Hacker News Reader

oh_sighon Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions

They probably didn't get to the point of making $18B a quarter by keeping on a bunch of organizational dead weight.

oh_sighon Removing data transfer fees when moving off Google Cloud

It could also be a method to put pressure on AWS to get rid of their egress fees.

If it doesn't work - GCP looks a little better compared to AWS

If it does work, AWS users will have an easier time extricating themselves from the platform, and possibly going to GCP.

oh_sighon Engineer Used Water Pump to Get $1B Stuxnet Malware into Iranian Nuclear Plant

Talking about it would have painted a huge target on his back for retribution from the Iranian government. It would have also put a target on his wife's back, as well as all of her family that is presumably still in Iran. Killing him also would make it much harder to recruit assets in the future, if it became common knowledge that you will be offed after your mission is complete.

It seems much more likely that he actually did die in a random motorcycle accident (not uncommon), or he was entirely uninvolved and a dead man was chosen to pin blame on in order to hide the real method(or, to make Iranians stop trusting foreign contractors, making them do everything in-house with higher costs and worse quality).

oh_sighon I pwned half of America's fast food chains simultaneously

Still missing something - the garage would have to be on your private property, not visible from public property, and the only way he could check for you is if he entered your property and tried to get into your garage.

oh_sighon You Don't Need More Resilience. You Need Friends. and Money

In my experience, the loose group of acquaintances is actually really good at getting support from, so long as you aren't a taker and are generally in good standing.

oh_sighon www.google.com – The page is blank when accessed

It's not the responsibility of the browser vendors. But they have an interest in un-breaking the experience for their users. In a sense, Google is too big to fail, so users want it to work any way possible.

It happens all the time, you probably just don't realize it. There is special code in Windows for supporting/un-breaking popular applications, same with Android and iOS.

oh_sighon My 2024 AI Predictions

On desktop there is a script running which, at the very least, tries to mimic custom styling of selecting text...for apparently absolutely no reason at all. I bet that script is configured for mouse events but not touch events. Very silly.

oh_sighon Buffett once bet $1M that he could beat a group of hedge funds over 10 years

Except that billg would have had much more control over MS if he hadn't diversified, meaning MS would have made different decisions, and maybe not have been as successful if he stayed active in it.

oh_sighon bigFORTH (1997-)

On Forth, anyone know how Chuck is doing these days? I haven't seen anything from him in almost a decade.

oh_sighon The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge (1939) [pdf]

What civilization isn't subject to narcissism?

oh_sighon The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge (1939) [pdf]

Shameful that this man living 100 years ago isn't as progressive as I am.

He's saying it goes at least that far back, not that Francis bacon invented curiosity.

oh_sighon U.S. moves closer to filing antitrust case against Apple

I think it is kind of funny that one arm of the government is saying Apple can't sell its watches, while another arm is saying the watches are furthering their monopoly position.

oh_sighon Are roads the biggest driver of ecological destruction?

The problem is you're just overlaying suburban lifestyle on a city without adjusting it to suit your environment. The equivalent would be a city dweller moving to the suburbs and thinking they can just walk to Walmart, when it might be 10 miles away.

If you live in a city you can just pick up milk at a convenience store as you walk by, when you need it. There will probably be one within a 5 minute walk of your house.

I would also like to know more about this milk consumption. Median consumed by US milk drinkers is 1/3rd gallon per week - your family is drinking as much milk as 36 people do every week.

oh_sighon Minimum Wage Clock

What examples are there of that?

oh_sighon Minimum Wage Clock

What society reduced it's rich people and increased the average richness? When I think of the concept my mind jumps to stalin eliminating the kulaks, or mao and the cultural revolution, or pol pot, which ended up helping destroy their society, not make everyone wealthier.

oh_sighon Fewer people are buying electric cars in the US

> we are not prepared to let you make decisions for us

Besides for all the decisions society foists upon you, of course, including what kind of cars are legal to purchase.

oh_sighon Blueprint health protocol

Life doesn't seem short. Heck, humans are some of the longest lived mammals in the world. I suspect people only say life is short because they are counting the days ahead of them and comparing it to the days behind them - not considering the total number of days. I bet very few 10-year-olds would say life is short, but maybe a lot of 60-year-olds would.

oh_sighon Blueprint health protocol

How is he not living? What would he need to do to really live? Go get drunk at a bar? Stay up until 3am playing video games?

oh_sighon A lightweight Lisp interpreter in Malbolge

Obscene stuff like this seems perfect for the young. Not quite at the same level, but I wrote a custom tiling GUI in befunge when I was 19 (well, the befunge program output draw instructions which were rendered by a traditional C program).

Now, 19 years of professional software engineering later, I don't think my actual code-outputting skills are much better than they were at 19 - all I have now is more knowledge about the process and human side of software engineering and some extra esoteric facts and histories stored in my head. In fact, maybe I'm even worse, because I wouldn't have the time or patience to actually sit down and write something like that in befunge any more, because my priorities have changed.

oh_sighon U.S. cities opt to ditch their off-street parking minimums

Why is 3 parking spaces per car inherently unsustainable?

oh_sighon Need a Home for 80k Puzzles? Try an Italian Castle

Depending where, but you'll also be expected to host people from the nearby towns for events, host town parties, weddings, etc, all at no cost or far below cost.

Or, you can not do that and be a social pariah and have the local government thumb their nose at you when you need something like permits.

oh_sighon Delete or hide life-wasting apps

You can use the same techniques that other people use for other addictive things. Try browsing through a copy of Allen Carr's "The Easy Way To Stop Smoking", and then apply those lessons to social media or whatever your addiction is.

oh_sighon We Could Fix Everything, We Just Don't

Sure - my point was that maybe mammoths weren't viewed as nice shared stable resources, but rather like cruel giants that might destroy your settlement, crops, and family randomly for fun. Sort of like how how elephants are viewed by rural farmer folk in many parts of Africa.

oh_sighon We Could Fix Everything, We Just Don't

Maybe losing mammoths wasn't actually a tragedy.

oh_sighon Nvidia AI Lead: We are ~3 years from the ChatGPT moment for physical AI agents

His Twitter bio says he is the lead of Nvidia AI Agents. I guess that makes him an AI lead, but not the AI lead.

oh_sighon Coastline paradox

But the middle of the river is just a function of both shifting coasts.

oh_sighon Brexit has failed for UK, say clear majority of Britons – poll

The obvious answer is to it have the standard be "50% + 1".

If the desire is to do nothing or do something, and the vote is roughly equal, then generally you should just do nothing because of the increased cost of doing something. If 66%+ or 75%+ of people want to do something, then go for it.

oh_sighon I'm a world champion pea thrower

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooper%27s_Hill_Cheese-Rolli...

Example: Chasing a cheese wheel down a hill

oh_sighon NY Times copyright suit wants OpenAI to delete all GPT instances

I agree with your IANAL take, but what about a situation with an extra level of indirection? So the service never reads actual NYT articles, but only reads blog/forum posts about NYT articles, and derives what is in the article from conversations about the article by people who have read it. Is that legal now?