newuser88273

Common Lisp actually has a core of a mere thirteen "special operators". You can think of everything else as standard library.

If Mozilla was a-political, Klabnik couldn't work there if Brendan couldn't. He can, and Mozilla isn't.

Actually, the politicalization of Mozilla means that everything technical will lose priority over time.

Expecting privacy (or privacy-preserving security) from Google products has always been folly.

Mozilla used to be different. However, when Brendan was purged, first doubts may have arisen. Now that we also see cyber-bully Klabnik on their payroll, the probability has risen sharply that Mozilla has been successfully subverted into a political pressure group.

Since Mozilla now is enrolled in support of the dominant ideology, it has no incentive for supporting privacy anymore, either: The dominant ideology wants minority opinion holders to be outed and ostracised.

If you combine that with the pain stim version into one device and give me the remote, I'll have you barking like a dog whenever I lift my little finger.

The good news is that schools don't have to drug unruly boys anymore...

Just so people don't think there's no third way to think about your work: I get nothing but snake oil vibes from Urbit, but loved the blog, which, among other things, was the venerable art form of Usenet trolling taken to utter perfection.

If you sum over all micro-insults suffered by victims of racists, caused by billions, possibly trillions of micro-aggressions, who knows how many death-equivalents you might get?

Anyway, whomever socialists might have killed, it was long ago: smack in the middle of the dark ages of widespread racism, to be exact. Which means those so-called victims of socialism probably all were racists.

So this outfit, mSpy, sold to people the capability to track activities on one (1) other person's smartphone: Less than a nanogoogle! Why the outrage?

Japan is betting that automation means they don't need gazillions of workers to feed their old.

If they're right, they'd win so big compared to "us" that in fact the biggest obstacle they're facing might be that "we" won't allow them to win the bet.

Scheme has come up with the idea of pretending that an undelimited contination is a function, which is somewhat true-ish... in the degenerate sense of a function with empty domain.

This is fine for Scheme, which is an expression language, so every method of invoking a continuation would, syntactically, be an expression anyway.

In C, which has statements, making return look like an expression is somewhat pointless. It doesn't matter whether C "has" continuations (and it arguably has) or not.

Maybe you know about usenet. Of course, usenet is dead. However, one of the last groups to die was comp.lang.lisp, which is an instructive example in this context.

I submit that what, or rather who, kept comp.lang.lisp alive for so long beyond most of the rest of usenet was a guy named Eric Naggum. He may not have identified the sociopath aspect, but did have the entitled MOPs in his crosshairs and kept them out with (sometimes utterly brilliant, btw) flamage.

Sadly, comp.lang.lisp also points to something not mentioned in the linked post: Entitled MOPs and sociopaths will not just silently accept their exclusion.

When excluded, they attack, possibly indirectly through other venues. To this day, in an astonishing number of online discussions of Lisp culture, you're apt to find attacks on comp.lang.lisp in general, or Erik Naggum in particular, for the high crime of having once excluded (for example) an entitled MOP who wanted his homework done by comp.lang.lisp.

If you're in the west, KGB backdoors are less of a risk to you.

Say you're in the west. NSA has backdoors into your US-designed hardware and your US-designed OS. NSA also, probably, has access to your ISP's routers and US net/web corporations like Google. As a result, NSA may hide C&C channels where KGB use of a backdoor to your hardware would still show detectable illegitimate network traffic.

Lower risk of detection translates to higher probability of use.

I've seen multiple sources showing reduced fertility in high-IQ females (across multiple countries.)

The culprit, however, doesn't seem to be raw intelligence as such, but modern western education, which seems to have a dose dependent sterilizing effect on females. In that light, high IQ isn't fertility-reducing in itself, rather low IQ is protective against modern western education.

I probably unconsciously undercount "legitimate" grey-outs, so... maybe. Still, you really can't have all three of these: (1) Votes to register (dis-)agreement and (2) very prominent visual effect of downvotes, yet (3) no hivemind induction.

I'm not lobbying for changes. The whole up/downvote business is really hard, maybe there's no better way. Just thought people here might be interested in the fact that HN has been getting somewhat of a hivemind reputation, lately.

Under that assumption, upvote should not be a way to voice agreement, as that implies that downvote is disagreement. But downvote leads to graying-out and disappearance, which is just perfect to induce the hive mind.

And yes, downvoting into oblivion articulate comments not at all devoid of content really has become endemic here, and many (though certainly not all) of those I read anyway were obviously downvoted for disagreement, often political. The result is a strong hive mind at HN. (I've seen seen that opinion on HN voiced outside of HN more than once.)

You're downvoted because your comment implies that "just following orders" at companies with morally questionable business models might reflect back on the one taking orders.

For more downvotes, try suggesting that working for an adware and spyware based company could (and should!) lower your social status, even if not yet in the eyes of other people working for adware and spyware giants. But with growing awareness in the wider population, the outcome is inevitable.

