Hacker News Reader

duke_samon Melvyn Bragg steps down from presenting In Our Time

His genuine interest in such a vast range of topics and his ability to keep experts away from rabbit holes made the show exceptional. He will be sorely missed

duke_samon Airbus A320 Poised to Overtake Boeing 737 as Most-Delivered Commercial Airliner

It’s impressive that Airbus caught up with Boeing after a 20 year head start. It sounds like Airbus’s bet on the future paid off but the article reads more like a PR piece than a case for why the A320 out competed the 737.

duke_samon Doge Is Putting Major Government Efficiency Projects at Risk

And will anyone talented enough to put all the pieces back together want to work for the federal government after all this? Feels like a good way of ensuring the only path forward is to pay large sums to private enterprise to fill the gaps.

duke_samon Days Since Starship Exploded counter made it to 48. It's back to zero again now

The schadenfreude is strong here but it’s hard to argue with results. By treating space launches as a process to refine through iteration (so the more the better) they’ve come to dominate the market. It’s also a process where others don’t gain the benefit of those iterations, there’s no new tech innovations to base your own launch vehicle on, just lots and lots of internal knowledge.

It’s worrying to have a capacity like this so concentrated in one company (whatever the leanings of the figurehead) but hard to see how that changes unless others start using the same methodology

duke_samon Google begins testing AI-only search results

The whole new iteration of attempts to game this are going to be fascinating. The adversarial nature of AIs trying to produce content better able to fool the AI judging the content sounds like the perfect Petri dish to quickly increase sophistication.

duke_samon US deploys AI to revoke visas of foreign nationals supporting Hamas: Report

This is one of the many initiates where the process and details matter. What’s the due process here, can people see the prompt that judges them to be supporters? Is AI just highlighting “supporting” content for human review?

Even if you support the idea in principle, the actual practical implementation should be treated with skepticism.

duke_samon TikTok's algorithm exhibited pro-Republican bias during 2024 presidential race

Not that I think TikTok is particularly spotless but this sounds like the result of an algorithm learning what groups will engage with, ie democratic leaning accounts were more likely to do _something_ with republican content than vice versa.

duke_samon Ask HN: Promoted, but Career Path Derailed

You’ve been given the chance to show that your previous success wasn’t just a function of the domain you were in and team you were on.

Taking a flailing org and being visibly a part of turning them around will open a lot of doors in your current company. Notably those open doors won’t really translate if you switch jobs. If you switch jobs you’ll have to rebuild the trust that senior middle-management have in you.

At the end of the day if you want to find a small niche and stay in it then senior staff+ is likely not for you unless your technical area is in demand and very complex.

duke_samon It's OK to hardcode feature flags

The risk of deployments isn’t entirely technical. Depending on your business and customer base it might be necessary for some groups to have access to the feature earlier or later than others.

duke_samon DHS removes all members of cyber security advisory boards, halts investigations

Whatever problems or limitations the existing approach had dropping everything on the floor is one of the least helpful ways of trying to fix it (assuming good intent).

duke_samon Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt's Leaked Stanford Talk

You are assuming the business is entirely located in one city or at least region which is rarely the case beyond a certain size. It would also be an argument against function specific offices or locations (eg a NYC sales office) which has been a characteristic of companies for a very long time.

duke_samon James Joyce was a complicated man

Ireland tends to top the list of countries happy to be part of the EU. Which would be an odd position if European was a touchy identifier. It’s also not unheard of for people to refer to the mainland as if it were the whole continent.

duke_samon Python Gotcha: strip, lstrip, rstrip can remove more than expected

Absolutely, it’s possible the name could be misleading but surely this is one of those times where maybe you make the mistake once and then never again. There are far more painful gotchas in Python (see mutable args).

duke_samon California's war on plastic bag use seems to have backfired

Most shops in Ire/UK have stopped providing thin plastic bags for sale. All bags are either bags for life or (much) more expensive reusable plastic bags. Only small convenience stores still have the thin bags available.

