Hacker News Reader

SuddsMcDuffon Facebook paid £4,327 corporation tax in the UK in 2014

You're taking a highly subjective view and presenting it as fact. That Facebook is a "socially beneficial organization" is extremely debatable. I would argue that Facebook has actually had a detrimental effect on social cohesion.

SuddsMcDuffon Trans-Pacific Partnership Trade Deal Is Reached

"if"???

SuddsMcDuffon Vibecatch – Easiest job satisfaction poll

I sent my team a link to https://www.retroospect.com/ each week, the novelty wore off after 3 weeks.

SuddsMcDuffon Behind Germany’s refusal to grant Greece debt relief

> "Why the hell would anyone give out loans in first place if they are going to get zero to negative interest rates?"

Good question, ask the ECB - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/jeremy-warner/115...

> "you simply demonize EU and Banks"

Wow, after all your Greece trash talk you accuse ME of demonizing? This is no longer a rational conversation.

SuddsMcDuffon Behind Germany’s refusal to grant Greece debt relief

^this.

Or a third option, they were manipulated into getting to this mess by a 3rd party who stands to make an awful, awful lot of money from it.

SuddsMcDuffon Behind Germany’s refusal to grant Greece debt relief

There's no good guys and bad guys in this. You must understand that unless a loan is issued with a zero or negative interest rate, it will always have a net negative impact on your balance. Where else does the money to repay the interest come from?

This is especially true with central banks, where every € you receive comes with debt attached. How do you repay the interest on those debts? You have to borrow more €'s from the central bank, which also come with more debt attached. And so your debt burden increases exponentially until you're crippled by interest repayments. It is mathematically impossible to repay debt in these circumstances.

It takes two parties to get into a mess like this. As the old saying goes, "if you owe the bank $50 thousand, you're in trouble. If you owe the bank $50 billion, you're in it together".

SuddsMcDuffon Behind Germany’s refusal to grant Greece debt relief

I think your argument is predicated on the notion that banks lending money is somehow a benevolent, charitable act. It isn't. In a fractional reserve banking system, making loans is precisely how banks make their money.

Unless of course they get greedy and start making ill-advised, unsecured bad loans. Then their greed is going to come back and bite them in the ass when the debtor can't pay.

Lets not forget the Goldman Sachs helped Greece to cook the books to get into the Eurozone in the first place.

SuddsMcDuffon Behind Germany’s refusal to grant Greece debt relief

Mooching? They're not actually receiving much at all - 90% of the bailout money they have received has gone straight back to their creditors - Deutsche Bank, ECB and IMF. Only a tiny fraction of the bailout actually enters the Greek economy.

It's like throwing a money boomerang at someone, and each time it comes back claiming that they owe you another 50 billion

SuddsMcDuffon Incudine – Real-Time Audio/DSP Programming in Common Lisp

Any plans to move away from Sourceforge?

SuddsMcDuffon Water Fluoridation May Not Prevent Cavities, Scientific Review Shows

The headline introduces an element of doubt in something that was previously reckoned to be conclusive. I'd say it's pretty effective.

SuddsMcDuffon Ask HN: Guide to becoming a dad?

I think you're both making good points here :) As with most things, extremes in either direction are harmful. As always it's a case of finding a healthy balance.

SuddsMcDuffon Ask HN: Guide to becoming a dad?

You may be seeing things a little black & white here. His advice was to listen to cravings & not control diet "too much". You seem to have interpreted this as "let here constantly eat all the junk food she wants & become obese."

SuddsMcDuffon Ask HN: What are the greatest discoveries in the last few years?

Are invented and discovered just a matter of perspective?

SuddsMcDuffon Ancient Roman Swiss Army Knife on Display

I was surprised to see the DailyFail on HN too.

SuddsMcDuffon [dead]

Very unfair title. Intel have already released the code under a very permissive license, what more do you want from them? All they're refusing to do is sign a copyright waiver, which is absolutely fair.

