Hacker News Reader

s_devon Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

To clarify I'm not commenting on what you've done but how you've phrased it. I really don't mind about pirating movies I don't even see it as wrong.

s_devon Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

Appreciate the context, however if I was to follow up on my own comment. You were sentenced to prison, I went to the grocery store yesterday. It's the casualness of the phrasing that is jarring.

s_devon Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

>I went to prison for 18 months, my digital and physical life was stolen from me

This is wild phrasing.

s_devon Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore

Google as a search engine peaked in 2005. Since then they've become far more profitable, increased revenue by orders of magnitude, brought search to many more areas, increased headcount massively, improved their share price massively, diversified, serve far more paying customers, become more efficient per query, built data centres, devices and chips with more vertical integration etc. But as a consumer product for simple internet search where I type words and get a list of relevant results it has only gotten slightly worse since then.

This is pure observation/anecdotal. I have no measurements to back this up but I think others will share this view.

s_devon Microsoft starts canceling Claude Code licenses

So "Microsoft chooses to eat its own dogfood" is a more accurate title?

s_devon Flipper One Tech Specs

I've heard some professionally inclined RFID engineers dismiss these as mere toys and not useful compared to professional grade hardware. Perhaps some of those folk are on HN if so what are the tool sets you actually use that can be sold to the public?

s_devon New Lifetime Plex Pass Pricing

I have a remote Jellyfin setup as a server that streams. It's entirely in the cloud. It's far easier to share with friends as none of them are required to buy a Plex account.

s_devon New Lifetime Plex Pass Pricing

Jellyfin have that feature now working well. Presumably this is the one where if you pause to go to the bathroom it pauses for the other person too and doesn't go out of sync even if one connection has slow internet for example.

s_devon New Lifetime Plex Pass Pricing

https://neptuneplayer.com/

https://firecore.com/infuse

s_devon New Lifetime Plex Pass Pricing

The writing was on the wall years ago. Those of us who have seen this film before knew where this was going.

A few years ago I went full Jellyfin for my media server needs and never looked back. Yes, some people complained Jellyfin client apps weren't as polished. However if you want to pay you can get the likes of Infuse or sign up for a Netpute beta.

There was no arguing with Plex fanboys though and I think even the most ardent fans will slowly start to give up over the next few years. This is a win for Open Source. I can only see the Jellyfin ecosystem advantages starting to compound.

https://neptuneplayer.com/

s_devon US is starting to see heavy job losses in roles exposed to AI

I'm not sure what 'film' America is trying to be but I've seen plenty of real life references that could have come straight from either the Handmaids Tale, Idiocracy, The Dead Zone or Civil War the past few years. Life does seem to imitate art sometimes.

s_devon Web Server on a Nintendo Wii

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

You can draw the line wherever you like but for me it is still a Wii even with a different OS. I would draw the line at replacing the hardware inside with XBOX hardware. Others may draw the line at the chassis.

s_devon I Moved My Digital Stack to Europe

Irish here, it was never EU or Irish. The Collisons are Irish but Stripe is an American company. The profits are ultimately repatriated to the United States.

s_devon BYD overtakes Tesla and Kia as the best-selling EV brand in key overseas markets

I didn't say they're bad. Subsidies are fine, all governments do it for their own reasons but when you receive artificial support it does beg the questions as to when and how that support will be pulled so it puts a question mark over the sustainability of whatever is being subsidised.

>Should we qualify statements about how successful they are with an asterisk that they got favorable treatment from the government?

Yes

s_devon Poland is now among the 20 largest economies

>Very little will change in Hungary with the new government.

Things aren't going to improve magically in the next few years but the backsliding has stopped, improving things takes real effort and focus. At the end of Orban's regime Hungary is now officially the poorest country in the EU, even behind Bulgaria and Romania which is why so many Hungarians are upset with Orban.

I expect their economy to slowly tick upward over the next few years. Magyar has also stated his ambitions to join the Euro which is the opposite of Orban who wanted Hungary to leave the EU.

s_devon Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

>This reads to me almost like saying “Why are pigs not avoiding the most problematic slaughterhouses?”

I don't think that's a fair comparison. Pigs are literally reared for slaughter and have no autonomy. Employees can and do choose these companies completely of their own volition.

s_devon Poland is now among the 20 largest economies

>Think of it as an investment.

An economic investment as well as one of solidarity. People forget that the EU is a peace project that ensures peace via economic cooperation. This nuance seems trivial but is actually massively important. I can see trust degrading in the US but being fortified across the EU.

Look at Hungary recently, they did a 180 not because of Brussels or Berlin saying they should. Hungarians are sceptical of both. However they do trust the Polish people who they see as genuine peers who are very pro-EU.

s_devon Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

>- “Are you hiring people just to fire them a year later to protect yourselves?”

You think the naive part is the response and not that question?

My point is that you'll simply have to read between the lines on responses with leading questions not that they're going to be upfront about these things.

