Curmudgel

The UNRWA has found rockets in their schools on multiple occasions:

http://www.unrwa.org/newsroom/press-releases/unrwa-condemns-...

Do you find this page visually overbearing because all of the non-downvoted comments are #000? I have never seen a page of text on a computer screen look overbearing because its color was #000 and not lighter.

#000 is easier to read on devices with that have dim backlights.

That is poor advice which doesn't account for the difference between computer screens and ink on paper. The deepest black you can get on a monitor will not be as dark as certain inks on a page.

It's a shame that the "readable" mode has #333 body text instead of #000.

It's a collection of some of the best rants from the Unix Haters mailing list that existed in the late eighties/early nineties. The people that were on the list usually had experience with operating systems that were more advanced than Unix. Constructive criticism was never really the point of the mailing list.

My point was that the parent's suggestion that anyone who criticizes Unix obviously isn't smart enough to understand it is just flat out wrong and offensive.

Have you read the Unix Haters Handbook?

http://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf

Sure, you could write a kernel in Lisp or Forth. But if you are a developer for a kernel that written in C/C++, you don't really have a choice.

The new interface requires more clicks than the last one in order to select the options, and since I don't agree with the default options, it is quite annoying. The contrast for the drop down options is really, really bad. The fixed headers are an enormous waste of screen real estate for small laptops, and when this is coupled with the smaller line width, the effect is that information density is a lot worse.

On the front page of Hacker News, the number of points and the time an item was posted are not a links, but on your search results page, they are. They're not underlined, so you just have to guess that they are links. The little heart, person, and clock icons make it harder for the eye to scan across the line, and since they're not links, they don't really serve any purpose.

If the changes must stay, I would appreciate a "classic style" search option, preferably at at different URL, so that I don't have to switch to the old style every time.

There's also nothing wrong with cars which don't pop the lock back open if the car is off and the key is in the ignition, except that when such a technology exists, is pretty cheap / easy to implement, and can save users potentially a lot of trouble, why would you not implement it?

If you drive an armored car, then you wouldn't want the doors to automatically unlock whenever you put it in park. An ICE agent was killed three years ago in Mexico because of this feature.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/armored-suv...

Could you please change the body text color to something closer to #000, if not #000 itself? The current contrast ratio fails WAG AA and AAA standards for normal sized text.

What? In what context?

I have installed lots of extensions on FF because I find them to be useful. If I were to use Chrome as my primary browser and wanted the same features that my current FF setup gives me, then I would have to install extensions. But the extensions would slow Chrome down and then I would be back to square one. So "just use Chrome" is not a solution.

You should restart FF with addons disabled (Help > Restart with Add-ons Disabled) and then compare the two. If you want a "passive web browsing experience" on FF, you could create a separate profile.

If you read that document carefully, you can see that the EFF edited one of passages that they quoted and did not mention their edit, which is a big no-no. The original letter says:

  (this exact number has been selected for a specific reason,
  it has definite practical significant.

  (this exact number has been selected for a specific reason,
  it has definite practical significance).

Yes. Keyboards with thumb clusters, e.g. one made by Maltron or Kinesis, make key chords as natural as pressing a single key on a regular keyboard.

As others have pointed out, Eich was not fired. His resignation was of his own volition.

It's perfectly legal and acceptable to not use someone's product if you don't agree with their politics. That person does not suffer any loss of rights.

It's pretty clear from the smiley in the title that he was just teasing her. I just found it odd that he would write it in the title of a blog post meant to be read by thousands of strangers. It's like shouting some bit of raillery at your friend across a crowded public plaza.

I got the old website when I visited it, but based on the image that another user posted:

http://i.imgur.com/m2d1Gf4.png

the text color of the description for search results is around #808080 on a #FFFFFF, which is a contrast ratio of 3.95 to 1 according to http://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/

This fails both WCAG AA and WCAG AAA recommendations. Please increase the contrast, preferably by leaving the text the way it was (#000000)

Perhaps that's what the term means to the author. To others, it's a synonym for a drunkard or alcoholic and has nothing to do with flirting.

