Hacker News Reader

grayfacedon Google says it won't follow Amazon's lead with a return-to-office mandate

Every company with sensitive data need to consider insider threat risk. Many compliance standards require background checks specifically because employees can lie. My point is simple, it's not as simple as "employee complete tasks? Y/N" but that every employee is a potential liability that businesses need to do risk management according to their role. Remote work makes that more complicated, and requires different controls.

grayfacedon Google says it won't follow Amazon's lead with a return-to-office mandate

That sounds akin to saying a security breach doesn't matter until there are consequences. Not many companies would be comfortable being in the position that they have not verified the identities of employees who have access to payment processing data.

grayfacedon Google won't be mandating a strict return-to-office plan

And if you find out that your developers were actually in North Korea and you've violated sanctions, would you care then?

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-disrupts-n...

grayfacedon Ask HN: Why is Pave legal?

Hate it in concept (I can't speak to Pave specifically). Metrics are useful if the manager doesn't make hard targets, the data is good and the model is good. How do you model compensation packages? how does 20 days leave compare to unlimited leave? Are two companies with unlimited leave equivalent? When the managers have targets, they're incentivized to massage the data in their favor. So even if you're doing it right, that makes every other companies data suspect.

This also sounds like it will reinforce some negative behaviors. If the data shows that other companies are paying women 80% of their male peers, shouldn't this recommend I also pay women 80%? But I doubt the output will spell it out that way, will I even know it's influencing me this way?

grayfacedon The Unix Pipe Card Game

Yea that's the fault of the scoring method (Count pipes). Character count would be better... either that or play within the spirit of the game and learn the tools for their intended purpose. I use a lot of awk/sed for quick one-time processing and I use a similar mental model for how I do most of my processing. Build a input stream, use sed to structure the data into records, use awk to process records, massage the output (e.g. sort/uniq). In many cases I could use sed or awk to replace eachother but that makes it take longer to visualize and also harder to re-use.

grayfacedon Real-Time Settlers of Catan

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamemechanic/2831/real-time

Galaxy trucker has a good app and would recommend it both on mobile and in real life. Sidereal Confluence is highly complicated, high investment game that's based on frantic negotiation, I can't recommend it unless you're seriously into games.

grayfacedon The IMEI Code: Your phone’s other number

In 2004, I was doing something similar on Tmobile. Flip phones internet was cheap. Could tether it via a cable to laptop and I also used an external antenna to improve signal. I would leave it up overnight downloading videos on p2p. I was in Army barracks at time and no one else had decent internet.

grayfacedon Autonomous Weapons: The False Promise of Civilian Protection (2022)

What you're describing might be intended. Your argument hinges on the assumption that oversight was supposed to stop this, but it could be they just have a higher level of acceptable collateral damage.

Either way, it's the responsibility of humans to design risk controls. When the AI makes a mistake it should be auditable how it came to that decision. The humans need proper training and regular exercises and ultimately to be held accountable.

I believe this achievable for those that want to achieve it.

grayfacedon S.3819 – Shrinkflation Prevention Act of 2024

CPI accounts for shrinkflation, so it's not hidden. Turns out data collectors pay attention to the numbers.

grayfacedon Yuzu emulator developers settle Nintendo lawsuit, pay $2.4M in damages

I disagree. The other platforms built their walls secure enough that they don't bother. Nintendo is aggressively defending a low fence.

Most Nintendo cartridges will function a decade from now. Many discs for other consoles don't even have the full game on it... and many can't function without connecting to a service. I'd prefer the system that is possible to preserve (but gets aggressive with monetization) then the one that's impossible to preserve.

Points to xbox for doing well with backwards compatibility and carrying libraries forward. But that could change in future.

grayfacedon Keep your phone number private with Signal usernames

It was also banned and blocked in Russia for several years. It was only unbanned when they agreed to cooperate with security services.

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

grayfacedon 3M knew its chemicals were harmful decades ago, but didn't tell the public

It's not about the research itself, it's about what happened after the discovery of danger. If their research discovers harm and they discontinue the product promptly, that should be a mitigating factor. If their research discovers harm and they continue, that should be a severely compounding punishment. That promotes research because it mitigates company risk.

grayfacedon YouTube is now blocking ad blockers so I make ads run faster

Most adblocker users are unaffected because it's only had a limited rollout. I've both been affected and unaffected using same software in an inconsistent way.

grayfacedon The thrill of the bargain hunt at unclaimed baggage

Do you have evidence of this single named company engaging in stolen items? Or just felt like throwing out accusations?

grayfacedon Scientists create artificial protein that can degrade PET plastics in bottles

> if you hold industry liable for damage done by people improperly discarding its products, soon you will have no industry

If it's predominantly being misused, then they do have a moral obligation. They control the packaging, and they know how much of it will end up improperly discarded. And by moral obligation, I really mean it should be a regulation to capture the damage done. Perhaps the recycling deposit from aluminum cans should be expanded.

grayfacedon SpaceX Starship Super Heavy Project at the Boca Chica Launch Site

And others would interpret it as "We could safely fire our nuclear weapons." And I'm not counting on the guys responsible for building the weapons to decide the more altruistic interpretation.

