Hacker News Reader

lacampbellon YouTube is taking down educational hacking videos

High speed internet is better and more available than ever before. Storage is also much cheaper than before youtube came along. If it could happen back then, it can happen much easier now.

lacampbellon Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku

Good move. The name 'Perl' has connotations (good or bad depending on who you ask), but this language always seemed like a different kettle of fish.

Names matter.

lacampbellon Dealing with China Isn’t Worth the Moral Cost

So to sum up - we should deal with a regime that runs concentration camps and threatens its neighbours because you once met a nice taxi driver. I'm convinced!

lacampbellon How Automattic develops software for over 75M websites

To an American sure. I know people in NZ paid less than that.

lacampbellon NBA's China dilemma: $4B at risk as Chinese TV cancels game broadcasts

Modern China is like a dystopian alternate history novel where the bad guys won.

lacampbellon NBA's China dilemma: $4B at risk as Chinese TV cancels game broadcasts

Which communist society was not "State Capitalist"? IIRC State Capitalism is a term invented by Trotsky, who used it to describe state control of the economy is opposed to workers control in the utopian vision of communism. But the early USSR rapidly abolished the workers councils while he was still a major figure in the USSR.

lacampbellon NBA's China dilemma: $4B at risk as Chinese TV cancels game broadcasts

Fascists and Communists are very similar. Mussolini used to be a marxist, the Nazi party started out as an explicitly socialist party and was until Hitler took over. Many people today call the regimes of Mainland China and North Korea fascist. People used to call Chiang Kai Sheks regime fascist, but earlier in his career he was the "red general".

The two seem to always be found near each other.

lacampbellon NBA's China dilemma: $4B at risk as Chinese TV cancels game broadcasts

Communism is a utopian ideology from the 19th century. That doesn't mean communists don't exist, and the people who advocate that ideology aren't communists. Of course China isn't a communist society. Nowhere is or ever will be.

It's a bit like saying Tom Cruise isn't a real scientologist because Xenu doesn't exist.

lacampbellon Apple Hides Taiwan Flag in Hong Kong

When was this?

lacampbellon Apple Hides Taiwan Flag in Hong Kong

Communist China has annexed territory. It also has a civilian death count much higher than that of Nazi Germany.

I often think that if Germany had won the war people today would be talking about how it wasn't pragmatic not to do business with the greater reich. "Sure they ethnically cleansed eastern europe but whataboutamerica?"

lacampbellon Apple Hides Taiwan Flag in Hong Kong

The Republic of China is commonly known as Taiwan. No one is confused about the geopolitical entity you mean when you say "Taiwan".

The ROC government has for some time used some variation of "Taiwan (Republic of China)" when using English - passports, visa entry stamps, embassies, etc.

lacampbellon Uber makes JFK airport helicopter taxis available to all users

Helicopter Taxis are much cheaper than I thought they would be. What distance do they travel for that amount of money? Not familiar with New York.

lacampbellon Inbreeding in a European ancestry sample from the contemporary UK population

Maybe these should be flagged too:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21175195 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21174439

Happy moderating!

lacampbellon An apology to our community, and next steps

Yeah, thicker skin and reading manuals.

All jokes aside, there's surely a middle ground between being rude to everyone and "hi guys wowzors dinosaurs and ninjas! this project is made with <3" and the overwhelming passive-aggressiveness of this inane dumpster fire drama over CoCs.

lacampbellon An apology to our community, and next steps

Does anyone else remember the days before the tech community became filled with all these CoC writers?

lacampbellon Inbreeding in a European ancestry sample from the contemporary UK population

Well I thought the Norfolk joke that the other poster did was a bit low effort. So I thought I'd go all in and ask the real question - is in-breeding the reason the british and irish often have big weird ugly heads? I am leaning to 'yes'.

I make no apologies for comedy.

lacampbellon Inbreeding in a European ancestry sample from the contemporary UK population

The Brits here are fine to take the piss with their Norfolk or Daily Mail jokes, but seem to have a bad sense of humour when they are the target :D

Their big misshapen heads must be bright red with rage.

lacampbellon Inbreeding in a European ancestry sample from the contemporary UK population

Have you seen celebrities from that part of the world? I mainly know comedians. Ricky Gervais, Al Murray, Dara O'Brain... those are all considered normal looking people over there. They'd be considered circus attractions in Australasia. Or speaking of Gervais, compare the cast of the UK office with the cast of the US office. It's night and day. The only person in the UK office who would be considered even average is Tim (Martin Freeman). Martin Freeman is a heart throb by UK standards, but let's be honest - put him in Australia and give him an Aussie accent and no one would look at him twice.

lacampbellon Inbreeding in a European ancestry sample from the contemporary UK population

I hate to break it to you, but...

