Hacker News Reader

crunchlibrarianon Super Micro says review found no malicious chips in motherboards

When the state department tells you to write a story you write the story, or face the real prospect of the end of access which will be the end your journalism career. Not an ideal system for anyone, except the state department.

crunchlibrarianon Tell HN: Aaron Swartz's website is offline

I doubt his kind of "dangerous" thinking will be allowed to be spread for much longer in our corporate dystopian internet. It's just a matter of time before speech daring to criticize the corporations will be considered a security threat or whatever and immediately deleted.

crunchlibrarianon Coinbase is exploring the addition of new currencies

Terms like "market" and "gold rush" are probably too generous, more like "pyramid schemes unraveling".

crunchlibrarianon They Rejected Us

I'm pretty proud of how I got rejected from Google, how I laid into several of their products as bad and slow and missing important features. Now that they've incorporated most of my feedback into those products I go around and brag about how mad everyone got when I dared to criticize the holy Google during the interview.

crunchlibrarianon Facebook's seized files published by MPs

Anti-trust. Anti-monopoly. We needed to revive these movements five years ago.

crunchlibrarianon Facebook employees calling former colleagues to ask the best way to leave

Move

crunchlibrarianon Facebook employees calling former colleagues to ask the best way to leave

There's a lot of informal sharing of info about employees between the tech giants in the area. I don't think they are sharing the lists but people call eachother.

The speed with which we are building this "you're either with us or against us" dystopian factional mega-corporation ruled hellhole is really remarkable.

crunchlibrarianon Facebook's Bikini App Lawsuit Is Getting Really Ugly

The weird song and dance of luring developers by offering so much personal data to them for free in the early days of Facebook's API always creeped me out. I remember thinking about this all the time back in 2007-2010 or so and wondering how people could be so naive and when it would all blow up.

Blow up would have been nice. I was overly optimistic in those days.

crunchlibrarianon Facebook’s top execs ‘make tobacco executives look like Mr. Rogers’

Well you know, that whole enabling genocide thing is arguably as bad as poisoning people. Should we just not criticize corporations until the death count gets to a certain threshold?

crunchlibrarianon Facebook’s top execs ‘make tobacco executives look like Mr. Rogers’

It's a link to a commentary podcast, not sure which "actual story" you're referencing but there have been several negative stories about Facebook which they talk through and that's kind of the point of the podcast.

crunchlibrarianon Stamos says the US must ‘come together to protect’ democracy from misinformation

"Tech will always need to act in a quasi-governmental manner, making judgments on political speech and operating teams in parallel to the U.S. intelligence community,"

No, absolutely not Alex.

The fact that these massive tech monopolies are so powerful that it's now just taken for granted that they are pseudo-governmental entities should be a wake up call for everyone. It's high time we start talking about anti-trust and the breakup of Facebook, Google, Amazon, and maybe others. This is completely unacceptable.

Our laws are woefully out of date, they were written when the only foreseeable damage from companies this large and powerful was pricing abuse. The damage they have caused is far more extensive and severe than that, we need new laws and aggressive anit-trust/anti-monopoly stances to undo this damage, hopefully before it becomes too late to stop them at all.

crunchlibrarianon Amazon Web Services in Plain English

This page is hilarious, and reminds me of the early days of both open source and cloud services when everyone thought you needed some complicated sounding new phrase & acronym to be taken seriously. Just because that's the way IBM, Oracle, etc did it so we had to emulate that.

crunchlibrarianon ‘I Don’t Really Want to Work for Facebook.’ Say Some Computer Science Students

This is like something a stoned frat boy would come up with as their first attempt at a mission statement.

crunchlibrarianon Japan's cyber-security minister has 'never used a computer'

I know and work with a lot of millionaires and a couple billionaires, once you get to that level of eliteness they view using a computer as a boring chore for a technician, like fixing the plumbing or paying the bills, something they are far too important for and delegate to staff.

