Hacker News Reader

cc439on Let's Talk About Capacitor Failure

I find that interesting since Bromine is so often used as a sanitizing agent in indoor pools and hot tubs. I see that it causes central nervous system issues and I'm left wondering why Bromine in a steamy hot tub is somehow acceptable while its use in a tiny capacitor is somehow harmful.

cc439on Let's Talk About Capacitor Failure

LGA designs place the quality control onus on the motherboard manufacturer and their supply base. When your marketshare has relegated you to being the "budget-conscious" choice like AMD found itself for over a decade, the last thing you want is the budget quality motherboards 3rd parties are supplying to cut corners and potentially tarnish an already shaky brand perception. I've always applauded AMD for bringing excellent low to low-midrange hardware to market even during the worst of times, but of the many Phenom II, Piledriver, and Kaveri builds I put together for people back in the day, only a handful included a midrange or high end motherboard. Most were built with overall price/performance on a strict budget as the #1 goal and the $55-80 motherboards that ruled that market weren't as lovingly designed and carefully packaged as the $90-130 motherboards that dominated the Intel market at the time. You can find plenty of forum posts complaining about budget Intel boards coming with bent pins out of the box and the usual advice was to just buy a nicer motherboard. Now consider that a "nicer motherboard" would blow the budget for many of these AMD systems and that they often used even lower end boards than the cheapest recommended Intel builds. Manufacturing and making sure a female PGA socket survives packaging and shipping is far more error tolerant than manufacturing an LGA, especially if that LGA would only be made in quantities 1/20th the number of Intel LGAs. In short, I believe AMD keeps using a PGA expressly to avoid these issues given their market position.

cc439on A majority of consumers do not expect Google to track their activities

There's a difference between "activities" and "search activities". People expect Google to track search data, but "activities" is so broad that many people may not understand Google is tracking nearly as much as they actually are.

cc439on A majority of consumers do not expect Google to track their activities

The idea that your phone's microphone isn't constantly parsing speech into text and then occasionally uploading certain keywords to whichever major advertising platform (FB, Google, Amazon, etc) has an active app on the phone doesn't seem so far fetched. We know Android and Apple phones are generally always listening for their keyword phrase (Siri, Hey Google, etc) for voice-based AI assistants and that their speech-to-text support is very robust. Uploading a text log is very data efficient and becomes even more efficient if it merely sends a positive for certain keywords it's told to listen for based on the individual's demographic profile and advertiser's interest in said demographics. I've had enough "coincidences" happen to believe this can be explained otherwise.

cc439on A majority of consumers do not expect Google to track their activities

>(O)r they flat out have no idea how to profile people except expressed interests from outside sources

I think this is the closest to the truth if you meant that the way I'm interpreting it. YouTube seems to base its search algorithm around certain, broadly defined parameters that are chosen purely based on advertiser demand. If I watch one "meme compilation" sent to me by a friend, my entire recommended section will be meme compilations for weeks afterward. These videos grab eyeballs, particularly eyeballs in my demographic category as a general rule. However, if I search for car repair videos surrounding a specific model, I will never see anything relevant in my recommendations except for general "auto enthusiast" videos that target a very broad audience (broad in terms of the demographics of this hobby segment). It seems like YouTube is very focused on serving videos that please their advertisers and that their major advertisers are only interested in very generic target categorization.

I'd say this is best explained by the fact that producing a compelling video advertisement is several orders of magnitude more expensive/difficult/labor intensive than simply choosing a set of keywords for a "click here to buy" ad to show up in google search results. This means microtargeting is effectively impossible as it just doesn't make sense to spend $15k+ filming a professional quality video advertisement (plus cost per impression/click expenses) just to sell a hyper-niche product like a manufacturer-specific diagnostic tool. That said, I am a huge fan of two specific channels which seem to draw a large enough and unique enough audience to get hyper-niche ads for things like capital pipeline maintenance equipment so maybe YouTube just doesn't have the volume of audience analytics to make such ads work on anything but the most obvious signals in the data.

cc439on Why Drug Prices Keep Rising Despite Congress's Efforts

I would consider a change from ingestion via IV to insufflation is a pretty major development and all around improvement on the existing drug and.method of administration. If someone managed to create an ingestable pill or nasal spray for insulin they'd win a Nobel prize. While the scale and importance of that discovery is greater, the fact that such a switch in delivery method is that significant leads me to believe this controversy surrounding a nasal spray is more outrage porn than actual reality.

