Contracts don't necessarily need a signature to be valid. If you order food at a restaurant, there is an implied contract that you will pay for the meal.
However, this amount is almost always stated in the menu, so it isn't arbitrary. In fact, in each of the above cases, the amount you pay is almost never arbitrary, but based on usage or a preset price.
I think they just mean that in many restaurants you pay only after receiving your food, but it's really not a very good comparison for a number of reasons.
Especially since all of the above listed things, but especially restaurants, have stated prices and often a means of negotiating them down or being entirely un-obligated if the providing party fails too severely.
And since, though not fully related, a restaurant can choose not to accept credit cards for instance, but there's often an obligation to state that clearly and visibly somewhere obvious beforehand, and always (in the US) an obligation to accept cash for debts owed in this manner.
I've noticed that myself and attributed it to the site having a large percentage of U.S. readers. It's annoying when there's scientific studies and then a lot of the comments take a particular political stance about the topic.
The submission itself usually disappears from the front page very quickly too which might be because of the low quality comments.
Interesting that they are linked to a limited number of people - that does imply astroturfing to my mind.
I'm glad to see that I'm wrong about it being a U.S.-centric site. My default assumption is that a lot of websites are heavily U.S. biased and a 50% U.S. vs the rest of the world sounds like a good mix to me. (I'm in the UK).
So basically astroturfing? Does this type of activity automatically get flagged? I wish there were a way for us regular users to be able to detect this. Otherwise, we end up with these discussions where people conclude that something is, say, a widespread mentality in the U.S, or a "Silicon Valley thing", when in reality it could be a small number of bad actors.
It's quite difficult to assess what's happening on HN from the outside (I know, I've tried).
It's both bad form and against guidelines to make accusations.
But you can ping mods if you suspect some sort of promotion/demotion ring, sockpuppets, etc. I'd emailed dang about an hour ago on this thread. My regret is not having done so earlier.
> a lot of the comments take a particular political stance about the topic.
And oftentimes, these political stances are US-centric and don't make sense to anyone else, e.g. you might have an article about the efficacy of masks and then you'll read a dozen comments saying that "Fauci lied to us", which is completely irrelevant to anyone not living in the US (if you really wanted to generalise it, you'd have to claim that politicians in most countries lied to their people which IMHO is a much harder sell, but whatever).
Whilst much of Europe is well past climate denialism, with the exception of the petro-fascist state of Russia, there's still an active English-speaking denialist community in the UK, less so in politics than in the largely right-wing / conservative press, with such people as Matt Ridley leading that brigade.
I spend a great deal of time reading and listening to news from across Europe, and the degree to which climate, degrowth, and energy transition are treated as mainstream topics is far ahead of the US, another petro-state.
(Notably, Norway doesn't seem to have followed the lead of other petro-states in climate denial that I'm aware, though its own oil-wealth legacy is distinctive on several grounds.)
I recall seeing something (likely a youtube video on cosmology) that suggested that the Big Bang would be the white hole horizon (i.e. a singularity in out past) and that does make some kind of sense as it'd be impossible to go inside the Big Bang. I recall there being some good reasons as to why that's not believed to be the case though and also why the visible universe doesn't have an event horizon.
> the Big Bang would be the white hole horizon (i.e. a singularity in out past)
The white hole horizon is not the same thing as the white hole singularity. The "Big Bang" as an initial singularity in our universe (which is not actually the correct usage of the term "Big Bang", but that's a whole other discussion) would be the white hole singularity, not the horizon.
Note also that in a white hole model of our universe, we would be inside the white hole horizon, not outside it.
> the script exited with an error. But it didn't tell you that.
Yes it did, by having a non-zero exit code. However, it didn't explicitly mention that it didn't complete successfully, but that's down to the script writer. I like to include a function to tidy up temporary files etc. when the script exits (e.g. trap __cleanup_before_exit EXIT) and it's easy to also assign a function to run when ERR is triggered - if you wish, you can set it to always provide an error backtrace.
Akshuaaaly, I think you'll find that any BASH script uses an array for the command line arguments.
Personally, I'm fine with BASH arrays (even associative ones) and yes, the syntax can be opaque, but they get the job done. I find that the long-term advantages of BASH outweigh the many, many problems with it. (If you want something to keep running for 20 years on a variety of different machines and architectures, then BASH is easier to manage than almost any other language).
Command line argument parsing is already a complicated issue in Bash. It’s not a hard rule, but whenever I have to Google Bash’s array syntax I think to myself “stop it now, you’ll regret it”.
It hasn't got the same level of cross compatibility though. I can just copy a BASH script from some x86 machine and it'll run just fine on an ARM processor.
The big problem with trying to move on from BASH is that it's everywhere and is excellent at tying together other unix tools and navigating the filesystem - it's at just the right abstraction level to be the duct tape of languages. Moving to other languages provides a lot more safety and power, but then you can't rely on the correct version being necessarily installed on some machine you haven't touched in 10 years.
I'm not a fan of powershell myself as the only time I've tried it (I don't do much with Windows), I hit a problem with it (or the object I was using) not being able to handle more than 256 characters for a directory and file. That meant that I just installed cygwin and used a BASH script instead.
reply