The only way to avoid this IPC-handler-explosion in the design is to define the set of IPC objects a priori and mandate all programs know how to handle them. Then, there are O(1) IPC handlers per program, and adding a new program does not require me to couple its implementation to any other programs. This is effectively what UNIX does: there is one IPC object--a string of bytes.In UNIX-2 I could have more types of objects, but the fact that they're defined independent of the programs means that I will still be "hoping the receiving process understands" when I give it data from arbitrary programs...My point is, trying to enforce OOP on IPC will take away universal program composibility, which is the killer (if not defining) feature of UNIX.

Not necessarily. You could pass S-expressions instead of bytes. Parsing would be much easier, and there would be no loss of generality.

But Ruby is an acceptable Lisp[0]

Yes, (as tptacek said), just like Esperanto is an acceptable English.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=416589

The command line is the heart of Unix and Friends, which is why it wasn't abandoned decades ago. And it's almost impossible to replace the *nixes because of network effects and extraordinarily high costs.

The command line is "powerful" because it is "simple" in the sense that it doesn't really do anything for you. Commands have their own input and output syntax based on their needs and it's up to the user to figure out how to fit it together. I think one having standard serialization format, so that you wouldn't have to waste time learning and thinking about each command's special little syntax would be much more powerful.

Well, yes and no. If you want to look at something very small, you have to learn how to use a microscope. It's not that hard to learn how to use a simple microscope, and you can make adjustments by thinking about the physical principles, which are universal. And if a certain type of microscope isn't suitable, you can always change or someone can design a better one.

The *nix command line is not based on physical law. There is no mathematical or physical reason that human-computer action has to be through an underpowered, user hostile design that requires lots of unnecessary memorization. People use it because everyone does. You can come up with a better design, but you'll still have to use the old design if you want to interact with anyone else.

Edit: By "underpowered", I mean that passing byte streams and parsing them is less powerful than passing objects. And this is made worse by the fact that different commands have different output syntaxes.

Don't forget HIV denial:

"I believe, but cannot prove, that global “AIDS” is a whole cluster of unrelated diseases all of which have been swept under a single rug for essentially political reasons, and that the identification of HIV as the sole pathogen is likely to go down as one of the most colossal blunders in the history of medicine."

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=184

Yes, typing is usually faster than cursive. However, most keyboards are not ergonomic and years of use at high speeds will most likely lead to RSI or at least sore wrists. And there are still be plenty of times in life where writing something by hand is more appropriate than typing it up.

Cursive handwriting, when done with proper technique, is faster than block and does not cause hand cramps or wrist pain.

I find the user experience on the new site to be much worse than the new site. When I'm reading an article I really don't care about navigating to the rest of the site. I have a small widescreen laptop, which means that the fixed headers at the top give me less room to read the article. I don't need gobs of white space to read the news article in print, so why is white space so important on the web that navigation has to be hidden in one of those awful hamburger buttons? The text is harder to read because it has lower contrast. The new comment system is totally unusable. I don't really appreciate large, useless images interrupting the flow of the article. And I don't need Javascript to read a newspaper article (the site loads like a pig with Javascript) because I'm going to be navigating to a different page when I read another article. It's faster to just open the home page and open each article in a new tab (with JS disabled).

The information about amphetamines made an impression. His friends at times tried to discourage him, but he claimed that without them, he could create no mathematics. Given his colossal output, this means that a significant part of the landscape of modern mathematics owes it existence to this drug.

Erdős was a heavy user of many other stimulants (like coffee), but only started to use antidepressants and then amphetamines in 1971 when he was 58 after his mother died. He was already established as a first rate mathematician (he should have won the Fields Medal), and using amphetamines to work 19 hours a day was his way of coping with the death of his mother.

See http://www.untruth.org/~josh/math/Paul%20Erd%F6s%20bio-rev2.... for more.

Transistors and semiconductor advances were far more important than UNIX or C. You can't have modern computing without the underlying hardware, but it's not hard to envisage an alternate reality where UNIX or its descendents never became popular.