cc439on Why Drug Prices Keep Rising Despite Congress's Efforts

There is one bright spot on the pharma horizon and that is the industry's discovery and pipeline crisis. There has been a marked slowdown in the discovery of novel drugs over the past decade, a trend that has remained resilient even in the face of enormous R&D spending. Whether you think big pharma spends too much on marketing in comparison to R&D doesn't dampen the importance of the sheer volume of dollars being spent. The pipeline for many pharma giants is practically dry and only getting drier with each passing year. Many have tried to offload the risks involved in massive R&D efforts by letting small companies develop the drug and then obtaining their IP through mergers and acquisitions but even then, the pace of discovery for novel drugs has still slowed meaning the number of M&A opportunities are also shrinking.

Maybe the pharma giants simply played themselves, greedily focusing on exorbitant short term profits and naively assuming R&D would always deliver something at their existing levels of funding while ignoring the long term effects this would have on their business model. Maybe we've simply reached "peak pharma", running out of easy discoveries that are best treated by applying a chemical and entering a world where biotech and immunotherapy will drive the future of healthcare. Either way, the patent cliff looms and we are rapidly approaching the threshold where enough profitable drugs go generic that the industry can no longer afford to buy out, bribe, and cheat their way to maintain their position.

cc439on Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand

Good point. Funny enough, the Google Drive desktop application was killed and replaced with Drive File Stream which broke the offline usefulness of Google Drive.

cc439on AT&T’s “5G E” is slower than Verizon and T-Mobile 4G, study finds

The FTC does though. It's a shame different departments of the same body seem to act as completely sovereign and unattached nations of bureaucracy though.

cc439on Kickstarter’s staff is unionizing

How many companies are located within such close geographic proximity to their competitors that employees can choose to work for the competition without moving to a completely separate place? Outside of natural resource extraction, this kind of thinking only applies to nascent eras of new and flourishing industries such as the late 19th century steel industry, early 20th century automobile industry, and current SV-centered tech industry. Eventually those industries will expand away from that overly competitive region in a fragmented manner, divorcing an employees choice in employment from affecting any change in the labor market for a given industry.

cc439on Kickstarter’s staff is unionizing

Wouldn't every ESOP corporation meet this standard? 100% of all profits that aren't reinvested into the company are returned to the employee in the form of shares although they are only able to access the full value of those shares upon retirement.

cc439on The rise and fall of scientific authority, and how to bring it back

"Without that, it is possible for people who are not personally accomplished, who pontificate in recycled stock phrases, who polarize situations and who are insatiable braggarts coveting media coverage, to acquire power and influence."

This is almost perfectly personified in the form of Bill Nye the Science Guy post-2000 or thereabouts. I also feel this applies to practically all figures in the "pop science" scene to a lesser degree. Few meet the standard of being an "insatiable braggart" but most are attention hungry and willing to abandon their stated principles in pursuit of furthering their influence.

cc439on Tesla Model Y

>Because Tesla manufactures all its car in California, which has far stricter rules than other states. If other manufacturers moved their production there, Tesla would rank better than the competition

I just want to point out that Tesla's California plant is Just the old GM/Toyota NUMMI plant. The article insinuates the safety violations are greater than any US based plant operated by other manufacturers over the past 10 years, a time period which includes the era in which GM/Toyota ran the very same plant.

cc439on Tesla Model Y

Extension cords duct taped down to the sidewalk so they don't pose a trip hazard?

cc439on Rudder issue that plagued the Boeing 737 throughout the 1990s

Honestly, I can't understand how this was a bad thing given just how dated and stretched-thin the KC-135 fleet was at the time and those problems have only growm worse. The Air Force has been trying to replace thr KC-135 for decades since the newest airframe was produced in 1965 and their entire in-flight refueling logistics rely on these aircraft. Yes, it is unseemly to slip something into a continuing resolution to fund a war effort but when the bureaucratic roadblocks to purchasing something so critically important yet so unsexy as a flying gas station, one has to wonder if the people involved were acting out of good-willed desperation to help avert a massive problem with critical defense infrastructure. While $16 Billion for 100 aircraft may seem exorbitant, it has taken until this past year for the KC-135's replacement to enter servjce at a cost of $179 million per unit. That still beats the inflation adjusted cost of $160m per 767 tanker but think about how !uch money has been wasted on upfit and restoratiom programs for the 60+ year old KC-135 airframes over the 15 years since that "scandal".

