Hacker News Reader

sethgon Nokia Confirms It’s Keeping An Open Mind About Using Android In Future

It would be perfectly logical for Nokia to have an alternative OS waiting in the wings, in case Windows stops being useful for them, or even as an incentive to discourage Microsoft from squeezing them too hard.

Of course, once upon a time, (Linux-based) Maemo/Meego was the OS waiting in the wings, which they were going to migrate to after Symbian stopped being useful to them, and look how well that worked out.

sethgon Things I learned by pretending to be blind for a week

“I’ve been seeing spots in front of my eyes.”

“Have you seen a doctor?”

“No, just spots.”

sethgon Wisdom from Psychopaths?

As I understand it, psychopathic traits are very good for getting what you want in the short term. If this author’s interview subjects had appreciated the long-term consequences of their antisocial behavior, they wouldn’t be behind bars.

sethgon Black and Whitey: How the feds disable criminal defense

Genius!

sethgon Black and Whitey: How the feds disable criminal defense

Or, as others here have suggested, simply give public defenders’ offices a budget comparable to the prosecutors’ offices.

If the interests of justice make it worth spending $100K of taxpayer money to prosecute someone charged with a relatively simple crime, then it’s also worth giving that person access to $100K worth of defense lawyering. If the government wants to spend $5M to prosecute an alleged mobster, that alleged mobster should have access to $5M worth of defense.

If the mobster has allegedly ill-gotten gains and the government wants to freeze them, then $5M of those gains would be placed in escrow; if the defendant is acquitted or later proves that the money was earned legitimately, then it would be deposited back into the public defenders’ fund.

sethgon China's Beidou GPS-substitute opens to public in Asia

The government doesn’t charge anything for GPS: http://www.gps.gov/policy/funding/

sethgon Never Make Counter-Offers (2011)

Why did you not realize that “this guy is worth it” until he already has one foot out the door?

If his only reason for being dissatisfied with his current job was the money, why didn’t he just go to his manager and say “hello, I was looking at salary surveys and other information about the job market, and reviewing all the ways that I have made money for you guys over the past year, and I think I deserve such-and-such more than I’m getting right now”? Why is he finding staying in the familiar environment of your company less attractive than job-hunting in his spare time, possibly even burning vacation time for interviews, and then going out to work with a bunch of strangers?

sethgon Expedia: Bad for the Traveler, Bad for the Hotel

Expedia is (allegedly) lying about one of their “partner” hotels in a way that drives customers away from the hotel. Isn’t this the kind of thing that a lawyer would call “tortious interference with business relationships”?

sethgon Using Github issues to track house repairs

I once suggested to my wife that we use the RT bug-tracking system to keep track of household chores. And then, I said, we could create an RT account for each of the kids, and buy each of the kids an iPad Mini, with the Safari homepage set to the RT page, so that as soon as they opened their browsers, they could see what chores they had to do, and easily report on their progress!

For some reason, she was not convinced.

sethgon Ask HN: Salary Increases Over Time

In the US, your employer can forbid you from revealing your pay to outsiders, but the National Labor Relations Act guarantees that employees have the right to discuss their pay with one another. (I believe this falls under the heading “you have the right to discuss with your co-workers whether or not your job sucks so much that you should try to organize a union.”)

sethgon Book Translates American Minutiae for Russians

A lot of Russians still view Americans as self-indulgent, somewhat retarded know-it-alls, bathing in life's luxuries that make no sense.

And they’re right! We are!

sethgon Book Translates American Minutiae for Russians

In Boston, if you put too much money into the bus farebox, you get back a coupon that you can use to pay for another bus. The transit authority also sells one-day and one-week passes for the convenience of tourists. I don’t know how other cities do it. (Mass transit is good in Boston, superb in NYC, and mediocre-to-nonexistent everywhere else.)

I think attitudes to being approached by strangers on the street vary by region. People in California and the South are chattier than people here in the frozen Northeast.

sethgon FedEx Overcharged Customers for Years, Sealed E-Mail Says

they've apparently deliberately designated a large number of shipment delivery locations as residential delivery

More likely: they have a database or some other kind of service that maps addresses onto “residential” or “not residential”, and either they put off upgrading the database or have some flakiness in their code, so that a lot of addresses get incorrectly marked “residential”, and, well, when you’re prioritizing which bugs you need to fix, the bugs that make your company more money than it deserves usually don’t end up at the top of the list.

sethgon You Are Naturally Short Housing

If X is some investment (gold, real estate, Apple Inc. stock, whatever), and I have structured my portfolio so that I would benefit from the price of X going down, then I am “short X”. If I would benefit from the price of X going up, then I am “long X”.