SuddsMcDuffon Sidechain Elements: Open source code and developer sidechains for Bitcoin

Any degree of centralization leaves the network open to attack, whether by technical, regulatory, or financial means. Ripple Labs recently got hit with a hefty fine from FinCEN - http://www.coindesk.com/fincen-fines-ripple-labs-700000-bank...

SuddsMcDuffon SourceForge: Third party offers will be presented with Opt-In projects only

If they want to save /. they should post articles condemning SourceForge. Sacrifice the one to save the many.

SuddsMcDuffon Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (June 2015)

  Location: Portsmouth, UK
  Remote: yes, local preferred
  Willing to relocate: no
  Technologies: C# Javascript NodeJS .NET RabbitMQ NServiceBus DDD BDD TDD MVC Distributed-systems CQRS MongoDB CouchDB Redis XP Scrum Kanban
  Résumé/CV: https://careers.stackoverflow.com/mattdavey
  Email: my.name@fsfe.org

SuddsMcDuffon Show HN: The first websynth that's 100% mappable to a MIDI controller

wubwubwubwub

SuddsMcDuffon Show HN: The first websynth that's 100% mappable to a MIDI controller

Here's my patch :) http://resistorsings.com/106/#patch/PATCH%20NAME?vca-level=1...

SuddsMcDuffon Hello World: Windows 10 Available on July 29

I stopped buying games by EA and Ubisoft about 5 years ago for this very reason - shipping incomplete & buggy software with the mentality "we'll patch it later". In EA's case, those patches didn't even materialize a lot of the time.

I take it from your comment that they're still up to their old tricks... I'll continue my boycott of EA and Ubi

SuddsMcDuffon MIT cheetah robot lands the running jump [video]

Good catch - I just assumed it was related to Boston Dynamics because the tech looks so similar. Rookie error.

SuddsMcDuffon MIT cheetah robot lands the running jump [video]

It speaks volumes about their engineering principles - KISS is alive and well at Boston Dynamics :)

SuddsMcDuffon MIT cheetah robot lands the running jump [video]

Robot suicide, what an interesting prospect. I can't think of any surer sign that and entity has achieved consciousness, than when it makes the decision to end its own "life".

SuddsMcDuffon MIT cheetah robot lands the running jump [video]

Flag covered coffins are a powerful image which help to galvanize the people and maintain public support for a campaign.

It's hard to imagine that people will care much if all they see is a pile of scrap metal being shipped home.

It'll be extremely difficult for a government to use robotic infantry whilst having public support for such an action.

Rather than appealing to a sense of "brotherhood/camaraderie against a common foe" in order to support a campaign - propogandists will likely have to exploit the peoples sense of fear to garner support. This is a shift we have already started to see with the "war on terror".

SuddsMcDuffon MIT cheetah robot lands the running jump [video]

I felt the same when I had my first child.

SuddsMcDuffon MIT cheetah robot lands the running jump [video]

It seems obvious that the engineers at Boston Dynamics have spent an awful lot of time carefully studying and analysing the movement of real 4-legged animals.

There's a big difference though between learning valuable lessons & taking cues from natural bio-mechanics, and trying to emulate them.

SuddsMcDuffon Ask HN: I hate my new job, Need some advice

£26k is definitely on the entry-level side. I'd expect most graduates to be looking for that kind of sum in their first role. I have 8 years experience and my salary is more than double that.

OP - it sounds like you're worth way more than £26k ;)

SuddsMcDuffon Ask HN: How do you log application events?

How do you find logging over RabbitMQ? I have a guy at my place who's pushing to get log messages flowing over the message bus, but using Rabbit as a logging mechanism makes me feel a bit uneasy. Do you find that it pollutes your regular messages? Or do you have them on a separate control bus?

SuddsMcDuffon We Buy Broken Gold

Not sure if that's the best way to look at it. You bought your wife the ring as a token of your everlasting devotion to her - there's a certain poetic quality to that token being made of the hardest substance on Earth.

You didn't buy the ring as an investment, I mean what are you going to do, take the ring back and sell it when the market is more favourable? Any profit you make will be quickly swallowed up by the divorce.