Hacker News Reader

maverick_icemanon Jeff Bezos Is Now the World's Second Richest Person

I don't see anything wrong in people becoming super rich by exploiting their talents in the free market. That's the opposite of feudalism.

The alternative was tried in Soviet Union and Maoist China. The results were not exactly pretty.

maverick_icemanon UK triggers the official Brexit process in a letter to EU

Hopefully, UK will now get rid of onerous, business-strangling regulations of the EU. That's at least one good aspect of Brexit.

maverick_icemanon The Arrival of AI

>it wasn’t a coincidence that the industrial revolution was followed by three centuries of war

This is woeful selective reading of history. Warfare was a constant everywhere in the world before the industrial revolution. Also 19th century Europe (since Napoleon's fall to WWI) was largely free of war.

maverick_icemanon The Arrival of AI

At times, I feel that Musk is a con-man, selling dreams to naive and impressionable techies.

maverick_icemanon Elon Musk’s Neuralink wants to boost the brain to keep up with AI

Am I the only one surprised (and concerned) by how many ventures Musk start at the same time?

maverick_icemanon Netflix expected to spend over $6B on original and acquired programming in 2017

OA seems like a poor cousin of Stranger Things. Very slow paced and nothing much happens in S1.

maverick_icemanon Netflix expected to spend over $6B on original and acquired programming in 2017

I think Netflix is diluting the quality of their original content in the race of creating more and more minutes. Initial Netflix offerings like House of Cards were awesome, it has gone downhill since then. The Marvel offerings are awfully slow paced and boring (except maybe season one of Daredevil). I've been on the verge of cancelling my Netflix subscription recently and will probably do unless they significantly improve their original content.

maverick_icemanon The end of smartphone innovation

I wish I could frame this comment in gold.

maverick_icemanon Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

Maybe they make promotion decisions based on new product launches, incentivizing multiple products over the unsexy work of maintaining old ones.

maverick_icemanon Google Talk Is Being Discontinued

I doubt they have any coherent strategy in the messaging space.

maverick_icemanon Never mind

>I don't really know what purpose they serve.

Ego.

maverick_icemanon A Brief History of the Grand Unified Theory of Physics

That's stupid. What happens when both GR and QM become important as in the vicinity of a black hole or in the early universe? There should be a way of answering these questions and without unifying QM and GR we cannot.

maverick_icemanon Insert D-Wave Post Here

Argument from authority, really?

maverick_icemanon The Tenacity of Tech Recruiters

Shouldn't you have a Lamborghini instead of a Tesla?

maverick_icemanon Uber's 'hustle-oriented' culture becomes a black mark on employees' résumés

How about religion?

maverick_icemanon Uber's 'hustle-oriented' culture becomes a black mark on employees' résumés

People can change their religions, it's still a protected class.

maverick_icemanon Apple starts rejecting apps with “hot code push” features

Justice Clarence Thomas wouldn't agree with you.

maverick_icemanon Google is acquiring Kaggle

Anyone knows what was the price?

maverick_icemanon I spent three months working full time to get a job

Uber?

maverick_icemanon Sweden brings back military conscription

Firing squad?

maverick_icemanon Programmers are confessing their sins to protest a broken job interview process

If the engineering interview is broken as TFA implies then surely the companies employing these practices will lose out to rival companies. They will be forced to change their hiring culture to be able to identify good programmers. The fact that they have not, testifies to the strengths of the current interviewing culture. It identifies strong programmers from a very large pool of applicants using limited resources. Sure there's a lot of false negatives but that's a much lesser concern than false positives. The alternatives proposed (like doing a project together or looking at past work in Github) are prohibitively expensive to do at scale.

Since this issue comes up so often in HN a reader might think that there's a strong consensus in the tech community about the demerits of the current system. However, that would be a false conclusion. The losers under the current system complain a lot but people who have positive experiences don't feel the need to share their side of the story.

maverick_icemanon Programmers are confessing their sins to protest a broken job interview process

Sour grapes.

maverick_icemanon SpaceX to Send Privately Crewed Dragon Spacecraft Beyond the Moon Next Year

No one would be happier than me if they pull this off. However, I think the timeline is super ambitious. They never had to deal with human passengers till now, meaning they have to develop all that skill set in 1.5 years. Even with significant help from NASA/Russia this sounds like an extremely tall order to me.

maverick_icemanon “I was just asked to balance a Binary Search Tree by JFK's airport immigration”

RIP the First Amendment.

maverick_icemanon Alphabet's Waymo Alleges Uber Stole Self-Driving Secrets

It's pretty stupid to get paranoid over this. As GP pointed out if you logged out then it's very unlikely that they will get access.

maverick_icemanon Most scientists 'can't replicate studies by their peers'

I'm not sure that this is necessarily a problem. Most working scientists know that preliminary studies are often wrong and just because it is published in some journal doesn't mean it's true. If there's merit to it then the scientific method will eventually settle upon the correct answer. This looks like someone outside the field just came across this news and had a visceral reaction, "Gasp! Most journal articles are wrong! We can't trust science!"

(Note that I'm talking only about hard natural sciences. Social sciences are another whole can of worms.)

maverick_icemanon Most scientists 'can't replicate studies by their peers'

Yes, this is well known among working scientists. Even in my theoretical field it was well known that at least 50% articles contain some mistake.

maverick_icemanon Most scientists 'can't replicate studies by their peers'

Wouldn't this allow you to explain away all negative results? Say you get a negative result and you don't like it. Then you start fishing for a cause and found out someone sneezed during the experiment, so you'll delete the null result. Isn't that problematic?

maverick_icemanon Seven earth-sized planets discovered circling a star 39 light years from Earth

It's probably futile to argue with you but have you considered maglev trains?

maverick_icemanon Seven earth-sized planets discovered circling a star 39 light years from Earth

What's your score?[1]

[1] http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html