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/news/the-most-googled-que...

lacampbellon Avoid Working Alone

One advantage of working alone is that you will inevitably be closer to the business, its product, and its users. To me that has been worth more than working with a high performing development team. I am not in a US tech center, my road to decent compensation is not being a brilliant technician in high paying companies.

I do notice in technical arguments on the internet I often seem to come out of leftfield. It took me a while to realise it was because people in larger teams have an entirely different perspective when it comes to tools and technology. I need a Toyota and they need an Airbus.

lacampbellon Hong Kong protest safety app banned from iOS store

There is no extradition treaty between Taiwan and China.

https://www.mac.gov.tw/en/cp.aspx?n=FD37619195CF6DA5&s=CED28...

You are probably thinking of this. It's not an extradition treaty. It's also now widely ignored.

lacampbellon Why do companies with unbounded resources still have terrible moderation?

He should at least have the good manners to tell us who he's going to murder.

lacampbellon Why do companies with unbounded resources still have terrible moderation?

I'm not convinced fascism really exists in the modern world anymore. I tried searching for self-described fascists on the internet, and I encountered one mans geocity page that claimed he was running for US President in 2008. He admired Mussolini and Saddam Hussein, and had roman inspired costumes on. I checked the results of that election and it turns out no one voted for him, so perhaps even he was a hoax.

Ethno-nationalism is definitely thing. But if that's the same thing as fascism, then the entire western front of WWII was a huge inter-fascist struggle.

So what do you think fascism is, and where do you think it exists? Could you point me to a website of fascists?

EDIT: Thinking about this further, if fascism = ethno-nationalism to you, or even ethno-nationalism + a dictatorship, then Mainland China is arguably a fascist state. How many hundreds of millions of them do you think should be shot? That's a lot of bullets.

lacampbellon Hong Kong protest safety app banned from iOS store

Communist China issued invasion threats when the UK proposed introducing self-government in the late 50s and early 60s.

https://qz.com/279013/the-secret-history-of-hong-kongs-still...

lacampbellon China laying tracks for 1,000km/h maglev trains

Seems like an extremely expensive vanity project. Is that wise for a middle income country where hundreds of millions of people live in abject poverty?

lacampbellon Hong Kong protest safety app banned from iOS store

To expand on whoevercares' comment, recently someone committed a crime in Taiwan and fled to Hong Kong. To close this loophole and prevent HK from becoming a safe haven for criminals, the Chief Executive of HK proposed a new law to facilitate extradition of these crime suspects from HK to various jurisdictions in the region, including Taiwan and mainland China.

Countries without extradition treaties can still extradite criminals on a case by case basis. It was also very cheeky of them to use a criminal from Taiwan R.O.C - a democratic nation with a strong rule of law - as an excuse for an extradition treaty with the Mainland Area of China, a communist dictatorship where laws are at the whims of party members.

lacampbellon Ask HN: Who Wants to Be Fired?

I'm not exactly at a fortune 500. I'm one of two developers at my company and it would be hilarious to me if my CEO (who seems like a nice enough guy) even knew what version control was.

Then again, this isn't a tech company.

lacampbellon Hong Kong protest safety app banned from iOS store

Stuff like this is one of the main reasons I focused my efforts on web apps, not native ones.

https://hkmap.live/#

Looks like the devs were smart enough to make it a web app, so it can still be used.

lacampbellon Ask HN: Who Wants to Be Fired?

Why is a CEO even getting involved in an issue on that low a level?

Unless these are 'CEOs' of 3 people tech companies, I guess.

lacampbellon Ask HN: Who Wants to Be Fired?

I'm bewildered as to why a CEO would have any opinion on version control at all. Or why you'd ask a CEO whether you could use one. It's like a builder asking a construction company CEO if he can hold a hammer lower in his hand and that CEO forbidding it. Can someone explain?