Hacker News: quasque

New comment by quasque in "Python is now the most popular introductory language at top U.S. universities"

quasque — Mon, 07 Jul 2014 23:09:51 +0000

The computing courses at my university use Haskell in the introductory programming course - apparently it works rather well as a vehicle for exploring algorithms and data structures.

The students move on to Java, C++, Perl, Prolog and others after that; not sure about Python.

New comment by quasque in "Plain text wrapping in Gmail"

quasque — Sun, 06 Jul 2014 14:47:27 +0000

This preference is based on the assumption that the extra information conveyed in the HTML part of the email is worthless, which may not be the case.

I can see from the downvotes that some HN users are excessively passionate about their plain text emails, but many people do prefer the extra formatting and layout that a well-constructed HTML email can provide.

This can be observed in general by the fact that almost everyone uses web browsers like Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome - rather than Lynx.

New comment by quasque in "Plain text wrapping in Gmail"

quasque — Sun, 06 Jul 2014 14:00:19 +0000

I don't think that is a very good argument in these modern times, with the relatively huge storage and bandwidth availability. The extra size of such formatting markup is negligible.

New comment by quasque in "Plain text wrapping in Gmail"

quasque — Sun, 06 Jul 2014 13:57:22 +0000

Seems a rather archaic requirement to be imposing on one's users, but thanks for clarifying!

New comment by quasque in "Consciousness on-off switch discovered deep in brain"

quasque — Sun, 06 Jul 2014 13:52:48 +0000

Consciousness in the medical sense can be considered along axes of wakefulness and awareness. For example, in a coma the subject is neither aware nor awake.

In contrast, patients in a persistent vegetative state are awake, but not aware. It sounds like the researchers may have replicated this state of consciousness, which would imply that the claustrum is important in awareness, but perhaps not as critical in wakefulness, at least in this particular subject (keeping in mind that her brain is already abnormal in some sense due to epilepsy and neurosurgery that excised the left side of her hippocampus).

This paper has a nice review of the topic: http://www.coma.ulg.ac.be/papers/vs/2005_VS_TICS.pdf

New comment by quasque in "Plain text wrapping in Gmail"

quasque — Sun, 06 Jul 2014 13:28:39 +0000

The author hasn't made a case for why he needs to send plain text emails.

Every mail client - including text mode ones like Pine - supports HTML formatted emails, even if they end up displaying them without formatting.

New comment by quasque in "Jamming XKeyScore"

quasque — Sun, 06 Jul 2014 11:51:54 +0000

You'd be wasting your time as there is no feedback as to whether your attempts have worked to frustrate their targeting, and that's the best case scenario. The worst case is that someone picks up on your efforts and casually flags you to make your life more difficult - extra searches at borders, no fly list, and so on.

New comment by quasque in "Jamming XKeyScore"

quasque — Sun, 06 Jul 2014 11:45:54 +0000

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. They may have stopped attacks but not revealed any information about this publicly, or engaged in misdirection as to their role using parallel construction.

New comment by quasque in "Things You Should Know About Tor"

quasque — Wed, 02 Jul 2014 07:00:10 +0000

Hidden services can't be located in that manner unless the owner has badly misconfigured the service so it's reachable by IP address. A typical configuration would have the service listening on 127.0.0.1 or a private (RFC 1918) network address only, and have Tor connect to that.

New comment by quasque in "Drinking behind 1 in 10 deaths of working-age adults"

quasque — Sat, 28 Jun 2014 21:15:29 +0000

Headline should be modified to indicate that the study was carried out in the USA. It's not generally applicable to the world population, or necessarily to all high-income countries.

Media Queries – a showcase of websites demonstrating responsive web design

quasque — Tue, 24 Jun 2014 23:06:21 +0000

Article URL: http://mediaqueri.es/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7941275

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Wide-band WebSDR in JO32KF

quasque — Mon, 23 Jun 2014 22:26:18 +0000

Article URL: http://websdr.ewi.utwente.nl:8901/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7935131

Points: 10

# Comments: 0

New comment by quasque in "Teaching creationism as scientifically valid now banned in all UK public schools"

quasque — Sun, 22 Jun 2014 22:08:44 +0000

The problem with 'intelligent design' is that it's such an infantile way of trying to understand the world. Stating "God did it", rather than using one's brain to figure out the mechanisms of how the world works, is just lazy, regressive thinking that doesn't advance our knowledge and understanding in any way whatsoever.

New comment by quasque in "U.S. Postal Service Logging All Mail for Law Enforcement (2013)"

quasque — Sun, 22 Jun 2014 16:03:38 +0000

How do you know it doesn't work? From all we've been told (very little, mostly through leaks) there isn't enough information to make that judgement.

The key issue isn't the potential benefit of mass surveillance in dealing with crimes or potential crimes, but rather its risk to individual privacy and the danger of enabling authoritarian governance.

New comment by quasque in "Teaching creationism as scientifically valid now banned in all UK public schools"

quasque — Sat, 21 Jun 2014 11:48:45 +0000

It's a poorly argued essay.

The author starts from an assumption that the Bible is true and cherry-picks evidence in an attempt to support that, choosing the interpretation (or misinterpretation) that best fits into his pre-existing biases.

Not convincing unless one has already been indoctrinated into the belief that everything is 'God-given', rather than being more open-minded and inquisitive about the nature of the world.

Tor anti-censorship using Google, Akamai, Cloudflare as proxies

quasque — Fri, 20 Jun 2014 20:53:14 +0000

Article URL: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/meek

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7922823

Points: 5

# Comments: 0

New comment by quasque in "UK intelligence forced to reveal secret policy for mass surveillance"

quasque — Wed, 18 Jun 2014 14:47:53 +0000

Oh, I agree. Just pointing out that mass surveillance may well be both helpful to national security and very damaging to human rights.

For what it's worth, I suspect it's unduly balanced towards authoritarianism as well.

New comment by quasque in "Suicidal Software Developer"

quasque — Wed, 18 Jun 2014 14:44:45 +0000

You exhibit a disturbing lack of empathy.

New comment by quasque in "Canadian court ruling orders Google to block sites worldwide"

quasque — Wed, 18 Jun 2014 11:31:24 +0000

Apparently it's any site that sells the "Datalink GW1000".

New comment by quasque in "UK intelligence forced to reveal secret policy for mass surveillance"

quasque — Tue, 17 Jun 2014 14:23:48 +0000

> Your beliefs are wrong, as we have been shown that this mass surveillance has failed to prevent even one terrorist attack since its inception.

We don't actually know this. Mass surveillance may have led to 'extrajudicial' methods of thwarting terrorist attacks, i.e. death squads or drone killings. Or when cases of terrorist plots have been taken to trial, its use could have been masked by parallel construction of evidence.

This level of underhandedness seems to be increasing in recent times. For example, there is a terrorist conspiracy trial currently ongoing in the UK that is being held almost entirely in secret - the public and media are not permitted to know the evidence or the sources of evidence against the suspects. In fact up until recently even the existence of the trial and the identities of the suspects were under a gag order, for reasons unknown[1].

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/law/2014/jun/12/secret-terror-tri...