Hacker News Reader

mhzshon Hard drives on backorder for two years as AI data centers trigger HDD shortage

Radio on internet?

mhzshon LG and Samsung are making TV screens disappear

I did this to disable the "Samsung TV Plus" app that is impossible to uninstall, and otherwise impossible to stop from periodically taking over the TV (e.g. instead of booting to the last app that was opened or last HDMI input, it starts its own app instead, or after Netflix has gone idle for awhile, it switches to its own terrible channels).

I blocked every Samsung domain that I possible could in a fit of rage.

Now, instead of getting some random jarring channels when I turn on the TV (or.. random times), at worst it's a black screen that says "something went wrong" and I open the thing I want. The TV just slams the pihole with failed DNS requests over and over.

mhzshon Linus Torvalds Now Favors Ampere Arm Chip over Apple Silicon MacBook

This feels like a lot of editorial for an original source that only contains this:

> And I now have a more powerful arm64 machine (thanks to Ampere), so the last week I've been doing almost as many arm64 builds as I have x86-64, and that should obviously continue during the upcoming merge window too. The M2 laptop I have has been more of a "test builds weekly" rather than "continuously".

> Not that I really expect that to really show any issues - the laptop builds never did - but I feel happier having a bit more coverage.

mhzshon Ask HN: Show me your half baked project

https://streamigo.io/

It's an app to help 2+ people choose what to watch together on the most popular streaming platforms by presenting semi-random titles, asking each person to vote (swipe left/right), and settling on the "best" based on most votes/popularity.

It was born out of endless scrolling through Netflix (and the like) with significant others and friends, and not settling on something to watch. Instead, this shortens the process by allowing everyone to give their input, but accepting the results from the app as the thing to actually start playing. As the creators, we've almost exclusively used it to choose movies or series to watch, and have often ended up watching things we'd have never found naturally in XYZ streaming service's UI (so at worst, we created an expensive away for us to avoid getting frustrated finding something we agree on).

It's limited to usage within the US only for now, as wrangling all of the metadata is time consuming (and we're based in the US). The UI/UX needs some help, as it was built by backend devs with React Native. The backend is Scala/Play/Redis/Postgres deployed on Docker Swarm.

mhzshon The underground economy of Glassdoor reviews

And then there are the fake reviews left by shady reputation management services. $previous_company (which was very small) had many negative reviews pop up in a short time frame, which at first was thought to be a disgruntled employee making multiple accounts, but then a reputation management service "came to the rescue" just at the right time and offered to get them removed. IIRC, Glassdoor did actually remove these eventually after being contacted, but whoever offered to get them removed was told to fuck off.

mhzshon Netflix's New Chapter

And at the beginning, they tried to partner with Enron to do it. For some reason that part didn't pan out...

mhzshon Korg makes music with Raspberry Pi

Recently, though? This worked earlier this year, but one vendor had at least 90x RPI4-8B in stock yesterday and they were gone in seconds. rpilocator didn't even see it.

mhzshon The road to Dart 3: A fully sound, null safe language

There is a cost to pay up-front in having null safety in your codebase, but the savings come back over time. Can we easily measure whether or not it truly makes a difference? Maybe not, but I'm jaded enough to gladly pay that cost, knowing I can think about whether or not something is null once, versus having to forever wonder if the complicated code I need to interact with is going to bite me later.

mhzshon Speedup from switch to +=

But why is it faster? A non-associative translation to byte code (or however python works)?

mhzshon America’s favorite family outings are increasingly out of reach

I wonder, how much of ticket price increases can be attributed to resellers? It's not long after tickets are released that it seems _everything_ for sale is third-party.

mhzshon Lessons from Writing a Compiler

4. You want to learn how to implement a parser by hand.

mhzshon Ask HN: What makes you optimistic about the future?

> There wasn't right-wing news and left-wing news, there was just news.

Perhaps in part due to the revocation of the FCC fairness doctrine [0] in 1987. I wasn't old enough to understand what news broadcasting was like _before_ this, and there are some criticisms of the doctrine, but what we have now _feels_ so much worse.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine

mhzshon Someone is impersonating us in a recruiting scam

In this case, neither party has really signed-up for it. To the candidate, it might not matter that much if they don't have a negative experience with the recruiter, but to the company whose job listing was straight-up plagiarized and outranked on the same job board (with a big recruiting fee on top), it's very different. With doordash, you at least agree to the fee, right?

mhzshon Someone is impersonating us in a recruiting scam

Years ago, my previous employer had a few listings on Indeed for software engineers (some were very long-running). A recruiter reached out to us with a candidate they had, who had experience in the areas we were looking for, which was enticing because people like this were not so easy to come by for a small company not based in a major city. By chance, we found out during the interview process with the candidate that the recruiter was playing both parties. This very shady recruiter cloned our job listing (removing the company information) and was able to out-rank us in the search. They presented themselves to the candidate as if they were working for us, and to us they presented themselves as trying to place this candidate, effectively collecting a recruiting fee for hijacking our listing forwarding a resume. They ended up with nothing but a warning from lawyers, but they _almost_ got an easy paycheck out of it.

mhzshon An experiment to test if Bionic Reading helps you read faster

It's cool to see that someone is trying to test these claims. Not long ago, the BR site was shared on my work Slack and there were some that immediately argued "Yup, I can read faster using this and comprehend everything", which is quite a bold claim to make after reading a paragraph. Personally, having bolded letters sprinkled across my screen feels noisy and distracting, so it's a bit hard to get past that mental block.

mhzshon The Great Decentralization? Geographic shifts and where tech talent is moving

Well, thanks for eating up a bunch of my time, too. It feels like some of the data its using for hazards is wrong. My current county gets excluded by "avoid hurricanes" and "avoid tornados", where I don't remember there ever being a tornado (definitely nothing major), and hurricane risk is very low (not directly coastal).

mhzshon Job hunting while day-jobbing (2021)

Yeah, I mean the part of doing this while having a job shouldn’t be rocket science: “I have an appointment” is usually a good enough reason to take some time at the beginning or end of day.

mhzshon Texas man wins $75K suing telemarketers for illegal robo-calls

For types of 2FA, sadly. AWS also does it to verify your phone number when you create an account.

mhzshon Texas man wins $75K suing telemarketers for illegal robo-calls

Then phone spam would be replaced by fraud, similar to what already happens with premium number fraud: https://www.twilio.com/learn/voice-and-video/toll-fraud

A bot tricks a voice service to call them, then rakes in fees.

mhzshon Competitive Programming with AlphaCode

Creating a higher level abstraction is something people have been trying to do for decades with so-called 4th-generation languages. At some point, abstracting away too much makes a tool too cookie-cutter, and suddenly deviating from it causes more difficulty.

mhzshon StackOverflow: Sunsetting Jobs and Developer Story by April 2022

This is a shame, I found my current job on StackOverflow along with other high quality interviews.

What alternatives are there?

mhzshon Scala at scale at Databricks

Spark is really its own world that’s fairly separate from the Scala community at large. What makes it a ”terrible technology”?

mhzshon Ask HN: What are these low quality “code snippet” sites?

I actually saw a job posting by them on SO awhile back for “part-time article writing”. My guess is if they legitimately hire people to do it, those people just end stealing content to meet their writing demands.