Hacker News Reader

campfireveteranon C Is Not a Low-level Language (2018)

Yeap. One of my roommates from college worked at HP during the Itanium development.. it was great on paper but customers didn't want it or need it. The bigger picture is throwing everything away every few model years isn't "innovation," it's planned-obsolescence consumerism and pointless churn. Turing completeness and standardization > whiz-bang over-engineering.

campfireveteranon Stripe's 210 Day Hold Practices

I used Authorize.net circa 2010 at a large cell phone manufacturer for processing micropayments. They changed their API without notification and it broke payments for a few days, and it was really crappy considering they were supposed to be a "big dog" in the industry. Any changes were supposed to happen first in their staging environment and our test-suite ran against it to make sure it still worked before it was signed-off to be deployed into production.

Also, when I was in the UK, getting a payment processor (we had our own merchant accounts) pre-Stripe was a royal PITA. They wanted all sorts of documentation and proof that we were a "real business" before letting us process payments.

TBH, it seems like Stripe and PayPal are being pushed by "risk management" corporate suits into being unreasonable and treating their customers like United Airlines' passengers. A few years back I would ordinarily point people over to FeeFighters' Samurai to shop the best deals on payment gateways, but GroupOn decided to buy them and make them commit seppuku.

campfireveteranon Autonomous DeLorean drives sideways to move forward

In the US, a new DeLorean isn't all that expensive compared to typical "jelly-bean" vehicles that are the most common. Back in 2005, I narrowed down a vehicle purchase decision to a new DeLorean, an used Lotus Elise or a new G coupe. I went with a bone-stock manual G that I kept for a few years before I got into Cold War-era West German and French vehicles. I'm not a rich person, far from it.

campfireveteranon Autonomous DeLorean drives sideways to move forward

Yeap. That's where I sent my roommate from college to learn performance driving; a Korean dude with a CS degree from an UC turned California highway patrol (CHP) officer. (How many cops has anyone ever run into understood Big-O notation?)

Disclaimer: I learned a thing or a thing and half sliding around the back roads of the Sacramento levee system with water hazards on both sides. }:]

campfireveteranon Autonomous DeLorean drives sideways to move forward

    echo $NICK | s/80mph/88mph/

campfireveteranon Banksy unveils dark nativity scene at his Bethlehem hotel

FWIW, Banky's hotel in Bethlehem:

182 Caritas Street

Bethlehem, Palestine

http://www.walledoffhotel.com

reception@walledoffhotel.com

https://www.openstreetmap.org/search?whereami=1&query=31.719...

campfireveteranon UK court rules MI5 agents can murder, kidnap, and torture

US police can also be videotaped stealing money for their personal enrichment and not be prosecuted.

https://reason.com/2019/09/20/court-rules-fresno-police-accu...

campfireveteranon Apple Lying About “User Agent” in iPad Pro – Blocking PWAs

"Lying" is dishonest clickbait. Presenting a mobile browser with an UA identical to a desktop one is standard practice.

campfireveteranon Apple Lying About “User Agent” in iPad Pro – Blocking PWAs

There ought to be a standard "caniuse" features discovery API rather than parsing UA's or oodles of platform quirks/detection "magic."

campfireveteranon Dating of bones from Indonesia confirm Homo erectus roamed planet for 1.8M years

They'll surely find evidence h. erectus ran Android in an archaic app store up until 100k BCE. Tablet computing way back.

campfireveteranon Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (December 2019)

Startups co-founders/first-employees pay less and have fewer perks, but no one can hide in their own cube corner at that size and have deliver excellence if they want to survive.

