morbius

thanks though, it makes my decision a lot clearer -- goodbye HN

oh great, more downvotes!

Yep, fantastic way to prove to a suicidal person that life is worth living and having independent opinions for (I'm the OP, FWIW) /s

Perhaps a bit of both. Regardless, Larry's intentions are good and he's an angel -- which is rare among programmers. Many (like Linus, RMS, DHH) are almost sociopathic in how they view others' work and treat the people they work with, so it's very refreshing to see someone that's not only passionate about his work, but gentle and kind as well.

It's not entirely inaccurate.

Because there's no object to their jokes. It's just exaggerated humor not at the expense of anyone.

The SRS sidebar makes it pretty clear that the whole SJW façade is exactly that: a façade. They obviously have legitimate complaints but hyperbolise everything to poke fun at it.

I never said someone should be liked because of their gender. It's just that using Victoria as a defense for Reddit's consistently juvenile view of women doesn't really work.

Victoria was beloved despite the fact she was a woman, not necessarily because of it. I understand what you're trying to say, but it doesn't really hold up.

That's a two year old link to a sub whose whole intent is to be as diametrically opposed to the SRS sub as possible. If you're trying to strike a point here, I think it'd be much more effective to link to something that's more impartial and up-to-date.

But Reddit wasn't attacking corporatocracy or actual censorship. They were just trying to defend their right to be dicks to other people through abusive and hateful subs.

The right to free speech is not the right to speech without consequence. And what obligation does reddit have to preserve "free speech" in the first place? They run the website and it is fully up to them what gets filtered through and what sticks. It's not beholden to the first amendment.

now predictable narrative of '50 white male racist misogynist neck beards' who want to chase women out of tech again

This is a pretty accurate narrative. You may not agree, but casual misogyny is incredibly pervasive on most defaults, and it's fairly prevalent within the smaller, community-based subs as well.

small group of militant activists trying to silence people who they disagree with

If you're referring to SRS, they're annoying and take themselves far too seriously, but as far as I know they don't try to silence anyone.

The most critical things against Pao and her husband I have seen are posts about there phony extortion sexism and racism law suits.

I'm not even going to address how laughably absurd your characterization of consistent harassment, abuse, and terrifyingly legitimate rape and death threats as "criticism" is. Most people were upset with Pao because she was part of an executive decision to shut down FatPeopleHate and a couple of other abusive subreddits. It's quite a stretch to say that she was solely responsible for this decision, and even then, it's sobering that people would respond with scathing, fiery, and highly toxic personal and threatening attacks on a decision that was intended to help people be kinder to each other -- and worse, lobbed on someone that had at most 2/5ths of the executive power to make that decision.

The media didn't turn the shaky relationship between reddit's users and their administrators into a black-and-white affair. Reddit itself did, by using Pao as a scapegoat to attack everything they saw as antithetical to freedom of hatred and abuse under the guise of "free speech."

IFE systems do show telemetry data from aircrafts' EICAS, though -- things like ground speed, altitude, temperature, etc.

I'm not sure on the specifics since Boeing has kept silent about the whole debacle, but I do wonder whether the IFE and avionics are airgapped on all aircraft, and whether you could exploit them if they aren't.

Sorry if this is off-topic, but as someone who once sat through a four-hour compile of Octave several years ago and never touched it again, what exactly are the advantages of using Octave and R compared with the standard SciPy stack? (IPython, matplotlib, numpy, sympy, scipy, etc.)

Of course, I've no reason to doubt that. Apple's design philosophy is great for many people, but the trend of its design becoming the only design for interfaces (see also: Galaxy S6) is disappointing. It homogenises the market and ultimately makes it less interesting.

Right-- but Ive also seeks to reduce form so much to the point where it begins to impede upon functionality. Take the thickness of the iPhone 6, for instance. The drive to reduce the noticeability of the hardware is at the direct expense of battery life and camera quality; I'd certainly consider this a failing of his design philosophy.

This seems like little more than an Apple puff piece.

Apple has recently developed a standard British power plug whose prongs fold elegantly back flush into their body. Easily stowed, no agony if accidentally trod on. A separate and wholly different solution to that offered by the Mu Plug which solves the problem in another way.

“It took ages to solve,” Ive says wistfully. And that is the point. No one else cares as much. Of course it took ages, because anything worth doing does. People who take pains to the extent he and his team do are very very rare.

