Hacker News Reader

hiouon Seattle C.E.O. Who Promised $70,000 Salaries Wins Suit Filed by Brother

In this case we really aren't talking about a cut and dry example of putting workers over shareholders. The company has seen significant increases in value over time. It's a pretty difficult sell to say a CEO is hurting the company while also creating as much value as he was for the shareholders. These are boardroom disputes not courtroom disputes.

hiouon Show HN: A minimal setup for React/ES6 sites with a Firebase back end

With firebase you can just write a front-end single page app and never think about servers or anything like that. It takes seconds to start using and very little knowledge about how it works.

hiouon Hedge Fund Wants to Use Atomic Clocks to Beat High-Speed Traders

So one of the most famous HFTs is now going to offer a way to block the damage done by HFTs?

Despite the hilarity of such a thing, is this a sign that HFT is not nearly as profitable as it once was?

hiouon Venezuela Refuses to Default, and Few People Seem to Understand Why

Exactly. And this is why defaulting is so dangerous. To lose access to that foreign investment in the future would be disastrous for that plan.

hiouon Venezuela Refuses to Default, and Few People Seem to Understand Why

Not sure what part of this is warrants down voting? There are valid points even if they might be a a little off the mark

Venezuela is very dependent on financing for its oil exploration and infrastructure. The reality is that they simply need to hold the fort until oil rebounds in a year or two. Otherwise a huge portion of their future oil extraction will go to financing as opposed to Venezuela. It is certainly a risk but to say the opposite is not a huge risk with serious consequences is pretty naive.

hiouon Tech job listings are down 40% on several job boards

Its definitely slowing down a bit, but the other side is that the talent pool is growing significantly. This doesn't mean there is nothing out there. That said, it is getting much closer to looking for any typical professional job if you don't have contacts. Send out tons of resumes and eventually you'll get lucky type stuff. Sometimes doing some freelance contact work for a company is a good in for web work as well.

hiouon San Francisco's homeless problem: A civic disgrace

The reality is that most mid to long term homeless are 100% unemployable. There is no solution for most of these people in our current system. This is not a San Francisco problem but a national problem as it is a direct side effect of our chosen system of resource allocation. We as a country need to either change our current methods of allocating resources or accept it as a price we are willing to pay.

hiouon CSS is powerful, you can do a lot of things without JS

CSS animations and behaviors can be rendered outside the main JavaScript thread whereas JavaScript based animations cannot.

hiouon Rats free each other from cages (2011)

Could I enquire why you find it difficult to believe that empathy can be a common driver of behavior?

hiouon Review of ‘Chaos Monkeys’, Silicon Valley tell-all

> if we could economically rearrange society

Maslow's Hammer rears its head https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_the_instrument

hiouon Lending Club plans layoffs, discloses loans to former CEO and family members

You punish the family when you send a parent to prison.

hiouon Digitising public domain images creates a new copyright, rules German court

I have and have seen it done often. Even a fair amount of sculpture photography. It isn't that difficult.

hiouon Digitising public domain images creates a new copyright, rules German court

> Preparing a halfway decent digital image requires a great deal of skill, in the same way that a decent transcription of a written text requires a great deal of skill.

No it does not at all and as said already it needs to be a creative work(meaning transformative work that deviates from an obvious conclusion) as opposed to simply being difficult. And again, it is definitely not difficult.

hiouon Detecting Money Laundering

So your argument against tracking and enforcing money laundering laws is that laws in general are silly because not everyone agrees with them?

hiouon Why Fruits and Veggies Are So Cheap in Chinatown

And if you figure in the 10-25% of business they do laundering money you find where the rest of the margins are made up.

How is something this naive in WSJ?

hiouon Zume, a new startup trying to make a more profitable pizza through robotics

That robotic arm is the salary of a dominos employee for 10+ years.

hiouon YC set to launch one-year minimum income pilot project to figure out logistics

This isn't actually an academic experiment. It's a group of very rich people using lesser off people as entertainment.