If it were me, I would insist on equity, be it co-founder, first-employee or employee at worker-owned co-op. If the company profits and you helped it get there, so should you.

campfireveteranon PG&E Had Systemic Problems with Power Line Maintenance, California Probe Finds

Thank you, kind person.

campfireveteranon Study of “moral grandstanding” helps explain why social media is so toxic

A billion-dollar idea: a combination pseudo-outrage, crybully, political correctness, troll, flaming and keyboard warrior pre-filter. And for 2.0: a micropayment cost to comment that adjusts based on social reputation and identity verification (people who give very good, high-signal answers should get some payment or bonuses periodically and per engagement).

campfireveteranon Kurt Vonnegut Museum Opens in Indianapolis

I wonder if it closes before it opens, and then the hours change at random? Maybe you even leave before you arrive while spending 3 hours seeing the whole thing? It should be unstuck in time, at least.

campfireveteranon Neil Young quits Facebook because of its “obvious commitments” to right politics

Disclaimer: I don't subscribe neatly to a particular political label.

Commercial social media platforms have way too much power to put their thumb on the scale, i.e., manufacture consent and subvert democracy to whoever pays them the most: Cambridge Analytica, HRC, etc. A better state of things would require large social media platforms be:

1. Prohibited from monetizing ads for themselves or data-reselling. (Subscriptions and donations okay. Company and individual/celebrity pages monetizing ads okay.)

2. Similar to the previous equal time rule in mainstream media, but extended to stay out of politics.

2.a. Prohibited from officially favoring any candidate or adjusting algorithms to accomplish the same.

2.b. Prohibited from running political ads.

2.c. Prohibited from contributing to elected officials or PACs. (May or may not require overturning CU.)

3. Required to monitor content for violence, terrorism, child endangerment, bullying, genocide, and mis/dysinformation.

Just like the seperation between church and state, seperation between social media and state (and eventually, seperation between extreme wealth (corporations) and state).

campfireveteranon Microsoft's “Love” of Linux

0. Embrace

1. Extend

2. Extinguish (or at least Exhaust Energy on Extraneous complexity through Engineering design-by-committee feature creep)

(But never Excellent Enginerding, unless trying to gain status at a conference.)

campfireveteranon How to Hide a Billion Dollars

If you have substantial liquid wealth, the best ways to hide it include art (portable/small objects with stable/increasing prices) and foreign real estate in desirable areas in municipalities with strong property rights.

campfireveteranon The Editable PDF Initiative

At first, I thought it said edible PDF, but I didn't think a closed format would taste very good.

campfireveteranon Silicon Valley founders who grew up poor can’t shake “mindset inequality”

Self-sabotage and buddy-sabotage are pernicious flaws of attitude, belief and habits that exist in all people to varying degrees. This baggage is likely the greatest source of failure when fundamentals aren't an issue. I can't prove it, but this is my belief based on qualitative experience.

campfireveteranon Some Employees Chafe as Google’s New Internal Rules Take Hold

Right/left is the best divide-and-conquer wedge issue found so far, exploited by media corporatists to atomize people further from each other in the name of money, while the real division is between the have-way-too-muches and the have-little-or-nones.

campfireveteranon Some Employees Chafe as Google’s New Internal Rules Take Hold

During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.

- George Orwell

campfireveteranon Learning from the Earthquake (1990)

I remember that earthquake. I was 11, home alone, doing algebra homework on the kitchen table with the sun setting behind me. It started as a vibration that then turned to seem like gravity went sideways in a paint shaker for several minutes and the family dog went crazy. Bookshelves spilled like avalanches onto the floor. Half of the pool dumped itself into the bushes and onto the grass. The first thing I did after convincing the dog to get outside was shut off the gas to the house and that of some of the neighbors, fearing a gas explosion should any pipes have ruptured. The biggest thing I remembered was there were aftershocks all night, and we debated sleeping outside. That was one of the last earthquakes I remember in the Bay Area, the ones since were rather small and infrequent. Subsequently, all of our appliances and furniture, large and small, were bolted into studs in the wall. Big, TV-style computer monitors were held down by industrial Velcro.

