Hacker News Reader

plutanianoon Minnesota becomes first state to ban prediction markets

Unresolved markets transmit information too. A market doesn't need to resolve to transmit information.

plutanianoon Unsung heroes: Flickr's URLs scheme

I really like tiktok's solution to this problem. Every user page is prefixed with a @-sign.

tiktok.com/@about

tiktok.com/about

plutanianoon Webflow Down for >31 Hours

Will the company survive long enough to produce a postmortem?

plutanianoon How a 20 year old bug in GTA San Andreas surfaced in Windows 11 24H2

Aren't you just creating another contract? Users might write code that depends on it being random.

plutanianoon Up to a Quarter of Rental Inflation Is Due to Price-Fixing

I wonder if we will ever reach a point where implementing a land value tax will be politically feasible. All other solutions look like bandaids to me.

plutanianoon Courts Close the Loophole Letting the Feds Search Your Phone at the Border

It’s a question on the DS-160, IIRC.

plutanianoon One-third of Amazon warehouse workers are on food stamps or Medicaid

> The point is that they pay such low wages that their workers are still eligible for welfare when working there (despite being hugely profitable)

I'm not contesting this. This is a valid point.

> This essentially means that tax dollars are subsidizing their profits.

I don't see how this would be the case.

Two scenarios:

- Welfare is now $0/month

- Some people that could get by with welfare now can't. They start looking for jobs.

- Increase in the supply of workers.

- Decrease in wages. (good for amazon)

- Welfare is now $3k/month

- Some people decide that it's no longer worth it to work. They'd rather just live off of welfare.

- Decrease in the supply of workers.

- Increase in wages. (bad for amazon)

plutanianoon One-third of Amazon warehouse workers are on food stamps or Medicaid

Doesn't Amazon have to compete with welfare for workers, instead of benefiting from it?

The more welfare pays, the worse a job at Amazon is in comparison, is it not? How does Amazon benefit from this?

plutanianoon Apple searlized the iPhone 14 backglass [video]

As someone who lives in a country where pickpocketing and theft are really common: agreed.

If making an iCloud-locked iPhone and all of its parts useless is what it takes to make pickpocketing not worth it, i'm all for it.

plutanianoon 418 I'm a teapot

I've seen a 418 response on a production system once... on a simple request that took 5 seconds to be fullfiled.

Building integrations for duct-taped legacy systems in finance is fun.

plutanianoon Should billboard advertising be banned?

I live in São Paulo (the city mentioned in the article) and I always find it amusing how you can tell exactly where São Paulo ends and the neighboring city (Guarulhos) begins just by the billboards.

Here’s São Paulo’s welcome sign coming from Guarulhos. There are lot of billboards before it, but exactly none after.

https://maps.app.goo.gl/Dw8AFJS2sNRW27PL9?g_st=ic

plutanianoon Xv6, a simple Unix-like teaching operating system

I'm working my way through this[1] operating systems book and a few of the exercises[2] require customizing and compiling Xv6. It's so cool to code your own scheduler or syscall and see it working on a actual OS.

[1] https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/OSTEP/ [2] https://github.com/remzi-arpacidusseau/ostep-projects

plutanianoon Ask HN: Is there hope for micropayments?

I'm a brazilian living in Brazil and I can't overstate how much of a game changer Pix is. The Brazilian Central Bank did an outstanding job.

Instant transactions, zero fees, available to anyone with a bank account.