“You are naturally short housing.” = “If the price of housing goes down, you will be naturally be better off.”

sethgon You Are Naturally Short Housing

There is a case to be made for having precious metals as part of a diversified investment portfolio. (IIRC Burton Malkiel, mentioned elsewhere in this thread, suggests that it be about 1% of your holdings.) But the “gold bugs” are the people who treat gold as the measure of value.

Paul Krugman wrote an excellent critique of the gold bugs in 1996: http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_dismal_science/19...

The price of gold has had a nice run since Krugman wrote that column, but if you look at the longer-run historical data, you can see that it’s gone down before: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gold_Spot_Price_per_Gram_f...

sethgon California School District Owes $1 Billion On $100 Million Loan

In California, under Proposition 13, it takes a two-thirds majority vote to raise either local or state taxes.

sethgon California School District Owes $1 Billion On $100 Million Loan

On a national level, yes. But on a district level, what proportion of the children who were educated in a given school district end up working there and paying taxes after they grow up?

sethgon California School District Owes $1 Billion On $100 Million Loan

http://seekingalpha.com/article/49701-subprime-mortgages-cro...

It doesn’t have exact numbers, but the tl;dr is that people from every income bracket were taking out subprime mortgages, including middle- and upper-class people who could qualify for prime mortgages but wanted to borrow even more.

sethgon California School District Owes $1 Billion On $100 Million Loan

You don’t need to live in the “ghetto parts” to be seduced by a long-term loan that has easy terms up front.

The subprime mortgage crisis was built on respectable hard-working middle-class families that were persuaded to take on debt like this for their own homes.

sethgon 2012 Corruption Perceptions Index

What I’d really like to know is: which countries have significantly increased their scores over the past five years or so, and how did they do it?

sethgon 2012 Corruption Perceptions Index

I suspect that when people encounter government corruption in the US, it’s usually at the city or state level, in jurisdictions where a political machine controls important purchasing decisions and opponents of that machine face odds much lower than 48%.

sethgon Staffer axed by Republican group over retracted copyright reform memo

The Republican Study Committee was founded by Republicans who thought the mainstream of their party was too moderate. Proposals that go beyond what is politically feasible is part of their mission, because they want to change the boundaries of what is feasible.

(For example, right now the committee’s Web page links to an op-ed advocating a flat 15% income tax. The President—any President, of either party—will sign a flat income tax into law some time after the Air Force trades its fighter jets for flying pigs.)

sethgon Staffer axed by Republican group over retracted copyright reform memo

According to the exit polls, voters aged 18–29 favored the Democratic candidate by 9 percentage points in 2004, 34 points in 2008, and 23 points in 2012.

In 2016, is the Republican Presidential candidate (whoever he or she may be) going to capture a majority of this demographic? Not bloody likely. But all other factors being equal, if that candidate only loses the youth vote by 10 points, it’s that much easier to win the election as a whole.

sethgon Touché

It could be worse.

I used to work at a hospital with an automatic elliptical revolving door (I assume it was designed that way so you could push a gurney through it). On the one hand: automatic revolving door, shiny! On the other hand: they had to post a sign telling people how to walk through it.

sethgon Linode Simplifies Plans, Reveals CPU Priority

For the things I actually use a personal server for, $150/month is overkill. A server that used to handle my family’s email\* and runs my personal Web site runs just fine on my Linode 512. Heck, if they offered a “256” plan with half the capacity for $9.95/month, I’d be tempted to switch to that.

\* I moved to gmail, not because of cost, but because I got tired of managing the spam filter.

sethgon Rootkit infects Linux web servers

The article says the rootkit works by inserting a line into /etc/rc.local. If my /etc/rc.local file looks OK, can I assume I haven’t been infected, or does the rootkit use more sophisticated means to hide its presence?

sethgon The Curiously Different Inflation Perspectives of Men and Women [pdf]

The US Federal government subsidizes agriculture to a certain extent, using price supports to keep prices above a certain floor, and the US is also a net exporter of food, so that may be blunting the impact of rising food prices.

sethgon The Curiously Different Inflation Perspectives of Men and Women [pdf]

Do the actual statistics bear out the theory that inflation is significantly higher for the things that low-income groups purchase? See, for example, this graph:

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?id=CPIAUCSL,CWSR...,

sethgon The Curiously Different Inflation Perspectives of Men and Women [pdf]

If you asked me which major party was more likely to preside over a period of high inflation, I would say “Democrats” (even though I vote for them). Yet according to this commentary, the demographic groups that perceive and expect the highest inflation are women, singles, nonwhites, and lower-income groups—all of whom tend to vote for Democrats!

Perhaps people who are more likely to feel that the economy is sucking are also more likely to take pessimistic views of every economic indicator, even the ones that, in fact, are not sucking.