FlemishBeeCycle

5 ms·

1.
Confirmed: The NSA is Spying on Millions of Americans(eff.org)
1227 points by FlemishBeeCycle 13y ago|444 comments
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by FlemishBeeCycle 14y ago
Exactly. Being offended in and of itself is worthless (I'm sure we can find that Stephen Fry quote somewhere in this thread), it is not a motivator for a behavioral change, at least for me, unless I care about the person being offended. Whe
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by FlemishBeeCycle 14y ago
You're placing entirely too much importance on particular categorizations, "comfort" has much more to do with "what you're used to", than the idea that people are constantly fretting about how population densities in their environment match
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by FlemishBeeCycle 14y ago
Why do you believe the github style guide to be the authoritative source for JavaScript style? There is no benefit for avoiding use of semicolons other than not writing semicolons, whereas there are several detriments for their omission. &#
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by FlemishBeeCycle 15y ago
My guess is that rather than give an exhaustive list, the author wanted to give an example of a familiar language _without_ static typing. As Haxe is more similar to ECMAScript than Python, Ruby, Lua etc. - it's the most appropriate compari
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by FlemishBeeCycle 15y ago
While I disproportionally use Ruby and JavaScript on a daily basis, this statement is referring to a specific type of (common) error, which is largely alleviated by the use of static typing, and therefore not exactly untrue. I didn't take i
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by FlemishBeeCycle 15y ago
That's been one of my concerns, the best way to circumvent that issue is to do something like the following: <script src="//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.7.1/jquery.min.js"></script> <script>window.j
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by FlemishBeeCycle 15y ago
And what if you both sit in a life drawing class drawing the same model? What if for some odd reason you decide to sit behind one of the participants and draw a portrait based off their drawing? I certainly understand what you're getting at
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by FlemishBeeCycle 15y ago
As individuals, we don't act the same way around our peers, our friends or our family. While we certainly present ourselves differently in different contexts, I wouldn't call these different "identities", rather the same identity applying t
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by FlemishBeeCycle 15y ago
Unless you have a specific example, merely omitting mention of both genders hardly qualifies as "sexism" to me? There are plenty of gender-specific magazines for females that do the same thing all the time. I don't see why everyone must now
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by FlemishBeeCycle 15y ago
I'd recommend Mirah ( https://github.com/mirah/mirah ) and Pindah ( https://github.com/mirah/pindah ) as an almost Ruby over Ruboto for Android due to slow startup times from the poor performance of Reflection on Dalvik.
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by FlemishBeeCycle 15y ago
I understand your position, and perhaps I should have better clarified my own. I did not mean to imply that photography was not a technical or creative field, rather by "mechanical process", I meant the physical act of creation. I put a bru
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by FlemishBeeCycle 15y ago
> Merely reproducing something is not art, it's direct reproduction. Introducing unique style would be art. One could then argue that photographs are merely reproduction of reality, and therefore not art. I fail to see why you think pho
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by FlemishBeeCycle 15y ago
The burden of proof would be on the photographer to prove that it was a "copy" of their work rather than an independent creation. At a certain point it comes down to this intangible idea of intent and process. Reminds me of the "What Color
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by FlemishBeeCycle 15y ago
"Uniqueness" isn't a qualification for determining whether something is "art". Most art is not unique, and certainly not most photographs. Calling the pixelated version a "flippant" capturing is disingenuous, as it seems to be a reflection
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by FlemishBeeCycle 15y ago
I don't follow your argument. If a painter and a photographer both depict the same scene, your argument seems to be suggesting that the "degree of 'artistic' creation" from the photographer would somehow be greater than that of the painter?
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by FlemishBeeCycle 15y ago
I would blame poor/lazy devs inappropriately using JS rather than the evolution of the browser for this. For the average web page , it's unnecessary 90% of the time to require JavaScript for any core functionality ( not so much with web
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by FlemishBeeCycle 15y ago
You are a much less cynical person than myself if you think that society is a reflection of its members' values. There is a mismatch between what people say/think that they value, and what people actually value. It takes only sidelong glanc
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by FlemishBeeCycle 15y ago
Mirah is what finally got me started with Android development. Coming from a Ruby background there's practically zero learning curve, plus you can install it from RubyGems (which when using RVM makes it dead-simple). That being said, for my
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by FlemishBeeCycle 15y ago
No one is questioning the existence of the patent - it's the validity of the patent that's being doubted. Given the current processes followed by the USPTO, existence says _nothing_ for its validity.
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by FlemishBeeCycle 15y ago
Why should one identify with a country they may have never been to, or a culture they may never have experienced? What's the point of romanticizing an intangible connection that only exists if you want it to? As a person of mixed-raced desc
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by FlemishBeeCycle 15y ago
What exactly goes on in a BitCoin party?
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by FlemishBeeCycle 16y ago
I don't think he seriously views Second Life as a real competitor - he was just using it to draw an analogy. As for the community, I believe the "fakeness" he's getting at is the ability of the user to carefully cultivate their likeness and
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by FlemishBeeCycle 16y ago
While it may be "depressing", isn't it logically consistent with how the world appears to work? One way to make a lot of money is to sell a lot of a product. Most people are of "pedestrian" (average) intelligence; ergo, to sell a lot of pro
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by FlemishBeeCycle 16y ago
You seem to be missing my point - which is not to criticize JS (I use JS frequently, and actually like a lot of it) - I'm merely suggesting that its success is not due to the language itself and its merits, but to the domain that it has f
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by FlemishBeeCycle 16y ago
> I choose JS because it is the only language that runs in the browser as well as the server (<--- Killer feature) That's what I was getting at - that JavaScript is popular because of the position that it is in ( not because of the
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by FlemishBeeCycle 16y ago
I don't know if JavaScript had much to do with its own success. I would say that JavaScript has succeeded, in spite of itself, due to increasing focus on web applications. Not to imply JavaScript is a "bad" language - I just don't think peo
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by FlemishBeeCycle 16y ago
I didn't mean to imply that I was condoning the author's actions. Perhaps I misinterpreted, but I was responding to the parent comment's decrying of the author's actions due to the perception that the author justified their actions through
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by FlemishBeeCycle 16y ago
I imagine it has to do with political correctness, but it seems there is an undercurrent on HN of treating all opinions as equally valid? Even if both sides of the argument are incorrect, if the second opinion was formed through rigorous sc
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by FlemishBeeCycle 16y ago
I can't help but draw some parallel to AOL/CompuServe/etc. Like Facebook, they were attempts to make the web both more accessible to the average person as well as present in very clear terms what they could do on this new "Information Super

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