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WilliamEdward

372 karma · joined July 4, 2018

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WilliamEdward··on Google deletes “communist bandits” from comments on Youtube
Not even the most anti-china, anti-communist person in the world operating on half a brain cell would call china communist. How are you buying things from china with capital if they're communist?
WilliamEdward··on Google deletes “communist bandits” from comments on Youtube
You won't ever see a youtube competitor. Youtube is running with google's proprietary search engine and has a decade and a half of content a competitor simply wont have. It will always be better than its competitors and some nonsense ban on a word won't stop anyone except 10 or 11 people on hackernews.
WilliamEdward··on Ask HN: Is there still a place for native desktop apps?
It was the ambiguity of the word 'web' that tripped me up. You still need a network of computers for email to be useful.
WilliamEdward··on Ask HN: Is there still a place for native desktop apps?
Achievement is a big word here. They had to shove it down people's throats with a bloated, buggy, and expensive app suite.
WilliamEdward··on Ask HN: Is there still a place for native desktop apps?
Email doesn't naturally involve the web? What?
WilliamEdward··on Amazon is handing out 'Thank you' t-shirts to warehouse workers as it cuts pay
If your execs earn a billion dollars a year collectively, and you have 200000 employees, you can distribute 2500 dollars to them all and the execs would still earn more than the low wage workers. So if simple arithmetic is your thing, there you go.

Amazon has around 570000 employees, and 22 executives. One of those executives actually earns a lot more than 1 billion dollars. Nevertheless, with just 2 billion dollars you can give a decent pay raise to every single one of those employees. Some don't need it as much as others, but whatever.

WilliamEdward··on Amazon is handing out 'Thank you' t-shirts to warehouse workers as it cuts pay
It is ridiculous that you've boiled it down to those two options. The 3rd is cutting executive salary and paying low wage workers. Also amazon is not cheap compared to my local competitor and aliexpress, people buy from amazon because of convenience.

And amazon makes profit on non-AWS products as well, don't be silly. I can literally google their financial statements to prove this.

WilliamEdward··on Coronavirus Is Making Universal Basic Income Look Better
You realise in this case the money is coming from existing taxes being used on stuff like military anyway? These are also incredibly rich nations with reserves of money that were produced sometimes centuries ago. No one thinks it's coming from thin air.
WilliamEdward··on Coronavirus Is Making Universal Basic Income Look Better
This is so vacuous. Does it imply that UBI money is coming from thin air? That's obviously false.

Also the article says a type of UBI is being used to stimulate job creation and work for industries that are rapidly losing in these areas. This is literally on par with what Elon said, how could it be a counter argument?

This is the rare Elon quote where I don't even have to attack his behaviour to discredit. It's just not applicable in this context as a counterpoint.

WilliamEdward··on Five Years of Rust
Plenty of big name companies (discord, amazon) and even universities (georgia tech) are using and teaching rust. That's enough for me to say you should jump on the train.
WilliamEdward··on Next dream job can be in an HTTP header
It didn't have any value to begin with, honestly. Websites have the exact same message in their code simply by inspecting source or opening a console, and that certainly doesn't show you have any sort of skill or curiosity.

It's not like the sites are offering you a job, they're saying you should interview with them. I have not heard of anyone getting hired because of this.

WilliamEdward··on Senate narrowly rejects plan to require a warrant for Americans’ browsing data
It's a pandemic, and as far as i remember they didn't finalise a rule to allow senators to vote remotely[1]. I don't know if this is why Bernie missed it, but 3 other senators besides him missed it too.

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/techtank/2020/05/12/congress-...

WilliamEdward··on The modern HTTPS world has no place for old web servers
I like that HTTPS forces you to actually care about improving and maintaining your website. Somehow, leaving your site alone forever to gather dust is considered a good thing. The author totally missed that one.

Yes, some sites serve basic content that can stay up forever without change (thistothat.com comes to mind as a good example) but it really doesn't hurt to force people to put a little bit more care into their sites.

WilliamEdward··on The modern HTTPS world has no place for old web servers
Users are all about privacy and security until they realise they have to actually maintain their websites to achieve it, then it becomes an unnecessary chore.
WilliamEdward··on The modern HTTPS world has no place for old web servers
Yes, making websites secure requires work and maintenance and modernisation. The author even admits this. I think i'm ok with what's being lost in this transition.
WilliamEdward··on Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever
This is essentially the same as saying "the sky is blue because it just is"
WilliamEdward··on The most prized degree in India became the most worthless
I think you're right, it just feels a little wrong to claim a title so easily when others work hard in a specific practise to earn it and have standards designated by law for it.
WilliamEdward··on The most prized degree in India became the most worthless
I was going to say the solution is to raise the bar for software engineers, but it seems the problem here is the culture around prestige and money which has prompted millions of people to go after programming careers. It's not easy to change culture.

Still I think there should be some needed post-grad accreditation for software engineers if they want to actually be called engineers.

WilliamEdward··on [dead]
This is clickbait and will lead to a flamewar.
WilliamEdward··on AWS services to avoid
I know it still makes sense but 'amazon web services services' is funny
WilliamEdward··on Old box, dumb code, few thousand connections, no big deal
In what way is this helpful to newcomers at all? It uses a ton of heavy jargon and no example code.
WilliamEdward··on Old box, dumb code, few thousand connections, no big deal
I don't know why rachel doesn't ever post source code or simply say what architecture she's using. I'm left to assume it's just plain c++.

I'll just stick to python thanks.

WilliamEdward··on Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
You nailed it. The infrastructure in developed countries is taken for granted by its consumers. Websites are often not tuned for low speed internet, or for people across the ocean, because everything works so smooth in developed countries. Also, having a server that serves to the US and Europe if you live in a remote area obviously cannot be on-premise, it has to be in the cloud served in those countries for latency reasons.

And you cannot have a website that doesn't cater to US and EU users, unless the website only solves local problems.

WilliamEdward··on Tackling Webdev as a Bioinformatician: why is it so hard?
I don't have any experience in scientific research, so that's a fair justification.
WilliamEdward··on Tackling Webdev as a Bioinformatician: why is it so hard?
Good points though I considered REST to be more like best practises than theory. One could see it either way i think.
WilliamEdward··on Tackling Webdev as a Bioinformatician: why is it so hard?
Webdev is more like a trade than a science; you benefit more from remembering a large body of facts and details that comes with experience. There's no theory to learn, you just have to get practise in things like databases, browsers, HTTP, frameworks, etc.

This is probably why the author is struggling. This is a real world industry tackling real world problems. It is not the neat and cut world of science research.

WilliamEdward··on Show HN: How many miles do you think you've scrolled today?
Just don't update it?
WilliamEdward··on Bye, Amazon
I understand the disease-symptom dichotomy, but if amazon is only a symptom then it is one of the biggest ones out there. This makes tackling amazon more important than tackling a mom and pop shop who treats their workers poorly, even if they're both symptoms of a bigger working class oppression disease.
WilliamEdward··on Bye, Amazon
Who cares? If a sex and a race are disproportionately negatively affected, it doesn't matter whether this is definitionally prejudiced or not.
WilliamEdward··on Amazon locks down internal employee communications amid organizing efforts
Amazon is interesting because there is a rift in the company; on one side you have upper middle class engineers, and on the other working class warehouse labourers.

It's easy to dismiss union organisation coming from the former side, but the real tragedy is the thousands of workers working in dangerous conditions. They won't get their union.

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