Not too terribly far off from this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fenn_treasure

hiouon Bloody Plant Burger Smells, Tastes and Sizzles Like Meat

But does that change if the fake is $3 and the real one is $15? I think a lot of people in the front end of these startups trying to create almost identical to meat and dairy products are looking at that possibility in the not so far future as to why they will be successful. As opposed to something like a boca burger that is more intended to fit inside a hamburger bun as opposed to being exactly like meat.

I say this as someone who hasn't eaten meat for well over a decade and a really close meat substitute sounds gross.

hiouon New York passes bill making it illegal to advertise entire apartments on Airbnb

You do as least recognize that under our current system land ownership is a long way away from being a free market path? The government subsidizes and insures a large portion of lending for home ownership. Also large tax breaks are typically given for new large scale construction. On top of that transportation to and from that land is provided by the government as well as government supplied protection for that property. Not to mention government supplied utilities for that property to access resources such as water and electricity.

I definitely not trying to get into a base line discussion about libertarian property rights ideas. But at least to help you understand what we have right now is a long long way from individual free and clear property ownership of land. Maybe before we start letting people do whatever they want with what you feel like is solely their land we need to address the massive amount of government supplied resources that land owner is currently enjoying.

hiouon Laid-Off Americans, Required to Zip Lips on Way Out, Grow Bolder

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

hiouon Wall Street Has Hit Peak Human and an Algorithm Wants Your Job

I'm surprised no one around here talks about AI replacing software programming jobs.

hiouon Wall Street Has Hit Peak Human and an Algorithm Wants Your Job

But they can still compete on price. Migrant farm labor does that successfully in the present.

hiouon The Art of Closing

Docker is the first project I can remember using that has actually underdelivered features to the point I'm using it less and less.

I would definitely not follow their model of open source development as they are an example of the opposite and equally ineffective extreme.

hiouon YCs Basic Income Experiment

I imagine it involves people doing some sort of task we don't normally consider work but kind of is. Watching ads or maybe being part of a reality TV show.

But I could certainly be wrong and would very curious as well

hiouon YCs Basic Income Experiment

This is clearly unethical and I hope illegal so that it is prevented from happening. Experiments on people like this will absolutely have dramatic changes that will last their entire lives.

It's bad enough we have television shows ruining people's metabolism, likely for life, just for some ratings. But then to come from someone claiming to be doing academic research, especially in light of the history of research like this, is repugnant.

hiouon How to win the coding interview

Just so you know, in the past I used to actually bother to jump through the hoops like a trained circus performer for the apparent gift of employment from some place that actually needed me a lot more than I needed them. Then I would get all the way to the end of the interview and then tell them I would never take the position because of it. I used to hope this might stop the silliness.

Then I just stopped taking interviews with that nonsense altogether and found places to work that I actually wanted to be and that, more importantly, had mutual respect for one another as opposed to being treated like someone who was supposed to be grateful for working at some run of the mill office job. One where we were all supposed to pretend we were given some great gift of fixing someones crappy log file code that broke production. Or adding some api endpoints for a new model.

These jobs aren't all that great and all this nonsense is I'm sure keeping a lot of capable people out of the industry making slightly less money while being treated like human beings and equals.

hiouon How to win the coding interview

The only winning move is not to play.

hiouon Forty Percent of the Buildings in Manhattan Could Not Be Built Today

Data certainly shows that oversupply of housing is almost always correlated with crime. Whether or not that is the cause is certainly up for debate but I am very curious about what the argument is that oversupply does not result in staging grounds for illegal activity. Especially based on what we have seen in the rust belt.

hiouon Forty Percent of the Buildings in Manhattan Could Not Be Built Today

Because a service and investment economy is based on proximity to those with money as opposed to proximity to factories or resources.

hiouon Forty Percent of the Buildings in Manhattan Could Not Be Built Today

I'm curious what all of these increase housing supply fanatics think about cities in the rust belt(Cleveland, St Louis etc) with an oversupply of housing which makes them a hotbed of crime and gang activity?