Also the interview isn't the only way to gauge these things, You can Google for layoff numbers as well and make determinations that way. There are some websites that are dedicated trackers of layoff announcements, both the loud and quiet ones e.g. Spotify I think were letting 29 people go per month for a while. I think the law in Europe was if was 30 people you had to announce it. I can't remember the exact detail but plenty of companies expose these loopholes.

s_devon Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

"Why is this role open"?

Either they will answer directly with something solid like "We're growing the team" or they will evade it which is still a meaningful answer for you. You could probe further with questions like:

"How has the team's headcount changed over the last 18-24 months?"

Basically you're alluding to 'employee turnover' without saying it.

s_devon Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

This is completely acceptable. When was the last time you saw any job seeker seriously enquire about such practices in interviews or at the application stage?

A lot of people here and in the industry in general seem to optimise for compensation package and put blinkers on themselves for other factors that are definitely relevant.

Companies aren't penalised by candidates for such practices. I'm not saying it's good but it's astounding to me the number of people who for example optimise entirely for salary and then are shocked when the working conditions are very poor.

People game companies and companies will game people in return. Murray Gell Man amnesia will kick in and next week there will be thread about how CloudFlare is a great place to work for software devs because you can earn 20% more than other comparable companies with no reference to how things like job security or working conditions are measured.

s_devon Pinocchio is weirder than you remembered

Did you watch Guillermo del Toro version? I'm enchanted by it.

Pinocchio is a selfish brat and that's a central tenet of his redemption arc.

s_devon Child marriages plunged when girls stayed in school in Nigeria

Can you point to any examples of this:

>I think a stable fertility rate AND educated girls are simultaneously possible all around the world

i.e countries with a very high education attainment rate or high ranking in the human development index coupled with a high fertility rate? There was HackerNews discussion a while back that alluded to the fact the more developed a country becomes the lower the fertility rate.

Because its suggested that solutions like affordable housing, more free time, child care may help in a few situations but largely don't bump the fertility rates.

Developed countries are currently getting by on their immigration rates but as the rest of the world becomes more developed this isn't a lasting solution.

s_devon BYD overtakes Tesla and Kia as the best-selling EV brand in key overseas markets

It was a good watch but I don't think there is too much detail to put here. BYD has a lot more debt than they're claiming and their growth was subsidized by the Chinese government in order to buy market share.

s_devon Red Squares – GitHub outages as contributions

It's common knowledge that the official status pages don't actually reflect downtime due to SLAs and the status page could be weaponised against them. So comparing them is useless.

You rarely see "outages" even if that what happens in reality, in marketing speak it's referred to as 'degraded performance' i.e. the cheque is in the post, your data is in the tubes on it's way, it's just slow! A business oriented lie.

Far more useful are the 'independent status pages' maintained by enthusiasts that are unaffiliated with whomever they are measuring.

s_devon Germany Overtakes US in Ammunition Production Capacity

All of these financial 'privileges' are based on the US having the world reserve currency and petro dollar. The US in the unique position of being able to 1. Print Money. 2. Externalise inflation. 3. Ensure a base load demand for it's currency based off a worlds need of oil.

These privileges were supported wholeheartedly by all the worlds 'middle' powers e.g. Canada, Australia, Japan, Germany, Spain, Sweden etc. Thus establishing a world order.

The US has seemingly turned on all these middle powers for no reason, decided the world order needed to change when it was already #1. The US will of course still be a superpower but it is going to lose it hegemony.

s_devon Mistral built a $14B AI empire by not being American

>From the perspective of the company he was scamming them by not paying for a previously agreed service.

How could I have possibly scammed them by providing them money while not availing of the service?

s_devon Mistral built a $14B AI empire by not being American

I support the US->EU movement but I've been put off Mistral's Le Chat. https://european-alternatives.eu/

I subscribed (and paid) for a year of Pro. They gave me 1 month on the basis that a payment was missed on the second month. They simply stopped providing Pro and continued to take a monthly subscription for the next year (Stripe allows subscriptions to be fixed in the background). I must have changed cards that specific month.

I spoke to customer service who told me any sort of refund or complementary tokens was impossible and that I should have been paying closer attention to how much money I was giving them. So I shut down the subscription and now pay Claude $200 a month and deleted the account.

Genuinely was shocked at poor customer service can be with EU services sometimes compared to US ones. That said I will keep trying and exploring EU options, hopefully a new EU LLM giant emerges in the next few years.

s_devon US special forces soldier arrested after allegedly winning $400k on Maduro raid

You have to switch your VPN to France to watch this video. Just FYI. I didn't get it at all btw.

From what I gathered:

What's the difference between a good hunter and bad hunter.

A bad hunter shoots anything that moves, a good hunter shoots anything that moves. Perhaps something was lost in translation.

s_devon Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

Scissor keys are the good ones, you're thinking of Butterfly keys.

s_devon German implementation of eIDAS will require an Apple/Google account to function

You are conflating the philosophical notion of identity with functional identification in the real world. There is no cryptographic escape hatch from the social contract.

>You just are/I just am

Is not an acceptable thing to say to a bar tender when being served an alcoholic drink when you're 22. You hand them government issued ID.