Viewing profile — wtbob

Would you please be so kind as to update https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html to indicate 'ideological talking points' the staff believe prevent thoughtful & informativ…

sctb, I honestly don't understand why you are threatening to ban me. It's not an ideological talking point that people who die earlier due to health problems don't cost extra in pe…

I'm not arguing that they don't reduce health costs: I'm arguing that a) they increase other costs (e.g. old-age pensions, since people would live longer) and b) they are an unjust…

> Cigarettes, alcohol, and junk food directly increase medical costs, and people who indulge (and over indulge) in those things should be partly responsible for those increased cos…

Our problem is the cities, and how they have many more people. Representation in proportion to population is pretty kick-ass if you live in New York. It's a little less kick-ass if…

Well, I'd argue that you should grin I've had much the same experience that the Mr. Marshall describes with many aspects of Common Lisp: repeatedly, I'll discover that something wh…

No, no he didn't. None of the information he released revealed anything criminal whatsoever. All he did was violate his oath and the law, and for what?

> They won't consume a lot of public resources (no need of school or of police repression). Either the host country's end-of-life medical care is not great by American standards (i…

You're right, but I'd just like to plug Debian for servers — it's a really well-made distro, put together for sysadmins by sysadmins in large part. And it's pretty wonderful on the…

Note that with the latest changes to Android, using mitmproxy to analyse the behaviour of apps has become impossible: apps refuse to accept personally-installed certificates. In th…

I think a more properly-REST approach would be to PUT a representation of the resource with the action applied. That is, rather than POSTing to /resources/:id/close, one would PUT …

Generally, people are not very good at determining if thoughtful design is worth the effort. Yes, waterfall was a mistake, but design-nothing is mistaken too. Thinking before doing…

Another problem is that people want an RPC mechanism, when what they need is a state-transfer mechanism. It turns out that the semantics of RPC — attractive as they undeniably are …

> Except that - unless you're on a tiling WM on Linux - your window manager sucks Isn't the solution to that to not use systems with poor usability? Linux exists; it's capable of d…

And a (short) discussion on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/plan9/comments/6a683b/fuchsia_the_n...

> I can't really think of an essential daily app (minus work / minus business related / minus intensive reading) that I use which has better UI and UX on a tablet. For me it's TV. …

> There's remarkably little evidence that terrorists are making routine use of strong encryption. Even if they were, we Americans have a fundamental right to strong encryption, pro…

Astigmatism and severe myopia. They're easily correctable, but without glasses I can't see more than about three inches from my nose. At normal viewing distances I simply cannot ev…

Requiring ID to exercise the right to vote is no more 'needlessly restrictive' than requiring it to exercise the right to bear arms or the right to drink. Canada, Germany, Switzerl…

That's actually something I worry about. I'm blind without my glasses, seriously, debilitatingly blind. With them, of course, I have better-than-perfect (for some value of 'perfect…

Egad that XML is horrible! Whoever thought that could possibly be a sane format? And to repeat it over and over — it's like a boot stomping on disk space, forever.