Hacker News Reader

misterbowfingeron YouTube’s fake views economy

The Outline is really beautiful. They do a great job of designing a modern digital publication.

misterbowfingeron DeleteFacebook: Perspective from Mastodon

Mastodon can't be considered a real alternative unless you have a solution for all the child porn on some of the most popular instances.

misterbowfingeron Launch HN: Promise (YC W18) – Cost-effective, more humane alternative to jail

How do you choose which incarcerated individuals get to be part of Promise? The most obvious media circus is going to be around high-profile arrests. Would you allow alleged high-ranking members of crime syndicates to be part of Promise?

misterbowfingeron Stock trade app Robinhood raising at $5B+, up 4X in a year

If Robinhood opened up an API, wouldn't it be possible to invest in a way that mirrors existing index funds? I'm not super familiar with the details but it feels like it would be.

misterbowfingeron How Your Returns Are Used Against You at Best Buy, Other Retailers

non-paywall https://outline.com/HKktYH

misterbowfingeron The real reason for large DDoS attacks? It's IP Spoofing, not memcached

If anyone here has run Spoofer:

https://www.caida.org/projects/spoofer/

What was your experience?

misterbowfingeron Updated Request for Startups

> just a marketing document for YC

That's true, I just disagree with how you framed it. Some people may genuinely be inspired by it, and some good can genuinely come out of it, even if it "costs zero"

misterbowfingeron Updated Request for Startups

Isn't that true of most businesses that aren't Facebook/Twitter/Walmart size? I agree with what you're saying, but it seems more applicable to the economy in general as opposed to just startups.

misterbowfingeron Google to Sell Zagat to The Infatuation, an Upstart Review Site

Woah this is really cool! I'm a huge fan of The Infatuation. It's solving a really important need on the internet - quality reviews from trusted sources that you actually want to read.

misterbowfingeron Tracing from JavaScript to the DOM and Back Again

> Posted by Ulan Degenbaev, Alexei Filippov, Michael Lippautz, and Hannes Payer — the fellowship of the DOM

Nice

misterbowfingeron Wilberg v. Google – Recruiter that was fired for refusing to discriminate

Relevant bit:

13. In April of 2017, Google's Technology Staffing Management team was instructed by Alogna to immediately cancel all Level 3 (0-5 years experience) software engineering interviews with every single applicant who was not either female, Black or Hispanic, and to purge entirely any applications by non-diverse employees from the hiring pipeline. [The recruiter] refused to comply with this request.

Another bit:

In response to Plaintiff's complaints, Google on occasion would circulate e-mails instructing its employees to purge any and all references to the race/gender quotes from its e-mail database

misterbowfingeron The Afterlife of Pablo Escobar

Escobar’s cartel died with him, but, despite a U.S.-assisted war on narcotrafficking that has cost thousands of lives and more than nine billion dollars, international consumption has spread enormously, and the drug economy remains strong; last year, the United Nations reported that Colombia was the world’s largest producer of cocaine.

Damn, that's so sad. All that effort for a drug war, and for what? People still do drugs, and narcos still run Colombia. What was the point?

misterbowfingeron Ruth Bader Ginsburg Thinks Some College Title IX Trials Are Unfair to Accused

Oh sure, I don't disagree, I just think it's important to know if a publication has a particular slant.

misterbowfingeron Ruth Bader Ginsburg Thinks Some College Title IX Trials Are Unfair to Accused

I wasn't familiar with reason.com. Looked through a bit, it looks like it's a digital publication with a libertarian angle:

https://reason.org/frequently-asked-questions/#q1

Not an issue per se, but good to know.

misterbowfingeron Can Uber Ever Deliver? Even After 4Q Cost Cuts, Uber Lost $4.5B in 2017

This year [2017], Lyft is on pace for $1.5 billion in net revenue -- the amount of money it generates after paying drivers -- on losses of $400 million, according to the document, which was prepared at the end of the second quarter. Since then, Lyft has spent heavily on a nationwide marketing campaign, including TV spots with actor Jeff Bridges. Investors are now anticipating losses of close to $600 million in 2017, two people said.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-11/lyft-set-...

