| HN Mirror

EGreg 4579 days ago

Randall Munroe you seein this? :)

saraid216 4579 days ago

What, the katana wasn't enough?

repulsebo 4579 days ago

The problem is that people are shooting the messenger and focus on a guy living by his words which is quite unusual.

The same happened here where most comments discuss stallman and not the actual matter of the post.

This is a nice list of sourced documentation about facebook dangers, I happen to maintain one myself for future reference and it is quite useful to have.

twelvechairs 4579 days ago

to actually focus on the linked article however - this isn't just an opinion but an actual reason why Facebook has lost its huge earlier momentum of use and user signups. though there's quite a big social network inertia, over time its going to be hard to justify the high-profit 'all your personal information is ours to sell and market' model.

mrobot 4579 days ago

That doesn't save time, it works directly against this by reducing it to a bunch of superficial funny bullets, it's an attack on preserving privacy, as usual. Let's talk about the article at least a little bit if we're going to talk.

Just wanting something that works is the same as having nothing to hide is the same as not understanding or caring about privacy.

His ideas aren't bad, but he is terrible at selling them.

saryant 4579 days ago

He's pretty nuts. I met him when he spoke at my university a few years ago, the CS department invited him and had a reception with RMS for CS faculty and students only. At one point, a retired faculty member asked if he had any suggestions for convincing his bank to make their website Firefox-friendly since his wife didn't want to switch.

His suggestion was to lie to his wife and switch anyways...

Half the students at the speech got up and left (not kidding) when he put on a halo, proclaimed himself the Jesus Christ of Software and started auctioning off a stuffed gnu.

Add in his tirade about how evil the university IT department was for requiring authentication to access the network and you had a very pissed off administration the next day.

nicholassmith 4579 days ago

"Half the students at the speech got up and left (not kidding) when he put on a halo, proclaimed himself the Jesus Christ of Software and started auctioning off a stuffed gnu."

Wait, what?! I can only imagine that's like a car crash where you don't want to look, but you just can't tear yourself away from it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S76pHIYx3ik

lewispollard 4579 days ago

saryant 4579 days ago

It was bad. Literally no one responded to his auction, the room was dead silent. After a minute one guy offered ten bucks out of pity and that was the end of the auction.

berntb 4579 days ago

I've seen a real nerd (the guy that got the big companies to do tcp/ip in Sweden, I'm not going to write Googleable names) do an ass of himself in a similar way.

I happen to know that he considered that "funny". I'm willing to suffer his sense of humour; he is a national treasure, imnsho. The same goes for rms, I guess.

"It is a foolish buyer, he who evaluates the product being sold on the quality of the person selling it."

Everyone everywhere buys stuff based on how it has been sold to them. Not the individual or company selling the thing, but more the way the story of the thing has been told. Call them "foolish buyers" if you want, but this is how the majority of people make decisions. I suspect Stallman protests it by increasing his extremism as a response to it. That causes many people to dismiss him. The end result is that it is a disservice to his causes.

Many people do lots of foolish things, but that doesn't justify doing foolish things. Making snap judgements about people based on irrelevant criteria has been a failing point of humanity since well before you and I were born; thankfully, we've come a long way in civil liberties and in making progress on abolishing slavery, women's suffrage, gay rights, etc. The problem there was clearly more widespread than here, but the symptom is the same -- humans aren't very good at being open minded.

Yes, I understand that it's a fault in humanity, that people's decision-making skills are compromised by completely irrelevant factors. I'm sure I'm just as guilty of it as anybody else.

The point, for what it's worth, wasn't to call the parent foolish, but to point out that disregarding a good idea because the messenger isn't your favorite is, plainly put, silly. As individuals, we should be mindful of the needlessly silly things that we do, and try to be better than that.

I get the feeling that you might be talking about Stallman's appearance, whereas I am talking about his behaviour. I think more people can see past appearance than can see past unsociable/rude behaviour. Pedantically insisting that people call Linux "GNU/Linux" for example. If you were running a business, you wouldn't do that to your customers, right?

atmosx 4579 days ago

add to the above quote that the guy literally sneezes and he is front-page on HN and some hundred thousand linux/OS related forums... Which means that he is the exact opposite of a nobody in the tech community and you have a good bargain reading what he says.

lazugod 4579 days ago

Is this quote from anyone in particular?

I don't mind Stallman, but to decry all boycotts and competition-of-personal-values is itself foolish. We should care about who gets our money and our attention.

No, I just made it up.

I can see your point about vendor discretion, but that's not really the same thing. I try to avoid companies whose values do not align with my own wherever possible. In many cases, I even consider my opinions to be well founded, or even informed.

That said, I still understand them to be value judgements, and while I'm happy to discuss those values to whomever, it isn't my place to push my values onto another, and it would be silly of me to ignore the good aspects of somebody because they also possess aspects I consider to be negative.

Moreover though, it is foolish to discount good advice because you don't like the source. It is, I believe, the height of pettiness, and should be avoided at all costs by pragmatists.

unclebucknasty 4579 days ago

>No, I just made it up.

So, you were quoting yourself?

Pretty much... for effect. People like quotes, especially those written with slightly syncopated grammar.

nl 4579 days ago

Meh.. The GNU project seems fairly successful if you view it in absolute terms.

