Viewing profile — ken

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…

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%. Tha…

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 …

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 …

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 office…

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, an…

> 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 featu…

Cool idea. Would you also limit the volume of the computer to typical human skull capacity?

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 m…

> 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 trans…

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/America…

Different article about the same event: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23422469

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 annotati…

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…

> 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 …

> 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 "…

Not every new line must have the same meaning. Do you also look down on James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound?

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 s…

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 Nationa…

> 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…

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.

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."

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 re…

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 …