Hacker News Reader

marsRoverDevon Forced migration to Google Sheets API v4

I guess the biggest takeaway here is caveat emptor. Google famously does not support their services, and wields so much power that you are pretty much SoL on this one.

I have sympathy for your situation - but next time, remember this and consider whether supporting their platforms is a good business choice. I don't believe a provider of a free API should be contractually or morally obliged to maintain it into perpetuity.

marsRoverDevon Facebook Portal – Privacy review

I would not go so far as to assume iPhones do not perform surveillance. What Tim Cook says is one thing, what the national security letter they've received says is another.

marsRoverDevon My years working on black programs

Perhaps SAR with very high resolution too - allowing them to image at night and through cloud cover.

marsRoverDevon Saudi Aramco Is the WeWork of Energy with Pulled IPO

So their inability to adapt to a modern world is our fault? I find that hard to believe when they as a society have had way more resources than the rest of the world for quite some time, and haven't really done much with it.

marsRoverDevon Bulgaria is the world’s fastest-shrinking country

Which company pays this in Sofia? VMWare? My company has engineers in bulgaria but they don't make that kind of money (still good money, but not $5.6k good).

marsRoverDevon Questions to ask a company during a job interview

Multiple machines approach can work if you have an IT person dedicated to a development team, located in the same office, with a low ratio of IT-to-other-staff.

If the process for getting something like IntelliJ IDEA installed on an airgapped machine involves less than an hour with their help, it's workable. If it is not, forget it.

Unfortunately, it takes a lot for management in most companies to see why this is a good idea, and why spending that much on staff ratios is a good idea.

marsRoverDevon Questions to ask a company during a job interview

I worked at one place where instead of giving us root access to our machine, gave us one that was offline (with access to an air-gapped local network and a dedicated IT guy to ensure we had access to tools/IDEs/licenses etc) and another, shittier one that had internet access side by side. This worked fine.

I went somewhere else where we had locked down machines. I am never, ever, ever going back to a place like that. Fuck working in that kind of environment.

marsRoverDevon Beijing Internet Court launches online litigation service center

We in the west are already using this for bail decisionmaking - this one is used in the US.

https://www.equivant.com/northpointe-suite/

On another note, why is there always a push to "humanise" the system with some bullshit robot? It's completely unnecessary. What it boils down to is some weighted matrices doing mathematical work. I would argue that if it was used by a human judge to aid their judgement, mixed in with their prior experience. I would argue that in a lot of cases it is going to make them question their own biases if the system is designed to be race blind and only using the salient facts.

marsRoverDevon Aussie ISV buys ads to wake up Google support

I feel lucky to personally know Google employees. The times when I've had an issue and gone via the public channels there has been radio silence. Directly report it via a google employee and it generally gets dealt with. It should not be this way.

marsRoverDevon Jeffrey Epstein's Death Was on 4Chan Before Officials Announced It

4chan is basically a million monkeys on typewriters, so it's unsurprising they've managed to predict the death of Epstein. Let's not forget that every man and his dog on reddit and elsewhere immediately predicted this guy would get suicided. It was as predictable as the tide going in and out.

marsRoverDevon How the Stock Market Works

This falls far short of "Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About The Stock Market But Were Too Afraid To Ask".

Does anyone have a source that actually begins to explain thi stuff? I want something that goes into long/short, that begins to take a stab (in simple terms) at how to analyse a company's finances to identify red flags, or reasons why investing might be a good idea.

marsRoverDevon Airbnb host ordered to pay £100k of unlawful profits after letting council flat

Pick up the phone and ring your local council right now - they all seem to have a different approach to this, but the person on the other end of the phone will have the answer for you. They will be very interested in the outcome of this.

marsRoverDevon Alan Turing to feature on new £50 note

When I first moved to London my Australian bank changed about $1000 AUD for me to british 50s; I think in that part of the world the banks/money changers get shipments of 50s to save space/weight. Took me a good year to shift those though, 3/4 of places would outright refuse to accept them and the other quarter would handle them with a mix of confusion and distrust.

