Hacker News Reader

byseton Lawyer divorces wrong couple through dropdown selection error

Or the UX designer… or the lack of a UX designer

byseton The risk of RISC-V: What's going on at SiFive?

Lattner left some time ago

The queen (or king) can abdicate but would not have the power to abolish the British monarchy. That's a constitutional change and would presumably take a Parliamentary act.

byseton I remember feeling derisive about marketing as a young techie

also, young engineers are often working on features meant to address market needs discovered by marketers, but they don't know it.

byseton Germany fines YouTube for removing video of anti-lockdown protest

Can’t one frame either side of any controversy using these sorts of histrionics? This makes us all stupider.

byseton The Amazon 'Personal Games' Policy

“Unless it impacts your performance during working hours” — Shouldn’t the employer just note the poor performance and tell you to improve, rather than police your personal life? Under your reasoning, an employer could require a certain number of hours of sleep per night.

byseton John McAfee found dead in Spanish jail after court approves extradition to US

“…as long as you don’t challenge their ideological stances”? Maybe the problem is you

byseton Six charged in Silicon Valley insider trading ring

Didn’t hurt his career much? He was barred from the securities industry forever. Sure he had a lot of money left, but how can you know where his career would go if he weren’t prosecuted? That’s like saying that if Bill Gates were forced to cash out of Microsoft in the 80s it wouldn’t have affected his career much because, after all, he would still be a billionaire

byseton Six charged in Silicon Valley insider trading ring

SEC pursued junk bond pioneer Michael Milken in the 1980s, Ivan Boesky before that… unsure of specifics of SEC personnel getting to “high office” because of that but seems obvious that high profile successful prosecutions would be career-making

(Granted those examples are from the 80s but i would think there are more recent examples…)

Milken was prosecuted by Rudy Giuliani which didn’t hurt Giuliani’s career, but Rudy was a US district attorney or something, not SEC

Agree with your sentiment generally though, seems like a boatload of people could have been put away after the financial crisis but they instead profited from bailouts

byseton Six charged in Silicon Valley insider trading ring

Wouldn’t that just leave you with more syllables and less precise language?

byseton The media's lab leak fiasco

Ok thx for the reply

I was just dismayed to see the story sink so fast (but I get it now) — the article involves an interesting discussion of how scientific consensus is represented in the media and how it relates to social media, which seem like very HN-friendly topics… shame that so many are eager to flag something like this based on (as seems likely) some sort of forbidden-topic litmus test

byseton The media's lab leak fiasco

"And guess where else lab leak was suppressed? Here on HN."

And maybe is still getting suppressed? This post was #1 on HN one minute, and then, less than an hour later, it's down on page 3, ranked #88. Does the HN ranking algorithm really bury stuff that quickly?

byseton Coinbase from YC to DPO

"I log into it once every couple of years." That probably explains it?

byseton Yahoo Answers to shut down May 4, 2021

I do remember often being frustrated when mostly useless Yahoo Answers content would appear at the top of Google search results. I never understood why it was ranked so highly. YA seemed like what Quora would be like if you were required to flunk a literacy test in order to participate.

byseton At Home with Down Syndrome (2008)

I would think that's more of a cognitive thing where if you don't normally spend time around people with Down's syndrome, the particular physical features that characterize Down's syndrome really stand out in a way that makes you perceive them as looking less distinctive as individuals. But once you get used to it, it becomes apparent that they look as different from one another as anyone else does.

byseton Beverly Cleary has died

Oh man, Ralph S. Mouse! How I loved that book, I'd forgotten that Beverly Cleary had written it.

byseton CFTC charges two individuals with multi-million digital asset pump-and-dump

"Funding secured!"

byseton CFTC charges two individuals with multi-million digital asset pump-and-dump

Yeah. Once it's got a price and trades on markets, it ain't a joke anymore.

byseton CFTC charges two individuals with multi-million digital asset pump-and-dump

I wonder how much DOGE Elon Musk holds, and how his, or anyones behavior towards these speculative coins is any different.

So you're speculating that the world's richest man (give or take) risked a felony conviction by running an illegal Dogecoin pump-and-dump scheme? Is that right?

I'd wager that Musk's Doge-pumping buffoonery is more of a hobby than a revenue-generating side gig. If he ends up in federal prison, It'll be for cooking Tesla's books.

byseton Dr. Seuss books deemed offensive will be delisted from eBay

You're joking, right?

byseton Dr. Seuss books deemed offensive will be delisted from eBay

No one fails to make this "hey, it's a private company" point in these discussions. It's always brought up when someone is criticizing a tech behemoth for censorship of some kind, and it's nearly always a non-sequitur.

Guess what? It's totally fine and valid to criticize private entities even when their conduct is perfectly lawful.

Thought experiment: imagine eBay and Amazon started to promote Neo-Nazi literature on their home pages in the same way that they now promote anti-racist books and such. What would be the appropriate response: outrage, or "bUt iTs a pRiVaTe cOmPaNy!!!"?

byseton Bitcoin Is Time

I hear this idea a lot, that Bitcoin is obviously flawed design that would be done differently if we could do it over again, so either it's the myspace of crypto and something better will supersede it, or it's the QWERTY keyboard (or maybe MS Windows 3.0) of crypto — locked in as a standard due to network effect but it's a sad thing because it's basically a garbage design that we're all stuck with now.

But it's always kind of vague what is fundamentally different about this imaginary, perfected version of bitcoin. Is it the block size, i.e. Bitcoin Cash is really the ideal bitcoin? Seems highly debatable, but anyhow, the block size is a debate about tradeoffs between centralization and throughput rather than an obviously embarrassing decision. Or is it more about the issuance schedule and supply cap?

Generally, if the current bitcoin is an embarrassing beta version that we're stuck with due to network effect, what does the better bitcoin look like? Does it exist already? That seems like a more interesting conversation than a meta-discussion about why we're stuck with this "dumb beta version" or why bitcoin maximalists are so mean.

byseton Bitcoin Is Time

wow, can you teach me how to read minds?

byseton Bitcoin Is Time

given how much HN hates bitcoin, it's curious that anyone would assume anti-bitcoin boilerplate would get downvoted here

byseton BTC Endgame

It's not an error, it's a different (yet common) usage of the word "inflation" to mean expansion of the money supply, rather than the more common usage meaning a decrease in the purchasing power of money.

byseton LinkedIn’s Alternate Universe

It’s even worse than that, because LinkedIn actually pretended to be you —- its invitations to “connect” were crafted to look like they contained a personal note from you.

byseton LinkedIn’s Alternate Universe

LinkedIn was much worse as they used dark UX patterns to trick you into letting them spam all your contacts with invitations to “connect”.

byseton Fecal transplant turns cancer immunotherapy non-responders into responders

Says in the writeup that the transplant is done "through colonoscopy" so it is "inserted in the other end", right?

I have heard of fecal transplants being effective administered orally via capsule. Though that might be a bitter pill to swallow, I might prefer it to the other route...

byseton Chipmaking Is Being Redesigned

Maybe he was just being honest!

byseton Ticketmaster admits it hacked Songkick before it went out of business

But per the article, a Ticketmaster employee has pleaded guilty to a criminal offense related to the hacking