Hacker News Reader

pushcxon Brave launches 1.0

Please return "Brave" to your User-Agent[0] so we can return to opting out of your cryptocurrency.[1] (Yes, I'm aware of the changes since the scandal broke[2].)

[0] https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/1052#issuecomm... [1] https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters/issues/761 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18734999

pushcxon YC, not Lambda School, is unbundling education

Huh? Lobsters doesn't replace HN. Not just in the obvious, practical sense that HN is 100x bigger on any metric than Lobsters, but also in a theoretical sense, because our definition of topicality is a strict subset of HN's. And we're not trying to replace HN. And we're not an organization, or even particularly organized. If you think HN should be replaced... maybe try doing that, rather than contributing to it?

(Context: I'm the admin of Lobsters.)

pushcxon Public-Health Puzzle: Young People Having Less Sex, Contracting More STDs

Compare sources. First, there is no long-term trend: https://gssdataexplorer.norc.org/variables/5057/vshow

Second, and more importantly: the GSS is an survey of 1,000 people. There were 396 people in this age range (https://gssdataexplorer.norc.org/variables/53/vshow) and 45% were men (https://gssdataexplorer.norc.org/variables/81/vshow). Seems safe to assume those variables are independent, so that's 178 men in the age range. You are hanging a sweeping claim that there's been a total upheaval in heterosexual sexual activity whereby a "large percentage of men are totally excluded from removed from the dating market" on literally 31 guys answering one question differently. The CDC studies linked above had tens of thousands of subjects.

pushcxon Public-Health Puzzle: Young People Having Less Sex, Contracting More STDs

> a large percentage of men are totally removed from the dating market (not by choice)

Please don't make up things like this. There's tons of well-researched data available from the CDC and NIH. None of it supports this misogynist conspiracy that men have stopped having sex.

> Regarding opposite-sex sexual behavior, 95.3% of women and 93.5% of men aged 18–44 had ever had any opposite-sex sexual contact.

There are pages of tables in this study alone: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhsr/nhsr088.pdf

Sexual activity is slowly declining across the board, and more in young women than young men:

> In 2011–2015, 42.4% of never-married female teenagers (4.0 million) and 44.2% of never-married male teenagers (4.4 million) had had sexual intercourse at least once by the time of the interview (were sexually experienced). These levels of sexual experience among teenagers are similar to those seen in 2002 and 2006–2010 data. Longer-term trends, from 1988 to 2011–2015, show declines in the percentage of teenagers who were sexually experienced.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhsr/nhsr104.pdf

pushcxon The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)

Yep. I've run Barnacles for a few years and became the Lobsters admin almost two years ago. They use the same codebase.

https://github.com/pushcx/barnacl.es https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters

pushcxon Tired of Stack Overflow

Selfishly, I would appreciate it if HN would adopt downvote reasons because Lobsters has to acculturate people used to how HN does things. Occasionally they're outraged that we do not have downvote-to-disagree when a mod contacts them to ask that they stop picking random reasons to do so. If HN would be so kind as to train several million programmers in the UI and norms I'd appreciate it.

Less tongue-in-cheek, I do think flag/downvote reasons are worth the added complexity for us, but as there's a cultural component to these design issues it's probably a non-starter for HN to adopt. A change in such a fundamental interaction on the site would be an upheaval that's not justified by probability and size of an expected benefit.

+1 on basically your entire message, especially recognizing the limits of mods and size as dominant variable on roughly everything to do with communities. Best of luck.

pushcxon Wikipedia Is Now a Brave Verified Publisher

I see why you read it that way, but I can't read it so charitably after they claimed payments were held in escrow when they weren't.

I don't believe this program was live 90 days before the uproar, so I don't give much credit for them not taking the donations.

pushcxon Wikipedia Is Now a Brave Verified Publisher

No, but they still haven't shown remorse for claiming those payments were held in escrow when in fact Brave held the payments, and planned to take them after 90 days. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736743

pushcxon Peloton S-1

A figure in the "Opportunity" section has two large inverted cones showing total addressable market.

