Hacker News Reader

_0nacon What I gained, lost and learned while working for Microsoft

It's all relative. I spent six years at university without ever taking a single taxi and I still consider Uber rides a luxury, because I can also take the bus for a quarter of the price or bike for free.

Also, as the OP mentions, the trap of getting used to nice things is that while you soon stop appreciating them, you will feel their loss quite painfully.

_0nacon Haversine Formula

https://openflights.org/ uses the Haversine formula (and much more!) to not just compute distance, but plot great circle flight routes on a world map:

https://github.com/jpatokal/openflights/blob/master/js/great...

There are a lot of interesting edge cases regarding routes that cross the dateline, the North Pole, etc. Most of the code was taken from Movable Type's incredible library of lat/long code:

http://www.movable-type.co.uk/scripts/latlong.html

_0nacon Marissa Mayer on career growth and how a revenue guarantee almost killed Google

Does your codebase date from 1995? Because some of Yahoo's does. Time to send Jerry a nastygram about not adequately preparing the codebase for arbitrary color changes 25 years ago?

_0nacon Moving from Heroku to Google Kubernetes Engine

If you can't wait for their teaser of "In a future post, I’ll cover the migration process itself", the GCP site has a hands-on tutorial of migrating an app which may prove interesting:

https://cloud.google.com/solutions/migrating-ruby-on-rails-a...

Disclaimer: I work for GCP and wrote most of that :D

At the end of the day, Heroku and GKE are rather different beasts with different philosophies, so migrations are never going to be 1:1. I expect this to become simpler over time as tooling matures though, eg. using https://buildpacks.io to build Docker images instead of having to craft them by hand seems promising.

_0nacon An American Citizen Was Forcibly Drafted Into the South Korean Army (2015)

There was no mistake: by Korean law he's Korean and thus has to be conscripted. Of course it sucks that he wasn't aware of this, but the letter of the law was followed here.

_0nacon US refuses to ground Boeing 737 Max

That initial A320 flight was a demo flight for journalists where the pilot was intentionally pulling stunts like flying very low in front of spectators. Turns out he was flying lower than intended and basically plowed into the forest at the end of the runway. There was a long, still unsolved debate about where the A320 reacted correctly to the pilot's eventual commands to rev the engines and pull up, but ending up needing to do that was definitely not the plane's fault.

_0nacon The head of luxury at Facebook and Instagram

People who don't signal wealth tend to like to think so, but it's been fairly exhaustively demonstrated that signaling wealth with visibly branded clothing does get you better treatment in all sorts of things, including job interviews.

https://www.cnbc.com/2015/04/10/wearing-expensive-brands-of-...

And yes, in some circles ostentatious signaling will be counterproductive, but that's the exception rather than the rule.

_0nacon The Colgan Air disaster was a milestone in aviation safety

Please have a read of the article before downvoting: it's not some random neoliberal "unions are evil" rant, but a very coherent explanation of how seniority-based pay works and how the system is set up to ensure senior pilots get paid $300,000 while juniors get $16,000.

_0nacon The Colgan Air disaster was a milestone in aviation safety

Two words: unions and seniority. Here's a good intro:

http://philip.greenspun.com/flying/unions-and-airlines

It's also worth noting that this is largely a US-only phenomenon. It has led to a lot of junior US pilots heading overseas to fly with other carriers, most notably in the Gulf, although that party is slowly starting to wind down.

_0nacon EU and Japan create world's biggest free trade zone

Not sure what's up with the downvotes here, since this is objectively correct.

A Chinese friend of mine loves to regale listeners with tales of eating things consider outre even by famously expansive Cantonese standards (live mice etc), but he considers the idea of eating rotten, moldy cow lactations (blue cheese) to be beyond the pale.

_0nacon The Route of a Text Message

Wikipedia goes into this in some detail, but it really is pretty much the canonical example of a protocol designed by committee.

