Hacker News Reader

carcon Trading halted as U.S. stocks plummet

Lots of bold, unsubstantiated claims. I think every time there is a big peak, or a big valley, some percentage of people are always peddling "but this is different"

carcon Jeffrey Epstein, blackmail, and a lucrative ‘hot list’

My understanding is that Gates and Epstein were more or less just acquaintances, but it seems you think otherwise. What am I missing?

carcon Makers, Don't Let Yourself Be Forced into the 'Manager Schedule'

I'll never understand this sentiment. You don't have to have alerts from slack outside of business hours. Or respond in general. If I responded or looked at my messages every time I got one, I'd never get work done... so I simply ignore them until I am taking a break or otherwise at a good stopping point. It's not that hard.

carcon Amazon’s Consumer Business Turned Off Final Oracle Database

Just wanted to say this is completely inconsistent with almost all people I know who work/have worked at Amazon as developers

carcon OKRs from a development team’s perspective

This seems like there isn't buy-in to the OKRs across your employer. My company does OKRs and it's taken seriously by VPs as well as the devs. Here, it's very reasonable to say no to something (and have that be respected) because it's not contributing to your team's OKRs. If it's a VP or something and insists it needs to be done then that means the OKRs need to be updated to reflect the nature of this work.

carcon To Message Bus or Not: Distributed Systems Design (2017)

A couple of big reasons don't like message buses (but open to hearing about why I'm wrong):

-All "requests" will succeed even if malformed

-Couples producers/consumers to the bus (unless you put in the extra work to wrap it in a very simple service)

carcon Go 1.13: xerrors

I think I agree with you - I'm just trying to understand the other perspective from someone that seems to think not having exceptions is an improvement. I've mostly worked using java and go and to be honest I think I prefer exceptions because you should (almost) always check error codes in go anyway, and if you forget, you just made debugging much more difficult.

carcon Go 1.13: xerrors

Aren't you supposed to check all the possible errors in golang anyway? How's that any different than java code being littered with error handling code?

carcon REST is the new SOAP

> Why is REST so popular?

You think this guy is a hateful hipster, but most of what he says probably resonates with most software vets. To me, it's mostly against the REST zealots who demand REST is done in a very particular manner. I've seen companies with a very stable, robust RPC framework that had a small faction of REST zealots who were extremely against it because it didn't do things according to REST. It didn't matter to them how stable it was or how well it worked.

Also, REST is relatively not popular - what percentage of the world's APIs use REST do you think?

TBH, you're the one coming off like the hateful hipster to me.

carcon Coinbase Wants Wall Street to Resolve Its Bitcoin Trust Issues

To counter anecdote with anecdote, I've had no issues with coinbase and have found them pleasant to use. That includes transferring to gdax/selling/withdrawing, etc.

carcon The Bitcoin Whales: 1,000 People Who Own 40 Percent of the Market

This is simply false.

carcon Google's AlphaZero Beats Stockfish In 100-Game Match

Neither go nor chess are solved

carcon Jim Cramer says Snap shouldn't be a public company due to its low earnings

Why the downvote? The world is rife with people making claims like this but not putting their money where their mouth is...

carcon Jim Cramer says Snap shouldn't be a public company due to its low earnings

If it is so obvious that snap "shouldn't be a public company", then the price would be far lower than the ~$12 it's at now..

carcon Nothing Is Too Strange for Cities Wooing Amazon to Build There

To me, this sounds like it's the perspective of a pampered person.

