Hacker News Reader

rfrankon Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down

> That is, I don't think it's very common for someone to say "I want to sell a lot of drugs because I can't afford to kill enough people otherwise,"

This depends very much on who you're talking about.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ana-davila/drug-cartels-where-...

rfrankon Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down

And 'small time' drug dealers get their supply from the bigger fish. The value in prosecuting them isn't in stopping end users or sales that max out at like $200, it's in working towards shutting down large international suppliers. Because they don't just ship drugs, they ship people and weapons too. Regardless of how one feels about drug use, the realities of the trade are grim.

I think there's also value in defining what people mean by 'small time dealer' in this context. To me, that connotes someone selling a bit of pot to their friends so they can smoke for free or something. People who ship misc. substances internationally and in some cases earn six figures plus annually don't fit that definition in my eyes.

rfrankon After big layoffs SoundCloud founder says its strategy is to ‘take back control’

My take on the matter too, particularly the hiring freeze thing. Yeesh.

rfrankon After big layoffs SoundCloud founder says its strategy is to ‘take back control’

This seems strange, given that another article from TechCrunch today states that the layoffs bought them very minimal runway.

https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/12/soundshroud/

> Instead, sources at SoundCloud tell TechCrunch that founders Alex Ljung and Eric Wahlforss confessed the layoffs only saved the company enough money to have runway “until Q4” — which begins in just 50 days.

> A core question from staff during the all-hands was why there wasn’t transparency into the finances or a strict hiring freeze. The message from management was that a hiring freeze would show weakness and lead to people asking questions. That wasn’t satisfying when the company ended up shedding almost half its staff.

rfrankon Evolution of Sexual Intimidation: Male Baboons Beat Up Females, Increases Mating

The broader conversation about the desirability of separating ourselves from our humanity is what made me think of the novel, because it's ultimately about the importance of choice (especially the UK version with the final chapter included).

> In the final chapter, Alex finds himself halfheartedly preparing for yet another night of crime with a new gang (Lenn, Rick, Bully). After a chance encounter with Pete, who has reformed and married, Alex finds himself taking less and less pleasure in acts of senseless violence. He begins contemplating giving up crime himself to become a productive member of society and start a family of his own, while reflecting on the notion that his own children will be just as destructive as he has been, if not more so.

Broadly speaking, the whole sentiment makes me uneasy, especially given how powerful a tool the internet can be for consensus building.

rfrankon Evolution of Sexual Intimidation: Male Baboons Beat Up Females, Increases Mating

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Clockwork_Orange_(novel)

rfrankon Amazon engineer will let strangers manage his $50,000 stock portfolio 'forever'

A friend of mine kinda does this, a lot of the content on his site is comparable to what you're describing.

http://www.verticalsolutions.com/papers.html

rfrankon Do 20 pages of a book gives you 90% of its words?

Ah nice, I need to do the same with House of Leaves, I'm a big fan of stories with unconventional structuring. Sometimes a Great Notion by Kesey is my favorite; it's told from multiple first-person perspectives that shift pretty rapidly, where the shifts are indicated by having a particular speakers' text italicized, in parenthesis, with no formatting applied, etc. It's pretty neat.

rfrankon Do 20 pages of a book gives you 90% of its words?

I wonder how Pale Fire by Nabokov would look after this sort of analysis. For the unfamiliar, per wikipedia, "Starting with the table of contents, Pale Fire looks like the publication of a 999-line poem in four cantos ("Pale Fire") by the fictional John Shade with a Foreword, extensive Commentary, and Index by his self-appointed editor, Charles Kinbote. Kinbote's Commentary takes the form of notes to various numbered lines of the poem. Here and in the rest of his critical apparatus, Kinbote explicates the poem surprisingly little. Focusing instead on his own concerns, he divulges what proves to be the plot piece by piece, some of which can be connected by following the many cross-references. Espen Aarseth noted that Pale Fire "can be read either unicursally, straight through, or multicursally, jumping between the comments and the poem."[4] Thus although the narration is non-linear and multidimensional, the reader can still choose to read the novel in a linear manner without risking misinterpretation."

rfrankon Sony plans to make vinyl records again

It's pretty variable, but this is still the case for some releases. The opposite is also true as well, particularly with electronic music releases from small labels, with a low quality masters becoming the source material for the pressing. Music on Vinyl [1] is held in high regard for the quality of their masters/presses.

[1] http://www.musiconvinyl.com/

rfrankon The Future of Coal Country

Virtual reality. Telerobotics. Initiatives for improved rural internet access. All of these problems are addressable without forcing people to move.

rfrankon The Future of Coal Country

> What's stopping them from pursuing online education or skills training in their current location?

rfrankon The Future of Coal Country

What's stopping them from pursuing online education or skills training in their current location? That's what I did when I supported myself at a minimum wage canvassing job that really sucked. Why are they only worth helping if they live in cities?

> "entire social support" systems, which I might add seem to be coming up short in the first place.

I doubt very much you'd make the same statement about the urban poor.

rfrankon The Future of Coal Country

How many people in Appalachia can afford a down payment on any house? From a quick search of the addresses you linked, all are in places with high rates of property & violent crime. None of them seem like better options than being poor in your home town, and avoiding the myriad risks associated with big moves when you're a low earner who can't take any hits at all to monthly income without major sacrifices.

rfrankon The Future of Coal Country

No, it's not beside the point, and it's actually a huge portion of the point. Those same constraints exist in the majority of major cities in America.

