lone-commenter

> they just add a tiny markup to their prices to pay the eventual fine instead

Ironically, this counter-argument applies perfectly to the "US solution".

On the contrary, EU's huge fines have a better chance of being effective.

I just tried asking ChatGPT #5 and it answered this:

I'm sorry, but the term "optimystic" does not have a widely recognized or established meaning. It appears to be a combination of the words "optimistic" and "mystic," [...]

Relevant paragraph IMO:

> First, it includes an appeal to trust, which is a line of reasoning with which I don't agree. You can't trust your colleagues, just like you can't trust yourself. A code review serves more purposes than keeping malicious actors out of the code base. It also helps catch mistakes, security issues, or misunderstandings. It can also improve shared understanding of common goals and standards. Yes, this is also possible with other means, such as pair or ensemble programming, but from that, it doesn't follow that code reviews can't do that. They can. I've lived that dream.

I think that the other counter-argument discussed in the article can't confute Farley because, contrary to the author's stated intentions, it is in fact a straw man. The author focuses on the benefits of "asynchronous" workflows over "synchronous" ones: i.e., in his words, reviewing pull requests is easier (for an introvert like himself, at least) than dealing with the social stress involved in pair/ensemble programming.

To "disable" the Dock — not really: it will pop up sometimes, e.g. when some icon bounces, but anyway — you can

    defaults write com.apple.Dock autohide -bool true
    defaults write com.apple.Dock autohide-delay -float 100
    killall Dock

Here 100 is how many seconds you will have to keep the cursor on the edge of the screen before the Dock appears. You could set it to 3 or 5 should you need the Dock sometimes but don't want to trigger it by accident.

> but Iraq war was a good thing for Iraq

I wouldn't even know where to start. This is such an obviously illogical argument. I mean, man, c'mon.

> it would force advertisers to use less effective ad text to avoid filters.

That seems counterproductive to me. I mean, ads would still be annoying. And that’s why we block them.

> 6. Copy files to/from a flash drive.

It's possible (but yeah, it's been a problem for long).

Anyway:

> 4. Switch between front and back cameras while recording a video.

This is the only point that actually affects a typical user. The others are cherry-picked technological differences between the two platforms. They have nothing to do with usability, which is what people mean when they say iOS is simpler to use.

> 8. Copy whatsapp chats from older phone.

Yeah. If you kept the chats only locally (which you should).

> 5. Play fortnite.

Got me!

PS. I used Android for long and liked it. I just think iOS is somewhat nicer and safer to use for common people.

> My father for example always used Android. [...]

> [H]e got an iPhone and he find it more difficult to use [...]

I guess that's precisely because he is used to Android, not because iOS is more difficult.

We may agree that piracy is theft, but 'ALittleLight has a point.

From Novembrer 2011 — when it was published — to September 2012 — when the author believes it's been "pirated" — there is a window of just 10 months. Not 21 months. 10 months.

Now, did sales beging to drop only after September? Were them already going down? How long before? How do sales typically go over time for books? For Amazon books? Other possible causes?

Moreover, I think your analogy is completely off. Here is a better one.

You can't find your credit card anymore. You are notified of suspect online payments by your bank. Thinking about it, you're quite sure you left it at the supermarket; and you somehow conclude that that sneaky cashier must have stolen it.

But it turns out, your son got a trojan while trying to pirate a PlayStation game on your family PC with the magnificent Windows XP, and your card number was saved in Google Chrome.

Except the emacs sequence will get you tendinitis in the long run, won't it?

> The argument for censorship against stupidity assumes exactly that, that the majority of people are stupid which they are not.

It's not censorship against stupidity. It's censorship against bullshitters who spread medical misinformation that may put people in danger; factually untenable opinions, expressed in an assertive manner, in a context which seems authoritative to the layperson.

Nobody says the majority is stupid, nor it is relevant. Protecting a minority is as good an excuse as it is protecting the majority, don't you think?

The original game in Let's Make a Deal went exactly like you described. Monty Hall opened the remaining doors; no option to switch.

Then there is the ambiguity as whether the host will always offer you to switch or just when he hasn't revealed the car.

Google could have given its users the same advantages of AMP without AMP just by saying: we'll penalize slow and cluttered websites in web searches, in favour of fast and clean ones.

That would have been equally painful for the developers, but not for the users.

> Focus on the things people are saying and not nitpicking their delivery and you will absorb more information.

I agree. Form is not so important.

Those are typographic eccentricities, to be pedant :)

And they're not even that uncommon on the Internet and amongst tech people. (See the Jargon file[1], for example.)

But I get your point: pedantry is often needless, and sometimes even lacks proper justification (see taejo's comment). But it's difficult to stop seeing errors when you see them, so I would forgive the parent for being that Hacker News guy.

[1] http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/writing-style.html

Pure Saul Goodman style.

A better description would be “I know what people that happened to share your current IP address downloaded on BitTorrent”. Given that providers either implement dynamic addressing (unless the user pays for a static address) or NAT, it’s not accurate at all.

I meant that it's dubious whether we can reproduce a brain-like machine until we'll understand the matter well enough to either prove it possible or impossible.

Anyway, I feel like you. If it's been done once, it can't be impossible in any meaningful sense.

Further, the argument from lack of understanding would work only if knowledge (and science) could not advance any further; but that's tough to prove -- not to say that it's used over and over in faith vs. reason debates to the point it's become annoying -- so the argument is quite weak.

We don’t understand something. It’s a complicated phenomenon. So it’s impossible to replicate? I think the “argument” is so silly it doesn’t need to be disproved. If one wants to prove something impossible they’d better avoid logical fallacies. A priori we can’t say that it’s impossible, nor that it’s certainly doable.

So do they feed such information only when training the system?

Actually, it’s 1/998001 :)

> ... we have a small favour to ask. Millions are flocking to the Guardian for quality news every day.

I'm perplexed:

> Blog posts, sign-up pages, curated lists, and other reading material can't be tried out, so can't be Show HNs.

It's a list, but it's not intended to be consumed the way a list of books or other resources is meant to. It's a list of useful scripts that can be tried right away.

The use of check marks and "no entry" symbols throughout the article is purposefully misleading. Chrome gets check marks even for bad features, like tracking; Firefox gets gray marks even for good features, like built-in anti-tracking. It's fine to take money from Google to sponsor their browser. But faking an ad as an objective comparison and using subtle tricks to deceive the reader is deplorable.

"You're using passwords wrong."

This made me think of a joking short poem by Galileo Galilei, "Against the Donning of the Gown".*

A passage:

    I now conclude, and turn to you, signior,
    And force you to confess, against your will,
    The Greatest Good will be all clothes to abhor.

    Think, if you please, of happy times gone by and
    Of times when malice and deceit were still unknown,
    And things under the stars went hand in hand;

    You will then see that, not only when alone,
    But all the time, in rain and weather fair
    Man went unclothed, both young and fully grown.

    Nothing at all, no knickers did they wear,
    So that, what good there was, but also what of bad,
    Was well exposed, out in the open air.

* The translation is by Giovanni Bignami

So... being forced to wear clothes at all when in public is a breach of civil rights, too?

This won't improve the security, right? Both apps use the same crypto for communication; while regarding the quality of infrastructure and client's code, they are at best comparable.

The only point against WhatsApp (and a good one) is it's owned by Facebook, and thus so-called metadata belong to them.

But one may be happy to see people moving away from Facebook.

Yes, technology can benefit any field; I know it. But this doesn't make all this startup business around things which are completely divorced from reality worth to pursue.

Productivity growth is a myth of the money-centric attitude that I'm criticizing; I don't see how it could confute my point.