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

Here's the technical spec, which manages to combine the single bit level detail of old school telco with the enterprisey goodness of SOAP.

http://www.qtc.jp/3GPP/Specs/23140-6g0.pdf

For example, this is how you say "OK" in MM7:

    HTTP/1.1 200 OK
    Content-Type: text/xml; charset="utf-8"
    Content-Length: nnnn
    <?xml version="1.0" ?>
    <env:Envelope xmlns:env="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/">
    <env:Header>
      <mm7:TransactionID xmlns:mm7="http://www.3gpp.org/ftp/Specs/archive/23_series/23.140/schema/REL-5-MM7-1-3" env:mustUnderstand="1"> vas00001-sub</mm7:TransactionID>
    </env:Header>
    <env:Body>
    <SubmitRsp xmlns="http://www.3gpp.org/ftp/Specs/archive/23_series/23.140/schema/REL-5-MM7-1-3">
      <MM7Version>5.6.0</MM7Version><Status> 
      <StatusCode>1000</StatusCode> 
      <StatusText>Success</StatusText></Status> 
      <MessageID>041502073667</MessageID>
    </SubmitRsp> 
    </env:Body></env:Envelope>

_0nacon The Social Credit System in China [video]

A lot of the comments here seem to be based on speculation, not the actual content of the video. A few key points:

* There is no one system (which is why the title is "The" Social Credit System, the scare quotes are there on purpose!), but ~70 local experiments, with the talk focusing on three of these (~19:45)

* Alibaba's Sesame/Zhima system is not government-accredited (~26:00) and has a lot of shopping/loyalty card features (pay with Alipay, earn points!)

* The current systems have many crippling flaws, like rich people being trivially able to buy their way to good scores to paper over their sins (~35:00)

* Some type of nationwide system is likely to be rolled out nationally at some point, but the details are still very fuzzy (~49:00)

_0nacon Show HN: Visalist – Find visa requirements for countries around the world

Interesting, but how do you keep this up to date? These requirement change constantly and the only reliable source I'm aware of, Timatic (which is what airlines use), is copyrighted and quite tightly locked down.

Wikipedia does crowdsource this info fairly effectively though, sample: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_requirements_for_Indian_c...

_0nacon I Put Words on This Webpage So You Have to Listen to Me Now

Shallow typing? Seriously? Next you'll be telling me you use Dvorak. Deep hyping is where it's at and both flopnar and ropjax excel at that.

_0nacon I Put Words on This Webpage So You Have to Listen to Me Now

This is totally obvious submarine astroturfing. Christine is a paid shill of rilkef, whose VC fund lead investors drink the same brand of organic kombucha as Zuckerberg. Don't be fooled: flopnax, not rilkef, is the consensus way to do containerized federated blockchain service hybrid ML at web scale.

_0nacon Toronto’s Tech Industry

Though it sometimes seems like it, Toronto didn’t become a worldwide tech hub overnight. In fact, it was a years-long process that led to Canada’s biggest city being mentioned alongside tech markets like New York and Silicon Valley.

Yeah, I'm going to need a citation for that being a thing even now. London, Berlin, Boston, Seattle, Los Angeles, Tel Aviv, Beijing, Singapore... but Toronto? Srsly?

_0nacon Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?

Totally unsurprising if you've ever worked with Oracle. The layers upon layers of legacy cruft are plainly visible even in simple things like the GUI installers.

_0nacon Japan's Hometown Tax

I see a lot of moaning about inefficiency here, but here's a point of comparison. During the Bubble years in the late eighties, when many rural areas were feeling left out, there was a scheme to give basically every municipality in Japan a large lump sum of money ($10m?), no strings attached, except that it had to be used for building something new.

This, as you might guess, was an incredible waste of money. Many podunk towns built flashy "multi-purpose halls" (多目的ホール) perfect for all those symphony orchestras just dying to perform in the middle of nowhere. More memorably, the town of Utazu, Kagawa purchased a solid gold toilet...!

http://english.cri.cn/6909/2010/09/09/1901s593626.htm

https://www.emporis.com/buildings/191596/gold-tower-utazu-ja...

