HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

raquo

3,253 karma · joined March 15, 2008

submissionscomments
raquo··on Use links not keys to represent relationships in APIs
(Not the GP) Yes, when done right, but it's iffy.

For example, the article includes URLs like "/people/123". The security of having a leading slash in these depends on API base URL.

"https://api.hotstartup.com/v1" – safe

"https://api.hotstartup.com" – unsafe with ".evil.com/people/123"

I wouldn't really call this particular scenario a security issue, but allowing such things is a bad habit that will eventually bite. It's like not HTML-encoding values like usernames that you "know" are safe (but you know are not HTML-encoded).

raquo··on Use links not keys to represent relationships in APIs
I never had any uncertainty regarding where I can use a given entity id in a well designed API. Fix the naming and organization of your API if that's a problem for your users.

Conversely, I often need to log or store API-provided entity ids on my side, and having to parse it out of a URL or store irrelevant URL bytes in my own database would be really annoying.

You're not going to avoid the need to compile entity URLs on the client side either, unless you only make requests to entities returned by the API, which would be a weird constraint to design client code around.

I really don't see the point to any of this.

raquo··on ‘Build More Housing’ Is No Match for Inequality
Yeah, cities don't get cheaper as they grow in size and density. They become more desirable due to better availability of jobs and services, and therefore more expensive.

Of course a myopic analysis of building a single tower is not going to capture long term effects of building a hundred of such towers over many years. Especially if your incentives say you should build.

If governments want cities to be affordable they need to

- make cities less desirable compared to currently semi urban areas by spreading out the location of government services and jobs, providing incentives for private companies to do the same

- allow for building reasonable amounts of housing, but only the kinds and locations that match policy objectives

- cut off all "investment" demand for housing by eliminating the expectation of risk free profit. Ban foreign money, add much higher property taxes on anything but primary residences and purpose built rentals, etc.

If you set up a proper incentive structure for everyone, things will settle in a much much better equilibrium than today. Desirable places will still be expensive, but general affordability would improve a lot due to layers of profit seeking parasites exiting the market.

raquo··on New Taxes and Higher Density Aren't Fixing Vancouver's Housing Problem
It seems that literally every new condo for sale in Vancouver is marketed as "luxury". Doesn't have to be downtown. Doesn't have to be well built or have extra high ceilings. Everything is expensive here.
raquo··on New Taxes and Higher Density Aren't Fixing Vancouver's Housing Problem
I'll take this "noise" as a success, considering that the previous few years saw insane 20% YoY growth. Crashing the market overnight was not the government's task.
raquo··on Ask HN: Are there any studies on vaporizing herbs other than marijuana (CBD)?
Honestly that reads like essential oils for "progressive millennials". Of course you should vape everything if you ask a vape salesman.

"Nobody knows anything" is the best case you can hope for. Do you want to be the guinea pig and find out what the long term effects are in 20 years? Go ahead. Vaping is not an established field of medicine, it was only popularized fairly recently, and that was mostly for smoking tobacco and marijuana, not camomile or garlic or whatever.

raquo··on Ask HN: Best mask for wildfire smoke / extreme air pollution, children included?
I think you mean N95?
raquo··on Negotiations Failed: How Oracle Killed Java EE
(Not an expert on all the Java nomenclature / standards / politics)

What does Eclipse foundation have to do with Java EE? Does this news sabotage their use of OpenJ9 somehow?

raquo··on JetBlue explains to a passenger how it got a photo of her face
Eh, I don't really think we're about to see a stable government in Venezuela, let alone a stable Stalin-grade dictatorship.
raquo··on JetBlue explains to a passenger how it got a photo of her face
New Stalin style dictatorships are unlikely to arise in developed countries. A gradual descend into modern-Russia style governance is much more likely.

We have learned a lot about building stable power structures in the last 50 years. You don't need to have a death grip on everything in the country. A much softer touch is the technique of choice of modern oppressive regimes.

Why disallow other parties when you can just make sure the right party always wins?

Why get rid of capitalism if you can just pick the winners?

Why censor information when you can drown the airwaves in fake news?

Why purge dissidents if they have no power to change things?

Why control what people do when you can control what people want to do?

raquo··on Ask HN: How do you not ruin your back (as an engineer)?
Start by finding a good physiotherapist and doing what they say. Don't confuse with chiropractors.
raquo··on Show HN: Sauron – A web framework in Rust that adheres to the Elm architecture
What specifically are you waiting for? You can already run rust in the browser, by compiling it to wasm and talking to the DOM using wasm-bindgen (like this Sauron library is doing).
raquo··on Ask HN: Why is Facebook not having a harder time hiring?
Too many words for nothing. There is a simple solution:

Deregulate and cut corporate taxes. If they have access to more private user data and keep more of their money from atrocious behaviour they'll be less atrocious.