misterbowfingeron MongoDB gets support for multi-document ACID transactions

From that post mortem:

It was unfathomable to us why people would choose a system that barely does the thing it’s supposed to do (store data), has a big kernel lock, throws away errors at random, implements single node features that stop working when you shard, has a barely working sharding system despite it being one of the core features of the product, provides essentially no correctness guarantees, and exposes a hodge-podge of interfaces that have no discernible consistency or unity of vision.

I mean... that's unfathomable to me too. He explains it later, that " MongoDB turned regular developers into heroes when people needed it"

I have a hard time understanding why devs choose / chose MongoDB. Postgres with JSON columns gets you so far, why would you go with MongoDB, given the issues it's had?

misterbowfingeron Facebook User Growth, Time Spent Fall on News Feed Changes

It feels like they want to move towards being more "useful", a la WeChat:

http://blog.ycombinator.com/lessons-from-wechat/

misterbowfingeron How to Beat Amazon

I wonder if Amazon would be open to reselling access to their distribution centers, a la cellular networks. I feel like the upside to them would be enormous.

misterbowfingeron In California, Where Cancer Warnings Abound, Coffee Is Next in Line

Non-paywall:

https://outline.com/H992nD

I'm like, 90% close to making a bot that just does this for HN submissions.

misterbowfingeron Former employees say Lyft staffers spied on passengers

I suppose it's difficult to answer what's specific to your architecture..... but it does seem interesting. I really wonder if there can be a open-source solution that makes it easier to do what you're suggesting, but for anyone.

misterbowfingeron An update on Redis Streams development

> that is to create an API for developers thinking like I'm designing an iPhone

Albeit my request is quite selfish, I really would love to hear/read more about your thoughts on designing APIs. My experience using Redis has been excellent and I'd to be able to replicate that sense of design in the systems I build as well.

misterbowfingeron Former employees say Lyft staffers spied on passengers

Would you consider open sourcing it? It seems quite interesting and valuable

misterbowfingeron Open Letter to the Airbnb Community About Building a 21st Century Company

> Infinite time horizon

I get what he's going for here, but this phrasing just sounds too TED-talk-y for me. I also don't get what they'd change as a result, but I guess that's TBD.

misterbowfingeron CNN Is Closing Down Beme, YouTube Star Casey Neistat’s Video Company

It's less about politics than it is about the "wisdom of the crowds". For example, it'd be really useful to get info from traders if they have special information about how the market will move.

misterbowfingeron CNN Is Closing Down Beme, YouTube Star Casey Neistat’s Video Company

The "Surprisingly Popular Vote" actually works quite well:

- http://news.mit.edu/2017/algorithm-better-wisdom-crowds-0125

- https://www.princeton.edu/news/2017/02/06/crowd-wisdom-surpr...

Although it seems like there needs to be more research on the boundary cases

misterbowfingeron Why social media bosses don’t use social media

This article makes a huge assumption that the "social media bosses" don't have fake or anonymous accounts. I can't imagine that they don't.

misterbowfingeron The Neuroscience of Changing Your Mind

Thank you! A bit frustrating that the original article didn't cite the paper

misterbowfingeron Why we transitioned from Medium back to our own blog

Damn! Why did they stop?

misterbowfingeron Why Don’t the 20 Cities on Amazon's HQ2 Shortlist Collectively Bargain?

I grew up in New York. Just wanted to add a data point that stadiums don't always "uplift" communities. There's a lot that goes into it.

misterbowfingeron Why Don’t the 20 Cities on Amazon's HQ2 Shortlist Collectively Bargain?

Just a small counterpoint - the United Center in Chicago was supposed to revitalize the surrounding neighborhood, but in practice drove it down to the ground. Same deal with Yankee Stadium and Citi Field in New York.