Hacker News Reader

JimmyAustinon Reasons Not to Use Apple (2018)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman

Stallman has been the leading proponent of software freedom for many, many decades. He isn't inherently against big corps, he is against what a lot of big corps do.

JimmyAustinon Uber Not Criminally Liable in Death of Woman Hit by Self-Driving Car

Absolutely not an issue. The last thing you want when developing a prototype piece of software for a 1 ton chunk of metal is another bit of software plugged in that you dont control or understand.

JimmyAustinon France Plans 5% Digital Tax as Governments Chase Internet Giants

In the US, the IRS collected $3.33 trillion in revenue in 2018, with a total budget of 11.5 billion (2017). Thats 0.3453%, or 35c per $100 of tax revenue. Fairly minor in the scheme of things.

JimmyAustinon Paul Graham on the Transition to Meat Substitutes

From my understanding many fast food chains shy away from using hunted meat for supply chain reasons.

JimmyAustinon Magic Lantern

If I remember correctly, Steve Jobs compared the iPhone 4's design to a Leica.

JimmyAustinon Apple Said to Launch 16-Inch MacBook Pro with All-New Design in 2019

The current max price of a MBP is actually $10,899 AUD, though $5,120 of that is the jump from a 512gb SSD to a 4tb SSD.

JimmyAustinon TablePlus – Native GUI tool for relational databases (2018)

Counter: Sublime Text and Sublime Merge.

Though I will concede they put an extraordinary amount of work into hitting all three.

JimmyAustinon TablePlus – Native GUI tool for relational databases (2018)

I'd say it's a protection in case of their servers being breached and you downloading a malicious version of the application.

No court on earth would support them if it attempted to exfiltrate all of your data.

JimmyAustinon SQL: One of the most valuable skills

Both incredibly close, but not right on the money.

JimmyAustinon SQL: One of the most valuable skills

My first job out of university was on an analytics team at a consulting firm (big enough that you know them) that used MS SQL Server for absolutely everything.

Data cleaning? SQL. Feature engineering? SQL.

Pipelines of stored procedures, stored in other stored procedures. Some of these procedures were so convoluted that they outputted tables with over 700 features, and had queries that were hundreds of lines long.

Every input, stored procedure, and output timestamped, so a change to one script involved changing every procedure downstream of it. My cries to use git were unheeded (would have required upskilling everyone on the team).

It was probably the worst year of my life. By the end of it I built a framework in T-SQL that would generate T-SQL scripts. In the final week of a project (which had been consistent 60-70 hour weeks), the partner on the project came in, saw the procedures written in my framework and demanded that they all be converted back into raw SQL. I moved teams a few weeks later.

The only good bit looking at it, is that now I'm REALLY good with SQL. It's incredibly powerful stuff, and more devs should work on it.

JimmyAustinon Jeff Bezos Accuses National Enquirer of Blackmail

"Billionaries destroying media outlets" is an emergent property from two facts: - Some people can't/don't get justice because they can't afford a lawsuit. - Rich people can give money to poor people to get them that justice.

In order for Bezos to destroy them legally, they still need to have messed up in some way.

JimmyAustinon Jeff Bezos Accuses National Enquirer of Blackmail

Fixed!

JimmyAustinon Jeff Bezos Accuses National Enquirer of Blackmail

Fixed!

JimmyAustinon Jeff Bezos Accuses National Enquirer of Blackmail

Peter Thiel (worth 2.5b) destroyed Gawker with a contribution of 10m to Hulk Hogan's legal fund.

If Bezos contributed a similar proportion of his fortune (112b), he would be contributing 448m. Not only is the National Enquirer about to be in the shitfight of its life, but every single other lawsuit it's going to be facing will be armed to the teeth with amazing legal talent.

Couldn't have happened to nicer people.

JimmyAustinon German town votes ‘No’ to street names

The issue with lat/long isn't just that it's inconvenient, but it doesn't map to high density structures. A resident of 432 Park Avenue, the tallest residential building in the world with 96 stories, would share a lat/long with 95 other people.

JimmyAustinon Economics of Spotify is making songs shorter

I'm not sure about the mobile app, but command-f to search for songs inside a playlist works on the desktop app. It's really not hard to delete songs.

JimmyAustinon Ask HN: What software do you actually pay for?

- Sublime Text

- Sublime Merge

- Alfred

- Daisy Disk

- Github

- Office

- AWS

JimmyAustinon Sequel Pro – Open source macOS native MySQL GUI client

I don't think that freeware is really a part of the Apple Developer ecosystem. Most of the MacOS exclusive software I use on a daily basis costs $20-$30, a price I'm more than willing to pay for software like Pixelmator, DaisyDisk and Alfred that is significantly more polished (and Mac-ish) then the average piece of open-source software just due to the resources available to them.

JimmyAustinon MacKenzie Bezos likely to be world's richest woman after divorce

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lou_Pai

Lou Pai was an Enron exec who divorced his wife and married a stripper. As a part of his divorce he sold off 250m of shares months before the value of them collapsed. He was (relatively) shielded from the insider training charges.

JimmyAustinon The Divide Between Silicon Valley and Washington Is a National-Security Threat

This is just the cyber equivalent of "Shoot someone and you'll go to jail, join the military and shoot someone, get a medal".

JimmyAustinon Ask HN: What is your backup plan for laptop if you have windows 10 laptop?

I've always had issues attempting to install Windows on a machine that already has Linux on it, but it's been (relatively) smooth sailing going Windows -> Windows + Linux.

JimmyAustinon The Best Programming Advice I Ever Got (2012)

"If you come at the king, you best not miss."

If you criticize a seniors ideas, and they interpret it as you coming after them, you better destroy their reputation, or they'll destroy you. It's hard to destroy someones reputation within an organization, and most people get defensive when newcomers (especially juniors) come in with suggestions, so it's typically not worth kicking the nest.

JimmyAustinon Intel ME Manufacturing Mode: obscured dangers and MacBook vulnerability

:%s/can't/won't/g

JimmyAustinon Fastai for PyTorch: Fast and accurate neural nets using modern best practices

My DL box has a Ryzen 1800x and a GTX 1080ti running Ubuntu 18.04. The Ryzen has given me very few issues, Nvidia gave me some setup issues, but now that it's all configured its rock solid.

JimmyAustinon What disk space usage software are you using?

For Windows: http://www.steffengerlach.de/freeware/ For Mac OS: DaisyDisk

JimmyAustinon Ultimate Hacking Keyboard

The CTRL's predecessor, the K-Type, also featured hot-swap socket.

There are a few others (like the GK64 and the Ergodox EZ) that also feature it!

JimmyAustinon “Free College” programs vary in how they define both “free” and “college”

I honestly don't know anyone in my (australian) high-school cohort who even thought about the varying costs of under-grad degrees. It's such a small difference, and it's all covered under HECS anyway.

JimmyAustinon Kansas-born woman told birth certificate not proof of citizenship for passport

It's reaching but Steve Mann could qualify.

https://techcrunch.com/2012/07/16/augmented-reality-explorer...

JimmyAustinon YouTube and Netflix ‘Throttled’ by Carriers

In that context it was because most video algorithms are designed to chunk, which reduces bandwidth at the cost of increasing latency. That's a good trade off for Youtube, but not as good in a real time scenario like video conferencing.

JimmyAustinon Rideshare boycott sparked by murders in China

I think you've been listening a little to much to Peter Dutton.