Surprisingly, this seems to be true regardless of age

crunchlibrarianon PG&E stock plunged 32% after it disclosed a possible link to California’s fire

Super informative, thanks

crunchlibrarianon PG&E stock plunged 32% after it disclosed a possible link to California’s fire

So bury all the cables/equipment underground? I'm sure costs are substantially higher to do so, but we could add other infrastructure along these underground lines as well if there was a shred of political will to accomplish this.

crunchlibrarianon Uber Revenue Slows as Quarterly Loss Surges to $1.1B

In finance the actual growth rate is rarely looked at that much, but the rate of change of the growth rate is scrutinized to the nth degree.

crunchlibrarianon PG&E stock plunged 32% after it disclosed a possible link to California’s fire

I don't know much about the EE side of the world, but surely there is a way to design grid/transformer equipment such that the circuit can be interrupted immediately when a pole falls over or whatever.

Is this possible? Is it just a matter of spending the money to upgrade the infrastructure?

crunchlibrarianon Uber Revenue Slows as Quarterly Loss Surges to $1.1B

Uber’s sales are dramatically slowing even as the ride-hailing company is spending more to fuel global growth, particularly in its food delivery business. Revenue growth of 38 percent in the third quarter was almost half of what the growth rate was six months earlier, when the company was negotiating a $9.3 billion investment led by SoftBank Group Corp.

Brutal opening paragraph

crunchlibrarianon Amazon’s HQ2 Spectacle Should Be Illegal

Should we dispense with competitive processes completely?

When we're talking about pitting strapped local governments against each other in corporate welfare bidding wars, the answer is, absolutely, unequivocally, yes.

crunchlibrarianon Amazon's HQ2 Spectacle Isn't Just Shameful--It Should Be Illegal

In a starkly divided country, corporate pandering is the last bastion of bipartisanship, an activity enjoyed by both Democrats and Republicans at every level of government

$2.5B in corporate welfare and permission to build a shiny new helipad for Jeff. For locations they seem to have selected years ago.

What a farce. This far exceeds even NFL-owner level exploitation of a city.

crunchlibrarianon You Don't Just Get Fired at Netflix. What Happens Instead Is Brilliant

Ugh. Another rule added to block obnoxiously loud autoplaying videos on inc.com

I hate the 2018 web.

crunchlibrarianon Ask HN: Is Google Compute down?

This is nuts.

crunchlibrarianon Web.dev by Google

When Gmail first came out I was amazed at how fast it was, so much faster than the native outlook client I used at the time, wow! How is that even possible in javascript!

Now gmail is slower than most any other website I use regularly. Can't even refresh the inbox in less than three seconds.

I've noticed the same slower by a bit every year pattern with google maps too. I'm afraid to click anything when I have a map open because I know it might trigger a repaint which will cause me to sigh and switch to another tab while it chugs for a few seconds to accomplish this.

crunchlibrarianon Yelp craters 30% as advertisers abandon the site

I haven't installed a new app in like 18 months. I'm done with that song and dance, tired of my device always being the product, especially after I just spent $1000 on a phone.

You better have mobile web figured out properly or you're not getting me as a customer.

crunchlibrarianon Tell HN: Amazon now owns 3.0.0.0/8

Catering to the broken is like 90% of every developer and data scientist's day.

I've spent the past two weeks just trying to fix some horribly wrong/invalid data that is absolutely positively guaranteed to always be correct due to certain standards and lots of money and one of the biggest best tech companies in the world stands behind it.

Guess what it's still broken they just refuse to admit it.

crunchlibrarianon Application for Fixed Satellite Service by SpaceX

Geosynchronous satellite latency in best case: 250ms

LEO latency best case: 6ms

I've used those Hughes satellite connections before, I never got anything close to 250ms. More like 400ms.

crunchlibrarianon A note to our employees

There will be more stories coming out about Google in the coming months, they are notorious for having a whole different set of standards for their super special elite executives.

I don't know any specifics of an event or anything, but I have heard a lot about how none of the rules apply anymore once you get to the inner circles.

crunchlibrarianon Google in China: When ‘Don’t Be Evil’ Met the Great Firewall

"Biggest untapped market in the world"

is the phrase I hear nearly every day, sometimes many times a day, on CNBC, when talking about China. Once you start setting up expectations for wall street research firms it becomes very difficult to undo those expectations, no matter the reason. This keeps happening repeatedly with many US/European companies and China.

crunchlibrarianon Georgia’s secretary of state posts personal details of absentee voters online

The technology hasn't leveled the playing field at all, it just tilted all the power towards large organizations with lots of technologists sitting around.