lph

When I was a kid, I found out that serious game programmers used C. So I convinced my dad to buy me a book on C and managed to get a C compiler for the family Mac 512k. But the book only covered the C language, and it didn't give me any example of using libraries! It taught me how to print "Hello, world" on a console (an alien concept on the Mac), but I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to create graphics or a UI with it, so I gave up. It wasn't until the arrival of the internet to my life that I discovered libraries. (and also "computer class" in high school was about word processing)

This article misses the more interesting thing, which is tech founders getting huge pay packages for companies that haven't yet delivered anything or have no realistic path to profitability. They call out WeWork and Theranos, but fail to see how close many of these others are to those. Archer? We're never going to see air taxis in our lifetimes. Nikola is already a collapsing scam. Bird? They are never going to be able to charge what it actually costs for a scooter rental, just like all of failed bike shares.

The measure for founder success is now "able to raise an obscene amount of capital", and not "able to build a sustainable business". Investors should run screaming from SPACs, but they don't, because the sheer inertia of a high valuation brings in the next wave of dumb money, allowing the early investors to cash out. It's a damned Pyramid scheme. We are truly living in the golden age of scams.

Sure, job security for many has collapsed in a way that makes traditional jobs less appealing. That's a good insight. But "everybody wants to follow their dreams and go into business for themselves!" is sort of an LOL Hacker News caricature. Low-wage workers already knew they had no job security. They didn't need a pandemic and recession to show them that.

What I want to know is why aren't wages going up? Isn't that the textbook free market thing that should happen when the entire economy is having trouble hiring?

It's almost as if any crypto scheme whose mining entails the massive waste of a resource is going to cause problems.

Moving water around a grid like we do with electricity is prohibitively expensive. We need to move people instead. Cities in deserts are just not sustainable.

> 4,700 with iCloud user IDs and passwords

How does this amount to only four felonies?! Our system is so abysmally bad at understanding crimes of scale, especially when they happen over the internet. If he burgled 4,700 houses, it would be a lot more than four felonies.

Ah, you're right, it does go into that later.

The reporting isn't helping, with sentences like 'the company is rolling out a new machine-learning tool that will scan iPhones for images that match certain "perceptual hashes"'... is that describing a system that classifies new photos, or is it talking about comparing hashes to a known-evil set?

This is weird. Apple's own announcement only talks about hash matching, but other reporting (e.g., [0]) talks about a system called 'neuralMatch' that's doing AI on user photos. To me, the privacy implications (and chance of false positives) seems quite different. Quite a discrepancy.

[0] https://www.zerohedge.com/technology/apple-plans-monitor-all...

This is presented in a way that infers political partisanship, but without any evidence for or against that argument.

- No statistics for previous administration's like/dislike removal rate. Was it lower? Higher? We don't know.

- No statistics for YouTube like/dislike removal rates on other kinds of political or non-political videos. Maybe this is extraordinary behavior for YouTube, or maybe not. We don't know.

In other words, this is flame bait that people can read into whatever they want to confirm their biases. With a heavy dose of partisan editorializing ("Disgusting!").

At best, it shows a need for more principled study from someone else.

> Authority is the problem. We need to use our own minds.

No offense, but that depends on the quality of minds. What you've just said is exactly what Q-Anon proponents say, just before they go on to repeat absolutely baseless conspiracy theories they heard about on YouTube.

My mother passed away a few weeks ago. It was her wish to go with Recompose. She was a master gardener, and to her, the idea of returning to the ecosystem was so much better than cremation or a cemetery. Through Recompose, her 'soil' will be donated to a reforesting project.

As you can imagine, I've ruminated a lot on this lately. What's the purpose of a tombstone, or a plaque, or an urn full of ashes? To memorialize, or to honor someone who is gone? I don't need a monument for that. I spent a couple of hours yesterday propagating roses with my six-year old daughter, her grand-daughter. That's a better way to honor my mother, I think, and she would agree.

As old-world tradition and religiosity fade, we can all find our own new ways to do these things. This is 'meaning-making', an interesting term I learned recently.

Incidentally, her gardening buddies were intrigued to learn about human composting. I think Recompose is going to be big.

You can, at least here in Washington state. It's called 'green burial'.

It's hilarious to see libertarians whining about being oppressed by corporations. Like, dude, isn't your whole philosophy that corporations should be allowed to do whatever they want without regard for anybody else? Go start your own YouTube. It's what Galt would have done.

> I am sure this cryptoqueen scammer put a ridiculous amount of effort into her scam when these people who actually made absurd amounts of money legally in altcoins did far less work.

Right?! All they had to do is fork an open-source cryptocurrency, and they couldn't even do that. It's hilarious. With the hype empire OneCoin controlled, it's quite possible that it could have astro-turfed its way to a bubble like those of bitcoin or dogecoin.

> That said, Tesla's Bitcoin purchase does make a lot of sense ... They then announced their Bitcoin purchase with fanfare that drove the price up, marking a quick return on their investment.

Tesla is a car manufacturer! It doesn't make any sense at all! At any company that made sense, a CEO would lose his job for gambling $1B of company money in a casino totally unrelated to the company's business interests.

Seems like a stretch to claim that approving an app on behalf of an employer is protected political activity, but is this really so different from the pharmacist who refuses to fill a birth control prescription on religious grounds?

> China is very well managed.