The lie factor[0] of the "Peloton's Current Markets" chart is 4.2. The lie factor of the "U.S. Only" chart is 5.8.

[0]: https://infovis-wiki.net/wiki/Lie_Factor

pushcxon Paged Out – a new experimental magazine about programming

Our readme explicitly says we don't support people setting up their own sites. You did it anyways, we told you we won't support you, and you did it again.

pushcxon Paged Out – a new experimental magazine about programming

I didn't think I needed to be this specific, but: please finish the job and write an entire about page for your site. Yours still says "Lobsters" up and down it, and even if you search-and-replace the name there's a lot of stuff that's not about your site on there.

pushcxon Paged Out – a new experimental magazine about programming

Our codebase is available under 3-clause BSD and we're usually thrilled to see sister sites: https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters/wiki

The administrator of this site submitted a Bitcoin affiliate spam site to Lobsters, was one of the very few users to hit the automatic anti-spam threshhold (MIN_KARMA_TO_SUBMIT_STORIES), and abused our issue tracker to have us configure this site for him. So, uh, no, we have nothing to do with this site and are not exactly fans.

pushcxon Paged Out – a new experimental magazine about programming

Please remove my name from your about page. I am not the administrator of this site and wouldn't spam like this.

pushcxon What's Deoxyribonucleotide in Sign Language?

On this side of the pond, the University of Washington has a large and growing ASL STEM dictionary: https://aslstem.cs.washington.edu/

I don't know how widely accepted these signs are and it has a serious problem with spambots, but it was useful when I was tutoring a Deaf friend in programming.

pushcxon House Rules (2018)

I was quoting the version of the rulebook I've seen, bottom of page 3 in this PDF: https://www.wizards.com/avalonhill/rules/acquire.pdf

pushcxon Pock: Display macOS Dock in Touch Bar

I've been using this for the last two months on my work machine and really like it. The first week I used this machine the touch bar was an irritating distraction; then I removed everything except esc, sleep, mute, and the brightness/volume sliders. Pock makes the touch bar useful, especially the red dots for notifications.

My Pock settings: refresh every 30s, uncheck "hide control strip" and "hide persistent items" so I can put often-used folders in the dock to see them on the touch bar. Check "hide finder", "hide trash", and "launch at login". (On this last: once or twice an update or wake has left me with the default touch bar and I've had to manually restart Pock.)

My Dock settings: shrink the size down, move it to the left or right, uncheck "minimize windows into application items", check "automatically show and hide the Dock", uncheck "show recent applications in Dock". Unfortunately there is still no way to entirely remove the Dock.

pushcxon Block Fingerprinting with Firefox

And no access to that on mobile without security dialogs. Dude originally claimed it worked via CSS. I guess he doesn't have secret superpowers.

pushcxon Block Fingerprinting with Firefox

The old link you keep pasting does not support this or your other hyperbolic assertions. Stop dangling claims of secret superpowers or support them.

pushcxon San Francisco proposes “IPO tax” on eve of Uber offering

For anyone else immediately curious: the US's [ex post facto](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_post_facto_law#United_State...) law applies to retroactively deeming acts to be criminal. Challenges to retroactive tax laws on this basis have not succeeded.

pushcxon Show HN: Weight Lifting Algorithm Based on 5M Workouts

> FitnessAI is so simple your grandma can use it.

This is a terrible cliche. (More: https://geekfeminism.wikia.org/wiki/So_simple,_your_mother_c...)

How about something like:

* Your lifts should be hard, your tracking should be effortless. Record your set with a single tap and spend your rest recovering for the next (...or taking selfies, we don't judge).

This tells people exactly what the value is and tells the that the user that they deserve FitnessAI.

pushcxon Atheism Is Inconsistent with the Scientific Method

Yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19445855

pushcxon Brave taking cryptocurrency donations “for me” without my consent

Also: your responses here, and Brendan Eich's on Twitter, seem to assume you are somewhere in the general brand feel of the EFF or Firefox. That this is a big misunderstanding of a clearly well-intentioned feature from familiar volunteers to the public interest.

