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Re:Serbia just elected the world's brainiest parliament on Saturday October 31, 2026 @10:52AM (#50316719)
> * Everyone is quick to make judgement on something they don't know all the details of. > [snip]

I don't know how large the HN reader base is, but at the time of writing there are 309 comments on this story. I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that the HN reader base is quite likely significantly larger than 309 people, presumably by several orders of magnitude. As such, the vast majority of readers ("overwhelmingly intellectuals") have indeed decided not to make a any judgement on this thing they don't know all the details of.

Re:There is no official XScreenSaver GitHub repository on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @07:56AM (#50164945)
jwz also famously special cases traffic from hacker news. You may have better luck if you copy & paste the link to avoid sending referrer headers.
Re:How Fast is Python 3.15? on Wednesday October 07, 2026 @12:59PM (#49995555)
> PyPy dates to 2007

Not to mention that the PyPy name was established long before the initial release too. It was in development at least since 2003, under that name.

IIRC there was a PyPy talk at EuroPython 2003.

The first commit to the current repo is dated Feb 24, 2003, and the commit message is:

    Move the pypy trunk into its own top level directory so the path names
    stay constant.
...indicating there were previous history that got lost in the migration to hg or git.

In the next episode of Complaining About Names; Why did those silly South Americans give their forest the same name as Bezos' company? :-)

Re:RF Cafe on Sunday August 23, 2026 @03:54AM (#49406887)
On the About page (https://www.rfcafe.com/business/about-rf-cafe-disclaimer.htm) there's a map showing some high level visitor distribution, and there's a couple of dots in Thailand.

There's also the following copy on the same page:

"Repeated, crippling DDoS attacks from the following countries has caused me to block their access. Apologies to the innocent.

Brazil, Singapore, Angola, Seychelles, UAE."

My guess is that the geolocation Gods placed GP in Singapore.

Re:How does IKEA come up with names for its products? on Wednesday August 19, 2026 @08:02AM (#49360376)
Kallax :-)
I don't know... I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that you're from a country where football isn't very popular. I don't think you realize just how many fans there are. How utterly ingrained it is in the culture of many countries. "non-fans" make up a minuscule minority of the population of at least Europe, and as far as I understand it South America and parts of Africa too. Not sure about Asia (varies wildly between countries, I suppose), but according to [0] it's estimated that about 3.5 billion people are considered football fans.

This is certainly something many people I know have cared a lot about - and again, I'm not a football enthusiast myself, but still the vast majority of the people I know are, because, not being one really is an outlier.

[0] https://www.topendsports.com/world/lists/popular-sport/fans....

> There are plenty of stoppages in game already which take as much time.

Well. Not really. And those "stoppages" are part of the game. Actually watching the players quarrel with the referee and whatnot is something football fans want to do. It's not comparable.

I'm most certainly not a football fan, but I definitely know that a match consists of two 45 minute (and then some) halves. It's pretty much equivalent to a non motor enthusiast knowing that there are usually four wheels on a car.

I'd say this is very, very common knowledge in huge parts of the world. It's not something only enthusiasts and purists know.

Re:Kill The Cookie Banner on Tuesday July 28, 2026 @05:42AM (#49081538)
Is it completely unthinkable that we just don't want to be spied upon?
Re:Kill The Cookie Banner on Sunday July 26, 2026 @12:41PM (#49059830)
I've seen people argue, with a straight face, that they prefer to get ads that are "relevant to them". Including here on Hacker News.
Re:Dupes (product clones) took over the world on Monday July 20, 2026 @10:45AM (#48979604)
Of course it is. I have no idea why you'd suggest such a thing.
Re:Dupes (product clones) took over the world on Monday July 20, 2026 @01:32AM (#48974688)
> And maybe there are even fewer people to worry about this, because when the moved to the city, those people stopped having children.

> Who is this good for? Is it good for you?

Well, as a global population reduction is sorely needed, this is good for pretty much everybody. There's absolutely no way we can keep extracting resources and polluting at the rate demanded by our current enormous population (which has more than doubled in my life time).

Unfortunately, your theory isn't working, as the population still grows.

Re:Why American ambulance rides are so expensive on Friday July 10, 2026 @03:34AM (#48856869)
Foreigner from the socialist Nordics here, so perhaps I'm brain washed or something, but I don't get it. After some brief Googling it appears that you mean they have proposed a tax on a service that for some reason used to be tax-exempt.

Why was it tax-exempt? Why should it be?

What sets it apart from any other service where you pay someone to do something for you - such as cook you a meal, transport you somewhere or build you a house?

Re:India's surprise baby bust is a warning to the world on Friday June 05, 2026 @05:25PM (#48418560)
An alternative take is that we've endured thousands of years of propaganda aimed at keeping women as child bearing, house keeping slaves, and we're finally starting to see the end of that in at least some cultures.

But of course, it's only "propaganda" when you don't like it.

Re:We are Poles, so, of course, we print in Latin on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @10:59AM (#48295372)
Both priests are assumed to understand Latin. The situation they want to avoid is starting up a conversation with someone in a language they don't know.

So the options are:

1) Use Polish, with the risk of being rude if you happen to speak to the Spanish priest

2) Use Latin and ask "do you speak Polish?", and both the Polish and the Spanish priest will understand.

You could of course argue that it's not so very rude to accidentally try to strike up a conversation with someone in a language they don't know, but apparently Tade0's father thinks it is.

Re:Exit IP VPN servers mitigation rollout on Tuesday May 26, 2026 @11:44AM (#48281332)
> But unfortunately these addresses are hard to remember and "nobody" recognizes them when reading examples.