You really don't think Amazon opening a campus in a city with stagnating or negative job growth would be good for that city?

carcon Man charged after media storage site Dropbox finds child porn in his account

Permissions?

carcon NBC’s Snapchat news show gains 29+ million viewers in its first month

Weird, I always ignored the news 'show' but this prompted me to watch it and it had nothing that you just brought up. It talked the Barcelona attack, Bannon getting fired, and a couple of other actually worthwhile things. Granted, there were a couple of dumb things (like Taylor Swift's social media disappearing or something), but it still exceeded my (admittedly low) expectations

carcon An Indian village addicted to chess

As a recreational player that plays in tournaments from time to time and is active in my local chess community, this post really only exposes that you don't know what you're talking about. For context, I'm not amazing but I'm no slouch (~95th percentile in the US) and memorization accounts for so little of my defeats or victories that it's practically meaningless. In fact, studying the openings is usually considered to be the least value-adding way to improve unless you're a titled player (usually 2400+ US ELO)

carcon Want a Job in Silicon Valley? Keep Away from Coding Schools

Funny, I have almost the exact same experience. Quit my job as a CPA at a big firm to go to a coding bootcamp, made myself put in the same number of hours coding/learning as I was working my old job (70+/week) until I found a job... got a job at a startup first and 2 years later got a job at one of the "big 4".

I also don't list my bootcamp anywhere mostly because I'm worried about assumptions people will make about my technical knowledge if I do (rather than judging based on my actual performance). I'm also hesitant to recommend it to others because while I have to say it was 100% worth it to me... I've tried to help too many people learn to code who just failed because they weren't willing to fight past the frustrations of the learning curve (which is very steep at first). I just assume now that most people don't have what it takes (and that is NOT intelligence or cleverness... it's mostly just discipline/work ethic/intellectual curiosity).. so I'll never really encourage people to follow my path.

carcon UK bulk surveillance review is ‘fiction’, claims former NSA technical director

>> At least Russia, China and other regimes own up to their their actions. This is important as it gives people an opportunity to clearly identify and rally against repression. Running a sly dupliticious propaganda filled operation on the other hand will catch people by surprise when its too late.

Are you serious? Russia's go to response to things that they've blatantly done (think Crimea) is to just say they didn't do anything. It's laughable how much evidence there is to things they often deny...

carcon Why's that company so big? I could do that in a weekend

I think a related thing people say (that makes me cringe) is that xyz is "just a CRUD app", quite dismissively. You could argue that the vast majority of applications are "just CRUD apps"! Once you get up to a certain scale, even "basic CRUD apps" are complicated.

carcon Microsoft to shut London Skype office putting 220 jobs at risk

There's a hosted offering as part of the O365 suite.

carcon Lawsuit could be the beginning of the end for DRM

Whether it is effective is irrelvant. The question is: Do they have a right to prevent you from copying? If you purchase something, like a video game, I 100% think that no, sellers do not have that right. In netflix's, I think that they do. Whether it's effective shouldn't factor into the equation.. it's an implementation detail.

carcon Lawsuit could be the beginning of the end for DRM

I feel a little disappointed that so far, based on the comments I'm reading, this seems to be the minority opinion.

carcon Lawsuit could be the beginning of the end for DRM

Because you're not buying shows/movies from them....?

You're essentially renting here. I see DRM as generally bad only when it's on things you purchase.

carcon Stories and Tips: Interviews with Facebook, Twitter, Amazon and Others

That wasn't the real reason. They would have offered other teams she could have joined.

carcon Everyone is quitting

I live in the Seattle area too. I don't know a single person who work/worked at Amazon who disliked it or had any experience like what the NYTimes article described.

I like how you just make a blanket statement like "It is okay or great if you have low standards and low self respect/esteem". Way to play the superiority card. I know guys who went from Amazon to Google and say they liked Amazon way more.

Our experiences are obviously both anecdotal.. but only one of us is making condescending value judgments of others.

carcon Amazon Posts Another Blockbuster Profit

I've never heard someone saying that a company reinvesting profits into itself as "suppressing/hiding" profits. I guess all Warren Buffet companies are also suppressing an hiding profits. Are you calling those companies out too?

carcon Buffer Layoffs

Why are you saying something like it is always true when it is only true given a certain clause is present? It says right in your link that that's only possible when your employment contract says it's possible. Seems dishonest of you.

I never saw anything like this when I worked at an early stage startup, and it's obviously something an employee who reads their employment agreement would ask to be taken out. I'd never work at a company with that clause.

carcon Buffer Layoffs

They can't just take away equity that's vested to you. And any equity that hasn't vested isn't yours.