Oops, I meant the opposite of that.

raquo··on Ask HN: Why is Facebook not having a harder time hiring?
Yeah, it's very hard, all but impossible, when your primary constraint is maximizing profit while holding tons of market power in an unregulated environment. Poor facebook, they really try their best. It's just so hard.
raquo··on Flutter desktop shells
WASM would be a much more suitable platform for Flutter since it's more portable (works on the web) and better matches Flutter internals (C++ can be compiled to LLVM and through that to WASM).

Not to mention that Google might be a bit sensitive to anything JVM / Oracle right now, given the lawsuit they lost.

raquo··on Ask HN: How do you hire top talent in 2019?
Well, being approachable is a benefit too. You don't want people thinking that you will take them through crazy interviews like Google does if that's not what you're doing, so again I'd say the answer is revealing more information about what your hiring process looks like.

Similarly for work hours - if you publish an uncommonly good salary range you better explain what you're expecting in return, in terms of work hours, vacation, etc., or else I might think you will work me to death especially if you have stereotypes going against you (east coast, gaming, finance industries, etc.)

---

Speaking of platforms and getting in front of the right eyes, consider presenting at relevant tech events and conferences. Your dev team will probably be excited to share some cool things that they're doing.

---

It is also possible that your offer is not as good as you think. Could your target candidate get a job at Google with significantly more pay, vacation, etc.? Consider offering them something that Google won't - remote work, 4 day work week, autonomy, etc.

---

Also, the platform you choose to advertise on has a lot of impact on how revealing more information is perceived.

For example, something like AngelList treats job offers like house listings, letting applicants filter by compensation, technology, industry, etc.

On a platform like this where it's routine to see compensation published, putting up a range that is 30K-50K higher than your competitors is exciting, not intimidating.

---

(Another disclaimer that I'm not an expert on this by any means, just sharing my feelings.)

raquo··on Ask HN: How do you hire top talent in 2019?
I don't know anything about your particular company, and I'm not hiring myself, but here's my two cents from the other side of the table:

1) If you want elite engineers either offer them elite compensation and/or elite working conditions (remote, flexibility on workload, many weeks of vacation, time shifting, etc.).

2) If you want elite engineers make sure they know your job offer is elite by publishing specific compensation ranges, working conditions, and other information that makes your job offer elite. Abstract promises like "competitive compensation" or "above market pay" are standard marketing copy, not a differentiator.

This goes for other concerns such as dev culture just as well, but lack of compensation and work hours information is the worst. It's like trying to sell a house while withholding both price and location upfront.

raquo··on Freedom to Compete Act [pdf]
Ridiculous. This bill does not repeal any previous legislation or regulations, it just adds new ones.

Regulation that makes privately negotiated contracts void is still regulation, and with a significant effect on the market too.

It's the opposite of free market no matter how you twist your words.

raquo··on Freedom to Compete Act [pdf]
Really, still making up your own definitions, and of basic vocabulary terms now? Pathetic.

Private contracts like non competes are not regulations. On the other hand, laws designed by the government are regulations. Which this bill will be if it becomes law. To disallow certain agreements in the labour market. To regulate it. Because it's regulation. That makes it less of a free market.

raquo··on Freedom to Compete Act [pdf]
Do you need help with the definition of "free market"?

> In a free market, the laws and forces of supply and demand are free from any intervention by a government, or by other authority. Proponents of the concept of free market contrast it with a regulated market in which a government intervenes in supply and demand through various methods, such as tariffs, used to restrict trade and to protect the local economy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_market

Adding regulations to a market makes it less of a free market, even if those regulations are good for the people.

raquo··on Freedom to Compete Act [pdf]
Why, the existence of noncompetes is exactly free market in action. "Competition" != free market.
raquo··on Can you buy your own train?
Are the switches protected any better than trains? Can't you just walk up to them at the right time and switch them manually with some standard tool?
raquo··on Senators ask why vendors sell voting machines with ‘known’ vulnerabilities’
It takes a lot of mental gymnastics to see republicans as interested in fixing election problems after everything they have and haven't done since 2016.

They would have done that long ago if they wanted to, but instead they made themselves the primary beneficiaries of a broken election system, rampant gerrymandering, voter suppression and election fraud.

It doesn't matter which individual R's turn it is to temporarily go against the grain for some publicity, the republican committee and caucus will always vote with their party if they have majority to pass what the party wants. Partisan reductionism is the only proper attitude to this party.

raquo··on Senators ask why vendors sell voting machines with ‘known’ vulnerabilities’
It also went nowhere, stalled in a republican controlled senate by a republican controlled committee.
raquo··on Anthropic Capitalism and the New Gimmick Economy (2016)
I'll believe it when I see it. So far none of the website builders, low code platforms, rapid app development tools, etc. made a dent, and not for lack of trying.
raquo··on Anthropic Capitalism and the New Gimmick Economy (2016)
> You can think of the economy right now as being Pareto optimal or efficient

That's true but I'm not sure how that's relevant. The economy is Pareto efficient because it's literally impossible to make a significant change without making someone worse off, not because the current state is somehow good. This doesn't mean we can't make tradeoffs that will be better than the status quo (just not Pareto-better).

