Hacker News Reader

surajamaon Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI

That might stop European companies from buying inference directly from China. I don’t see how anyone could possibly stop them from taking an open-weight Chinese model and then modifying it and selling it to Americans as a European model.

surajamaon The Nature of Code (2nd Edition)

The first edition was absolutely critical in helping me understand how to program anything more than simple scripts. I got hooked into the physics simulation portion and created a pretty fun Asteroids-inspired game.

Although OOP is going out of style, I think learning it is super important to understand how you can use layers of abstraction to build increasingly complex programs.

surajamaon Employers bow to tech workers in hottest job market since the dot-com era

The Canadian tech sector has completely changed over the past 5 years (which is when I first came to Canada). When I first got here, $100k+ salaries were rare unless you were very senior or at a select few companies. I am now looking for a job in Toronto after working for a FAANG for a few years and often see companies offering over $200k for mid-level positions. However I will say that level.fyi is a little unrepresentative because it's mainly people with impressive TCs posting on there.

surajamaon 'Do Not Split': A Hong Kong protest film [video]

https://www.cbc.ca/cbcdocspov/features/canadas-gender-identi...

“could someone go to jail for using the wrong pronoun?

In the Criminal Code, which does not reference pronouns, Cossman says misusing pronouns alone would not constitute a criminal act.”

You are basically describing IPFS. Content-based addressing instead of location-based addressing. Allowing content to be decoupled from any single hosting platform

surajamaon Doctors and Nurses Are Running on Empty

If they refuse to work during the greatest health crisis of the past century that is going to forever tarnish their record and may impact their ability to find a job in the future. Doctors often have hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loans and don't have skills that can easily transfer to other lines of work. They don't have a choice but to work through this.

surajamaon Facebook Q3 2020

From the link in the post Facebook has two different metrics: MAU (month average users) and MAP (monthly average people). They don't define these terms but MAU sounds like someone with a Facebook/IG/WhatsApp/etc account who logs in, which that 2.74B figure applies to.

surajamaon How China’s Expanding Fishing Fleet Is Depleting the World’s Oceans

400-500 million people in India are vegetarian [1]. Are these all magical creatures?

[1] http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/the-food-habits-of-a-na...

surajamaon Apple Hides Taiwan Flag in Hong Kong

The US's relationship with Taiwan is much more nuanced than that. Taiwan-US relations are actually at the closest they've ever been. For example:

1. US sells $8B of fighter jets to Taiwan (https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/08/approves-8bn-sale-66-...)

2. US passes the TAIPEI act, which outlines the US's strategy in dissuading Taiwan's few remaining diplomatic allies from switching recognition to China. (https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/senate-bill/340...)

3. Visa free travel in the US for Taiwanese citizens (https://www.export.gov/article?id=Taiwan-Visa-Requirements)

The US might officially not recognize Taiwan as a country, but would it sell $8B of military equipment to a country it truly believed to be China?

surajamaon Apple Hides Taiwan Flag in Hong Kong

The current government of Taiwan actually openly disagrees with the one China policy [1]. This is a major reason China has ramped up their pressure on Taiwan.

[1] https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/united-states/a...