marsRoverDevon Alan Turing to feature on new £50 note

Because for many people casinos are about money laundering, not gambling.

marsRoverDevon Alan Turing to feature on new £50 note

The current batch of 50s are practically unusable because they are widely counterfeited and lack sufficient security features. The new one should significantly lower that risk - that having been said, it's likely that they will be hoarded by drug dealers etc so you won't be seeing a huge number of them in circulation.

marsRoverDevon Alan Turing to feature on new £50 note

ESA has named their newest mars rover after Rosalind Franklin, a good start.

marsRoverDevon Fighting climate change may be cheaper and more beneficial than we think

"more beneficial than we think"

I mean, apart from the whole not dying in a mass extinction event within our lifetimes...

marsRoverDevon India to order taxi aggregators like Uber, Ola to go electric

I don't think that solar panels will be capable of generating enough power to make much of an impact on an electric car's mileage. Happy to be corrected.

marsRoverDevon Australia May Be the World’s Most Secretive Democracy

I have seen rusted on voters from both sides of the aisle condemning this. The government's mistake was raiding a News Corp journo - they have absolutely no-one on side on this issue now.

marsRoverDevon China Has Whole Towns Focused on Making Electric Cars

https://github.com/996icu/996.ICU

9am-9pm, 6 days a week for $41k a year.

marsRoverDevon Global recession fears grow as factory activity shrinks

I find it hard to believe that this will be contained to Australia and China.

Australia certainly deserves what it gets (my home country) given its attitude towards debt and housing, but I think the contagion is real.

marsRoverDevon Uber’s IPO means higher fares for rides

Cost was not the only driver for the push towards Uber. The fact that the licensing scheme was ineffective at providing a safe, positive experience in almost every market I visited was the major driver.

If I'm paying the same as a cab it doesn't matter, as long as the driver is accountable for their behaviour, state of their vehicle and driving it is and always will be a superior experience to traditional cabs.

I also find it doubtful that the Uber experience will ever cost as much, unless they completely kill off all competition (not going to happen). They have no moat - the network effect does not enable them to have a true monopoly, or even duopoly because the concept is simple enough to implement with an app and a team.

marsRoverDevon Europe says 737 Max won't fly until it completes it own design review

Passengers as a whole don't have any idea what is going on and have the memory of an amnesiac goldfish.

They also don't have the ability to differentiate between planes in general, so this is probably just as likely to affect their perceptions of the A320.

marsRoverDevon Huawei case prompts F/OSS reconsideration (German)

Supposedly, the GDPR handles point #1.

marsRoverDevon Huawei case prompts F/OSS reconsideration (German)

I dunno about you, but I don't trust either the US or China. Doesn't matter what their publicly stated intentions may be.

marsRoverDevon ESA Space CyberSecurity Call for Ideas

Currently I believe that comms are E2E encrypted.

marsRoverDevon Call for Code – Developer competition that seeks solutions for natural disasters

I think they might need to accelerate their efforts, I think a lot of people here look at them in a very negative light.

marsRoverDevon Google Wing will deliver to about 100 homes in Canberra

I imagine this would be used for Immediacy solutions. Amazon Prime Now being a great example of which.

It would cost more, but per order it's probably cheaper than a guy on a bike given guy on said bike + insurance + overheads will take a bigger cut than the drone will.

marsRoverDevon Google Wing will deliver to about 100 homes in Canberra

I think with today's technology there's no need to build a card reader into the drone itself. It can just be handled online prior to delivery (or after successful delivery).

marsRoverDevon 996, GitHub, and China's digital workers rights awakening

My experience of working for a massive company in france was we had a "35 hour" workweek, which cadres would regularly ignore. They were typically doing 8:30-7pm or 9pm-7pm.