Hacker News: yesenadam

New comment by yesenadam in "Thomas Midgley Jr. invented leaded gasoline and chlorofluorocarbons"

yesenadam — Wed, 22 Mar 2023 14:36:36 +0000

I'm not sure how to respond to that comment, which I find profoundly shocking and depressing. I've read some HN comments before which for some reason suggest a large-scale nuclear "war" wouldn't be so bad, but..this one seems even much worse, for some reason. I don't get it. I don't get how anyone could believe or write that.

Anything I could write seems so obvious. I can't think. I think I need a break from HN for a while. You don't seem to have been downvoted in 5 hours.

New comment by yesenadam in "Thomas Midgley Jr. invented leaded gasoline and chlorofluorocarbons"

yesenadam — Wed, 22 Mar 2023 14:20:19 +0000

Nobel, inventor of dynamite, created the Nobel prizes to whitewash his name. It sure worked.

"by his death, his business had established more than 90 armaments factories, despite his apparently pacifist character."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Nobel

How ‘merchant of death’ Alfred Nobel became a champion of peace https://www.thelocal.se/20101004/29406/

New comment by yesenadam in "Ask HN: Do you still use browser bookmarks?"

yesenadam — Wed, 22 Mar 2023 02:53:57 +0000

Why "still"? hehe I only started fairly recently. Typing * in the Firefox search bar searches bookmarks—what's not to like.

URLs I use frequently I add to my start page.

New comment by yesenadam in "So you've installed `fzf` – now what?"

yesenadam — Wed, 22 Mar 2023 01:05:10 +0000

On mac 12.5 + bash + macports, having trouble getting anything to work, like Ctrl-R, Esc-C etc, **TAB complete, even after trying to follow the suggestions linked here.

The basic problem, however, is that whatever I type into the fuzzy search, it finds many thousands of hits. It seems it's picking up a lot of aliased Downloads folders in ~/Library/Containers. Anyone else have that problem? Not sure how to turn that off.

I just typed "abcdefghijklmno" trying to narrow it down, and still had 10 hits. Typing a further "p" reduced that to 2, but I could see most of those eliminated 8 had a "p" in the filename. Confusing!

edit: I got Ctrl-R, Esc-C and **TAB complete working by adding this to .bash_profile, not .bashrc as it said to when installing:

  source /opt/local/share/fzf/shell/key-bindings.bash
  source /opt/local/share/fzf/shell/completion.bash

But I still have many thousands of options for Esc-C cding, for example, whatever I type—mostly from ~/Library/Containers. I don't remember having that problem when I tried fzf a few years ago, on macos 10.13 I think.

New comment by yesenadam in "So you've installed `fzf` – now what?"

yesenadam — Tue, 21 Mar 2023 22:43:35 +0000

Thank you!! Why on earth isn't that the default. It always seemed weird that with multiple bash windows open, the commands from most of them weren't added to the history.

New comment by yesenadam in "Argbash – Bash Argument Parsing Code Generator"

yesenadam — Mon, 20 Mar 2023 22:35:35 +0000

> You have way too much time on your hands and seem determined to argue nonconstructively. Have a good one.

Please refresh on the HN comment guidelines. And reconsider who has been "constructive" vs "nonconstructive" in this thread.

New comment by yesenadam in "Argbash – Bash Argument Parsing Code Generator"

yesenadam — Mon, 20 Mar 2023 22:23:41 +0000

I thought it was "professional", helpful, and a great comment. I didn't think yours was constructive, just unhelpfully treating a different formatting style as objectively worse, in an unfriendly way. "Be kind"! It was also hard to parse, as the GP pointed out.

edit: You changed your comment after I wrote this. Now it mentions that you flagged the GP. That's ridiculous.

New comment by yesenadam in "Learning the ropes: why Germany is building risk into its playgrounds (2021)"

yesenadam — Mon, 20 Mar 2023 22:02:04 +0000

Please refresh on the HN comment guidelines.

New comment by yesenadam in "Learning the ropes: why Germany is building risk into its playgrounds (2021)"

yesenadam — Mon, 20 Mar 2023 07:23:12 +0000

That's not a real Plato quote. Quote Investigator couldn't find any appearance of it before 1967.

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/12/13/riot/

p.s. What I'm sick and tired already of is the word "boomerification", and that's the first time I've seen it.