grayfacedon Keystroke timing obfuscation added to ssh(1)

Bridge has a built in channel for communication that has very limited bandwidth. The bidding conventions are about maximizing how much you communicate with limited symbols and almost no attempt at secrecy. Effectively it'd turn the game into one where players play with their hands face up, because that's the most effective way to communicate. That doesn't sound very interesting to me.

grayfacedon Car Bloat: “Huge Cars Are Terrible for Society”

On a statistical macro sense, yes you have.

grayfacedon Car Bloat: “Huge Cars Are Terrible for Society”

Intentionally putting others in danger is immoral to many. But morality is subjective. Putting the whole community at net negative risk so you can squeak out personal advantage is perfectly acceptable behavior to some.

grayfacedon The US economy and the EU were the same size in 2008, the US is now nearly 2X

But in the period of the article (2008) things aren't as rosy as you paint. Car fatalities are up on a per mile basis. Life expectancy is flat (and turning down recently). Electric outages are up. Work-from-home is counter balanced by some pretty awful working standards for others (amazon).

By your metrics, it'd be hard to argue that things aren't getting worse in last decade. I'm not arguing things are worse now, just that you chose bad measures.

grayfacedon Bay Area woman is on a crusade to prove Yelp reviews can’t be trusted

Most review sites have a profit incentive that doesn't care about the quality of review. But I'll call out a couple that put in effort to be trusted.

Consumer Reports does independent testing with their established criteria. But it's a paid service and doesn't do user submitted reviews.

Steam gets gamed with review bombs but provides plenty of transparency and data for people to make informed decisions. They identify recent review biases and show spikes in volume. Importantly Steam has a generous refund policy with little friction, so they have a profit incentive to match you to a game you want to keep.

grayfacedon Pixelfed Introduces Import from Instagram

> And yet, today Firefox has single-digit-percent market share, and the dominant player is in some ways worse than Microsoft was. MS seemed to want to make the web stagnate, while Google wants to turn the web into (more of) a privacy-free, advertising machine, and has been steering web standards in that direction.

I think that reinforces GP point that consumers aren't driven by privacy. Firefox didn't take off due to privacy, it took off because IE6 was a miserable experience. The killer features that drew people to firefox were pop-up blocking, tabbed browsing and less crashes.

grayfacedon AI will save the world?

AI is a tool. Someday it will be more then that, but for now it's just a tool. If we design it and train it to be altruistic, it may be do some of the things he claims. If we design it and train it to deliver stockholders profit then it will prioritize that. If we design it identify dissidents and maintain security, then that will be it's priority.

Looking at who's doing development on AI, I have my predictions for the likeliness of altruistic AIs.

grayfacedon Reddit’s plan to kill third-party apps sparks widespread protests

Define "porn company", it'd be a stretch to call reddit one, but if the existence of any adult content is all it takes then there are plenty. Almost all of the premium cable channels (Cinemax) were showing softcore porn late night when cable TV was king. Twitter allowed porn while it was publicly traded. Also, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLBY_Group

I expect what the average investor actually demands is restraint and keeping porn out peoples faces so it doesn't become what you're known for. Don't become a "porn company" and don't show porn to people that haven't opted in or to children.

grayfacedon Reddit’s plan to kill third-party apps sparks widespread protests

Discord could replace reddit for interactive feeds/discussion. But I don't think it could replace it as a repository of past discussions. It's quite common for me to add site:reddit.com on google searches.

Also reddits use of threads/upvotes can trend discussion towards a general consensus. If I want a recommendation for something that consensus is useful (eg r/televisions weekly recommendations). Discord is kind of a crapshoot of whoever is active at the time.

Am I missing something with discord? I'm a user but I generally don't engage in large communities. And there is so much "filler" discussion, that is hard to lurk.

grayfacedon Surviving Burnout (2015)

Low demand doesn't have to mean low purpose. I would split demand out into two: urgency and significance. I want significant work, but not urgent work. Constant urgency will burn me out. Some people may prefer urgent work over non-urgent work because they enjoy the hustle. But I think everyone has limited capacity for urgency.

grayfacedon ChatGPT will revolutionize the economy. We need to decide what that looks like

and chat bots won't ever "forget" to try and upsell you on the things corporate expects. Every cashier will be advertising.

grayfacedon When can two TCP sockets share a local address?

It's interesting design decision to preemptively fail when the connect might later be ambiguous. However in memory allocation, Linux will gladly allocate memory it doesn't have, return success and then later when you attempt to use it, it will kill the process with OOM killer.

grayfacedon FCC Considering Banning Transfer of Online Consent Forms

Operational doesn't mean confidential. Sometimes reliability is the most important thing. For example sending a message to parents that school will be closed due to snow.

grayfacedon Social media is a cause, not a correlate, of mental illness in teen girls

I wonder if it's more about the usage then the tool. Group chats that are used primarily for communication with a social group seems like it could be healthier. But using it as a feed of content from internet celebrities the opposite. Social media platforms are all trending towards being a constant feed.

I'm curious what the research would say about discord for example. Something centered around a participatory activity or around a group of friends.