You're nowhere near them. You're in the same mental headspace as ICO scams because you're also promising that if we give your cryptocurrency a bit of money the riches will rain down for everyone. You need to radically change your rhetorical approaches to this PR disaster (not to mention this "feature") if you hope to start building trust.

pushcxon Brave taking cryptocurrency donations “for me” without my consent

https://twitter.com/ummjackson/status/1076221401353207808

Your UI really looks like Tom Scott has signed up to receive donations through you, not like you've scraped his photo and name off twitter and written a fundraising plea with zero mention that he's never heard of you and that you won't even try to contact him until $100 accumulates and then only half-assedly.

For most of us this is our first exposure to your model and UI, so that has set a very negative expectation. This looks like a scam and I'm now trying to figure out how to know if you've scammed any of my users without doing anything like installing Brave or signing up because your metrics probably count that as success rather than suspicion.

pushcxon Lobste.rs has now more than 10k members

The poster's speculation was incorrect. We don't care about employer.

pushcxon Lobste.rs has now more than 10k members

(context: I'm the admin of Lobsters)

Not purposefully, and a link to code projects isn't needed; users are welcome to invite based on their own criteria. A lot of people have been invited from the chat room just for describing an insightful comment they'd like to post, or by idling and chatting for a while.

My least favorite thing about the invite system is that it's a bigger hurdle to new developers who have a smaller professional network, have few or no public code repos, and have the least confidence to speak up in an unfamiliar social situation like the chat room. We previously had a formal invite request system to encourage them but had to turn it off when spammers outnumbered the newbies (it's still there behind a feature toggle for the sister sites using the codebase). Open signups would be much worse for spam, eternal September, sockpuppets, etc. If you (or anyone!) has suggestions for addressing this problem, I'd appreciate hearing your thoughts (email in profile, or #lobsters on Freenode).

pushcxon Ask HN: Is There a Hacker News Equivalent for Politics?

I'm not aware of one, but the Lobsters codebase with very similar functionality is available if you'd like to start one: https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters

You can get help in #lobsters on Freenode. If you know Rails, deploying to Heroku is an afternoon job; using the provided ansible scripts on a bare VPS is a day or two.

I'd strongly recommend checking out the moderation at https://old.reddit.com/r/changemyview. They deal with difficult political topics on a daily basis and generally have very high-quality discussion.

pushcxon Djbsort: A new software library for sorting arrays of integers

The library doesn't have a license on the site or in the tarball. From djb's previous writing and software, he probably intends it to be license-free software, which is an uncommon situation worth investigating before use: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/License-free_software

(Trying to describe this neutrally because I've seen enough bickering about it over the last ~20 years and don't have strong feelings about it.)

pushcxon Why ProtonMail is more secure than Gmail

This post would be improved by discussing that their [threat model](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threat_model) is so different than Google's that it regards some of Google's business practices as threats. And that, in turn, there are threats that Google treats as much bigger threats, bringing their own world-class security team to.

Calling this fundamental difference in approach "more secure" manipulates the less-informed instead of educating and almost eliminates the chance of a worthwhile conversation about tradeoffs and values that could be very flattering to ProtonMail.

pushcxon Announcing Caddy Commercial Licenses

Yes, he gave you free stuff and then reduced how much free stuff he gave you. That must be very hard on you.

pushcxon Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon review

Look hard at the review sites like the Better Business Bureau before you buy a Lenovo: https://www.bbb.org/raleigh-durham/business-reviews/computer...

I bought a 3rd gen X1 Carbon. Three weeks out of warranty, the display stopped working. The repair took five weeks and they put in the wrong parts, downgrading the CPU and RAM. it took three more weeks for them to even ship a new replacement. On every single interaction I was told something false about the repair process, timeline, shipping, etc - seriously, I kept a log. Every department pointed fingers at every other department, no one (even the "Executive Support" I was escalated to) even claimed to have comprehensive knowledge, let alone actually took responsibility for the process.

Read the reviews. My experience wasn't unusual. Would having no laptop for nine weeks inconvenience you?