Hacker News Reader

erichurkmanon What Happens Now That China Won't Take U.S. Recycling

Would mechanically shredding trash before being dumped help?

erichurkmanon Myequifax.com Bypasses Credit Freeze Pin

They don't want to make it hard to use your credit report. The worse job they do with security theater the more money they make, and the easier it is for you to obtain credit products. If they actually applied any reasonable security, the friction of getting new credit would reduce new customer acquisition.

For my view, that's ideal: people should put real, explicit thought into obtaining new credit or debt products. It's too easy right now, especially with products like Credit Karma trivializing getting new credit cards.

erichurkmanon TLDR Stock Options

Tax free at receipt is great. It should be tax free at exercise, too, and only taxed when the shares are sold. It's asinine to get taxed on something you cannot realize any actual gain from.

erichurkmanon Amazon to Shut All U.S. Pop-Up Stores as It Rethinks Physical Retail Strategy

I do hope 4-star works out. It's worked great for me a few times for last minute decent gifts (including for a kid and difficult to buy for relative).

erichurkmanon TLDR Stock Options

The biggest downside to options is the tax treatment. The treatment by the IRS is absolutely asinine: you're taxed on the 'gain' between strike & current fair market value, or rather, you'll pay tax through the AMT. You can't sell the shares, so why are you taxed at exercise?

erichurkmanon Cancer Complications: Confusing Bills, Maddening Errors And Endless Phone Calls

I wonder what the downstream effects of this are on building generational wealth. 100 years ago, when your parents died, you might inherit a home or a small amount of money. That then helped uplift the next generation. Now, if your assets are drained, you have a reverse mortgage, etc, there's nothing to pass on except for the very wealthy.

Cancer sucks.

erichurkmanon Linux Kernel Through 4.20.10 Found Vulnerable to Arbitrary Code Execution

TOT = Tip of Tree.

erichurkmanon Startup Credits – Free/discounted plans for startups

There's also FrontApp.

erichurkmanon Don’t Get Clever with Login Forms

> I thought the best practice was to make it unclear whether an email or username is in the system

It's useless obfuscation. 99% of systems that tell you "if you entered a valid username, we'll email you a password reset link" also don't allow duplicate accounts by email. Try to register a duplicate on their sign up page and they will tell you "this email address is already in use."

Useless "security" obfuscation and creates a terrible user experience trying to reset passwords.

erichurkmanon On Being a Principal Engineer

You need a path of self-demotion otherwise the only route to fixing a misplaced promotion is by firing or quitting.

erichurkmanon Facebook adds 5 divs, 9 spans and 30 CSS classes to every post in the timeline

if(ad_dollars > fines) { do_evil(); }

erichurkmanon Firefox 65.0 released

It's in the 'Chrome' menu. 'Warn before quitting'.

erichurkmanon Firefox 65.0 released

I really wish this was standard across all apps on macOS. It's beautiful UX, and easily discoverable.

erichurkmanon A Standard and Clean Series A Term Sheet

Delaware Court of Chancery is like a standards body for anything else: it's a set of well known, public rules.

Every major law firm has extensive experience in it.

Every major investor's law firm has extensive experience in it.

It doesn't use juries, it uses judges. Cases can move very quickly. The Chancery is well-funded, and the judges have deep experience in corporate law.

erichurkmanon Kite launches line-of-code completions, goes cloudless, secures $17M in funding

Does "really happy" include injecting your ads into our editors by hijacking open source projects? Because that makes me really unhappy.

erichurkmanon Office 365 is now on Mac App Store

The quality on Mac is nowhere near the quality of Office on Windows. At least Excel. Slow, crashes, tons of missing shortcuts, etc.

erichurkmanon Ask HN: Best things in your bash_profile/aliases?

