Hacker News: smacktoward

I think I’m done with HN

smacktoward — Wed, 24 Jun 2020 02:35:59 +0000

https://web.archive.org/web/20200624023221/https://twitter.c...

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23623343

Points: 74

# Comments: 54

New comment by smacktoward in "Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs"

smacktoward — Mon, 22 Jun 2020 19:25:12 +0000

AKA the Osborne effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect

The Aircraft Carrier We Need

smacktoward — Mon, 22 Jun 2020 19:15:54 +0000

Article URL: https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2020/07/06/the-aircraft-carrier-we-need/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23604742

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by smacktoward in "Forking HTML into a static language doesn't make sense"

smacktoward — Mon, 22 Jun 2020 15:57:34 +0000

Once upon a time (aka the early '90s), Gopher and WWW were both simple systems for publishing hypertext. Neither one was appreciably more complex or ambitious than the other.

WWW eventually pulled out into the lead, due largely to licensing considerations; WWW had been developed at CERN, which explicitly disclaimed any ownership over it, while Gopher had been developed at the University of Minnesota, which preferred to leave its ownership claims ambiguous. People gravitated towards WWW for the simple reason that they knew no one would sue them for using it.

As WWW's userbase grew, demand grew as well to add features to it. Mosaic added images and image maps; Netscape added JavaScript; and on and on and on. Eventually WWW grew to the ginormous, do-it-all system we know and (ahem) love today. Because Gopher had been left behind in adoption, it didn't have those pressures to extend its capabilities; it was free to remain the simple hypertext system it was in the early '90s.

I see a lot of people today point to Gopher as an example of what the Web should be. But this misses the point; the Web isn't what it is because of some design decision it made that Gopher did not, the Web is what it is because it had users. The more users there were, the more things people wanted to do with it; and the more things people wanted to do with it, the more features got tacked on.

If Gopher had been the one with the permissive licensing back in the '90s, it's very possible that it would have been the hypertext system everybody used, and today we'd be complaining about how complex Gopher has become and asking "hey, whatever happened to that toy Tim Berners-Lee was hacking on back in the day? Remember how simple that was?"

New comment by smacktoward in "Deus Ex at 20: The oral history of a pivotal PC game"

smacktoward — Mon, 22 Jun 2020 13:48:48 +0000

One reason it can't happen today is because it never ends well. Ion Storm was a huge disaster; it produced Deus Ex, but it also produced Daikatana, one of the truly legendary bad games. The studio mismanaged itself so badly that by 2001 the whole thing had collapsed except for Warren Spector's team in Austin, who soldiered on for a few more years before giving up.

New comment by smacktoward in "Micro-front ends in Webpack 5"

smacktoward — Thu, 18 Jun 2020 19:11:07 +0000

Webpack's general design philosophy is to dump a bag of tools on your head and tell you to use them to assemble a build system. So anytime the bag gets larger, I cringe.

New comment by smacktoward in "Time to Upgrade Your Monitor"

smacktoward — Thu, 18 Jun 2020 03:53:47 +0000

As with most things Apple, it is a joy as long as you restrict yourself to only plugging the device into official Apple peripherals, preferably ones that are available to buy right now. It’s when you start hooking your Mac up to old hardware or random commodity hardware that the problems surface.

New comment by smacktoward in "Expose – A fully open-source ngrok alternative written in PHP"

smacktoward — Wed, 17 Jun 2020 17:27:35 +0000

Of all the complaints that could be lodged against PHP, performance is a weird one.

New comment by smacktoward in "Welcome to America’s Cultural Revolution"

smacktoward — Wed, 17 Jun 2020 14:38:18 +0000

> The Times can claim that a harsh tone and a small factual error in Senator Tom Cotton’s recent op-ed was the reason the entire paper had a meltdown, but the staffers who revolted initially claimed that Cotton’s argument for bringing the National Guard into cities put black lives in “danger.”

Cotton’s entire argument was that the military should be sent into the cities to crack protesters’ heads, which is something significantly more aggressive than “a harsh tone.”

If I were to take to the op-ed page of the Times with the argument that national stability requires that we send the military to crack the heads of everybody who writes for the National Review, I suspect they would waver somewhat in their commitment to unlimited free speech.

The Cheese That Stands Alone: The Sad Fate of Limburger Cheese

smacktoward — Tue, 16 Jun 2020 18:42:00 +0000

Article URL: https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/cheese-stands-alone

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23542594

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by smacktoward in "Against Cop Shit"

smacktoward — Tue, 16 Jun 2020 18:37:29 +0000

I used the title the author of the article gave it. I generally try to do that when submitting, unless there is a very very good reason not to -- e.g. it's something completely incomprehensible to someone who isn't a regular reader of that specific site.

Nukes, Nubs and Coners: The Unique Social Hierarchy Aboard a Nuclear Submarine

smacktoward — Tue, 16 Jun 2020 17:58:19 +0000

Article URL: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/34104/nukes-nubs-and-coners-the-unique-social-hierarchy-aboard-a-nuclear-submarine

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23542043

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Against Cop Shit

smacktoward — Tue, 16 Jun 2020 17:42:54 +0000

Article URL: https://jeffreymoro.com/blog/2020-02-13-against-cop-shit/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23541863

Points: 103

# Comments: 68

Why They Say They Were Fired

smacktoward — Tue, 16 Jun 2020 15:02:00 +0000

Article URL: https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2020/06/labor-troubles

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23539931

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by smacktoward in "Basecamp’s founders are trying to start an email rebellion"

smacktoward — Mon, 15 Jun 2020 17:23:19 +0000

We've had forty years for people to build features like this on top of IMAP, and nobody has done so. This would seem to be a decent indication that the Unix philosophy is not going to produce much innovation in this market.

New comment by smacktoward in "WD Red DM-SMR Update: 3 Vendors Bail and WD Knew of ZFS Issues"

smacktoward — Mon, 15 Jun 2020 16:57:53 +0000

In every company, no matter how obscene the margins they're making on a given product, there is someone arguing that those margins could be even larger if they just cut a few corners.

Eventually someone listens to that person, and decades of painstakingly built-up brand value gets thrown out the window in order to bring home six nickels tomorrow instead of five.

New comment by smacktoward in "Responding to the Controversy about YOLOv5"

smacktoward — Sun, 14 Jun 2020 16:42:01 +0000

> Is YOLOv5 the Correct Name?

> Candidly, the Roboflow team does not know.

It seems like, unless you can say with certainty that you have a legitimate claim to use an existing name, the right and safe thing to do would be to not use it. Just name your project something else. You lose the brand recognition of the existing name, but on the other hand you avoid the risk of your project getting dragged like this.

When in doubt, save yourself a headache and just use a different name.

New comment by smacktoward in "Is there still room for debate?"

smacktoward — Sat, 13 Jun 2020 02:34:16 +0000

... he asks, in his column in a prominent national magazine.

Deep State Mapping Project

smacktoward — Wed, 10 Jun 2020 17:33:58 +0000

Article URL: https://deepstatemappingproject.com/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23479773

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by smacktoward in "The Silence of the Never Facebookers"

smacktoward — Wed, 10 Jun 2020 17:21:08 +0000

Schoolteachers (in the USA, anyway) get paid next to nothing, and frequently have to buy classroom supplies out of pocket because their school system doesn't have the budget to buy them.

Nobody becomes a schoolteacher to get rich.