For people on the low end of the earning spectrum, the lack of tangible benefits for moving outside of a vague promise of better job prospects makes staying put a viable option. If you worked at McDonalds, would you move across the country and away from your entire social support system for a chance to commute two hours on public transit to work at Arbys? I wouldn't.

rfrankon The Future of Coal Country

> The main difference is that there are at least jobs in cities.

There just aren't any houses, so their quality of life takes a greater hit than staying put in the form of huge commutes and dramatically increased cost of living. See service workers or teachers in San Francisco.

1. https://www.curbed.com/2017/6/20/15834514/rent-transportatio...

2. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/607957/the-unaffordable-u...

3. http://www.sfexaminer.com/mayor-lee-spend-44-million-sf-teac...

rfrankon Digital security and due process: A new legal framework for the cloud era

> They are the enforcement arm of the ruling class seeking to take away whatever privacy we have left.

Does that make tech employment in general the research arm of the ruling class trying to take away whatever privacy we have left?

rfrankon Truckers Working Alongside Coders Trying to Make Driverless Trucks

The examples in the article are trite, but the culture clash is a very real thing. I would point to things like the acceptance of alcohol in the workplace, expectations around work/home balance, the comparatively uniform social/political views of SF tech workers (and educational backgrounds), etc.

rfrankon Truckers Working Alongside Coders Trying to Make Driverless Trucks

Hah, you're definitely right (I work at an EMS provider). In the context of the piece it seems to me like they're more focused on SF type startups than places like where you or I work. I agree very much with:

> ...culture clash seems to me to be more common in technology companies doing hardware projects than in hardware companies adding software to their processes.

rfrankon Truckers Working Alongside Coders Trying to Make Driverless Trucks

I think people from most industries that are at the worst risk from automation are willing to help companies who make said automation products, as long as said company doesn't exist solely to put them out of a job and actually listens to them and their concerns. Those are the real rarity.

rfrankon Truckers Working Alongside Coders Trying to Make Driverless Trucks

> This is a company that employs truck drivers, is how the talk begins. The coders are sometimes taken aback—this differs from the usual change-the-world spiel deployed in hiring meetings. Truckers have very different ideas and different experiences from people like you, Seltz-Axmacher continues. Statistically speaking, many of them are Trump voters. They will say things that you may find startling. Not in a malicious way, but because people from, say, rural West Virginia talk differently than people from San Francisco. Can you handle that?

It's good to see someone doing more than just talk about this sort of thing; both the employment aspect and the culture clash side of it. Compare that to say, how Google treats its ex-military drone contractors [1].

1. http://www.businessinsider.com/ex-military-contractor-google...

rfrankon The Foreign Visa Crackdown Is Putting Americans Out of Work

https://medium.com/@taliajane/an-open-letter-to-my-ceo-fb73d...

edit: hn thread from the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11138086

rfrankon The Foreign Visa Crackdown Is Putting Americans Out of Work

What percentage of companies in SV pay their customer support staff a 'livable wage' for the bay area? If I recall correctly, this community wasn't kind to the Yelp letter girl.

rfrankon Twitch nabs exclusive streaming deal with Blizzard for e-sports events

I think it's more of an audience targeting thing, I'd guess there's not many people who are into competitive games and unaware of twitch.

For me personally, I watched twitch pretty regularly when Starcraft 2 was popular, to learn tips and tricks from players better than myself. It was more akin to watching game film than entertainment content to me.

rfrankon E-cigarettes ‘Potentially as Harmful as Tobacco Cigarettes’

Agreed on all counts, my lungs definitely feel significantly better.

rfrankon E-cigarettes ‘Potentially as Harmful as Tobacco Cigarettes’

Hah, feels like it's been that way for a while now. Definitely strange to me, and I'm going on two years of only my vape after being about a pack a day. Imagine people treated patches or nincorette like they do e-cigs.

rfrankon WSJ Ends Google Users' Free Ride, Then Fades in Search Results

None of that influences the way Google's spiders see their site, bad results are bad results. WSJ could leave their content freely available and sell banner ads, vs. locking themselves into the subscription model they're familiar with. It's not Google's fault WSJ doesn't want to change.

rfrankon WSJ Ends Google Users' Free Ride, Then Fades in Search Results

That's WSJ's job to figure out, not search providers. From google's perspective, a search which leads users to a page that doesn't load, which the user immediately abandons, is a bad result. WSJ isn't entitle to traffic because they're an old organization.

rfrankon “They Basically Reset My Brain”

Comparing injury rates between sports without acknowledging the fundamental differences in the games and how physical they are is an incorrect way to view the problem.

Attempting to force teams to bench their best players for injury prevention / adding games to the schedule that will be played by the bench players will also lower the quality of pro games, and turn off even more fans to the NFL - which is already not doing great.

rfrankon “They Basically Reset My Brain”

More games = more potential for injury. People need time to rest and recover after those games, Monday & Thursday night games are already extremely demanding on their bodies.