More recently, I assembled for my mom a trauma kit with woundseal, quikclot and a tourniquet with a metal windlass; I always have mine in the car, readily accessible.

campfireveteranon You May Have to Wait to Borrow a New E-Book from the Library

Encrypted "borrowed" DRM books that self-destruct after a certain period of time (like many of those historic tech books on Internet Archive) are garbage and a waste of my time. I'll either borrow the real thing or steal a DRM-free ebook. The. End.

campfireveteranon The war against today's dangerously dull playgrounds

When I was a kid (circa the mid-1980s), there was a real Korean war F-86 Sabre in the middle of a sandpit and a steel labyrinth maze that was shaped like a skyscraper with about 8 levels (tall: 13 ft/4 m, wide: 10 ft/3 m, deep: 3 ft/ 1 m) to crawl through at the De Anza playground in San Jose. Looking at Google Maps, it now contains depressing McDonald's-looking, clown-colored boring stuff no kid is really interested in.

campfireveteranon Keystone pipeline shut after spilling 1.4M litres of oil in North Dakota

Just like recycling bins, that's only the virtue-signaling parts of the story. It is vital to discontinue nearly all petrochem uses of fossil fuels and leave much of the rest of it in the ground. This implies:

- massive expansions of renewables (doable since costs have dropped precipitously)

- possibly temporary use of fission (replaced hopefully by fusion)

- elimination of diesel-powered ships, replaced by electrical (battery) and/or nuclear fission (again hopefully replaced by fusion)

- elimination of FF-powered air transport with electric-powered

- derivation of reasonable amounts of polymers from recycled materials and plant sources

- improved, efficient post-consumer recycling diverting a considerable fraction of the waste stream back into raw materials

Furthermore, it is necessary and possible to spend on the order of what was spent on the wars in Afganistan and Iraq on CCS to return GHGs to pre-industrial levels... if we don't do this, nothing else matters because we (and our progeny) will all be dead. We ought to examine:

- ferrous ocean seeding of phytoplankton blooms

- blooming the kelp over-proliferation between Mexico and Africa for harvest and subterranean/hadopelagic CCS

And to be consistent, the top two other major sources of GHGs should be minimized:

- meat agriculture

- clinker production (Portland cement / concrete)

campfireveteranon Millions Use Gabapentin. But There’s Little Evidence It Works

Define "works." My mother had an intracerebral hemorrhagic stroke about 5 years ago, leaving her with severe trigeminal neuropathic pain and hemiplegia. If she doesn't have 900 mg (3x 300 mg) of gabapentin 3x a day, she experiences unbearable pain. If she inadvertently skips a dose, about 4-6 hours later it becomes apparent because her pain level goes up considerably, so it doesn't seem to be just a placebo effect alone. I can't say it helps her post-stroke syndrome improve, but it is the only medication that seems to be able to manage the pain. She's also tried Lyrica (Pregabalin) and Ambien (Zolpidem), but they weren't helpful. At the moment, she's in consultations about having a gamma knife procedure that would decompress the trigeminal nerve in the cheekbone/ear area to ease what might be a large trigeminal demyelinated nerve bundle causing excruciating pain.

campfireveteranon Piper Announces First GA Aircraft with Autoland Capability

Btw, here's probably the only actual cat IIIC landing video on YT:

https://youtu.be/gthcuZV8agI

campfireveteranon Piper Announces First GA Aircraft with Autoland Capability

YT urls can be shortened like this:

https://youtu.be/d-ruFmgTpqA

^ I saw this in my feed before this HN article.

campfireveteranon Microsoft Access: The Database Software That Won't Die

I wouldn't rag on it or Access too much because it serves/d a purpose: app and data design for less technical users who are busy doing a million other things. I supported several dozen FMP apps at Stanford Student Housing (R&DE) as it was easy for analysts to make something quickly and worked at the scale needed. Later, they used proper databases, reporting, and app-ish tools. FMP ran on a half dozen early Xserves which used goofy, consumer-grade parts inconsistently while looking Apple over-designed.

campfireveteranon Which Planet Is Closest?

Classroom factoids gonna factoid.