Hacker News Reader

FBISurveillanceon The Black Sky Event

This "documentary" looks like a factually incorrect fear mongering that twists facts to fit the author's narrative. After watching the trailer I don't believe this film is shot in good faith. Also have a feeling that interviews were cut unfairly.

Finally, this film looks like it's made from stock videos (of course China, Iran, Russia would be red on that map, tovarisch!). Come on, you got to do better than this.

FBISurveillanceon Ask HN: 27, accidentally became wealthy, lost drive. What should I do?

Oh, and good luck experimenting with side projects and new startups - you'll find it so much easier to make more money when you have money.

FBISurveillanceon Ask HN: 27, accidentally became wealthy, lost drive. What should I do?

Do not inflate your lifestyle.

As someone who won IPO lottery twice netting 8 figures after tax, that would be the advice.

Learn investment basics, invest your lump sum into VOO, VTI, and the likes, and enjoy luxury of knowing you don't have to work when you retire.

You might also want to watch videos of Graham Stephan on youtube - all things considered, he's very clear about how frugal lifestyle benefits you long-term.

FBISurveillanceon Vercel raises $150M Series D

Because when the sun is shining, you go make hay.

FBISurveillanceon COP26 Climate Summit Lines So Long Officials Missing Meetings: Report

It's funny that so many people are not even wearing masks, while there's zero social distancing on the photo attached to the article.

FBISurveillanceon Ask HN: How do you prefer to pay for cloud

You can't pick one or another. It's all about scale.

When you're small, you usually don't want to commit to e.g. 3-year cloud spend. What if your business doesn't take off? Early on, long-term commits are a liability.

At certain scale you're inevitably going a fixed subscription (committed use) in order to get volume discounts. Depending on how high in 7(8)-figures spend territory you are per annum, these NDA'd discounts will be larger than many think.

At the same scale you also use commits to protect your business from stockouts during events like holiday season. You get a TAM (or a team of TAMs) that will help you bypass some standard support procedures and escalate your requests fast. You work with them on capacity planning for the next 1-2 years, etc.

FBISurveillanceon Ask HN: What are you building this weekend?

Building a better life.

Getting ready to move to a new place. Realized that I own only one trunk worth of stuff and happy about that. Frugal living is key to clear conscience IMO.

Will be looking for a new job too, this time not FAANG kind.

FBISurveillanceon Can Nuclear Fusion Put the Brakes on Climate Change?

Best time to invest into fusion research was 50 years ago. Second best time is now.

Nuclear fission is one of a few (if not the only) viable ways to have significant positive impact on climate change short-term (20 years).

Small rant on nuclear waste. I don't think it's a problem. I think it's a solution to fuel future generations of reactors (50+ years). I'd go as far as assume that e.g. Finland could import nuclear waste and store it in that new state-of-the-art nuclear waste repository. They would make money now to store the waste, and then make money eventually when tech is there to reuse it and generate power.

FBISurveillanceon Arctic World Archive Adds Latest Data Deposit in Svalbard Facility

Maybe. Maybe not.

FBISurveillanceon Arctic World Archive Adds Latest Data Deposit in Svalbard Facility

I've been there couple times during wintertime and it's an absolutely amazing place to visit. Highly recommended.

FBISurveillanceon 200 Years Ago, Faraday Invented the Electric Motor

This might be a bit of an unpopular opinion, but I think that using antibiotics unless you [absolutely] have to - like when you get one prescribed - is a problem if you think long-term because of a higher chance of antibiotics resistance. Using antibiotics "just in case" should be avoided.

Here's an example of E. coli developing resistance to a _strong_ antibiotic within 12 days [0].

Unfortunately, I know more than a few people who take antibiotics even when they get common cold/flu, which doesn't make sense since viruses are not bacteria and they should get vaccinated instead.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDa4-nSc7J8

FBISurveillanceon Costa Rica signs law to attract digital nomads

> They will also be exempted from local income taxes, will be able to open local bank accounts and can drive in Costa Rica using their country’s license, among other benefits.

With this kind of visas I've always been curious: Unless you're US or Eritrea citizen, does this mean you don't have to pay any income tax at all, given you loose your home country's tax residentship in 183 days after leaving?

FBISurveillanceon Marvell Announces First PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSD Controllers: Up to 14 GB/S

I see what you did there.

FBISurveillanceon The architecture behind a one-person tech startup

Fantastic, well written, detailed post, please share more of these.

