shrughes

Yesterday, I made a mistake. Without thinking, I made a post on Hacker News in response to some other posts that other Hacker Newsers made, and I want to apologize.

I value blending in to society. I value making the pretense of caring about others. I value shutting the fuck up instead of arguing with retards about all the stupid retarded shit that happens in Hacker News comment threads, who should know better than to share their inane opinions about shit that happens in the universe and the open source communities. Yesterday, I went against these principles and posted on Hacker News, and now I’m ashamed. There are constructive ways to talk about subject matter, but that’s irrelevant on Hacker News because there’s always another moron who’ll reply to you in a way that betrays total incomprehension of what you were saying. I will be thinking about avoiding these

Okay, this parody is getting lame. So anyway, fuck this guy: http://programmingtour.blogspot.com/2013/01/im-sorry.html

He’s so sorry that people found out he’s a complete asshole. He was pretending to be nice for years and years on the internet, and now everybody knows. Everybody knows that he’s an asshole!

Let’s hate him forever.

Here’s a Hacker News thread about that apology. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5107264 Specifically, read the posts by __cle.

There exists this disease on the Internet which is the set of people who react badly to things such as this:

void main() {
    printf("Hello, world!\n");
}

They’ll flare their hoods and puff out, “main should be declared to return int and not void because that’s what the C++ standard says, your code is non-standard and thus it’s bad!” Well gee, it would be just horrid if somebody porting the code had to change the return value of one function.

The problem with you, if you’re one of these people, is that you have nothing better to say.  This is the sort of thing where you sit in your chair at your computer like the little smugnesty you are and find some petty fault in the way other people do things.  Guess what: you’re unimportant and you don’t matter.  You should find something more important to bitch about, like problems with people’s code that actually matter.  Or problems with people bitching about code that doesn’t matter.

From the wipe(1) man page:

I hereby speculate that harddisks can use the spare remapping area to secretly make copies of your data. Rising totalitarianism makes this almost a certitude. It is quite straightforward to implement some simple filtering schemes that would copy potentially interesting data. Better, a harddisk can probably detect that a given file is being wiped, and silently make a copy of it, while wiping the original as instructed.

Recovering such data is probably easily done with secret IDE/SCSI commands. My guess is that there are agreements between harddisk manufac‐ turers and government agencies. Well-funded mafia hackers should then be able to find those secret commands too.