duke_samon Philips hid CPAP machine problems from FDA and patients for years

In an ideal world the state would prosecute the company and the evidence from that would be usable in a class action suit with huge punitive damages.

duke_samon Using a Markov chain to generate readable nonsense with 20 lines of Python

For a hack day project someone took our IRC logs to do something similar for employees who had left (one bot per engineer, small company so a handful of bots). This made for a great afternoon until the bots started talking to each other and then started triggering the simple command the ops bot would accept. It quickly got shut down.

duke_samon Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It

If you work for a company where your whole immediate team are co-located it can be great. In my experience I end up spending most of my time working with people in disparate offices so I get the worst of both worlds, constant in-office video calls (and all the meeting room shuffling that goes with it).

duke_samon I'm starting to think LEGO is evil

I just bought a couple of the Builders of Tomorrow Set #6177. All regular pieces, no tie-in or specialist parts. Expand with a couple of specific sets for the minifigs or custom pieces and you are set. If you are lucky enough to live near a Lego store you can also expand the collection using the wall of bricks.

I've never liked the Lego kits (even as a kid) for the reasons already mentioned. You build them once and then the (building) creativity is gone. Give me a pile of 4x2 bricks any day.

duke_samon Ask HN: Would a startup sponsor my visa?

I was lucky enough to get a startup to sponsor my H1B. It was a big investment for them since I'd cost them a large chunk of money and time before I'd written a single line of code. You spend most of the process feeling guilty for taking time from extremely busy people's days to go through huge email discussions with lawyers and filling out forms. When you actually land at the company people will wonder why so much time and effort was taken to ship someone in from abroad rather than hiring locally.

From the employee side there's also risk, while you can switch jobs on an H1B it's not trivial and startups have a tendency to go under (luckily my current employer is kicking ass so my chances of an unemployment related deportation are very close to 0 but it still worries me at times). Having your company go under is never fun, that coupled with facing a deadline to find another job with visa related friction slowing the process down is not something I'd like to try.

On the upside working for a US startup is an amazing experience. Ireland has some hardy souls trying startups but it's like another planet over here. A lot more energy and enthusiasm around starting something new and people don't treat startups like a last ditch attempt at employment which is nice.

duke_samon Star Trek Has Arrived on Netflix as Promised

So much better in fact that they are the trope namer for a series suddenly getting better: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GrowingTheBeard

duke_samon Copyright Lawyer: The Public Domain Goes Against Free Market Capitalism

Isn't the whole idea of the government taking action against people for marketing goods against free market capitalism?

duke_samon Why astronomers (and other scientists) should program in Python

  >>> from decimal import Decimal
  >>> 2 * Decimal("3.1")
  Decimal('6.2')

duke_samon In Fifty Days, Payments Innovation Will Stop In Silicon Valley

The problem with the market judging is a bank is worth your money or not is that by the time everybody decides that bank X is going under it's probably too late to get your money out (e.g. a run on the bank). This is why we have the FDIC.

duke_samon Gawker's Numbers Tanking

I know a number of people who fell back on using the mobile version but it was so much hassle they just found alternative sources. I used to hit Kotaku and io9 multiple times per day but the new design meant I spent more time trying to find stories than actually reading. Was a pity to lose sources that were usually pretty solid.

duke_samon Hulu Is Popular, But That Wasn't the Goal

I think the networks are missing the point, the alternative to Hulu and other online offerings isn't cable or satellite it's P2P. Hulu allows them to get _some_ money from people who otherwise would be worthless to them.

Paying $2 per episode on amazon or iTunes for a show you are only going to watch once makes very little sense as does paying $60+ for a cable subscription (assuming the content you want to watch is not HBO etc.) if you only want to watch a couple of shows.

duke_samon Another Inside Job

I understand that differences of opinion can exist on the function of the government and it's interference in private commerce but seriously:

"First, the proposed settlement only calls for loan modifications that would produce a greater “net present value” than foreclosure — that is, for offering deals that are in the interest of both homeowners and investors. The outrageous truth is that in many cases banks are blocking such mutually beneficial deals, so that they can continue to extract fees."