And `open .` does the opposite: opens Finder to your current directory.

erichurkmanon Build your own Mint

More background: https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/news08.html

Current account 'balances' for people he no longer wrote personal checks to: https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/boss.html

erichurkmanon Build your own Mint

Correct; that's why Knuth started issuing fake checks instead of real checks for people that found mistakes in his works: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuth_reward_check

erichurkmanon Build your own Mint

Careful, because Plaid also gives you access to your account's routing and account numbers [0]. I'm not sure if the way this library works gives access to those, but with a routing & account number a thief _can_ write checks, debit your account, etc.

[0] https://plaid.com/products/auth/

erichurkmanon Ultima Online spent years developing a system that was destroyed by players

I think a fair number of us owe our careers to UO; I'm in a similar boat to you, dabbled with UOX, POL, spent a good deal of time with Sphere (my first foray into 'large' C++ projects and, also my first real Linux exposure sshing into the servers to run `sphere &` when it inevitably crashed), and later with RunUO. It also is what made me learn data structures, in working with tools and programs to read/write (and distribute) changes to UO data files to create your server's own maps, art assets, etc.

(Or, as I used it for, replacing the tree art assets to be smaller, making it easier to see through the 2D isometric trees.)

My favorite tidbit about UO is around the technical term 'shard'. It comes from lore from Ultima I, where the wizard fractures the gem that contains the world into shards, and each shard contains a copy of the world. Ultima Online needed a word to describe multiple servers, they picked a term from the lore.. and now 20 years onward, we talk about database sharding.

erichurkmanon Quora pays thousands for posting questions

Instagram is good for marketing visual products and ideas. It's visual discovery.

Quora pushed a blend between Yahoo! Answers and Wikipedia. It was text-based discovery. I do miss the well-researched, cited, frequently updated answers of yesteryear.

erichurkmanon Show HN: Fancy fonts you can use almost anywhere

Please don't use this. Concrete example: if you use the OpenDyslexia font and have configured your browser to override individual website's fonts, this is what you see: https://i.imgur.com/aCk2ShW.png

erichurkmanon Project A119

This era of science always fascinates me.

First landing on the moon? July 20, 1969. First satellite launch? January 31, 1958. 11 years, 5 months, and 20 days.

Insane.

erichurkmanon Verizon says to shed 10,400 jobs by mid next year

And they get to structure who leaves and when. You can wind down projects responsibly, shift resources over time, train people on new tasks. Far less disruptive than a sudden layoff.

erichurkmanon Prions, Nearly Indestructible and Universally Lethal, Seed the Eyes of Victims

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11721058?dopt=Abstract

> we estimate that the mean duration of the incubation period is 16.7 years

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

> A comprehensive statistical analysis had earlier reported that the mean incubation period was between 10.3 and 13.2 years, but the tail of the distribution was long. Using these estimates, we calculated that the upper 0.4% quantile was 40 years, and even larger for those infected young (>50 years), very much in line with these new observations.

erichurkmanon Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?

> Gmail lags severely compared to when I use Thunderbird.

The number of times where I am typing an email and somehow trigger hot keys is absolutely ridiculous. Mid-word and suddenly I've deleted the draft, changed labels, and muted & archived a critical conversation is absolutely infuriating. It's Outlook level bad.

erichurkmanon Five-Year Trends Available for Median Income, Poverty and Internet Use

Or a non-developers use case for high speed broadband: a contract data entry job through Upwork is likely a much more sustainable job in Mississippi than it would be for someone in Brooklyn, but quality internet connections are required (minimum wage in Mississippi is $7.25…).

erichurkmanon Google Will Pay Publishers for ‘The Night of the Yellow Ad’

I took it to mean that Google was covering the advertiser's cost to the publishers that showed the ad mistakenly.

erichurkmanon Immutable Web Apps

Unique file names also solve poorly behaved caches. I spent too long at a previous job trying to figure out why a particular user kept hitting the same error even after it was fixed: it turned out to be his computer's clock being off significantly enough that assets that should have expired from his cache were not expiring.