Hacker News Reader

dxhdron Ask HN: Companies using Racket?

Speaking for myself, it was hard to appreciate a language like Racket until I had a few years of experience (5?) solving problems with imperative languages.

dxhdron What’s Wrong with Bananas

Here's a practical, measurable definition of "organic": Less pesticide residue on produce. Farm animals which haven't been fed other animals, growth hormones, or antibiotics.

Those are important qualities for food, no need to disregard it as spin.

dxhdron A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley

Oh yeah, Diablo was certainly engrossing. However I think there's a distinction between creating a fun game that happens to be addictive, versus architecting a game to be as exploitative as possible.

dxhdron Not Lisp again (2009)

I believe it's purely seeing lines that end with )))))))) that leads the OP's observation ("To me, how Lisp looks is its worst quality--the number of parentheses is just mind boggling"). You don't get that in a C-like syntax. In practice you don't read each individual closing paren to understand the code so it doesn't matter. But it sure looks "scary."

dxhdron A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley

Older games like Diablo were not engineered to maximize Day 1 / 7 / 28 retention rates. All mobile games today optimize for those metrics.

dxhdron Boise and Reno capitalize on the California real estate exodus

Plus a 9.5% / 10.25% sales tax rate if you're fortunate enough to live in LA or Santa Monica. I believe SF is around there as well.

dxhdron The path to $100B [video]

My intent was to get at the moral and ethical implications of desiring to create a $100B company.

dxhdron The path to $100B [video]

> In 10 years there will be a dozen 1 trillion dollar companies. The number of $100B companies is going to explode as well.

Devil's advocate, is that actually a good thing?

Might be good for the consumer but not great for the laborer. Working for someone else is a bummer. Increasing consolidation means increasingly more of us will be in that position.

dxhdron The path to $100B [video]

Yeah, 1-10 million is actionable with a lot of hard work but 100B requires the world organizing around you. Eg having good timing, being fortunate, lucky, what have you. But hey if it happens to you, congrats. It was bound to happen to someone!

dxhdron Rust can be difficult to learn and frustrating, but it's also very exciting

> In a dynamic language you still have to mentally understand what the type of a function is. You can't just throw any data in to it and have it work.

JavaScript would like a word with you.

dxhdron Erlang/OTP by Example

> As someone who has worked two jobs now writing, deploying, and operating Erlang clusters, I recommend switching to Rust.

I'm surprised to read this, Erlang and Rust have almost nothing in common. It's understandable that BEAM doesn't suit your needs but suggesting that everyone should write Rust instead is grossly misleading. They are suited to solving different problems!

dxhdron Intel 9th Gen Review

Why aren't they benchmarking it against the latest Threadrippers? They've got a i9-7900X up there which costs the same as the 2950x.

dxhdron Basic features that will hopefully return to the MacBook Pro

Or buy a ThinkPad X1 Extreme, it comes with a functioning keyboard including a dedicated escape key! Upgradeable RAM to 64GB and plenty of ports are a bonus.

dxhdron Microplastics found in 90 percent of table salt

> I totally expected it to default to the assumption that eating the plastic is by default harmful via magic

I agree, as an optimist I believe that consuming inorganic compounds is by default healthy!

More seriously, I believe we should be very concerned about chemicals with unknown biological effects entering our food supply.

dxhdron Alternative code styles

Fixed width fonts let you quickly parse syntax. Syntax and semantics are equally important when reading code, whereas semantics are generally the only thing you need for understanding the written language.

That said, I haven't seriously tried programming using variable width fonts; maybe it's a well-kept secret to digesting code. Or maybe it's like Hemp Milk, there's a reason it hasn't caught on.

dxhdron Epic Games Sues YouTuber 'Golden Modz' Over 'Magical' Fortnite Powers

Fortnite is a service, not a product you can own. It's very much the same as Netflix, Gmail, or Dropbox.

Given that, why should it be okay to hack Fortnite, but hacking Netflix or Spotify would be considered criminal behavior?

dxhdron Epic Games Sues YouTuber 'Golden Modz' Over 'Magical' Fortnite Powers

This analogy is growing very thin. If you've got a business operating board games, and I start a business to flip your board games thus ruining your business, what recourse do you have?

