Hacker News: plesn

New comment by plesn in "Sergey Brin's Unretirement"

plesn — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 13:25:38 +0000

No wonder he returned: he can focus on meaningful work without direct financial pressure, with full access to people, decisions, and resources.

If only we all had a time in life to do what we love, get paid, and face no paywalls. I call that "liberated work". If only at least retirement was like that.

New comment by plesn in "People care more about privacy than they think"

plesn — Tue, 18 Jun 2019 09:13:20 +0000

Thanks for this punchline which starts better than a long an laborious argumentation.

New comment by plesn in "In UK universities there is a daily erosion of integrity"

plesn — Tue, 24 Apr 2018 13:44:26 +0000

free doesn't imply that the service/product has no costs, only that your transaction has no costs. Google is also free but it has costs (mostly paid by ads which are then included in products costs).

New comment by plesn in "Be careful what you copy: Invisibly inserting usernames into text"

plesn — Wed, 04 Apr 2018 14:24:49 +0000

Indeed, I copy-pasted in emacs but not in vim, my bad...

New comment by plesn in "Be careful what you copy: Invisibly inserting usernames into text"

plesn — Wed, 04 Apr 2018 13:00:16 +0000

How do I see those invisible characters in emacs or vim ? In emacs I thought that whitespace-mode would do the trick but apparently it doesn't.

New comment by plesn in "Pointer Free Programming and the Future of Nim"

plesn — Fri, 20 Oct 2017 08:28:35 +0000

Could you provide more precisions / examples of this C code-style ?

New comment by plesn in "The Uncomfortable – a collection of deliberately inconvenient objects"

plesn — Thu, 07 Sep 2017 16:28:57 +0000

Those are only for fun, but real stuff are designed to be deliberately inconvenient (e.g. against homeless people): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostile_architecture

New comment by plesn in "When Bash scripts bite"

plesn — Fri, 12 May 2017 16:15:07 +0000

I would kill to have this module in the batteries included…

New comment by plesn in "Scala _ [underscore] magic"

plesn — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 10:39:08 +0000

I didn't know the last one. Nevertheless I find the mix of functions with no arguments, function values and optionnal parenthesis quite confusing syntax wise.

New comment by plesn in "10 Myths surrounding solar energy"

plesn — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 23:49:46 +0000

What about the end of life of solar panels ? Did they manage to build recyclable ones ?

New comment by plesn in "Lessons from the Lawbreakers - what entrepreneurs can learn from the mob"

plesn — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 13:32:56 +0000

There is a gray scale of "entrepreneurs" and "companies" based on the means they use to gain power and influence, so this is rather natural,just as people already read Machiavel or Sun Tzu before. Law, customs, means of legitimation (media) and force are fuzzy and moving barriers.

But one should not forget that this is only one aspect, one dimension, the "power and influence" one. Companies are structures for making things together with others : people spend much time there so we should also seek other aspects within them. E.g more "horizontal" and "democratic" structures preventing mafiaesque hierarchies can also bring fullfillment to much more employees : this is especially important in companies employing well-educated and smart people like programmers at the lowest positions.

New comment by plesn in "BMI: one person listening to his own music via the cloud is public performance"

plesn — Wed, 11 May 2011 11:33:32 +0000

Yes, thanks for reminding this essay. I think though that de-duplication is a lawyer oriented smoke-screen. It is based on a complete misunderstanding of Colour because Colour tracking happens at the wrong abstraction level. Colour does not exist in the computer but it is a property of the whole process. Therfore tracking content ownership doesn't happen at the bit-level of storing a copy or a pointer, but it is rather the consistency of the owner/content association.

New comment by plesn in "Bill Gates On Nuclear Energy: Compared To Coal, It Is Still Safer"

plesn — Tue, 03 May 2011 18:21:55 +0000

Many things are "externalized" in the process and we are pretty naive about risk.

Do we count the cost of side-effects like wars and oppression in our energy ? Think about Libya for oil or Niger for Uranium. Do we count the cost for democracy of the impact of energy lobbies ? Centralized production entails centralized structures which often have a tremendous influence (in France there was never ever any democratic feedback loop about nuclear energy).

The cynical view though is that this is nothing compared to other "industrial risks" and to the insiduous and continuous risk we are producing by saturating our planet with garbage.

New comment by plesn in "Dynamic languages are static languages"

plesn — Sun, 20 Mar 2011 22:26:02 +0000

Haskell's Data.Typeable kind of does this. (http://haskell.org/ghc/docs/latest/html/libraries/base/Data-...). It does not feel like python though…

New comment by plesn in "Understanding Japan's Nuclear Crisis"

plesn — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 03:17:04 +0000

Interesting article, clear explanation. One minus : in the conclusion it is assumed that the problem of pursuing nuclear power is about risk assessment on nuclear plants. This is partial truth biased by current events, in fact many side effects are at stake (the plundering of uranium producing countries like Niger, centralized energy production and its consequences…)

New comment by plesn in "How to play a sound in a web browser (it ain’t easy)"

plesn — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 17:29:16 +0000

No problem : play and further autoplay could be authorized on a per app basis.

New comment by plesn in "How to play a sound in a web browser (it ain’t easy)"

plesn — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 23:06:35 +0000

Give me easy audio but no autoplay and I will be happy. The same applies for video. In fact, in unicorn-land I would like it also for heavy animations. At least one advantage with flash is Flashblock ;-)

New comment by plesn in "Mises, Hayek, and Friedman"

plesn — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 05:11:49 +0000

Agreed, but precisely only through the mirror of our own desires and fears :)

New comment by plesn in "Mises, Hayek, and Friedman"

plesn — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 03:37:24 +0000

Aah, economy on HN… : ready, fight! More seriously, as Einstein put it quite briefly, economy is not a science because it is not testable. I would even add, following some philosopher's wisdom, that behind all those pretty theories you can sense their authors' fears and desires (plus some coherence and maybe even some stats…).

New comment by plesn in "Einstein's Defense of Socialism"

plesn — Sat, 11 Dec 2010 01:09:38 +0000

Interesting, even though i'm not suprised knowing Einstein's affinity for Spinoza : he must have carefully read Marx and other materialist philosophers.