Viewing profile — shawnhermans

I recently started collecting Blu-ray because of thrift and second hand stores. In a few cases, I was able to purchase some of my all time favorite movies unopened in the original …

The Wii came out in 2006 and all my discs still work fine. But me thinks this missing the main point people are mad. People are fine with digital only for the most part, but they d…

I resisted learning SQL for years. When I finally got around to learning it, I kicked myself for not learning it sooner. Sure, it has its share of jank and every DB has its own fla…

What really gets to me is how big tech isn't even pretending anymore to serve society. They clearly feel superior to the rest of us and entitled to rule.

Former Catholic. I left the church for a variety of reasons, one of which being the child abuse scandal. I am aware of the Catholic Church's long and often sordid history. What I a…

I stopped commenting on HackerNews years ago because of that same phenomenon. It doesn't matter if you agree or disagree with RMS. It isn't an excuse to act like a total asshole al…

This whole conversation is frustrating because it is boiling down to a stupid semantic debate. The author is claiming that people don't get paid to explore data, they get paid to f…

> Anyone who has tried to edit a page that's politically contentious, or that anyone cares about, knows that what's written depends almost completely on who has the most time and p…

I'm really struggling to understand the issue. I understand the issue of conflict of interest when it comes to things like government contracts and public corporations. Here confli…

Warren Buffett has a solid reputation of making excellent investments. As long as the money returned a good investment, I wouldn't care at all.

This is a crude way of handling low performing employees. It measures time spent at one's desk and not productivity. A good manager shouldn't be worrying about how their employees …

The author makes a lot of statements but doesn't really back them up with solid facts or analysis. Consider the second reason of "Bitcoin will not end the need for trusted central …

You claim that Google could use personal photos of my kid eating ice cream to sell advertising? This seems directly against their terms of service found at http://www.google.com/po…

As others have pointed out, I don’t think Berkshire Hathaway and YC really compete in the same markets. Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger have some great words of wisdom on their a…

When these types of things happen, I notice a strong "blame the victim" mentality. When Sony was hacked, I saw similar comments about how it serves them right for having bad securi…

By what stretch of the imagination is TCP/IP a bad protocol? It is a 30+ year old standard that is still in wide use today. It has managed to scale from a few networked computers t…

Technically, you are wrong. NSA has a signals intelligence side and an information assurance side. It does have two dual missions. You may argue that they haven't done a good job w…

From the first link: Very briefly, pointer events has 3 main drawbacks relative to the alternative: 1) Mobile-first web: Pointer events would likely never supplant touch events on …

Back in my days in academia, I used LaTeX for math and physics. I liked that LaTeX separated out formatting of content from the display. It made it easier for me to focus on the ge…

In most cases, I disagree with the point the author is trying to make. The author is arguing against the heavy restrictions Medium places on typesetting and layout. As a reader and…

Because it wouldn't accomplish anything productive. At best it makes her feel a little bit better, but at worst it backfires and burns some bridges that don't need to be burned.

That doesn't prove or disprove anything. The author assumes the simulation would have to simulate the entire known universe at the level of detail we observe. That is absurd. A sim…

I haven't read the book, but I did read the EFF's brief ( https://www.eff.org/document/eff-amicus-brief-ibm-ats-claim ) which seems to rely a lot on the alleged Nazi connections. B…

What does standardization, rules and responsibility have to do with being an engineer? Yes engineering does often involve a great deal of those things, but that is not the defining…

It is called obstruction of justice.