_0nacon Paul Allen has died

That's just straight-up wrong. Legal ownership of a gun in Japan requires an extreme amount of bureaucracy, but it's entirely possible and most legal gun owners in Japan are (non-rich, non-well-connected) farmers.

https://www.businessinsider.com.au/gun-control-how-japan-has...

_0nacon My Fiancé Jamal Khashoggi Was a Lonely Patriot

The Dikko affair, where the Mossad working for Nigeria attempted to kidnap a dissident in London and ship him back to Nigeria in a diplomatic parcel, comes to mind. The plot fell apart, but he would almost certainly have been killed if they had succeeded.

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

_0nacon Show HN: You Don't Need WordPress – Create a Blog With Only Google Docs

The data that G Suite organizations and users put into our systems is theirs, and we do not scan it for advertisements nor sell it to third parties [...] Google does not collect, scan or use data in G Suite Core Services [including Google Docs] for advertising purposes.

https://gsuite.google.com/learn-more/security/security-white...

Disclaimer: I work at Google Cloud, but not G Suite/Docs.

_0nacon In Brazil, it is considered rude to be on time to a party

I used to work in Indonesia, with Indonesian clients. Scheduling a meeting for 10 AM and not having anybody show up until 11 was normal; showing up four hours late and shrugging it off with "macet" (traffic) was not unusual. (Then again, Jakarta jams really can be that bad.)

They have a word for it too: jam karet, or "rubber time".

_0nacon Burger Robot Startup Opens First Restaurant

Which is why we should immediately un-mechanize mines and bring back hurriers and trappers!

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

https://thoroglove.wordpress.com/2015/03/12/trappers-hurrier...

Simply put: if a job is so repetitive that it can be automated out of existence, it's in the interest of humanity overall that it should be.

_0nacon Ethiopia is now Africa's fastest growing economy

Many Western aid projects are also thinly disguised subsidies for well-connected companies back home. The main difference with China is sheer scale and the fact that they tend to import their own labor as well.

_0nacon Medieval trade networks

Many of the spellings seem to be historical and/or purposely antiquated.

_0nacon Airbus A380, Once the Future of Aviation, May Cease Production

Well, it goes both ways: EK, being essentially a monopsony customer, is also in a great place to squeeze more concessions from Airbus. That's why the two sides are currently engaged in a game of chicken, with EK pulling what seemed like a done deal at the last Dubai airshow ("too expensive, lower your price!") and Airbus now making rumbling noises about cancelling production entirely ("price is too low, no plane for you!").

_0nacon Tea if by sea, cha if by land: Why the world only has two words for tea

Nit: Western (black) tea is 紅茶 hongcha, lit. "red tea". Chinese black tea refers to fermented teas like pu-erh, which are not the same thing.

_0nacon Tea if by sea, cha if by land: Why the world only has two words for tea

The friendly article notes that both Japan and Korea likely acquired the word long before the Silk Road.

Relevant random factoid: it's possible to tell when many Chinese words were imported into Japan based on the pronunciation, which varies based on where the Chinese capital (and hence the ruling class dialect) happened to be. See "Onyomi" under https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanji.

_0nacon Bitcoin Visa debit cards are cancelled

The major exception is Monaco, although this is only hypothetical since they haven't actually issued any cards.

It's also, ahem, a house of cards for its investors, but that's another story told on my blog: https://gyrovague.com/2017/06/16/monaco-doing-the-math-on-an...

_0nacon Professional Dress Code Tips

Oddly enough, in stuffy industries not adhering to the dress code is a strong social signal that you're good enough to be able to flaunt it.

I used to work in telecoms consulting, which is fairly buttoned up: usually dress shirts, slacks and nice shoes, although us engineers were permitted to dispose of the tie and open the top button. But the best engineer in my company -- the guy who'd be flown in by private jet when needed because the billing systems were dropping $1m/hour on the floor -- maintained a steady uniform of ripped jeans, ratty T-shirts and permanent 3-day stubble, and the clients would always fall over themselves with gratefulness when he showed up. Not because of what he wore, of course, but because he was "the real deal" and very good at actually fixing problems, instead of talking about them.