Source on KC-46 info and general issues with the agjng KC-135 fleet: https://www.defensenews.com/opinion/commentary/2019/01/16/pe...

cc439on Rudder issue that plagued the Boeing 737 throughout the 1990s

Reading both of your comments, one has to wonder if your wife and their classmate were one in the same.

cc439on Google Hardware makes cuts to laptop and tablet development, cancels products

Everyone assumes that designing a product for mass production must be easy since "industry" is a part of the "old economy" and thusly must have been so figured out that anyone can do it. The reality is that the past century of modern manufacturing development hasn't resulted in amazing amounts of simplicity just the same as how the "tech" world has only become more complex. The difference is one has a century of exponential complexity growth behind it while.the other has ~30 years of complexity growth in its modern era.

cc439on Canada grounds Boeing 737 Max 8

>The correct move here is to act even if they think the certainty is low.

What is the correct action though? The root cause of the first crash is understood to be a complete lack of training on a single aspect of the flight control system in a particular set of circumstances (one that happens to occur in the most dangerous part of the flight envelope). From what I understand about this issue, the correct action is to institute an immediate crash course (pun intended?) to train pilots on how to recognize and manage the actions of this subsystem unless further, currently unspeculated issues with the sensors and software are discovered.

>(T)he risk of grounding planes is operational inconvenience

I think you're overlooking the risks involved in adding significant pressure to flight schedulers (who have to get planes in place to make up for missed routes), maintenance crews (who have to provide more flight hours for the remaining fleet to make up for the missing planes), and pilots (who will have to fly something different than what they've recently been flying).

Think of how many opportunities for a mistake to happen would arise from changing something like the route, time, and (sometimes) vehicle used for the daily commute by every worker in a 2,000 person company. Tighter timetables, increased flight hours on the remaining fleet, and the need for pilot's to shake the rust off their skillset flying an airframe they haven't been in for a while are all significant risk factors that have played a part in the vast majority of flight accidents in the modern era of air travel.

cc439on Market Concentration Is Threatening the US Economy

Companies break up all the time, it's just that such moves are rarely sexy enough to break through into the mainstream news cycle. Take Hewlett Packard for example, the comapny's very existence is owed to its origin as a manufacturer of test equipment (calibration and measurement equipment) but they decided to spin off that core business unit in 1999 as Agilent (this move was the largest ever IPO in Silicon Valley at the time). Their decision wasn't made on entirely financial grounds either, the idea was actually that a smaller, more focused leadership team would allow the business to become more agile and thus more profitable than it could be while under the burden of HP's broad-focused bureaucracy.

To take that one step further, Agilent then spun off the electronic test equipment portion of the business (which was HP's original market when it was founded) as Keysight to focus on their life science divisions. Each of these decisions was made despite the spun-off division being successful under the greater corporate umbrella.

cc439on Dystopia Is What Results from the Attempt to Create Utopia

What's wrong with any of that?

cc439on What ABC called "pink slime," USDA now says can be labeled "ground beef"

Producing a collagen/cartilage slurry is also known as making a broth or a stew.

cc439on What ABC called "pink slime," USDA now says can be labeled "ground beef"

Ironic that this comment comes in response to an article about a slightly-more-than-normal processed meat product in support of hyper processed replacements for generally lightly processed meat and dairy products.

cc439on What ABC called "pink slime," USDA now says can be labeled "ground beef"

Literally every foodstuff will be exposed to bleach and or ammonia due to the washdown procedure in every food processing plant. It may not be present in the same quantities as a product directly treated by such disinfectants but it's still there.

cc439on U.S. Student Debt in ‘Serious Delinquency’ Tops $166B

Are the balkans not part of what has traditionally been considered Europe? I seem to recall a little conflict involving ethnic cleansing back in the late 90's...

