Hacker News Reader

JonathanMerklinon Just some red flags. No big deal. Just ignore them (2020)

IIRC from when I first read this back in 2020, it's Lyft. The hint is at the end (emphasis mine):

"In retrospect, there were many red flags. *Well, pink flags.* Whatever."

JonathanMerklinon Outlook just asked me if I want to upgrade to bigger ads

If I told you to your face that you were "sick and vile" for trying to do your job to the best of your ability - without a hint of play or irony - you would probably complain to HR. Name-calling doesn't have to entail the use of nouns.

JonathanMerklinon Discord is a black hole for information

I'm not sure if "click" is intentional wordplay or not, but if it isn't, the word is "clique" FYI.

I'm also strongly of the opinion that tying core business functionality and information transfer to a third-party chat application is a massive footgun, and other than the fact that I use it out of business needs and not just for voice, I think s/Discord/Slack/g applies. I've both heard Discord described as "Slack for hobbies" and Slack as "Discord for the employed" (although obviously it's not a perfect distinction and I've seen e.g. Netrunner groups on Slack and e.g. some startups communicating through Discord).

That said, the number of teams and departments I have either encountered or heard about from engineering friends elsewhere whose primary - and sometimes only maintained - deployment interface is a Slack command clearly means that I'm the dumb one for trying to work the UNIX philosophy into most of my life's tools and nobody else is blinking twice about vendor lockin and memoizing solutions in a chat application. I just try and take any question/answer that was sufficiently obscure or anything asked more than once and shove it in an "OAQs" ("occasionally asked questions") on Confluence or whatever the knowledgebase application du jour is, but it still feels like teardrops against the ocean sometimes.

JonathanMerklinon Show HN: Jless, a command-line JSON viewer

Wow, thank you so much for sharing this. I'm a frequent jq-to-less piper and probably a more frequent mobile browsing opener of ESPN scoreboards/subsequent grumbler about ESPN's web performance and experience. I think I'll get a lot of mileage out of plaintextsports as long as it stays up. I will also be sure to check out Jless next time I'm at my command line with sufficient bandwidth to tinker with my tooling/workflow. Cheers!

JonathanMerklinon Ask HN: What's the best book you read in 2021?

Throughout the overwhelming majority of the year, I wasn't in a position where I had a lot of "sit down with a good book and a good drink" reading time, but I've gotten some in during the winters at each end. I think best overall was one of the ones I read way early in the year, Beyond Good and Evil by Nietzsche. I had been saving The Pale King by David Foster Wallace for an "in case of emergency break glass" book because I couldn't bear to finish all his writing and I just had to break the glass recently. I've been enjoying that thoroughly and should finish before the year is up; it may win out.

I know this probably paints a bad picture of my reading habits because of the present public perception of those (previously publicly praiseworthy) authors, so I feel the urge to get in front of that and (1) insist I have eclectic tastes and this year had a small sample size, (2) insist those books (well, many parts of those books) really ARE excellent, and (3) provide one more suggestion even though this is already a wordy comment: why's (poignant) Guide to Ruby. Someone shared a link to the web version on HN earlier this year, maybe it was even in a deep, 1-upvoted comment, I don't recall - but that was what occupied the whole next part of my day, and I quite liked it (having already known Ruby from some ancient rusty Rails experience).

JonathanMerklinon Reddit files to go public

Oh, so they are! So what happened here, IYI: I did a paranoiac double-check that both domains resolved and showed content before commenting, but my (...)/.compact result was with smaller text/more "squeeze". I thought it odd but it made sense because, y'know, "compact."

Turns out I had at some point set an 80% zoom while visiting there on this particular browser. Sorry for the confusion!

JonathanMerklinon Reddit files to go public

https://www.reddit.com/.compact

There's also https://i.reddit.com which is a similar but slightly different experience.

EDIT: per commenters below correcting my mistake, this is "the same" experience AFAWCT

JonathanMerklinon YouTube deleting comments who criticize their hiding of the dislike count

Which is frankly still a wild concept to me because when I was of prime YouTube-binging age, the maximum length of a video was 10 minutes.

JonathanMerklinon The Age of AI by Henry Kissinger, Eric Schmidt and Daniel Huttenlocher

I apologize as well for the invective tone; I was a little cranky earlier in the day when I responded to this. I have no problem with your beliefs re: meat, the subtlety did indeed go over my head, and this just seems like a textbook case of textual communication fundamentally dampening nuance.

JonathanMerklinon The Age of AI by Henry Kissinger, Eric Schmidt and Daniel Huttenlocher

Because this is the HN crowd, I cannot tell if you're serious ("not only do I not support war criminals, I don't support animal murderers") or being snarky. If you're serious, you should also stop using software written by meat eaters, that way none of us sane folks have to read your comments.