New comment by yesenadam in "Black widows are losing to brown widows in the fight for attics and garages"

yesenadam — Mon, 20 Mar 2023 01:18:16 +0000

Check out this wonderful, unforgettable spanish movie on that theme, much better than any plot summary could suggest (and also I don't want to give spoilers) : The Uninvited Guest (El habitante incierto)

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0436374/

Taking the theme to a fantastic extreme is the amazing french miniseries Beyond the Walls (Au-delà des murs), which has a whole bizarre world secretly living in your house.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4999820/

New comment by yesenadam in "Alternative facts: How the media failed Julian Assange"

yesenadam — Sun, 19 Mar 2023 20:13:04 +0000

Geez, that is just chilling, horrifying.

New comment by yesenadam in "Alternative facts: How the media failed Julian Assange"

yesenadam — Sun, 19 Mar 2023 19:50:24 +0000

Thank you so much for this comment. Until I read it, I was regretting having submitted this story, after seeing it marred by starkd's sickening 27-comment barrage of Russian propaganda and insults.

> How about US invading Mexico, occupying and annexing its lands

Hmm I think they already did that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican%E2%80%93American_War

TLDR: Map of Mexico in 1824 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mexico_1824_(equirectangu...

New comment by yesenadam in "Alternative facts: How the media failed Julian Assange"

yesenadam — Sun, 19 Mar 2023 19:37:52 +0000

> How Mr. Assange has become the poster boy of "leakers against the government" with his outrageous egotistical and dickish behavior is beyond me

So, who do you think it should be instead? (genuine question)

New comment by yesenadam in "Alternative facts: How the media failed Julian Assange"

yesenadam — Sun, 19 Mar 2023 19:24:46 +0000

> Stupid comment.

Please don't talk anything like this in future on HN, thanks, regardless of what the other person says. You wrote similar things several other times on this page.

New comment by yesenadam in "Alternative facts: How the media failed Julian Assange"

yesenadam — Sun, 19 Mar 2023 13:58:13 +0000

What a sorry, shameful saga. I found this story linked to on rms' home page:

> Our next rally for Julian Assange is Saturday, March 4 at 11:30 to 12:30pm. We will gather at Park St. Station on the Boston Common to speak out for Assange and gather signatures on our petition to our senators. (See how the media failed Julian Assange at Harper's Magazine.)

https://stallman.org/

Alternative facts: How the media failed Julian Assange

yesenadam — Sun, 19 Mar 2023 12:51:12 +0000

Article URL: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/03/alternative-facts-how-the-media-failed-julian-assange/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35218448

Points: 227

# Comments: 334

New comment by yesenadam in "A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past"

yesenadam — Sat, 18 Mar 2023 09:56:41 +0000

That, apart from the first line, seems like a pretty generic/off-topic "I don't get philosophy and it's stupid" rant that could equally well be pasted under any story involving philosophy.

I don't see how it relates at all to the comment you replied to, which I thought was a good one.

New comment by yesenadam in "A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past"

yesenadam — Sat, 18 Mar 2023 08:36:24 +0000

> This is not entirely correct.

Which part? I didn't say or mean to imply philosophers are not worth taking seriously—if that's what you meant—just that philosophers are not scientists, and in particular, Huw Price is not a scientist. Uncontroversial, I would've thought.

An article titled "A growing number of scientists.." that then misrepresents Price as being a scientist, is the thing that's wrong, seems to me. Maybe it did that because "A growing number of philosophers.." wouldn't have anything like the same click-appeal.

New comment by yesenadam in "A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past"

yesenadam — Sat, 18 Mar 2023 05:38:13 +0000

> Not entirely true

If you want to communicate anything by that, please explain what you're referring to. I'm not going to read that entire page trying to guess. I can't at first glance see anyone asking "what is physics?", if that's what you meant.

New comment by yesenadam in "Ask HN: What has your personal website/blog done for you?"

yesenadam — Sat, 18 Mar 2023 05:10:01 +0000

I didn't make my website for those reasons. I was inspired by Bill Beaty of amasci.com's philosophy of putting everything online[0]. But after a while I got sick of how things looked online changing every time I looked, so (sadly) started making lovely LaTeX PDF books instead, and lately putting everything into Obsidian. I must move some of all that online one day.

The highlights have been John Baez commenting on one page how beautiful the images were, and Jugu Abraham (Indian movie critic) thanking me for linking to pages on his site. Am still considering getting rid of comments though—even though it's handled automatically, they're about 99.99% spam.

One thing I learned is that my pages on the most obscure subjects get the most hits! Two in particular are super-obscure and get hits almost every day. I guess there's no other pages on the web about those topics. That maybe seems obvious, but was surprising. It's hard not to assume a piece of writing has to be on a popular topic for someone to want to read it.

[0] http://amasci.com/faq.html#hits the whole page is a great read, as is the whole site. So much great stuff.