Hacker News Reader

jamroomon Seaweed could be scrubbing more carbon from the atmosphere than expected (2017)

I agree 100%. For some reason environmental discussions always have to include the "cost" to business in the decision whether we do anything about it.

I imagine if I told my neighbor that I felt it was cost prohibitive to pay for trash pickup service, so I was just going to dump my trash in their yard, they'd have a problem with that. Why do we allow companies to pollute water, land and air that doesn't belong to them?

jamroomon Nile: decentralized, commission-free, local-economy focused Amazon alternative

Looks like they paid no US income taxes in 2017:

https://www.seattlepi.com/business/tech/article/Amazon-paid-...

jamroomon Linux touchpad like a Macbook: goal worth pursuing?

Here's what you want:

https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/ssd/owc/macbook-air/2012

Just replaced the internal SSD on a 2012 MBA myself - works great now :)

jamroomon Cancer and mobile phones

This is true if you believe in the LNT (Linear No Threshold) model:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_no-threshold_model

Then check out the idea of Radiation Hormesis:

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

It's an interesting idea.

jamroomon GNU Mcron

Yes - I believe it will start the new job while the old one is running - your backup script should write a PID file to ensure it isn't already running.

jamroomon EEG Accurately Predicts Autism as Early as 3 Months of Age

I know you're being sarcastic, but it looks like there are 6 vaccines in the first 2 months:

https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/schedules/easy-to-read/child-ea...

Not that I think it matters - I was just curious based on your post.

jamroomon Medicare will require hospitals to post prices online

"cutting corners" is part of the overall profitability picture for a health organization (or any large corporation) so literally _anywhere_ that corners could be cut is already happening.

jamroomon E-waste recycler loses appeal on computer restore disks, must serve prison term

But that also includes the OS License if I am reading the article correctly. The value of a replacement for the OS is the cost to download it from MS.

jamroomon Goldman Sachs questions whether curing patients is a sustainable business model

It's not too expensive - the US can easily afford $150B. We just have to decide that it's a priority and make it happen. Each year we some how find almost a trillion dollars for defense (more if you include "black budget") and no one blinks an eye.

jamroomon Google makes push to turn product searches into cash

Because Google no longer will show you the BEST results - it will show you the results that are most profitable for Google.

jamroomon Show HN: Carbon Doomsday – Graph and API of Earth's Carbon Dioxide

OK I'm feeling kind of dumb - let's say a car gets 20mpg - if we are emitting 411 grams of CO2 per mile that comes out to 8,220 grams of CO2 in that 20 miles, which is 18.1 pounds of CO2. How do we get 18.1 pounds of CO2 out of a gallon of gas that weighs 6 pounds?

jamroomon Show HN: Carbon Doomsday – Graph and API of Earth's Carbon Dioxide

I can't believe that a car dumps a pound of CO2 every mile..

jamroomon Apple's Middle Age

Yep - in the long run it has been much cheaper for me as well. I moved full time to Mac in late 2008 with an aluminum Macbook, and used that Macbook daily until May of 2015 when I picked up a loaded Macbook Pro 15. I got almost 7 years out of that first aluminum Macbook (which I actually still use to serve media to my Apple TV), and I bet I get that (or more) out of my Macbook Pro. Previous to 2008 I was getting a new Windows laptop pretty much every other year as I always encountered the same slowdown as you describe. I think that Windows laptops get better than 2 year now due to decreases in overall CPU speed improvements relative to what we were seeing between 2000 -> 2010, but the build quality of the Macbook was something no one else could touch at the time.

jamroomon The U.S. government is set to borrow nearly $1 trillion this year

I'm sure you mean "entitlement" in the legal sense, which social security, medicare are (i.e you are entitled to these) - not the pejorative that the word has become. I'm hopeful that "patriotic centrists" will agree with you and finally stand up to the corporate welfare system that is out of control in this country and contributing more to our deficit than social welfare ever has.

jamroomon Learn FFmpeg the hard way

I'm sure you did, but just in case - did you checkout Sox?:

http://sox.sourceforge.net/

I've used both FFMpeg and SoX extensively for audio and have found SoX very useful on more than 1 occasion.

jamroomon Kids in ‘Netflix Only’ Homes Saved from 230 Hours of Commercials a Year

I don't know about kids cartoons, but I just watched the original Star Trek episodes from the late 60's and they are 50 minutes each (for a 1 hour time slot) so that's 10 minutes of commercials. Hour long episodes are now about 40 to 41 minutes in length, so the number of commercials has doubled since then.

jamroomon The Incredible Shrinking Airline Seat

Just want to say I can complete commiserate with you - I'm 6'10", wear size 16 shoes, 2 or 3 XLT for shirts and am 36x36 for pants. Shoes are a total PITA. Do you play basketball? :)

jamroomon Redfin shares surge more than 30% in $138.5M real estate tech IPO

If you were buying, then you don't pay a commission - both the seller AND buyer's agent are paid for by the seller.

jamroomon Startup Engineers and Our Mistakes with MongoDB

Why? I don't personally care if MongoDB succeeds or fails, but if they can listen to their users, fix their issues and come out the other end with a database that works as advertised what is wrong with that? Why is it so important to you that they fail?

jamroomon U.S. health care's widespread overbilling problem

So what do you do when you get cancer and run up $1 million in bills? That's what insurance is for. Not sure if your monthly fee is going to work for you like that.

jamroomon Moderate drinking associated with atrophy in brain related to memory, learning

You're right of course, but the "correct" amount of alcohol is still going to be much more toxic than most other foods that enter your body. Alcohol is a poison.

jamroomon Comcast accused of cutting competitor’s wires to put it out of business

Wow - if true I really hope Comcast gets taken to the cleaners over this. We REALLY need more ISP competition in the US- this is just ridiculous.

jamroomon Ask HN: How was your experience with AWS Lambda in production?

This is what drives me nuts about AWS, but is genius on their part - they've got you to spend more $$ on ElasticSearch and Lambda to overcome the fact that one of their other products just doesn't work very well.

jamroomon Google Cloud Prediction API End of Life

I was a big fan of SimpleDB - I feel like if they would have just given it some love (i.e. feature updates and moving it to all SSD) it would have been a really friendly, scaleable "almost SQL" database. I found it way more flexible than DynamoDB for most data models - maybe I am the only one but I think they missed the boat with SimpleDB, and now it's just been relegated to the forgotten side of AWS.

jamroomon [ -z $var ] works unreasonably well

while not as portable, using double brackets - i.e.

  [[ -z $var ]]

can be a bit "safer" in regards to quoted variables. Works in bash and KSH.

Edit to add: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/669452/is-preferable-over...

jamroomon Boeing to lay off hundreds more engineers

This isn't union - this is just how huge corporations work. I worked for Verizon and they did the same thing - everything was locked down and you had to file a Remedy ticket to get anything done (ugh).

jamroomon Boeing to lay off hundreds more engineers

I believe many of the engineers are in the SPEEA:

http://www.speea.org/

"Since January 2016, Boeing has cut 1,332 engineering and technical jobs from its Washington workforce".

As a Washingtonian I am _so happy_ we gave Boeing 8.7 billion in tax breaks and incentives. They're taking that money and using it to maintain their work force elsewhere :/

jamroomon Backblaze B2 Drops Download Pricing by 60%

Yep - I agree with you 100%, just pointing out what their page says. I'd love to see B2 get more data centers around the world - when we have to do a 500GB restore on a server in Germany, it's already slow even pulling from S3 - with B2 it would be even slower.