FBISurveillanceon Ask HN: How to handle secrets (one-person SaaS)

You could use something like https://www.envkey.com/ or https://github.com/Shopify/ejson to roll it relatively hassle-free.

FBISurveillanceon Philip Glass: My problem is people don’t believe I write symphonies (2017)

Philip Glass is my hero and inspired me to learn playing piano.

Personal anecdote: I've managed to get invited to a small Einstein on the Beach play at The Greene Space NYC - I've been flying to NYC for business and this alone made my whole trip so much nicer. I remember him sitting 2 chairs away from me and the play was beautiful.

If you're curious, I strongly suggest watching Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts documentary about his life and career. What a man.

FBISurveillanceon Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

Realpolitik.

FBISurveillanceon Ask HN: I have $450K cash, what should I do to maximize my return?

Go through wiki and threads on https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance.

You may also find interesting to read through https://www.reddit.com/r/fatfire if you'd like this to be your starting point towards retiring.

FBISurveillanceon U.S. prosecutors seek 27 months imprisonment for former Uber self-driving head

I'd bet he used some mechanism, e.g. Cook Islands Trust or similar in a defendant-friendly jurisdiction.

If you do shady business, you have to have plan B.

FBISurveillanceon GitHub was down

From what I understood, they are having capacity issues with one of their MySQL masters or something. I've read that they are in process of sharding/resolving that but it takes time.

To GitHub SRE/oncall people: hang in there, you're awesome.

FBISurveillanceon Ask HN: With Apple going ARM, what will happen with MacBook as a developer tool?

It will be fine.

There will be likely a shaky-ish transition period but we'll get there and my _personal_ expectation is that it will be better at the end.

I remember struggling with 16 GB RAM limit due to lack of LPDDR4 support on Intels until very recently, poor thermals, and other issues.

I look forward to better battery life and inevitably a more mainstream ARM adoption.

FBISurveillanceon Microsoft duplicates data from Firefox without asking

I'm not saying it's OK, but if you open Safari for the first time after using Chrome, it will import Bookmarks and History without asking for permission.

FBISurveillanceon Managed Kubernetes service is the one that’s made for you

One thing this article seems to mention only briefly is how different bandwidth (egress) pricing is. I think it deserves more attention.

With $0.01/GB egress, DO arguably is way cheaper what any of the other Big 3. This is not even taking into account a hefty "free bandwidth" that comes with every droplet (couple TB/month).

Compare this to $0.11—$0.23 that Big 3 charges per GB. On larger, production-grade projects, egress could get way more expensive than compute.

Kudos to DO for not doing pricing like it's 1998.

FBISurveillanceon Stripe's remote engineering hub, one year in

In ideal world yes, but reality is that it requires significantly more effort, e.g.: "anywhere in the world" would really mean "anywhere in the world except Iran, Crimea, and other countries/regions that US thinks you should not do business with". Sometimes a company may not be even allowed to have non-US citizen employees.

Then, you have to make sure you can handle payroll, taxes, and overall operations.

It doesn't have to be all or nothing: expanding from an office-centric to all-US is a good start - baby steps.

FBISurveillanceon Every software system used at Gitlab

See https://app.diagrams.net/ -- you'll recognize the style.

FBISurveillanceon Permanent.org – Nonprofit, secure cloud storage

They don't seem to mention anything about egress/bandwidth costs. Is that unlimited or is there some sort of vague "fair use" policy?

FBISurveillanceon Migrating ZooKeeper into Kubernetes

In context of Kafka, hopefully KIP-500 [1] will get implemented sometime soon.

If you're feeling lucky, you can also use zetcd [2] to connect ZK apps to etcd. I've been able to actually run Kafka with it as a toy project a little while ago.

[1] https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/KAFKA/KIP-500%3A...

[2] https://github.com/etcd-io/zetcd

FBISurveillanceon Office noise generator

And for those who miss meetings, no more: http://conferencecall.biz/

FBISurveillanceon Ask HN: If you had £500k in the bank and no home would you buy a home in the UK?

You'd have to look into unrecoverable costs of owning a house (property taxes, maintenance costs, and cost of capital) vs unrecoverable costs or renting (rent). You should be able to make an intelligent decision based on this data.

FBISurveillanceon Ask HN: Gitbook is too expensive, what is an alternative?

Take a look at https://v2.docusaurus.io/.