Hacker News Reader

he_is_legendon Google used ‘double-Irish’ to shift $75.4B in profits out of Ireland

Can someone explain to me why lobbyists are permitted? Surely politicians should be representing the needs of people who voted for them. Lobbyists appear to enable exactly the opposite behaviour.

he_is_legendon “The best minds of my generation are thinking how to make people click ads”

Or: gain market share by building a better product, or offering better service, or something else actually useful to the end user. Simply out-advertising your rivals using borrowed money while offering exactly the same product works to nobodys benefit.

he_is_legendon Pinboard asks lifetime users to convert themselves back to annual paying users

Original discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26199676

he_is_legendon How to Start A Niche Content Site

Wordpress.com has a lot of limitations:

- You can not run Google Adsense or other advertising programs to serve ads on your WordPress.com blog. - You can not write paid posts, sell links, review products, etc. - You can not extend the functionality of WordPress.com by uploading plugins. (it comes with a certain set of plugins, but you can't add just any plugin). - Same applies to themes as to plugins.

These were gleaned from https://www.wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/what-are-the-limi... which lists others also.

he_is_legendon The Intelligence of Earthworms

Philosophy

he_is_legendon A lightweight, customizable omnibox in JavaScript

What am i looking at? I type in the provided search input and nothing happens. I drag images to the interface, nothing happens. The github site has an animation that shows something being dragged, apparently then searched (indexed i would have assumed? but its unclear what is going on) and then some results get displayed without any typing ever happening.

he_is_legendon Netflix urged by EU to slow streaming to save internet

> What's the real bottleneck here?

ISPs overselling their last mile bandwidth.

he_is_legendon 50% – 75% of cases of Covid-19 are asymptomatic

There is a huge shortage of masks in the west - even hospitals are running out.

he_is_legendon Cursed Adapters

I have one. I have a PC tower case with extra cages for holding hard disks - 4 cages with 4 drives each fill the front of the case. However that meant moving the slot where the power switch and front USB connectors were. I didn't need the front USB headers, and I also didn't want to cut a hole in the case, so moving the power switch to a empty PCI bracket in the back was the perfect option.

he_is_legendon Show HN: I made a site that lets you download entire Playlists off of YouTube

no it isnt, and yes they will.

and this is why we cant have nice things.

yes. there exists a tool called youtube-dl that anyone can download and do this for themselves. its not overly well known outside "i know how to use a console / command line" circles and this is a good thing. and it enables exactly this sort of "enterprise".

what this sort of low effort SaaS website really does is not democraticising such software for the masses. software that humanity needs. instead it will get projects like youtube-dl shutdown, all for a few ad clicks.

copyright exists. it is evil. but please stop trying to profit from tools that bypass copyright. let those tools live in the shadows so that we may all enjoy the fruits of their labour.