How does that matter? The point isn't that the reader should know that "oh, this is a reserved address". The point is that there should be no room for the address that's actually being used by someone to end up being used incorrectly just because it showed up in some random documentation.

Much like how you probably wouldn't be thrilled if your phone number was used as an example in some random documentation somewhere.

Re:Ploopy Bean: a trackpoint for every computer on Saturday May 16, 2026 @05:37AM (#48158546)
Perhaps. But these ones have been around a while. Here's the new HN story, seven years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21263264

Not sure how long you're a startup...

Re:The vi family on Wednesday May 13, 2026 @04:38AM (#48119313)
Well, TRAMP was preceded by ange-ftp, which let you edit files remotely over ftp. I was using that in 1995, and I didn't get the impression then that it was brand new, so it had probably been around for a while already.

Of course, if your problem is "/usr won't mount", then it's likely that the ftp server isn't running either, so the advice still makes sense.

Re:Google Broke reCAPTCHA for De-Googled Android Users on Sunday May 10, 2026 @04:19PM (#48087507)
Alright. I didn't know that. "Just call them" did not sound like it included any kind of authentication procedure.

But giving birthdate (available to anyone via a single query in a public database) and (sometimes?! - what?!) PIN over the phone wouldn't really be considered good enough here. Birthdate is, as I said, public knowledge. And a phone is too insecure a medium for transmitting a password.

I'm not super interested in an long argument about whether it's reasonable that this isn't considered secure or not. I'm just letting you know what reality looks like. And the reality is that "just call them" is not a solution, because such information will simply not be handed out over the phone.

Re:Google Broke reCAPTCHA for De-Googled Android Users on Saturday May 09, 2026 @05:03PM (#48078233)
Not sure how that's relevant. There are computers now. Regulations change with the times. Green lasers weren't controlled in the 1700:s either.

Are you comfortable with anybody being able to ring up the hospital and say "yo, it's majorchord, how are my gonnorhea results?"

Re:Google Broke reCAPTCHA for De-Googled Android Users on Saturday May 09, 2026 @08:38AM (#48074515)
Fairly sure that would be considered a breach of patient confidentiality where I live, at least.
Odd point to raise in a thread about a family killed while waiting at a bus stop in broad daylight. Do you think reflective clothing would have changed the outcome of the event significantly?
Re:The becquerel as an SI unit for request rate on Sunday April 19, 2026 @04:44AM (#47822797)
I guess there's a difference between talking about how many requests a system is capable of handling, and how many they actually get.

At least when i encountered the discussion initially (some thirty years ago) I'd say we usually talked about how many requests the system was capable of handling. Then requests per second was the obvious unit since a request usually took less than a second to process (obviously depending on the system and so on - but mostly), so using that unit often gave a fairly low, comprehensible number.

Was it ten? A hundred (very impressive)? Perhaps even a thousand (very, very impressive!)?

Multiply those numbers by 60, and there's suddenly a lot more mental gymnastics involved. By 3600 and you're well into "all big numbers look the same" land.

Re:Steam on Linux Use Skyrocketed Above 5% in March on Thursday April 02, 2026 @08:03AM (#47613288)
I've got 6.19.8 in stable-backports. I don't know. I don't feel massively outdated.
Re:Steam on Linux Use Skyrocketed Above 5% in March on Thursday April 02, 2026 @05:09AM (#47611883)
> Gaming stuff needs a bit more bleeding edge packages.

Not sure I agree. I've been gaming on Debian since 2005, and while it certainly was some work in the beginning, it's been pretty painless for the last five years or so. I'm on Debian stable (mostly) at the moment, and don't really know what "bleeding edge" packages I would be missing.

Fair enough. Point taken :)
Well, yes, that sentence definitely simplified matters a bit. The fact is though, that those who expressed concerns about Microsoft - in that particular thread, and in others - were generally ridiculed in roughly the tone I imitated in my original post.

Of course there were people raising concerns, though. I figured that was pretty obvious in my original post. If there hadn't been any people raising concerns, nobody would have had to dismiss them - condescendingly or not.

So yes, I (incorrectly) used the word "everyone" to mean "a lot of people" in a sentence where I figured it was quite obvious that that's what I was doing, and in a way I've seen it used before in English so many times that I thought it was a common and accepted pattern. Perhaps I am wrong about the last bit though. ESL speaker, so that's quite possible.

"You're just a bunch of fanatic, Linux obsessed Microsoft haters living in the past. Microsoft are the good guys now."

-- ca. everyone here, during the GitHub acquisition

Re:Shell Tricks That Make Life Easier (and Save Your Sanity) on Thursday March 26, 2026 @11:37AM (#47531832)
I once saw this pattern referred to as a bashtag, which I think was an excellent name (no matter if you actually run bash as your shell or not).
> The ~foo as backup convention is not part of any standard.

Emacs does foo~ by default, not ~foo.

In either case, you're not really supposed to edit files in sites-enabled. That directory is expected to contain symlinks to files in sites-available. I'm not going to say with any certainty that one of the reasons for this indeed is that the pattern (which was used by apache as well - and perhaps other things before it) protects against accidentally reading backup files, but it's not impossible.

So there's definitely a case of holding it wrong if you end up with backup files in that directory.

Re:"Warn about PyPy being unmaintained" on Sunday March 08, 2026 @09:09AM (#47297029)
No. PyPy development was ongoing long before the first release. The first intact commit in the PyPy repo is from February 2003: https://github.com/pypy/pypy/commit/6434e25b53aa307288e5cd8c.... And that commit indicates there's been development going on for a while already. The commit message is:

"Move the pypy trunk into its own top level directory so the path names stay constant."

PyPy migrated from Subversion to git at some point. Not sure how much of the history survived the migration.

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