Hacker News Reader

oarlaon America is uniquely ill-suited to handle a falling population

"Death spirals tend to be worse in America because of the remarkable level to which the government is decentralised." Difference between USA and Japan. Japan is far more centralized than USA. Not saying that is a better system, but it may be advantageous to handle declining population.

oarlaon Google’s newly formed 'Platforms and Devices' team is all about AI

Weren't the 2 teams already part of the same company? And OEMs do make custom modifications to Android before shipping their devices, so they don't have to share everything they intend to do with the Android team.

oarlaon Man creatively sneaks onto Delta flight, but gets caught

Why would the sensor not show that the lavatory is occupied before the plane starts to taxi?

oarlaon Socioeconomic status and the relationship between the SAT and GPA (2009) [pdf]

Are standardized tests an accurate measure of intelligence? IMO, they're more a measure of knowledge and perseverance. Having said that, I don't know what is the best measure of intelligence.

There is certainly a genetic component to intelligence, but environmental factors have a big role to play as well.

oarlaon New Federal Rule Caps Credit Card Late Fees at $8

No, it's because they charged a $10 fee to move money from a checking account(at the same bank) to credit card account. That is just ridiculous! There should be no fees to move money between your accounts at the same bank.

oarlaon Why widespread tech layoffs keep happening despite a strong U.S. economy

The reason is simple. Many companies hired a lot during the pandemic to meet the crazy demand. That demand is long gone and coupled with that the promise of AI to get more work done for cheaper is driving companies to conduct layoffs.

oarlaon A 'scam manual' written to help immigrants not become victims

What's missing are transparency laws. Every business should give a breakdown on where cost for a service went. If that breakdown does not cover compensation to the employees then it should be illegal.

I was even more surprised to find out that delivery services don't pay tip to drivers on top of the agreed upon rate for their service. Instead the rate they're are paid is adjusted as per the tip provided so that the total amount of money they make remains the same per delivery.

oarlaon Indian government moves to ban ProtonMail after bomb threat

Tangential to the article being discussed, as this is not about secularism.

Not all the facts provided, just a one sided view that is parroted repeatedly in online forums with the intention of claiming a moral high ground when the facts are far more complex and intricate.

oarlaon Judge rejects most ChatGPT copyright claims from book authors

I have a more general question. Say I read a science fiction book which has descriptions of some futuristic technologies. I get inspired by it and spend lot of my time and energy becoming an expert in the required engineering and technologies and invent a machine/process to make that futuristic technology a reality. If I attempt to commercialize my work, can I get sued for copyright infringement by the author(s) of the science fiction book that originally described this technology?

oarlaon Arm Holdings Stock Price Soars 64% After Q3 Earnings Expose Its AI Wins

Looking at the volumes, heavy pumping. When will the dumping start?

oarlaon I Got Scammed

As a rule, I always call the bank's fraud department, even if they call me first(hang up and call the number on the back of the card). This has a much lower chance of me being scammed.

oarlaon How I got an O-1 visa as a software engineer

It's not that simple. You need to have been a manager outside of the US for 1 year, apply and get approved for L1C visa, enter the country on that and then once in the US apply under EB1C. All the time maintaining legal status.

oarlaon 'Our long-term objective is to make printing a subscription' says HP CEO

I'm more surprised that they are making 3 billion in profits from the printer business! I'd be even more surprised if non-corporate customers were a big chunk of that. Anecdotal, but no one I know wants to buy a HP printer due to them not actually owning the printer, since any arbitrary DRM can be pushed on to the printer disabling its features.

I can see printing as a service be successful, since a large chunk of non-corporate users would prefer not to own a printer(and maintain it regularly), but outside of big cities it is a challenge to provide this service reliably.

oarlaon All the Major Tech Layoffs in 2024 So Far

One additional reason according to me, pressure from investors to show growth post COVID. COVID time period saw rapid market expansion for a lot of tech companies, which was not sustainable. Now that things are getting back to pre-covid times, market is also shrinking. But investors want to see growth and what better way than to reduce cost and show growth than by laying off employees.

oarlaon Americans are spending billions on stuff they forget to cancel

On the contrary, most big banks provide year end summaries that can be download ed as csv to analyze them in Excel.