JonathanMerklinon Google DNS at 010.010.010.010

Do you perhaps think that DNS log data could be valuable for Google? As always, when a product is free...

JonathanMerklinon NPM package ‘ua-parser-JS’ with more than 7M weekly download is compromised

> npm, Inc. is a company founded in 2014, and was acquired by GitHub in 2020.

https://www.npmjs.com/about

> Headquartered in California, [GitHub] has been a subsidiary of Microsoft since 2018.

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

I think they're effectively a department that generates a lot of PR. They have paid security staff.

https://jobspresso.co/job/software-engineer-platform-2-2-2-2...

This is a job posting for a security engineer at npm from July 4, that appears filled to me. I'm sure as an organization npm inc. is aware of vulnerabilities in their core product, so there's internal back and forth - the usual stuff.

JonathanMerklinon Slack is experiencing a service disruption

I'll do my next reboot at nine, I'll do my next commute with wine.

JonathanMerklinon “Death” one of 5 ways to lose at Chess, according to PGN standard

I propose the alternative that death is instant disqualification regardless of game state, which incentivises murder as a strategy and adds an additional psychological tax but also a necessity to resolve disputes in a way that really makes the Han/Greedo distinction an important one and would make for a fun "spaghetti western involving but not necessarily for intellectuals" flick.

(EDIT: I hope the jest is clear. Murder is bad.)

JonathanMerklinon Vaporwave was created then destroyed by the internet (2016)

Corporate businesswave is so perfectly my aesthetic, thank you so much for the recommendation.

JonathanMerklinon Clubhouse is the big stinker that nobody wants to talk about

The generalization we're looking for here is Sturgeon's Law.

JonathanMerklinon Ask HN: Why Martin Gardner is no longer popular?

I think "less accessible" is a disingenuous way to put it. The internet has made his works more accessible, not less. The problem (for the Gardner estate, I suppose) is not availability, but discovery - there is significantly more math content to digest (for free!) and therefore lower probability any one budding mathematician is digesting Gardner content.

JonathanMerklinon To H-E-Double-Hockey-Sticks with Facebook

Two questions, since I enjoyed the few Stephensons I've read:

1) a quick search of FoDiH brings up that it's from the perspective of a character in Reamde, which is one of his I have not read yet. Is it a mandatory prerequisite, a good-to-have but optional prerequisite, or essentially unrelated?

2) that search also brings up that it came out in 2019, but your comment says "It was 2014" w.r.t. something to do with FB (I actually had a lot of troubling parsing the meaning of that specific sentence and am still unsure, but that isn't the point). Can you really say he "called it" if he's reasoning a posteriori?

JonathanMerklinon California sues Activision Blizzard over unequal pay, sexual harassment

I was referring more to "the state of California" being the plaintiff, for which giantg2 gave me the minutiae I was interested in. I hope it's obvious that I didn't think this was the first sexual harassment/pay discrimination case in recorded history. Thanks for pointing out DFEH's existence and involvement with the Riot Games hubbub; that was useful information that served as a good jumping off point for my skim research.

JonathanMerklinon California sues Activision Blizzard over unequal pay, sexual harassment

On topic: Does anyone know if there is some precedent for lawsuits like this? From years of experience in the art of existing as a human, I would guess A-B can't possibly be the only organization with these problems, but if a lawsuit like this has happened before, it must have been targeting a much lower profile company that flew under my cultural radar.

Mostly off topic: I wouldn't consider myself a gamer (anymore), and I get that it's about high revenue examples, but I thought "Call of Duty, World of Warcraft and Candy Crush" was quite the structural anapest to begin the article.

JonathanMerklinon Will Sylvia Plath always be defined by her death?

I think this depends on the artist (though perhaps you're already conceding this point with your "particularly for" qualifier). Caravaggio had masterful control of lighting and form, but was a murderer (manslaughterer). Someone who knows of DFW's interactions with Mary Karr would likely interpret Infinite Jest the same way as one who doesn't. I don't think ESR's politics have any bearings on cathedrals vis-à-vis bazaars.

JonathanMerklinon Akamai Edge DNS was down

Then what was the impetus to switch off of Bitwarden?

JonathanMerklinon Show HN: Inflation-adjusted Hacker News

For HN, you should know about: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=custom&page=0&prefix=false...

