Hacker News: pherrephatta

New comment by pherrephatta in "Netflix Targets Critical ‘Cuties’ Tweets with Copyright Takedown Requests"

pherrephatta — Thu, 05 Nov 2020 19:51:34 +0000

A billion dollar company.

The term probably[0] comes from the application of metric prefixes to monetary values.

10^9 -> Giga (G) -> 1 000 000 000

10^6 -> Mega (M) -> 1 000 000

10^3 -> Kilo (K) -> 1 000

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_prefix

New comment by pherrephatta in "Everything you ever wanted to know about terminals (2018)"

pherrephatta — Fri, 11 Sep 2020 01:39:55 +0000

You can look at the programmer's guide for the VT100[1], which does a good job of explaining the different ANSI escape codes.

To put it simply, you can move the cursor down and to the right. For example, you'd move the cursor 999 lines down, then 999 columns to the right, and then query the cursor's position[2]. You can then read the output through STDOUT and parse it.

I'd recommend anyone who's interested in playing around with ANSI and learning how to write a pure terminal-based program to look into the Kilo text editor[3]. That's where I learnt the above instructions.

[1] https://vt100.net/docs/vt100-ug/chapter3.html

[2] https://vt100.net/docs/vt100-ug/chapter3.html#CPR

[3] https://viewsourcecode.org/snaptoken/kilo/

New comment by pherrephatta in "Richard Stallman’s Exit Heralds a New Era in Tech"

pherrephatta — Sun, 22 Sep 2019 18:58:28 +0000

In seeing all the criticism that software developers have been taking lately over supposed speech transgressions (e.g. Stallman, Torvalds, "Bro", "Weboob"), I can't help but wonder why technical debates have shifted into personal ones, what the proper alternative is to the now seemingly much dreaded meritocratic way of doing things, who truly profits from this change and in what way do they profit from it?

There's no doubt in my mind that harassment and sexual assault, as well as discrimination and sexism, really do happen to some individuals. But when you have narratives being twisted to fit a prescribed perspective, when words and talk about the semantics of those words as signifiers (such as in Stallman's case) are interpreted as defense for the object signified by those words, the line between the aggressor and the aggressee become blurred. That does a lot more harm to movements FOR victim and AGAINST discrimination, by generalizing the phenomenon to the point that it loses all relative value it might've had. If everyone's an aggressor, and every conversation is discriminatory in terms of potential interpretation, all men, women, non-binary, etc. are affected. It is debilitating to the highest degree, and no one should defend, let alone strive to create, such an environment.

If anything, when faced with such situations, we are not discriminatory enough. As Popper described with his famous paradox of tolerance, tolerance of intolerance presages the destruction of tolerance itself. He clarifies, saying: "I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise."[0]

I can only hope that people who are outraged by these aforementioned cases of verbal transgressions have become so because they've misinterpreted what thought was being communicated. Unfortunately, as they more often than not work in consulting or have some "acceptance" program to push towards companies and projects, I can't be certain that they are genuine in their offense.

[0] Karl Popper, Open Society and its Enemies, vol. 1, note 4 to chapter 7.