oarlaon Order/license chaos for VMware products after Broadcom takeover

Because it's not SEC's mandate to protect the consumer. If anything, FTC should have been the one to raise concern about this acquisition, but they have bigger fish to fry.

oarlaon Etherify: Transmitting Morse Code via Raspberry Pi Ethernet RF Leakage (2020)

Not in the demo video published in the author's blog: https://lipkowski.com/etherify3/

oarlaon Etherify: Transmitting Morse Code via Raspberry Pi Ethernet RF Leakage (2020)

Interesting bit is that the Raspberry Pi 4 leaks at 125 MHz without a cable connected. Guessing that mostly a manufacturing defect on some boards and not universal to all RP4.

oarlaon U.S. Money Supply Hasn't Done This Since the Great Depression

Because my grocery bills, utility bills and monthly expenses for normal living are up ~10% from 2020. I live in a MCOL city.

oarlaon U.S. Money Supply Hasn't Done This Since the Great Depression

Isn't this a brute force way to fight inflation? I certainly don't believe that inflation is around 3%. My feel for it is around 9-10%. I assume the Fed is also aware of it and hence they are trying to reduce supply of money to curb the rate of inflation.

oarlaon With revenue declining, Mozilla CEO gets a 20% raise

If the CEO is being rewarded for declining revenue and users, then that's what the CEO was hired to do. Can't understand why the board wants lower revenue and user share.

oarlaon We have more to fear from stupid people than evil ones

Is this even a fair comparison? Cognitive abilities and emotional proclivity seem to be unrelated.

oarlaon Leonard vs. Pepsico, Inc

Very clever! They should have hired you to run future campaigns.

oarlaon Inflation Bites U.S. Engineering Salaries

Tangential to the article, but I think there is an error in this report. At Staff Engineer title you have Broadcom listed at second place with total compensation $786,000. The level listed is ICB 6. ICB 6 is actually 2 levels above Staff Engineer in Broadcom's leveling, titled as Master.

Staff Engineer, ICB 4, average pay at Broadcom comes up as $321k in it's leveling table.

oarlaon John Galt

For me, it was what age I was when I read Atlas Shrugged. I have so far read it 3 times, last 2 times just gone past Galt's speech as quickly as I could. Each time, I had a different opinion

1. Age 21: Loved the book. Loved the ideas proposed and completely agreed with the philosophy espoused in the book.

2. Age 25: Still like it. Maybe not all the ideas in the book. Some of them didn't make much sense, but overall the message from the book was agreeable.

3. Age 31: Hated it. Extremely unrealistic and more of a fairy tale.

I wouldn't read it again, waste of time and not worth the effort.

oarlaon India cuts periodic table and evolution from school textbooks

Then why don't the firms have a psychological evaluation to ensure that only people who are passionate about math or low level programming are hired in such firms? Seems like a win win situation since such folks can nurture their interest, mingle with other like minded folks and company also benefits by their efforts.

oarlaon Over 90% of Indian techies in the US are upper-caste Indians

"As a person from an upper caste background may I ask you why you think the criteria for reservation should be economic when the bias is because of caste?"

Quote from the article you have provided: "With money. Somebody who does not have access to money does not have access to “merit”."

And I agree with Yashica Dutt's analysis. It is true that irrespective of caste, if you have enough financial power, you can change your circumstances, particularly in India. Hence, it makes sense to have an affirmative action that benefits those who are economically underprivileged, than on basis of birth.

oarlaon Ask HN: Why and how did Comcast figure out I'm moving?

I get those mails as well from Comcast, though I'm not moving and haven't moved in the last 4 years. I think they just send them out at random.

oarlaon Perl 7 is going to be Perl 5.32, mostly

I worked on Perl for a while, liked it. Back in 2008/9, the only option for Perl on Windows was Activestate Perl, whose community version was missing lot of features that would have made it much less painful(I am thinking of PPM particularly). That was one of the biggest gripes I had with Perl. We moved everything to Python as soon as we could get comfortable with it and haven't looked back since.

Regarding Perl's one liners, I feel they are what makes Perl very useful, but my preference is AWK over Perl for that.