Hacker News Reader

Product Development, Sales and Marketing, and General/Administrative

gohrton How Bad Entrepreneurial Judgment Killed Half-Life 3

Is it long-term good to make a something no one wants to make well?

Remember what happened to Star Wars? Lucas pumped out a prequel trilogy that made a ton of short-term money, but then put a 15 year delay to wash away the filthy taste, before Disney took over and started self-perpetuation engine pumping out enjoyable and massively profitable movies

gohrton Did Pixar accidentally delete Toy Story 2 during production? (2012)

How is it possible to get a remake done by deadline? How did the original have so much extra time padded into its schedule?

> Steve Jobs's rallying cry that we could in fact get it done by the deadline later that year

There interesting but here is that Jobs didn't know if his cry was true. But he needed it to be true, so it was. Jobs was a member of the "action-based community", not the "reality-based community" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community

gohrton Did Pixar accidentally delete Toy Story 2 during production? (2012)

That's awful. So they train people to never ask for clarification or refresh if they misunderstand or forget, so instead they go on to make a far worse mistake acting on incorrect information.

gohrton Did Pixar accidentally delete Toy Story 2 during production? (2012)

> Doesn't Google do this? If you leak something to press, you're fired, then a company email goes out "Hey we canned dude for running his mouth..."

I've never heard of this happening. I've heard of people fired for taking photographs (or stealing prototypes!) of confidential products and handing them to journalists.

gohrton There is no WhatsApp 'backdoor'

Open source is a red herring, as you say. Closed binary is the problem.

I need a way to verify that binary I am installing is the same as the binary that has been thoroughly vetted by security researches. In the modern mobile app ecosystem, on a major OS, running a major app, I can't carefully pick and choose which binary version to install. I get whatever the OS company's server pushes to me, and I can't downgrade to a known good version.

gohrton The Sound of Silence

There's a difference between " shouting down contrarian or critical viewpoints when a discussion could be initiated" and "shouting down people who are rehashing tired old arguments that looks exactly the same as the arguments put forth by people who are already known to be operating in bad faith"

gohrton The Sound of Silence

It curbs privacy and the ability to explore controversial ideas. As Facebook shows, there are more than plenty non-anonymous trolls.

gohrton The Sound of Silence

It curbs privacy and the ability to explore controversial ideas.

gohrton The Sound of Silence

The startup ecosystem is still majority vindictively anti-diversity? That's sad.

gohrton The Sound of Silence

but those who have children also know (more than people without children) that having children didn't stop them from achieving their success

gohrton Thanks, Obama: NSA to stream raw intelligence into FBI, DEA and pals

Obama has spent 8 years not caring about the 4th Amendment.

gohrton App.net is shutting down

It's only a Twitter alternative if people I care about will read what I write, or I can read what people I care about write.

Until most of the publishers are dual-publishing (or migrated), or most of the readers are dual-reading (or migrating), it's not an alternative.

GAB is a niche Twitter alternative.

gohrton The Japanese Art of Grieving a Miscarriage

Jews have funerals (and 1-year anniversary gatherings: unveiling). and Shiva is very similar to a wake

gohrton The Japanese Art of Grieving a Miscarriage

Not everyone has read every 15 year-old article.

gohrton The Japanese Art of Grieving a Miscarriage

The headline has a distasteful fetishizing tone, but the article is a respectful appreciation of a valuable cross-cultural lesson.

gohrton Poor Neighborhoods Make the Best Investments

as long as the work keeps happening, there will be more quality housing than gentry. The problem today is that only the gentry get quality housing (because they pay for it out of their income/wealth), so wherever they spend money the housing gets better.

gohrton Poor Neighborhoods Make the Best Investments

why didn't welfare systems keep them in a home last time?

gohrton Why Many Cities Have No Money

mm-hmm.

https://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/25/when-new-york-...

gohrton Why Many Cities Have No Money

You prefer that your local neighborhood be administered by a national bureau of neighborhood affairs?

gohrton Why Many Cities Have No Money

Why did that town exist? Why did a small number of people live in that isolated area, instead of closer in to population centers?

gohrton The “.onion” Special-Use Domain Name (2015)

They were attacks on violations of the community's sexual morality, not attacks on privacy and free software.

gohrton Amsterdam’s coffeeshops are closing

http://mpdc.dc.gov/marijuana

As a result, it is legal for a person who is at least 21 years old to:

Possess two ounces or less of marijuana; Transfer one ounce or less of marijuana to another person who is at least 21 years old, so long as there is no payment made or any other type of exchange of goods or services;

A person can still be arrested for:

Selling any amount of marijuana to another person; Possessing more than two ounces of marijuana;

gohrton Call Centers May Know a Surprising Amount About You

...and they will defend against any accusations of discrimination or abuse by saying "no PERSON here did anything wrong -- we use a fully automated AI Machine Learning logistics system that optimizes our warehouse and delivery operations. We don't know why it picks which items to give to which customers"

This is the Unfriendly AI that people like MIRI should be worried about.

gohrton Uni. of Alberta researchers solve puzzle that baffled scientists for decades

what's the puzzle? mods, can you fix the title?

gohrton What science says about naming in programming

Charles Simonyi has been trying for over 20 years

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/the-dea...

http://www.intentsoft.com/us/ <-- in "stealth mode" for 10 years!

gohrton What science says about naming in programming

legal name in which country? name order varies between UK and China. What's a "call"? Whose company? what kind of address?

Following this line of thinking, communication is impossible because everything is ambiguous.