Hacking software and hacking an online service are not equivalent activities.

dxhdron Epic Games Sues YouTuber 'Golden Modz' Over 'Magical' Fortnite Powers

Good for Epic. Distributing hacks like this actively harms the game experience for everyone else and damages Epic's brand and business. It's not so dissimilar from DDoSing a SaaS company and encouraging others to do the same.

dxhdron Epic Games Sues YouTuber 'Golden Modz' Over 'Magical' Fortnite Powers

> Imagine someone making paper boats out of a book, selling them for one dollar each and the book has 300 pages (but costs 20 dollars). Is making paper boats suddenly copyright infringement? Or breach of contract?

This isn't a good analogy. Creating and distributing cheats ruins the play experience for everyone. Making paper boats doesn't detract from anyone else's enjoyment of reading a book.

dxhdron Ask HN: Ex-FAANG developers, where are you now and why?

It lost me until I came back and read this comment; I did not think to click "the email." The page reads as a standard newsletter subscription form so I just closed the tab.

dxhdron Brave – A private, secure and fast browser

Block current ad tech and replace it with their own. Where does Brave hope to be in 10 years? Controlling the internet ad marketplace via their BAT token platform. Once the initial creators have earned their take and lost their will the platform values will be slowly (rapidly?) eroded and we'll be right back where we are today.

How is this appealing?

dxhdron I lived in a Tokyo coworking space

> Tell your distant great grandfather, you know the small farmer in rural europe in the 1700s, that the cows just escaped the pen and see if he says "But its saturday evening, I'm off the clock".

He probably would if they were someone else's cows.

dxhdron The relative performance of C and Rust

I thought the tl;dr was: Implementing B-trees as an embeddable library in C is hard, therefore Rust is faster.

dxhdron SEC Sues Musk and Seeks Ban for His Tweets on Go-Private Deal

> It takes decades to build a reputation but it can be destroyed overnight with a single tweet.

To be more accurate it was a series of Tweets, each expanding the narrative and doubling down on the original statement:

- "Shareholders could either to sell at 420 or hold shares & go private"

- "My hope is all current investors remain with Tesla even if we’re private. Would create special purpose fund enabling anyone to stay with Tesla. Already do this with Fidelity’s SpaceX investment."

- "Def no forced sales. Hope all shareholders remain. Will be way smoother & less disruptive as a private company. Ends negative propaganda from shorts."

- "Investor support is confirmed. Only reason why this is not certain is that it’s contingent on a shareholder vote."

dxhdron NFL players' surprising performance hack: going vegan

The article claims that "there's a new performance hack taking hold in the NFL — going vegan," mentioning Tom Brady as an example. Article later clarifies that "though not vegan, his personal diet is reportedly 80 percent plant-based." So the performance hack is just eating healthy food?

dxhdron The Servers Are Burning

> If a function is "referentially transparent" or "pure" it can't do anything unexpected.

Sure it can; at a minimum all functions consume compute resources. A tiny change in a "pure" JavaScript function could lead to cascading deoptimizations that destroys performance and compromises service availability. For example, changing 0.0 to 0 could do it.

dxhdron A man who was raised by wolves

Science has long established friendship as a distinctly human-human interaction consisting only of the purest non-incentivized intentions.

dxhdron Amazon applies a restocking fee of 25% of the item price

> I would imagine the item now has to be sold at a massive discount, recycled, or simply thrown away, so to them it's probably 100% loss when you include things like shipping.

I've received numerous "new" items that were previously opened and returned merchandise; things like a vacuum with hairs in one of the cleaning attachments. Same with a pair of headphones. I'd be happy if there were a discount for accepting a minimally used item. As it is Amazon just hopes you don't notice.

dxhdron Tariffs China imposes on every country

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_trading_pa...

Looks like the US is the largest trading partner with China, how much leverage do you need? How long would it take a "unified bloc" to agree on doing anything?

dxhdron How two strangers set up Dropbox and made billions

That narrative doesn't quite align with the article stating that "for various reasons none of his friends were able to join the business." In retrospect all of Houston's friends made a huge mistake! Maybe Ferdowsi was tired of MIT and joined him on a lark? I am curious to hear the story from his perspective.