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Comment by justinclift | Hacker News Reader

> As a teen, she kitted out her home PC with a terabyte of memory ...

Ugh. Wired articles have a reputation for poor accuracy, but that's taking the piss.

I used to like wired. A lot. But when Chris Anderson left, you could almost see the editorial turn occur. Wired went from a magazine about technology and the people who use it to a magazine about people who might occasionally use technology. Basically GQ but they ask the subject of an article what apps are on their iPhone (and they actually did this, years ago)

I got to meet Chris Anderson once, when I was visiting the Reddit office back in 2010. I wasn't really able to articulate what an impact wired had on me at that point, as I didn't really appreciate it then, but we're I to meet him again, I'd absolutely make sure to convey it

As for the article in question, I wasn't able to make it past a couple paragraphs of purple prose before resorting to a kagi summary. In reading said summary, I wasn't missing much. An article gushing about a criminal who steals people's identity to commit fraud seems a bit on the nose to me

Wired basically underwent the same kind of Channel Drift as the Discovery Channel. Eventually all niche media will simply become mass media as they attempt to appeal to the biggest possible audience.

"Line must go up" is a very, very tired trope around here (and many other places). But it often feels like the primary thing which drives soooo much destruction of value.

This describes hacker news too.

Media that does badly will try new things.

But there also many like ESPN who stick to their topic decade after decade.

Oh but there are many other facinating angles.

0) The victims of identity theft didn't know or lose anything.

1) The internet was build, a truly crazy amount of code was written but you still cant conveniently use anything and prove you are you.

2) Each delivery or taxi service had its own failures. Each reinvented the wheel each with their own holes.

3) Taxi and delivery services profited from being unable to id people. The worse they did the more they profited.

4) She got to keep some of the profit.

5) The punishment is pointless as it doesn't convince people to not eat and not live anywhere. Prison is a resort by comparison.

6) And finally the failure to have this wizard do anything useful in a legal way.

Terabyte of mass storage, not RAM. Some call it "memory".

No one with a shred of experience calls drive space memory.

Not defending the garbage tech awareness of the writer of the article, but tons of non-english speakers do.

Cannot speak for portugese language (which is the predominant one in Brazil), but I can confirm that in russian if you say “memory” (“память”), you are talking about storage capacity. Not RAM.

I don't know what point you're trying to make here, I'm sure if you translate and reverse translate a phrase in enough languages you can get some sort of synonym back.

You think 'Lauren Smiley' doesn't speak english and auto translated this article?

> You think 'Lauren Smiley' doesn't speak english and auto translated this article?

No. But I think it could be the case that the author simply talked to the parents or the subject of the article, and then simply translated what they said in that part from portugese to english. And as a tech non-literate person, she obviously didn’t think to ask them “are you talking about storage space or RAM?”

But it's literally referred to as "secondary memory" in ye olde literature (where "primary memory" is the RAM... I wonder why the CPU cache never got a place though).

Stop the nonsense. Computer manuals from 40 years ago are not how anyone refers to things now whether they know nothing or are an expert.

CPU cache has never been sold as an independent upgrade. Wonder if a marketing study has ever been done on whether products with names that have been anthropomorphized sell better than those that have not such as random access memory vs storage. Maybe the appeal of being able to buy something illegal like human body parts or slave(s) [drive(s)] seems like it would have a cool factor for some consumers that has some how outweighed the disgust by others.

I’m fairly certain L2 caches were external (and could be purchased separately) on 486 and earlier systems

Back in the day we used to insert "memory cards" into cameras in order to store photos on them. You could transfer that memory card to a reader that was plugged into a PC and it would show up as a drive with files you could transfer to your computer's hard drive.

Personally, I usually specify RAM or hard drive/storage just to make sure I'm clear, because "memory" is pretty ambiguous in my experience.

And let’s not forget the “Nvidia processor” in the same sentence.

Good point. :)

Everyone who read this 'mistake' knew what they meant. And it's not particularly crucial to the main story.

Was just going to say this… what a bummer

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