JonathanMerklinon A URL Lengthener

Thought I'd comment to note that (as of 2021-05-14T22:07:00Z) this just does the alert() POC and isn't nefarious, if anyone is deeply curious enough to click but cautious enough to avoid a deaddove.jpg situation

JonathanMerklinon New algorithm breaks speed limit for solving linear equations

If this paper whets your appetite (talking mostly to grandparent comment, but also HN at large) OR alternatively if you think that this paper is a bit too advanced for your knowledge level, I implore you to read Scott Aaronson's book "Quantum Computing Since Democritus". The book is one of the finest in the genre of "too casual to be a textbook, too informative to be an easy read for laymen" nonfiction, and it is primarily concerned with philosophy vis-à-vis computational complexity. It does a pretty good job at assuming you only have a bit of computer science background (pun unintended, noticed, left in) and builds your knowledge base up from introductory set theory and first order logic in the earliest pages (In fact, it's based on a course he taught, and his lecture notes are available online and frequently make for fantastic supplemental material [1]). One of my favorite reads of 2020.

[1] https://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/

JonathanMerklinon Your Thinking Rate Is Fixed

The best teams IMO have about a 10/10/80 split between people who do great work and know it, people who do great work and don't know it, and people who don't do great work (caveat: they should do ACCEPTABLE work) but are aware of their limitations. There's only so much work that you want your talent to be doing and you can try and keep the major touch points to your power players, and then you try to silo off the drudgery to the folks who are happy to have something hard to fail at. The personality type of the good-and-knows-it tends to need to be offset by the humble good-but-unsure types. Heaven forbid you get even one worker who can crank out productivity like no tomorrow and claims to be doing good work because in a vacuum everything is functional but they optimize only to close tasks and leave the system in total disrepair. It takes literal years to clean up some messes, and from experience I tend to prefer working with people who adhere to N > quality(output) > 0 over those at |quality(output)| > N.

Yes, this mirrors directly that old adage from that German general [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_von_Hammerstein-Equord#Cl...

JonathanMerklinon A review of Dominion, 4000 plays later (2012)

Not necessarily "any strategy" - if you have interactive kingdoms it may be better to slow your opponent down (feed them curses, feed them junk, make them discard,outpace their Province/Duchy-driven victory points via alternate victory cards, etc). In "engine vs big money" or "engine dittos", you are totally correct in that you need to have the superior engine.

JonathanMerklinon USC's Dying Linebackers

As far as sportswriters go, if you're interested in the sentimental, I always used to flip to Rick Reilly's column in Sports Illustrated before reading any other part of the magazine (back when I was in school and could snag my dad's SI before he got home from work). He moved on to ESPN at some point but he has a few anthologies out.

In general, if you know what kind of articles to look for, there are some good stories out there by the major players. I really enjoyed the relatively recent (in the grand scheme of things; "totally old" as far as news goes) articles about the rise of wine's popularity among NBA players ([1]) and a look into NHL dentists ([2]) on ESPN.

If you're interested in writers who happen to be writing about sports, this year I got sidetracked from my original to-read list exploring the oeuvre of the late great David Foster Wallace, who has a handful of tennis essays that I thought were fantastic. He's such a talented writer that I must recommend you seek out his essay collections individually (A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, Consider the Lobster, and Both Flesh and Not) but if you're strictly interested in his tennis essays, they were taken from those three and reprinted in a collection called String Theory. As a taste, the title essay of Both Flesh and Not is readable online (as "Roger Federer as Religious Experience", [3]).

EDIT: this was more directed at the grandparent comment than the parent, but well, hey, all of HN is free to take my recommendations (or not!)

[1] https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/29517070/inside-nba-secr...

[2] https://www.espn.com/nhl/story/_/id/27851359/the-ugly-gory-b...

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/20/sports/playmagazine/20fed...

JonathanMerklinon Magic: The Gathering creator Richard Garfield on 35 years of making games

alasdair_ might be referring to WotC's lack of support for the 1996 Netrunner. One major expansion that really did fix a lot of things, then the poorly-distributed Classic (which had mechanics that showed great promise; facedown runner cards could have been a huge boon for bluffing complexity on that end of the board), and that was pretty much it.

JonathanMerklinon Ask HN: How did you fix your narcissism?

Honest question, really trying hard not to word it in a standoffish way: what do you get out of a therapist that can't be obtained from thought or general conversation outside of therapy?

I don't think a "brilliant rational mind" is a prerequisite for coming to the conclusion that you're spending money to lock someone in conversation with you - someone that would not associate with you otherwise. To me, the relationship is artificial and the lessons learned can be obtained for free. Therapy seems to be conversational prostitution, more or less.

But you and others affirm that therapy has a positive ROI, and some people recommend therapy with such vigor you'd think it was the only (or the best/most efficient) way to get that return. I just don't see it, and to date I haven't met a sufficiently elucidating explanation.