ken

14 ms·

1.
by ken 6y ago
You joke, but I've wondered the same thing. Apple, of all companies, is happy to re-examine (or discard) the status quo. They dropped the headphone jack on many products -- as they said, it's "over 100 years old, used to he
2.
by ken 6y ago
Black people in America have a measurably lower life expectancy than white people [1]. For people born in 2015, it's down to about 5%, but as recently as 1970, it was over 10%. That's a lot of years of life being cut short. (The
3.
by ken 6y ago
What point are you trying to make? Systemic racism is way bigger than just police killings. Do you want to ignore the (non-lethal) evils of prejudice, and just play a numbers game with fatalities? From some back-of-the-envelope math, th
4.
by ken 6y ago
I never understood why ortholinear keyboards aren't the standard. It's bizarre that the fingers on my left hand would move slightly to the left for the top row, but the fingers on my right hand would also move slightly to the le
5.
by ken 6y ago
You're trying to exploit a slippery slope. There are many churches which have had no such scandals, and are not associated with any who have. Just because Monitor (dozens of offices, thousands of employees) worked for Gaddafi doesn&#x
6.
by ken 6y ago
And the tester just happened to pick two friends, who live 20 miles apart in different cities, who have never ordered from the restaurant? That is both a remarkable coincidence, and a bizarre choice of test data.
7.
by ken 6y ago
> You do not communicate the full state of your system or even a small portion thereof when you use speech. Right, but that's not even the purpose of speech. Abstraction is a feature, not a flaw. Even with electronic systems where
8.
by ken 6y ago
Cool idea. Would you also limit the volume of the computer to typical human skull capacity?
9.
by ken 6y ago
A window manager may be only 2000 lines of source code but it implements a host of formal and informal standards and interacts with hundreds of other programs on my computer. You may need only a day or two to orient yourself to the source c
10.
by ken 6y ago
> Their window manager dwm is just a window manager. It doesn’t handle things like transparency, compositing or volume control. That is a strange division of labor. I thought transparency and composition were aspects of window management
11.
by ken 6y ago
Wings and tail, of course: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Airlines_Flight_261 And assuming the wings haven’t lost their lift due to ice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Eagle_Flight_41
12.
by ken 6y ago
Different article about the same event: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23422469
13.
by ken 6y ago
That's sort of true, in the abstract, but it wouldn't explain what's going on here. Even JavaScript (with a JIT, but not a separate compilation step, and certainly no type annotations) is faster at this than compiled Crystal
14.
by ken 6y ago
Maybe, but these two languages don't exactly have similar semantics. You can't make a Ruby program that uses fixnums-only. You also can't make a Crystal program that's dynamic like Ruby. Interestingly, though, when the
15.
by ken 6y ago
> When people scream “this is a bug”, it is irrelevant what it is caused by. It is a scream of a significant expectation mismatch. The team should work on resolving it, regardless of whether it was caused by a developer diverging from th
16.
by ken 6y ago
> I know someone who got a highly paid job by first doing it for free for 3 months to prove his skills And I know dozens of people who got burned by being talked into working for "exposure".
17.
by ken 6y ago
Not every new line must have the same meaning. Do you also look down on James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound?
18.
by ken 6y ago
Not all of it. Any bug attachments which don't have previews are served from https://github.com directly, for example. Here, I uploaded that image from the other day that crashes some phones. I gzipped it so it wouldn&#x2
19.
by ken 6y ago
In case anyone considers writing this off as a partisan or economic issue, it's worth remembering that both of the acts mentioned here -- the Endangered Species Act and the National Environmental Policy Act -- were enacted by a Republi
20.
by ken 6y ago
> The Macintosh model, on the other hand, is the exact opposite. The system doesn’t deal with character streams. Data files are extremely high level, usually assuming that they are specific to an application. When was the last time you p
21.
by ken 6y ago
I've traveled to several countries outside the U.S., and never had my fingerprints taken, even at border crossings which required seeing my passport.
22.
by ken 6y ago
Yup. "If you owe the bank $100 dollars, that's your problem; if you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem."
23.
by ken 6y ago
Every time there's a new programming language which claims to be "safer" than existing ones, I look at what they do differently. In some cases, they've come up with a new way to restrict computation so that undefined&#x
24.
by ken 6y ago
How do meth/opioids change the equation? They're not (for the most part) legal. Alcohol causes tremendous destruction, too, but I thought there was general agreement that national prohibition was worse.
25.
by ken 6y ago
Unions are great, but strikes are actually pretty rare. In the short term, they’re bad for workers, too! Striking is always a last resort. Unions have been on a serious decline the past several decades, but striking isn’t their only pow
26.
by ken 6y ago
It’s a good thing I’m not upset by it, then.
27.
by ken 6y ago
> the Smalltalk value proposition was: Pay a lot of money to be locked in to slow software that exposes your IP, looks weird on screen and cannot interact well with anything else; it is much easier to maintain and develop though! Sounds
28.
by ken 6y ago
I've never gotten AirDrop to work. I wasted a whole day, once, double-checking software versions and hardware capabilities and reading every manual and specification and forum post I could find. It seems to be one of those features t
29.
by ken 6y ago
What if (hypothetically) those 'people' are an organization that needs to organize work, and they're using it because they've tried email and other methods for years, and found that those didn't work? A lot of us us
30.
by ken 6y ago
> Facebook is the last major social network where people are able to speak their minds. Do LinkedIn or Reddit or Medium not allow you to speak your mind? In what way?

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