Viewing profile — samhw

Yeah, I am very troubled by it. I had a friend staying with me last year who I hadn't realised was schizophrenic (a hopelessly vague diagnosis but he undoubtedly had parted company…

Quite. Psychiatry loves to talk about brain scans and neuroanatomy, but until it dares to actually use them for diagnosis, I think it should be regarded as window dressing. And you…

The law locks up the man or woman, Who steals the goose from off the common, But leaves the greater villain loose, Who steals the common from off the goose The law demands that we …

It also continues to farm human beings. Tens of thousands of human beings each year are murdered to order (or, more accurately, they have their organs cut out and then are left to …

What do you mean by 'cancel', outside the context of blacklisting entertainers? How does that apply to a CEO? Presumably anyone considering employing or funding him is entitled (an…

So what if it’s tremendous[ly] depressing? It’s depressing that basically no animal dies of old age in the wild. It’s still the reality. Your comment doesn’t really seem to be tryi…

It's not just the strict denotative meaning. It's also the valence and emphasis of the statement. It doesn't concentrate the mind on "what if it disappears?", but on "how likely is…

Yeah, a genius heroin addict friend of mine drew a molecular structure for a new opioid[0] on the back of a napkin and sent it off to a synthetic chemist in China to be synthesised…

In the same vein, I was discussing police responses to mass shootings on Twitter, and was quite surprised to find Wikipedia took me to a disambiguation page when looking up “[rando…

The Wikipedia page is a bit better in giving the actual details in which the story is incorrect, and without the extended editorialising (though the final sentence is quite nightma…

Not to mention Damien Hirst (and I suppose Warhol's 'factory' was the real pioneer). I don't understand it. My friend has a bunch of 'his' paintings - high six figures a pop at the…

I mean, a friend of mine was an escort, and certainly ended up in entanglements like that. At the end of the day you are two human beings. Whatever your professional situation, the…

Well, this is bad news for the existence of infosec professionals...

What do you mean ‘a civil law issue and not a common law issue’? The UK’s civil laws[0] are very largely composed of common law; the two concepts are orthogonal, not opposites, and…

Yes. They can delete it, they can create it, they can mutate it. That’s how it works when you send information about yourself to somebody else for them to store on their hard drive…

Yeah, I'm not sure non-Londoners appreciate this. The escalators at Angel (where I grew up) go 60m deep. Someone skiied down them and hit 30mph: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angel…

Jesus, that thing looks like Lamborghini designed a tank…

But, like they said, it's talking about the legal reality and not the moral reality. I find it hard to see how that could be either factually or morally wrong.

NOTE: I can't now edit this comment, but I wanted to clarify, per below, that many of these issues are more about my experience of Cassandra in the specific context in which I expe…

Yeah, I 100% agree that many of those problems are inherent to distributed databases. There are an interesting few which kinda straddle the line in that respect – stuff like counte…

His initials were LT, if that helps (if not, I can clarify his whole name over email or however people privately communicate on HN?). I may well be exaggerating his 'major'ness - I…

> far easier to run than Cassandra I know precisely nothing about Scylla, but somehow I still agree with this. Cassandra is far and away the most horrendous software I've ever had …

Eh, I was semi-addicted to heroin, and I can testify - hell, I can give you a list of usernames from memory - that that's absolutely endemic on Wickr. It's the #1 go-to location fo…

Powerful people have long weaponised self-deprecation as a means of letting off steam and blunting more serious attacks. (That theme is elaborated very well in the LRB here: https:…

The most fundamental tenet of capitalism. Capitalism's most fundamental tenant, on the other hand, is probably Starbucks.