You were supposed to compare --- not the forbidden things AS SUCH, but (a) the abstract fact that they're illegal, composed with (b) SANE ways your OWN country can react to the fact of a NON-FRIENDLY FOREIGN power engages in ENABLING, ENCOURAGING and ENTICING your own citizens to breach same law.

To give yet another example: At some point in time, exporting an 128 bit symmetrical block cypher from the US may have been grounds for punishing you, the perp.

Let's counterfactually assume that China was successfully propagandizing tens of thousands of US citizens about both the ridicoulousness and the anti-freedomness of this law. Assume that thusly propagandized US citizens resisted and breached the law.

Again: Would you prefer that the US, assumed to be quite aware of the Chinese efforts, would have identified, rounded up and harshly punished US citizens having exported "munitions" in the form of 128 bit symmetrical block cyphers after having been successfully turned against perfectly patriotic (even if misguided) US policy by non-friendly Chinese propaganda, while completely not doing ANYTHING to stop that propaganda, even though PROVEN to put US CITIZENS IN JAIL??

...and watch China flood the US with dollars (it has a few of those, y'know?), halt all Apple smartphone production and lobby hard and successfully to finally replace the petrodollar?

Maybe all-out war is not the fitting answer to what was, realistically, a tempest in a teapot.

To play devil's advocate: If you had the choice between identifying all domestic users of GFW circumvention tools, rounding them up, and shooting them, or attacking some of the foreign devil peddlers of such tools, which is the more humanitarian and mild measure?

Edit: I'll try to make this a little clearer. Consider that many of the most free and civilized countries you know will identify, round up and harshly punish consumers of child pornography. Imagine a China (or another state of your choice) that sets its mind to providing the deprived and opressed western masses with as much child pornography as they can download. Is the West's only admissible choice to dutifully round up and punish its own citizens? Is it clearer now?

Lower prestige? I think this is true. People may not be consciously aware of it, but due to the company's core business model, i.e. basically adware and spyware, non-billionaire employees will almost certainly incur a hit to their social prestige account.

The registry is not very discoverable. However, once you discovered, a lot of customization can be had from running as little as a single registry script.

As a trivial example, remapping caps-lock to something sane was easier on the last few windows releases I tried (just run a registry script) than on any of the 'nixes I used in the same time period.

Clojure code is surprisingly hard to edit for a Lisp-like language. The gratuitous use of square brackets where a Lisp would just use parentheses is part of that.

Omitting the parentheses inside those square brackets, however, was an even worse decision wrt editability. When you can't edit a sequence of syntactically homogenous items by simple s-expression manipulations, your Lisp's design is defective.

There are some interesting similarities between Urbit and... the Church of Scientology.

Like Yarvin, L.Ron Hubbard made up a lot of new terminology for things that had perfecly good names before.

Like Urbit, in order to be able to be able to read for yourself what it's really all about, you're made to invest, heavily and up front.

The psychology of that is astounding. Scientology's formerly inaccessible teachings have been leaked, and nobody who reads that stuff unprepared comes away impressed. Scientologists, however, do NOT complain, "This is what you have gotten a decade's worth of earnings for from me? RLY???"

A large investment of time and effort seems to make people psychologically predisposed to accept as valuable whatever is revealed at the end (and tell outsiders that it all has been very much worth it.)

Haskell: ""We want a non-proprietary Miranda".

No, but my pain point as a user is that I want a fully charged phone right now. I don't care that the spares sit in a charging station for an hour or two; that's an uninteresting detail of the implementation.

I used to have that technology on my first mobile phone, back in a previous millenium. It was called "spare battery".

So it seems the problem with the German law was that they created a basic prisoner's dilemma kind of situation. Publishers who tried to get some compensation from Google for appropriating the fruits of their labor were thwarted by defection from those who didn't. It seems the Spanish law was drafted in recognition of this game theoretic problem. If traffic drops for Spanish publishers turn out to remain well below those seen by the Germans, this could become a model for other countries.

Your comment was funny, duly upvoted, but you seem to be making somewhat of a category error, as we're not talking about divorce rate prediction but divoce rate measurement, while global warming controversy is about prediction, not much about measuring current temperature. (Measurement, I seem to remember, didn't even corrobate older global warming predictions, or some such thing, which is beside the point, because at no point global warning was about high temperatures to be measured "now".)

Because your dual business model is (1) showing ads to humans and (2) gathering intel on humans. Bots can be used to bypass both.

Is there an anti-trust angle to this?

X11 was a great success because it was a protocol that you could write X servers and X clients and X window managers against.

Nobody wants to do that anymore. There are two major forces to blame.

First, open source. A well designed protocol is much more work, and you can avoid it by just pointing to the open source'd implementation, as this article (hilariously) shows for the case of DBUS.

The second force is the adware/spyware model of web and app monetization. You don't want people to use their own clients against a protocol (email, usenet, web 1.0) because you can't serve ads as effectively and you can't run analytics on their every mouseclick, touch gesture and keypress.

The whole systemd debacle would be much defused if systemd had been a couple of well thought-out and stable protocols, much like X11, instead of a big source-blob of underspecified and ever-shifting implementation.