I don't mean the projects. I mean the ideas he is trying to convince people of. Take for example his stance on DRM. What does success look like, or rather, what does it not look like? You might be able to argue moderate success in music (iTunes switching to DRM-free, but Spotify having DRM), yet in books the wide acceptance and love of Amazon's Kindle indicates a lost battle.

RexRollman 4579 days ago

It is sometimes surprising that people have to be convinced to care about their own freedom.

jfoster 4578 days ago

But you might also say the same about convenience. It doesn't make sense to completely ignore either of convenience or freedom in pursuit of the other. Most people are pragmatic about it. They compromise some freedom for convenience, and compromise some convenience for greater freedom.

belorn 4579 days ago

Or convinced to reject torture.

Its an natural psychological behavior to ignore issues not directly effecting themselves or those close around them.

salient 4579 days ago

Don't forget "who can trust anyone with that hair?"

lazyant 4579 days ago

you forgot about the parrots

berntb 4579 days ago

Well, it becomes simpler if we note that:

Most reasonably informed people should agree that the [software] world is a better place because rms is in it. And not only for gcc, emacs, etc.

The rest is just a question of how many years before today he is, this time. (And yes, sometimes the world he is years before isn't our planet. But his hit statistics isn't bad.)

rrich 4579 days ago

It is. His contributions have been immeasurable. He is a classic representation of how one's presentation doesn't equate to one's contribution. Something we all battle with at one time or another in the software industry. As rough around the edges as he can be his underlying message should be undoubtedly considered.

na85 4579 days ago

I've always viewed rms as such:

The world needs someone like Stallman quite simply because his views are so extreme. You need an extremist so that moderates can seem reasonable.

SimHacker 4579 days ago

His views may be extreme, but they are extremely well thought out, well justified, and well argued (as long as you don't count user-friendly presentation and being nice to people as necessary requirements for arguing well). He's not wrong about what he says and believes, and he's extremely consistent about that, but his priorities are a lot different than most people's. And the world's a better place because of his influence on many less extreme people with different priorities. Plus he has a great sense of humor, if you don't let him get under your skin: http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/text/rms-vs-doctor.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQSRPMFDTSs

stiff 4579 days ago

How precisely are his views extreme? The criticism of Stallmans opinions (as opposed to his behaviour which is another issue) I have seen unfortunately boil down to the fact that people can not even imagine sacrificing the smallest of their conveniences for any kind of moral reasons, and consider any suggestions of resigning from them "extreme". It's like the Louis CK sketch about the favourite thing, but with Facebook or whatever:

kenjackson 4579 days ago

I no more have to subscribe to your morality as your ideology.

I'm not a bug Facebook user, but it has nothing to do with privacy. I've always known some random engineer at Facebook could read my posts, and assumed it was not a stretch for the government.

You prefer to give up conveniences because of fear of govt. I'm still much more afraid of the random engineer, but think the convenience is worth it (maybe).

loup-vaillant 4579 days ago

Come to think of it, this is true of many causes. I recall the LGBT and atheism movements: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YxdM1WChHc (She says at some point that despite the infightings, radicals and moderates actually complement each other.)

dreamfactory 4579 days ago

There's something off about that cosy consensus view, quite apart from the fact that it is so open to manipulation. It's basically highly conservative and only accepts the status quo.

The reality is that what may have seemed a completely out there view can become the new normal within a surprisingly short time when the environment or culture changes. Apart from politics, you see this in everything from fashion to music, business etc. (e.g. predicting the death of print or record shops, or 'did I really think I looked good in that - what the hell was I thinking?')

jawns 4579 days ago

I feel like he could reduce the crazy vibe by hiring a web designer to overhaul this page. Well-designed crazy usually looks a little more sane than poorly designed crazy.

phaer 4579 days ago

In my opinion his page is quite well designed. It's easy to navigate, it's obvious whats navigation and whats content. The page is very readable, you see links easily. The page loads fast and is responsible in the sense that it usable on all devices and clients i tried (including my phone and w3m in a terminal).

I guess what you mean by "well-designed" is more colors and and images, but i prefer his page over those ajaxy blogspot-themes, which get completely unusable if you are on a phone-line-connection in a remote area, and a few other pages. And that even though i have nothing against good modern css in general :)

interstitial 4579 days ago

Needs more parallax. I feel like I'm reading or something: I get the annoying sensation of thinking. I want to feel like the internet is washing over me and flowing through me. That I am one with magic electrons and the thought-beams of narcissists and sycophants.

FiloSottile 4579 days ago

I think he has thoughts along the lines of http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/

http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/

why-el 4579 days ago

This should amuse you a bit.

varjag 4579 days ago

I don't know. Most of the stuff on the page is factually correct, although a number of entries are sensationalized. If it's crazy, I'd argue it's 2nd-amendment-advocate-crazy, not timecube-crazy.

nly 4579 days ago

So, not Tom Cruise Crazy?

panacea 4579 days ago

As a web designer... I say the linked page is beautifully designed.

ams6110 4579 days ago

This style of site (plain HTML with no styles) is pretty typical for a CS person who pre-dates the world wide web.

krapp 4579 days ago

It's a site designed on behalf of a man who, as I understand it, would rather use some complicated web scraping/emailing scheme to view websites than even touch a web browser.

It is probably exactly what he intends the web to be. Or at least his little corner of it.

theboss 4579 days ago

Web designers aren't free software......