Hacker News Reader

gresrunon Behind tech layoffs lay cash flow-negative companies

GOOG[0] & AAPL[1] each have stockpiles of cash & securities in excess of $100B. If thier investors are raising a stink, their CFOs don't seem to care.

Disclosure: Google employee

[0]https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/2020Q1_alphabet_earnings... [1]https://www.apple.com/newsroom/pdfs/FY20_Q2_Consolidated_Fin...

gresrunon Macintosh Y2020

Excel also has a deliberate bug where it thinks 1900 is a leap year because they wanted compatibility with Lotus 123, where the bug was actually a bug! [0]

[0] https://youtu.be/bC6tngl0PTI?t=325

gresrunon Flutter: UI platform designed for ambient computing

Full disclosure: Google employee

As an engineer that's written a lot of (old-skool) JS, Java, Obj-C, C++, and PHP, it is a real pleasure to develop web frontends with Dart.

Immutable Data Structures: Not out-of-the-box but we use the BuiltValue[0]/BuiltCollection[1] libraries extensively internally Functional Programming: Dart's Iterable[2] and Stream[3] classes have all the standard higher-order functions, like map, filter/where, reduce, fold, etc. Type System: With Dart 2.0[4], the type system is really great. Expressive with good type-inference, support for generic types, mixins, & typedefs. It's actually better than Java, IMO.

Also, the async story is fantastic! JS has caught up with Dart in some areas recently but Futures, Streams, async/await, & async*/yield, have long been first-class members of the Dart language.[5]

[0]: https://github.com/google/built_value.dart [1]: https://github.com/google/built_collection.dart [2]: https://api.dartlang.org/stable/2.7.0/dart-core/Iterable-cla... [3]: https://api.dartlang.org/stable/2.7.0/dart-async/Stream-clas... [4]: https://dart.dev/dart-2 [5]: https://dart.dev/codelabs/async-await

gresrunon TV networks vowed to cut back on commercials but stuffed in more

So, I’m pretty sure you just described YouTube’s model.

gresrunon Mammalian Near-IR Vision Through Injectable, Self-Powered Retinal Nanoantennae

Look at a bright enough 980 and you won't see anything else!

gresrunon SpaceX Crew Demo-1 Mission [video]

Official stream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ZL0tbOZYhE

gresrunon Google’s Secret China Project “Effectively Ended” After Internal Confrontation

Deep Packet Inspection [0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_packet_inspection

gresrunon Live tracking of Amtrak trains

Looks like they're using CryptoJS[0] based on some symbol names in the source[1].

[0]: https://github.com/bianjiang/crypto-js-npm/blob/1762940b9eef... [1]: https://maps.amtrak.com/rttl/js/AS.js

gresrunon The Flatness of U.S. States [pdf]

Native Floridan here. Close but untrue. Highest point is 345 feet ASL[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugarloaf_Mountain_(Florida)

gresrunon Cincinnati's Abandoned Subway

A great video of a couple guys exploring Cincinnati's subway: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nY6A0_uxyvs

gresrunon 90-minute ‘super commutes’ more common as Bay Area housing shortage intensifies

I know I chose to move out here because it was the best career move I could make. Having a FANG company on my resume plus the ridiculous salary and equity while I'm here would be foolish to pass up.

gresrunon Former employees say Lyft staffers spied on passengers

You can't prevent access but you can log all access and require a written reason for access. That, followed up by routine audits of access logs will reduce and discourage abuse as described in the article.

gresrunon Simone Giertz makes a living creating shitty robots (2016) [video]

YT Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3KEoMzNz8eYnwBC34RaKCQ

gresrunon Autonomous transportation launching to 125k residents in Florida

Also, the max speed limit on roads in the community is only 30mph and electric or gas golf carts are the ubiquitous transportation method today.

gresrunon China suddenly has way more of the world’s most powerful computers than the US

It’s also rather misleading since the majority of computing resources in the US are in “cloud” data centers (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, etc.) and they never bother to take the time to run Linpack on their clusters because making $$ is more important. I would wager Google’s compute cells alone would constitute a few dozen slots in the top 100.

gresrunon How YouTube’s Shifting Algorithms Hurt Independent Media

What you're describing is effectively what YouTube Red does. You pay a flat monthly amount and revenue is distributed out to creators based upon the videos you watch. [0]

Full disclosure: I work at YouTube but not on Red.

[0] https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6306276?hl=en

gresrunon Spring vs. Java EE

Dropwizard http://www.dropwizard.io/1.1.0/docs/

gresrunon Man jailed 16 months, and counting, for refusing to decrypt hard drives

IANAL, but it would fail to meet the basic criteria, as the communication was not for the purpose of securing legal advice and, the prosecution would argue, the communication was made for the purpose of committing a crime.

gresrunon Former employee sues startup for financials in order to value granted stock

Why shall they remain nameless? I, for one, am interested in hearing who has historically screwed over employees like this.

gresrunon Java REST framework Dropwizard 1.0 released

I successfully deployed several internal apps using DropWizard (0.9.x) with two different authentication schemes last year. Wasn't too difficult.

gresrunon Apollo 11 Guidance Computer source code

Also of note, in zero-gravity the ullage space must be forced to the opposite end of the tank before ignition so the fuel is at the intakes. Commonly this task is accomplished by "ullage motors" which fire to settle the fuel before primary ignition[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ullage_motor

gresrunon SyntaxDB – Quickly look up syntax for programming languages

   objective-c blocks
   blocks in objective-c

gresrunon Not a Hacker or a Hipster – How I Got My First Startup Job

Chutzpah must be followed up with hustle or people will quickly figure out you're just full of hot air.

gresrunon A cave in Romania that was sealed for 5.5M years

Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Busy_beaver#The_busy_beaver_fu...

gresrunon GCE down in all regions

They have three zones in Asia Pacific[0].

[0] https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/zones#available

gresrunon Apple VP: The FBI wants to roll back safeguards that keep us ahead of criminals

Ultimately, all security is founded on a basis of trust. Be it trust that their word is good, their signature is difficult to forge, their code they open-source is actually what is running, etc. We trust these companies to do right by us as their customers.

gresrunon The Problem with the FizzBuzz Problem

This is a bit too involved for a whiteboard problem, IMO, but it isn't that hard to create a relatively clean solution: https://gist.github.com/gresrun/602bd53dad80bb51bb94

gresrunon The Earl Grey programming language

The JS transpiler should be named 'picard'

gresrunon “This change deletes the C implementations of the Go compiler and assembler”

Once you go Go, you never Go back!

gresrunon Hacking Oklahoma State University's Student ID

There are many schools in a university. School of Engineering, School of Music, etc.

In most U.S. universities there is a hierarchy: university contains colleges which contain schools.