> It is an example of the power law distribution

People can tolerate such distributions as long as the vast majority who gets the short end of the stick has it pretty well off. That is the current situation. With automation we will see a higher concentration of wealth in the hands of fewer people. Whether it's natural or not is inconsequential if this puts most people into misery. They will not stand for it, and the society will collapse, but that will not happen because no one wants that, not even the rich, so the government will find some way to redistribute the tax revenue to make sure everyone can live comfortably enough that they don't need to riot. There's really no way around this redistribution if automation will indeed end up a serious problem.

> If you increase the tax rate to 90% over $1M, those individuals will simply move their assets elsewhere. What's stopping them from investing in real estate in Japan (where you can still get good deals, because the dollar is still relatively strong, even though it soon won't be)?

I am talking about a world where automation has eaten most jobs but the economy keeps producing a similarly high GDP (because all the same jobs are being done, just more efficiently), except the wealth is much more concentrated than today and needs to be distributed to a higher degree than today so that people don't starve. My back of the napkin suggestions are for that world.

In that world, other countries face the exact same problem because automation is not bound by country borders, and their governments will face the same pressures. The situation in different countries will not be perfectly equal of course, but neither are countries equal today (by tax rates or wages or environmental regulations), and we're able to manage that with visas, customs, tariffs and other barriers on international trade.

Even today the ultra rich and big corporations avoid taxes by parking money abroad. It's already a problem, it needs fixing regardless of automation and the taxation changes it will likely bring.

There is nothing special about how we happen to be doing things right now. All the tax rates, work hours, work culture, trade barriers or lack thereof – all that and more will change on a dime if we actually have a reason to change that. And with automation we very well might. Even 40 years ago the US had 70% marginal tax rates in the top bracket, and it's not like they were facing mass unemployment or any other crisis.

raquo··on Anthropic Capitalism and the New Gimmick Economy (2016)
And yet despite the monopolies and despite the superstar compensation for top programmers at Google, mediocre programmer salaries did not suffer. Because everyone still needs mediocre programmers. Because they still provide a lot of value.

Fighting off monopolistic tendencies and the disproportionate influence of monopolists and oligopolists – both economic and political – is already one of the greatest challenges of capitalism.

Automation makes this problem worse because our political institutions are corrupt and incapable of fixing the rise of monopolies, not because automation is bad in itself. And unlike brand recognition, lobbying, and other barriers that monopolists put up to keep their moat safe, automation is generally available to everyone, so it doesn't make sense to penalize it.

Inequality is a product of market regulations, not automation. Put a 90% tax on income over $1M, make 20 hour work week / 12 weeks vacation the new standard, introduce a land value tax, make it impossible to hide wealth offshore, and find a good way to distribute all the extra revenue so that people don't starve but still have just enough incentive to work (in a world that needs much less work because of automation). That'll go a long way towards fixing excessive inequality in a heavily automated world. Half of this can be done to great positive effect even today.

I don't know, maybe that's "a whole new system" that the author theorized that we need. But really it's just turning a bunch of knobs on the existing system. We haven't tried even that much, and everyone's already spelling doom.

raquo··on Anthropic Capitalism and the New Gimmick Economy (2016)
Sure I see that. What I don't see is how automation will make this variation larger for skilled workers like programmers.
raquo··on Anthropic Capitalism and the New Gimmick Economy (2016)
Creativity in arts and creativity in engineering and other skilled labour are vastly different.

You don't need to be a Botticelli programmer to provide value to your employer because being famous or unique is not how programmers provide value. Programmers are paid for solving business problems. The variability of that is not going to dramatically increase due to automation.

Even today you can tell that mediocre programmers are earning good wages while mediocre painters / sculptors / actors are starving. It is not because they have been automated.

raquo··on Anthropic Capitalism and the New Gimmick Economy (2016)
I don't see why programmers, chemists, researchers, engineers, etc. compensation would follow the way of athletes. Those specialists are paid for skilled use of their time, they are not paid for being famous. If you have more skills, you get paid more, that's ok. Those fancy 10x programmers don't make regular programmers less valuable though.

As for the entertainment industry - too many people agree to be underpaid for a chance to become famous one day. A career in those industries is not employment, it's running a personal brand business. No surprise that outcomes are so unequal.

← PreviousPage 2 of 31Next →