This sort of design has been present in countless cheap, $3 international power adapters. Ive's ego and insistence on exalting his own genius at the expense of others' is maddening, and to call something so simple an "innovation" illustrates how little is necessary for something to be deemed a work of ingenuity.

Like Marc Newson, much of his work is design for the sake of design, with little regard for functional implications. To have a company's philosophy be singularly focussed on aesthetics and minimalism alone is not a bad thing. But as Larry Wall prophetically said several years ago, "Apple is the arbiter of good taste. But when good taste becomes mandatory, it's no longer good taste, just manners."

I feel similarly about Apple's design philosophy. Their level of influence doesn't inspire opposing philosophies from their competitors, it inspires imitation-- since imitation is a basic, natural, fundamental reaction to something successful. The problem is that it alienates those who have other requirements that differ vastly from those of Apple's, and who would be better served with a little less aesthetic sense, and more functionality or durability at the expense of (largely arbitrary) things such as thickness, gloss, polish, and shine.

There is a reason you only see ThinkPads on ISS rather than MacBooks. Similar design goals -- minimalism, starkness, and abstraction -- but with vastly different approaches.

This seems like a non-sequitur, since the Indian filter coffee you linked to commonly incorporates both Arabica and Robusta beans.

"The most commonly used coffee beans are arabica and robusta."

I'm not sure, but it remains a pretty strong indicator of why we need good multipartisan cooperation in any good society.

Agreed. It irks me when proprietary software developers ask for donations for a 'free as in beer' work. Either offer your product as a paid service/item, or make it open source and free as in speech software. The middle ground is just annoying.

Exactly! Which is why I said something LIKE. :) There's literally nothing more fun than creating your DnD campaigns; it would be so cool to construct worlds involving interplanetary trade -- which incidentally, is one of that Star Wars RPG's strengths and also why I mentioned it.

(2) upvotes can't be the only factor determining HN's front page; that would make it consist of controversy, gossip, and fashion all day long

That seems like an awfully low expectation of the average HN reader IQ.

Something like this I presume? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars_Roleplaying_Game_%28W...

Findings like this, I think, are the most convincing arguments for retaining NASA's highly productive climate science division. There is a breadth of talent there squandered by horrible management both intra-agency and inter-agency. The fact that it's run by Congress and has little, if any autonomy is also a very sad, sad thing. I'd much rather see it spin off into its own thing that receives a set amount of funding but lets Dr. Bolden and the board have a degree of autonomy on where to spend it, much like USPS or Amtrak. Having anthropologists and attorneys decide critical science for the future just seems archaic, myopic, and horribly miscalculated.

That's a quite myopic view of both NASA and SpaceX. The cutesy circus is pretty much a necessary condition of scientific popularisation-- NASA's social media experiments have been incredibly successful ways of getting the public to engage in space travel and science in a way that wasn't ever prevalent before.

It's trite, but also mandatory. I wouldn't be surprised if SpaceX didn't take some things tongue-in-cheek too; a war against humour is one nobody wants to fight. Except Boeing executives.

A lot of this stuff isn't strictly necessary for many people. But there is a very distinct change in the quality of your thoughts and approaches to solutions after learning advanced mathematics and the theoretical concepts that inform modern systems and abstractions. For instance, Haskell is far easier to someone with prior experience with discrete structures, category theory, and recursion than to someone coming from a purely object-oriented background. Both will be able to write effective code, but it's no question that the mathematically-inclined individual will write more elegant, more concise, and qualitatively better code than the other.

Time off for hobbies and maternity leave are two very, very different things. Also, slippery slope arguments are considered so fallacious because they're often the most extreme visions of what will happen, when the most likely change will be very, very little. The same rhetoric was used to inhibit women's voting rights, but ended up being fallacious as well.

The problem is that even when you put "Paul Rand" in quotes, the search results still show "Rand Paul" half the time.

Not even close. Even if Walmart chooses to not stock a particular product, you can still purchase said product from other authorised retailers. This is more like if Walmart is the sole reseller in the U.S. for a certain hardware device used all around the world, and they choose not to stock it and you have no other venues from which to purchase it.

Luck is relativistic, though. It's far easier to become a billionaire when you've already established your success and connections. The fact that you can easily become a millionaire by working hard means that becoming a billionaire is easier from there than starting from scratch.