Can we not all agree that practices like that are predatory and an abuse of power? I really want to hear an argument about how an institution that holds as much sway over someones life as a mortgage holder would be justified in taking actions like this. The Republican party is traditionally ani-government intervention but they are elected by people, a non-trivial number of whom have to be getting screwed as badly by this as people who vote Democrat. I can't really see any grey area here unless the article is grossly misrepresenting the facts of the situation.

duke_samon 'W' Considered Harmful

Also in some parts of the world there is a leading H sound, specifically Ireland.

We also pronounce R like 'or' instead of 'are' which causes endless amusement every time I use the abbreviation HR in the states.

duke_samon Reddit AmA: Director of the first ISP to challenge the USA Patriot Act

One of the concerns of the 2nd amendment was protecting the people from an unjust government. Back then I could see a citizens militia being able to violently protect their rights as a form of last resort. These days unless you live in a fortified mountain cave you would have great difficulty protecting yourself from the US military (if it came to that). Luckily the chances of the US military/government staging an overt violent coup are slim to none. Unluckily there are a range of new means to subvert freedoms that you can't resist with guns. Mr. Calyx holing up with a machine gun would have done nothing to preserve the rights he thought were being violated. Today we need a new form of the 2nd amendment that prevents figures of authority trying to prevent people recording them when they work[1][2], and protections for people's privacy both in person and online.

[1]http://www.pixiq.com/article/maryland-motorcyclist-spends-26...

[2]http://newsone.com/nation/newsonestaff2/chad-holley-brutally... - the video was initially suppressed

duke_samon Why business analysts and project managers get higher salaries than programmers?

I'm also pretty sure this is why software houses run as widget factories will produce sub-standard solutions. The hierarchical structure gives more weight to the ideas of the people managing. This works if the manager is an expert (or at least as knowledgable as their reports) in their field but with software it results in the most informed opinions being ignored or devalued especially if the costs/benefits are not immediate, so lots of technical debt. If you are managing a team of good developers your role is one of administration and occasionally cat herder (someone has to call time on yak shaving arguments).

I've seen a bunch of government software contracts go down this road, they all try to use the same "tried and trusted" solution even when the assumptions that underpin it have changed wildly (developers are just looking to play with fancy toys and so can't be trusted). They hire based on cost, 3 developers being paid 20k are worth as much as one developer being paid 60k and generally won't fight to retain staff. I find this incredibly ironic since government projects are often challenging and novel, they are dealing with scales or activities that businesses (mostly) don't touch. It always struck me that the area crying out for a creative, original solutions implemented by a film crew team.

duke_samon When Irish Eyes Are Crying

The bank bailouts made very little sense, the biggest toxic bank, Anglo Irish Bank, was not a retail bank. They specialised in property financing. Letting them go under would not have resulted in the Irish Government having to cover huge amounts of deposits. The current majority party (Fianna Fail) has a history of connections to property developers and this connection is what a lot of people though spurred the saving of Anglo. Now more information is bubbling up about the exposure of European banks to Anglo and the other Irish banks. Europe (especially Germany) wants this mess cleaned up because if the Irish Government drops the guarantee then their own banks will have a huge hole in their finances. These were essentially risky investments made by foreign banks that the Irish taxpayer is now being forced to pay back.

Bank of Ireland and Allied Irish Bank were profitable (extremely so in the context of the Irish economy) and if kept in government hands would eventually make back their losses. Anglo made it's profits on the back of the property bubble, not something that will be repeated any time soon.

This is the perspective of an Irish economist on the debacle: http://www.ronanlyons.com/2011/01/18/the-irish-bank-sandwich...