Hacker News Reader

erodedon Facebook Down?

whatsapp.com as in the web-based client, which is down.

erodedon Square buys $170M worth of bitcoins

Lol!

erodedon How much I made as a good Engineer at Facebook

Bear in mind the majority of that comp is equity.

My first software engineering job in London in 2011 was arguably $1m/year, if I'd hung on to the equity until now!

erodedon Minimum salary required in London: £500k?

£40,000 of salaried income is currently £30,287 net, after £5,880 income tax and £3,832 national insurance.

erodedon Minimum salary required in London: £500k?

Real estate is the biggest struggle.

A 3.5-bed family home in Clapham is around £1m, a 4% payment on which would consume their entire net income!

source - http://www.londonpropertywatch.co.uk/avg_prices.html

erodedon Living Without a Cellphone

Don't forget those expensive plans typically bundle say a 700Eur+ iPhone into the plan on credit...

erodedon Nothing succeeds like success

I fail to see the difference between "real life" and "the Internet". Surely they're the same thing these days?

erodedon Letters of Last Resort

> one armed nuclear sub could be wiped out fairly easily if we're talking about a power like this, right?

The one that's in dock for service and repair, yes. But the others could be at sea anywhere in the world, in an unknown location.

> Would all four, if armed, be able to do much damage back?

Each sub can carry 16 x Trident D5 ballistic missiles, with a range of 6,000 mi. Each missile carries multiple warheads, each with much higher yields than those used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So certainly the potential to do lots of damage.

The US has a similar setup with their Ohio-class submarines, though I don't believe they carry such letters or equivalent.

erodedon An IPv6-only VPS that costs less

> "RIPE, the organization in charge of delegating IP addresses in Europe, ended the distribution of new IPv4 blocks about a year ago."

This is not true. All new LIRs can still receive a /22 - http://www.ripe.net/lir-services/resource-management/allocat...

erodedon Ask HN: Who are the 100 people who most changed the world?

Steve Jobs.

erodedon Airline classes as wealth redistribution

Care to give an example? I am not aware of a single programme outside of the US that offers this.

erodedon Airline classes as wealth redistribution

But what are the alternatives?

1. True segregation where the rich go to a separate school all-together / have separate planes, etc.

2. Everyone wears the same lowest-common denominator clothes / travel in the same travel class?

Each of these alternatives is economically inefficient, and the poor suffer more as a result as their fares cease to be subsidised by the rich.

I'd rather fly $500 return to Tokyo, because some rich guy upfront is paying $4000 for a flat bed, than pay $2000 because some left-wing loon demands everyone has the same class of travel.

erodedon Airline classes as wealth redistribution

s/complementary/complimentary

This is a fairly edge case, that only really occurs on US domestic flights. The majority of the world's frequent-flyer programmes do not give space-available upgrades in the way that say American or United do domestically.

The vast majority of those travelling in premium cabins (or their employers) paid cash for their ticket.

erodedon Airline classes as wealth redistribution

He was not seriously advocating such a system, merely saying that such a scenario would be the only way to get the richer parents to pay more, ala the airline model. Otherwise it's a simple act of charity.

erodedon A mother tongue spoken by millions of Americans still gets no respect

As a programmer, double negatives make me reel with horror. I cannot parse an English sentence with a double negative as being a single negative; it's utterly illogical. At best, they're an unnecessary hindrance.

erodedon ‘The Shawshank Redemption’: A Simple But Powerful Message

I'd agree, apart from that the "end result is binary".

When you aim to do something big, it's very hard to fail completely.

erodedon Deal would bring Google jets, millions of dollars to San Jose airport

To be fair, this isn't a private airport, it's really just a private terminal at San Jose International (SJC). Don't get me wrong, that's pretty darn cool, though really no different to, say, Lufthansa's dedicated First Class Terminal at Frankfurt. Well, apart from the private Google planes, of course :-)

erodedon How Syria Turned Off the Internet

The tool is http://bgplay.routeviews.org/

erodedon How to travel around the world for a year (2011)

Yes, but just book a fully-flexible return, the refund it after you've entered the country. Quite a stupid rule given it can be so easily circumvented.

erodedon Gmail was down

Works for me.

erodedon Airplanes can't get much more efficient

Have fun making a train that does San Francisco to New York in 6 hours.

erodedon The Britishisation of American English

>"an American would say" is more than a little offensive

Wait, what? What's offensive about that?

erodedon Wired Test-Drives Boeing’s New 787 Dreamliner

Alas the 787's expectations are too high, as the aircraft is basically an update of the Boeing 767. As with all launches, there’s a lot of hype and Boeing has certainly made a big deal out of it, but it’s not a radically different experience for passengers. While aviation buffs will know better, I think most of the flying public are expecting an improvement on the 777 and unfortunately it’s not – at least from the passenger’s seat.

erodedon Handling the London Waterloo rush hour on Twitter

So about the same as the Caltrain, then.

erodedon Jeff Bezos Taught Me When to Quit

Right, so he made a bad decision by taking the job. It's still much better to realise you made a bad decision and cut your losses (by quitting), than blindly sticking with it.

Given he was about to quit anyway if he wasn't offered a raise, there was no harm to asking.

erodedon The bandwidth of a Boeing 747 and its impact on web browsing

I didn't know 747s could go faster than the speed of sound ;-)

erodedon NASDAQ:FB

20:00 in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan.

erodedon A Man Can’t Live on Image Credit Alone

Indeed. I'm always surprised how many people believe they should be paid proportional to the amount of time and money that went into their product, regardless of demand. Their work is worth whatever the market will bear.

erodedon If your happiness is based on always getting a little more than you've got...

Honest Question - if you learn to be happy and content with what you have, what incentive is there to improve, to learn, to grow? It appears to me that everything worthwhile is done with the aim of improving our lives, and so if we're happy and content, why bother?

erodedon I am disappoint, Wolfram Alpha

This isn't wrong - /any/ time zone has a constant 24 hour delta before those two points in time.

What is changing is your time zone from, say, GMT to BST.