbtvz</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34098170</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34098170</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by ohbtvz in "Welcome to Comprehensive Rust"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>You can't check the hash of something you immediately piping to your shell, for example.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 22 Dec 2022 11:39:06 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34092364</link><dc:creator>ohbtvz</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34092364</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34092364</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by ohbtvz in "Welcome to Comprehensive Rust"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Are you sure you're replying to the correct comment?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 22 Dec 2022 11:38:05 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34092360</link><dc:creator>ohbtvz</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34092360</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34092360</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by ohbtvz in "Welcome to Comprehensive Rust"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I'm tired of installation instructions that consist of "curl | sh". Especially since this one just tries to detect the platform and downloads the correct installer for me. I know what platform I'm running, and I don't want to pipe the internet to my shell. In the end this is unpacking a tarball in ~/.rustup, I don't need the risk of running some bespoke script for that.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 22 Dec 2022 10:56:17 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34092099</link><dc:creator>ohbtvz</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34092099</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34092099</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by ohbtvz in "January 1, 2023 is Public Domain Day: Works from 1927 are open to all"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> Imagine that you are not that popular author whose works are his life savings. Pennies dripping from works you published are your life line that lets you buy food or sustain you in a way.<p>Why should we all pay to make that a viable way of life?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 21 Dec 2022 10:50:12 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34079012</link><dc:creator>ohbtvz</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34079012</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34079012</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by ohbtvz in "January 1, 2023 is Public Domain Day: Works from 1927 are open to all"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I don't think anyone has ever asserted copyright on the bible. I'm not quite sure what you're talking about? As for pamphlets, copyright can never prevent you from printing something that you created.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 21 Dec 2022 10:46:03 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34078982</link><dc:creator>ohbtvz</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34078982</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34078982</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by ohbtvz in "Threeuk is blocking Tutanota"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This is especially infuriating as a European visiting the US, where a bunch of services are geo-fenced to American IPs. In several towns, I couldn't pay for parking or buy a bus ticket because the online service is geo-fenced and there's no brick-and-mortar alternative anymore. They also restrict apps in the play store or whatever to US accounts. I had to buy a cheap SIM card to get around all that. It's insane.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 21 Dec 2022 10:42:16 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34078965</link><dc:creator>ohbtvz</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34078965</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34078965</guid></item></channel></rss>