They're not saying it's not worth talking about. They're saying it should have a date tag, as is customary for old articles on Hacker News.
Readit NewsSniffnoy commented on An Illustrated Guide to Hippo Castration (2014) science.org/content/artic... · Posted by u/joebig
https://kagi.com/proxy/latest?c=LsHiRSPxhD29sXqLhdI0j1EsQ98n...
It was the comic too.
Interesting! Do you have a link to the full comic by any chance?
Go back a bit further for why.
Netscape Navigator did, in fact, reject invalid HTML. Then along came Internet Explorer and chose “render invalid HTML dwim” as a strategy. People, my young naive self included, moaned about NN being too strict. NN eventually switched to the tag soup approach. XHTML 1.0 arrived in 2000, attempting to reform HTML by recasting it as an XML application. The idea was to impose XML’s strict parsing rules: well-formed documents only, close all your tags, lowercase element names, quote all attributes, and if the document is malformed, the parser must stop and display an error rather than guess. XHTML was abandoned in 2009. When HTML5 was being drafted in 2004-onwards, the WHATWG actually had to formally specify how browsers should handle malformed markup, essentially codifying IE’s error-recovery heuristics as the standard.
The article itself falsifies this explanation; IE wasn't released until August 1995. The HTML draft specs published prior to this already specified that these tags didn't need closing; these simply weren't invalid HTML in the first place.
The oldest public HTML documentation there is, from 1991, demonstrates that <li>, <dt>, and <dd> tags don't need to be closed! And the oldest HTML DTD, from 1992, explicitly specifies that these, as well as <p>, don't need closing. Remember, HTML is derived from SGML, not XML; and SGML, unlike XML, allows for the possibility of tags with optional close. The attempt to make HTML more XML-like didn't come until later.
Sniffnoy commented on Drones that recharge directly on transmission lines ycombinator.com/companies... · Posted by u/alphabetatango
Huh, is that legal? I mean I guess it is when the power company is the customer, as they talk about, but otherwise?
Location: New York City
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: Maybe if it's on the east coast
Technologies: JavaScript, TypeScript, C, Haskell, Solidity, C#, MUMPS
Resume: https://haltman.neocities.org/resume.pdf
Email: harry.j.altman@gmail.com
I'm good at this sort of nitpicky work, spotting and thinking about edge cases. I like getting things exactly right, even though that obviously isn't always possible due to various constraints. I've been kind of wondering if I should get into embedded development; I find it appealing when things are low-level or similarly constrained. I've beaten Microcorruption. :) (The original levels, I haven't played the new ones.)
I'm also quite interested in unusual or obscure data formats, and working on Truffle Debugger and its associated libraries certainly involved a bunch of having to figure undocumented formats and interfaces. :) I put down above what languages I've worked substantially in but I'd say I'm a generalist and will figure out whatever you give me (I knew approximately no Javascript, Typescript, or Solidity when I started working at Consensys).
I'm a mathematician by background and in my spare time, so after the Truffle Debugger project was shut down I took some time off to focus on my mathematical projects. But now I'm looking for work again! If you need someone like me, I'm available for hire!
Sniffnoy commented on Software engineers should be a little bit cynical seangoedecke.com/a-little... · Posted by u/zdw
I say it’s a straw man because it’s a caricature that is easy to knock down. The point of my comment was that I would be surprised to find out that even 20% of people think this, much less a majority.
20% is a lot of people! If 20% of people think something is true, that's something worth arguing against!
"Straw man" strictly speaking means something you invented, although, yes, that is likely overly strict, since you can find someone saying just about anything. But 20%? That's a substantial fraction of the relevant population!
The other thing worth noting here is that the point of a straw-man fallacy is. In a straw-man fallacy, you replace your opponent's argument with a ridiculous version, and argue against that instead of what they actually said. Or, alternatively, it's where you are arguing against some general nebulous concept, and you instantiate it as something ridiculous -- which maybe someone is actually saying! -- and use your argument against the ridiculous version as an argument against the more general concept, tarring other versions by association. (The real solution here of course is to not argue about nebulous concepts like that in the first place, it's not a useful way of arguing, but that's another matter.)
But if you're not performing either of these types of substitution, if the ridiculous position is actually out there and you're simply arguing against it as it is and not trying to use it to substitute for something else or tar something else by association... then that's not a straw man, that's just people believing ridiculous things and you having to argue against them.
Sniffnoy commented on Software engineers should be a little bit cynical seangoedecke.com/a-little... · Posted by u/zdw
> We live in a late-stage-capitalist hellscape, where large companies are run by aspiring robber barons who have no serious convictions beyond desiring power. All those companies want is for obedient engineering drones to churn out bad code fast, so they can goose the (largely fictional) stock price. Meanwhile, end-users are left holding the bag: paying more for worse software, being hassled by advertisements, and dealing with bugs that are unprofitable to fix.
This is quite a straw man. I think a lot of engineers believe that other parts of the org lack perspective, sure. I’ve certainly seen managers or salespeople genuinely convinced that they’re delivering value when I know for a fact they’re selling snake oil. But I never assume it’s in bad faith, just an artifact of a shitty feedback and communication culture. People want to do good work, they just don’t often get good signal when they aren’t.
Why do you say it's a strawman? All of those claims seem pretty familiar to me, even if, as the post says, the full exact combination might not be. You say you never assume it's in bad faith. Well, great! But that doesn't mean it's a strawman, it seems that other people do!
Sniffnoy commented on Ireland’s Diarmuid Early wins world Microsoft Excel title bbc.com/news/articles/cj4... · Posted by u/1659447091
Sniffnoy commented on Mathematicians don't care about foundations (2022) matteocapucci.wordpress.c... · Posted by u/scrivanodev
This seems to me to be the same as saying that mathematicians do not care about the meaning of their theorems. That they are only playing a game. They care about consistency only because inconsistency means one can cheat in their game.
I know TFA says that the purpose of foundations is to find a happy home (frame) for the mathematicians intuition. But choosing foundation has real implications on the mathematics. You can have a foundation where every total function on the real numbers is continuous. Or one where Banach–Tarski is just false. So, unless they are just playing a game, the mathematicians should care!
> But choosing foundation has real implications on the mathematics. You can have a foundation where every total function on the real numbers is continuous. Or one where Banach–Tarski is just false.
I mean, mathematicians do care about the part of the foundations that affect what they do! Classical vs constructive matters, yes. But material vs structural is not something most mathematicians think about. (They don't think about classical vs constructive either, but that's because they don't really know about constructive and it's not what they're trying to do, rather than because it's irrelevant to them like material vs structural.)