181–190 of 229 posts
This thread reflects how little HN has to do with hacker culture those days. I read the article and enjoyed very much his description of the process by which he learns foreign languages and how he tries to make maximum use of every bit of free time. Then I went to the comments and saw the batshit comments about ties. Time to rename the site to "Hater News".
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Is that really what he means though? Most people use the word "breakfast" to refer to the first meal of the day (or lack thereof) eaten within a few hours of waking up. Also the type of food. If you sleep in on a Saturday until noon, you'll probably tend to want breakfast food when you first wake up. The time of day is far behind those two factors for what constitutes breakfast in popular usage.
> If you sleep in on a Saturday until noon, you'll probably tend to want breakfast food when you first wake up. It's 9am on a Saturday here and I just ate two slices of cold pizza. Not everyone desires "breakfast food" first thing in the moring. :)
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> If you sleep in on a Saturday until noon, you'll probably tend to want breakfast food when you first wake up. It's 9am on a Saturday here and I just ate two slices of cold pizza. Not everyone desires "breakfast food" first thing in the moring. :)
Of course I wasn't saying that applies in every single case. I even double-qualified that part ("probably tend to"), but you still responded with "not everyone." I give up. :)
Even Wikipedia doesn't have a strict definition. I propose a standards committee meet to disambiguate this once and for all.
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Dare I point out that his personal preferences in ties are the topic RMS spends the most amount of text on?
I thought his opinion on ties (or really on the social pressure of ties) was one of the more interesting sections. BTW, he uses more text to describe his taste in music.
"The people who wear ties under these circumstances are victim-coperpetrators: each one who cedes to this pressure and wears a tie increases the pressure on others. This is a central concept for understanding other forms of propagating nastiness, including nonfree software and Facebook. In fact, it was in regard to ties that I first recognized this phenomenon.
I don't condemn victim-coperpetrators, since they are primarily victims and only secondarily perpetrators. But I believe I should not be one of them. I hope my refusal to wear a tie will make it easier for others to refuse as well."
I don't really see wearing or not wearing ties as some kind of moral imperative.
It's Stallman's own title, but a much more accurate title would be "RMS Opinions" I think it's interesting for that reason though, because it doesn't say as much about his actual lifestyle as it does what he thinks about other people. For instance: > As a matter of principle, I refuse to own a tie. Tells us more about an opinion he's made about other people. If he wanted to be more descriptive of his lifestyle, he co…
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It is more fundamental than that: religion does not offer any falsifiable claims. It is not that we do not apply the scientific method to it. It is that, by design , religion is out of bounds of the scientific method.
> It is more fundamental than that: religion does not offer any falsifiable claims Most religions offer plenty. In the Bible for example, age and creation of the world, the great flood, praying can cure you, God punishes bad people, etc. The claims that have been falsified are nowadays interpreted as "metaphorical" stories.
†As in deus ex machina.
Stallman on Harry Potter: > I don't say you shouldn't read these books. That I leave to the author. I only urge you not to pay for them. Quite the upstanding citizen. His justification for this is even more bizarre, he accuses JK Rowling of something hypothetical: > Suppose that the mistakenly sold Harry Potter books had been ebooks: then instead of ordering her fans not to read her books, Rowling could have ordered…
Quite the upstanding citizen.
What's your issue with it? Is it wrong to read without paying for it, now? Personally, I like libraries.
How does he reconcile using somebody else's cell phone to make a call if he's not willing to use one himself?