LOL. China is able to move very fast, but the idea that it's a well-oiled machine functioning in perfect harmony is a ridiculous fiction.

Construction projects in China cut every corner possible. When something fails catastrophically, they'll throw a low-level official under the bus. At every level, there is total abdication of responsibility. The whole system incentivizes this.

See: "The Chabuduo Mindset" https://www.chinaexpatsociety.com/culture/the-chabuduo-minds...

> The west is slow and we are in decline. China is growing fast.

Yes, and this should terrify everyone.

Yes, I can hear the high-pitched CRT TV noise. And also the high-pitched squeal that some CFL-backlit LCD monitors used to make. I'm not sure if it's that my ears are better, or if I'm just hyper-sensitive to sounds that other people filter out subconsciously.

One of the frustrating things about "the hum" that the article mentions is that, academically, it's been lumped into the lunatic fringe of conspiracy theories, and serious scientists aren't interested. It does seem like the right equipment and expertise should pretty easily be able to determine, conclusively, whether or not any given "hum" is a real physical sound.

It would be interesting to gather hum-hearers together and run some experiments. I'm also in Seattle, I also hear the hum, and like you, my hum is very location-specific.

It definitely is a thing; see my reply above. It's the engines. I was able to experimentally connect /one/ source of hum to tug boats specifically. Interestingly, though, the huge container ships that passed by did not make an audible noise.

One unfortunate effect of the name "the hum" is it kind of implies a single source. Realistically, it's probably a whole collection of sources, including some real physical phenomena, and some tinnitus-like audio hallucinations.

For coastal city dwellers, I think it's likely that marine traffic is a major source of the hum, but the world hum map has a lot of reports from far inland that aren't explained by that.

I used to live in a place that overlooked a shipping channel. I could perfectly tell you when a tug boat was near based on the low, resonating hum of its engines. I confirmed that theory with marinetraffic.com, and it was a relief to know I wasn't hallucinating.

I have since moved, and started hearing "the hum" in March. I'm now about five miles inland from that port, but I hear the hum louder than I ever did from passing boats. I can't match it to any specific marine traffic, although the sound is nearly identical. It could be nautical, or it could be some other industrial noise, or it could be something like tinnitus.

My wife can't either either sound.

I started hearing a hum in March, coinciding perfectly with my shift to working from home during lockdown. Glen MacPherson (who runs the hum database) has also reported a surge in hum reports.

That brings back memories. I loved my Transmeta-powered Lifebook P1120 and used it well beyond its reasonable lifespan: A nine-inch laptop that predated the netbook craze and had a fantastic keyboard. I wish they made a modern version.

If it's he-said/she-said between officials from NY state and the White House Coronavirus Task Force, I don't see any reason to automatically side with the White House except for political bias. This White House has proven itself to be mendacious, incompetent, and disorganized many times over.

None of that excuses NY from doing due diligence, but I'm just saying I wouldn't jump to conclusions about who told whom what.

...which could also be explained by progressive groups being the target of more repression lately than conservative groups.

We're going to be fine... whew, that's a relief...

> Levitt said the social-distancing mandates are critical

...as long as we practice fastidious social distancing, which, at least in the U.S., big parts of the country are utterly failing at...

> The goal needs to be better early detection — not just through testing but perhaps with body temperature surveillance...and immediate social isolation.

...and if we have widely deployed testing, which the U.S. government has failed at spectacularly.

So: We're going to be fine if we take this seriously and have a coordinated, competent government response. I'll be in my doomsday bunker if anyone needs me.

> "As a parent" is one of my favourite phrases, by the way. It translates to "I know better than you, regardless of your parental status".

I sympathize with this. Lots of parents are vociferous morons, because lots of people are morons and becoming parents does not fix that. But: There is a real difference, at least for many people. Your brain rewires itself to be hyper-vigilant about child safety and child harm. I can't watch TV or movies anymore that involve harm or the threat of grave harm to children, but these wouldn't have bothered me before. When I enter a room, I subconsciously scan it like Jason Bourne if he were a toddler's bodyguard. Slippery surfaces? Sharp table corners? Unfenced stairs? I've compared notes with friends and this is a common, if not universal, change in parents. They spend a lot of time thinking about child safety.

You clearly haven't seen some of the horrifying stuff that slips past the filters. We're not talking about the episode of Leave it to Beaver where Wally smokes a joint. There is a category of malicious amateur cartoons that look kid friendly in the thumbnail and in the first few minutes, and then become sick. The Elsagate stuff was part of that. I have seen, on YouTube Kids: an ice cream truck driven by a cartoon animal, who poisons and kills the other cartoon animals; and a knock off Mickey Mouse cartoon where Mickey rips his own head off unexpectedly with full blood and gore. This is not "have a discussion with your kids" territory, it's nightmares and trauma. As a parent, the risk of that happening obliterates the value proposition of YouTube for kids.

What a garbage article. There's not even any substance to disagree with. Why is this on HN? Because it uses Bill Gates as the representative of a progressive income tax?

Washington state is hamstrung by its constitution, which forbids an income tax. As a result, this "progressive" state has one of the most regressive tax systems in the country.

Washington is also hamstrung by knee-jerk anti-tax grifters in the mold of Grover Norquist (our local guy is Tim Eyman, a man who made the news recently for stealing a chair from Office Depot because he thought nobody was looking, and is now running for governor).