Also, I understand that Russia is considered less and less "European" with each passing year but the Ukraine and Russia (or at least all of its centers of power) are located within the European continent by definition. There's also the issue of the IRA's war against Northern Ireland and the UK as a whole, while that conflict doesn't meet the commonly agreed definition of "traditional warfare", it was the very template every modern insurgency bases itself upon. In a sense that was a war by any modern definition since traditional warfare seems to have become a relic of the past.

cc439on Most Americans don’t realize what companies can predict from their data

>following someone around takes time. If you photograph them you have to develop film (and you won't know if the photos turned out until then). And while it may have been legal, social norms said don't stalk people

It also required a minimum ratio of one person to one target to capture such information. The barriers to justifying round-the-clock surveillance of someone were far higher when such activity entailed paying for round-the-clock manpower. An individual would need to have made very wealthy or very determined enemies in order to demand such close attention but technology has lowered these barriers such that literally everyone with a smartphone is effectively under round-the-clock surveillance.

cc439on Most Americans don’t realize what companies can predict from their data

How would FB know what my friends have purchased? I've experienced the "ad that's way too specific to a conversation held just moments ago to be mere coincidence" phenomenon several times. Each incident has involved the kind of product neither of us owned, none of our other friends would ever buy, and dull/boring enough that no one would have a reason to post/chat about it on Facebook.

cc439on “I’m moving out of state”: employees are trying to avoid California income tax

Piblic roads are almost always maintained by the local municipality though and they collect the least taxes of any level of governmwnt yet deliver the most services. I've never bought that argument unless applied to the modern interstate system which was once a Federal responsibility but is now mostly state funded.

cc439on “I’m moving out of state”: employees are trying to avoid California income tax

You've basically summed up my opinion on CA in comparison with my current state of residence. The only major diffetence is our roads also suck like CA's despite having a similar weather advantage but at least I can blame them on the insane amount of truck traffic (~50% of interstate traffic outside of rush hour) fhat stems from our status as a major manufacturing hub. We don't pay much in taxes and all that sweet, sweet value added manufscturing employment and wage growth is worth the potholes in my opinion.

I recently visited SF, the capitol city of HN's core demographic and my wife and I stood aghast at the sheer filthiness and unseemly nature of the place. Present day San Francisco is a place ripped straight from the pages of a dystopian cyberpunk-ish novel from 20-40 years ago. Excessive wealth cloistered in enclaves surrounded by slums (homeless camps) and a complete degenration of the public square (in a broad sense, I'm referring to all the public spaces in the city center) into a gallery of feces, drug abuse, and general decay all bathed in the glow of private spaces reserved for the wealthy tech elite. The "high tech, low life" aesthetic popularized by that genre has been given life in that city and it is terrifying to see such a nightmare become reality.

cc439on Airbus will stop building the A380 in 2021

>Turns out outsourcing everything is not so ideal after all.

The crazy thing is that this has been the primary business model in the automotive industry for decades at this point and it (generally) works exactly as advertised. If I had to posit why the benefits failed to materialize fot Boeing, it's that the Aerospace industry's approach to and competence with supplier development and quality control is sorely lacking in comparison to that of the automotive sector.

It took decades for the major OEMs to get a handle on the mechanations of the tiered supplier system and they were also operating in a sector where production volumes are measured in the hundreds of thousands. It's far easier to absorb the cost of a "learning moment" when you can spread the cost of a new iniection mold made to the right spec over 100,000+ units. There are also far more opportunities for "learning moments" to appear when you're making hundreds of parts a day versus one a month. Not only can you play catch up without incurring too much of a cost penalty if a whole days production is scrapped, you can gather far more data to help you refine your process (statistical process control).

cc439on Activision-Blizzard layoffs after reporting record results

Just to be brief, non-adversarial and in-between models such as works councils [1] are allowed that are not legal per the NLRA in the US. The US also has restrictions against common sense methods of representation such as having elected union representatives serve on a company's board of directors or even in upper management. I'm all for the collective voice of workers having a say but the NLRA was basically the equivalent of the PPACA (in terms of being written for the benefit of megacorp insurers, pharma, and other stakeholders) but still being sold and defended as if it was free (at point of service) universal healthcare. It only allows for a purely adversarial relationship between unions and businesses with any sort of mutual ownership/leadership/stakeholding being expressly forbidden.

It afforded workers the right to form independent governing bodies and self-finance things like strike relief funds that are important in cases where a company is simply unwilling to bend in any way. However, my experience there is an enormous, unserved middle ground between "no collective representation at all" and "we need a separate warchest and leadership to force any sort of compromise" yet creating something in that space is effectively illegal thanks to existing law.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_council