Hacker News Reader

toufiqbarhamovon Austrian government seeks to eliminate internet anonymity, with severe penalties

It’s common, but disingenuous to talk about the Overton window as though it was some immutable, one-way thermodynamic process. The truth of course is that it goes both ways, that discussion and dissent do exist. History, American and otherwise, is full of examples of overreach that doesn’t lead to the desired result, but the opposite.

toufiqbarhamovon Taste graphs will transform fashion

Its been nearly two months since I started emailing hn@ycombinator.com without a reply. I’ve changed email providers in case it was a spam issue, and still nothing. So, I’m trying this again. Please respond.

toufiqbarhamovon Opening up BBC Sounds to others’ podcasts and commercial radio

toufiqbarhamovon Julian Assange Deserves First Amendment Protection

The charges have to be based on new information, and the UK judiciary isn’t overtly political. All told I think Assange will go down for the hacking, and then be off to Sweden. After that I suspect the world at large will be done with him. He isn’t anything like as important as he and his few supporters seem to think.

toufiqbarhamovon Traditional journalists may abandon WikiLeaks’ Assange at their own peril

I have to remember that one if I ever feel like burgling someone’s house. “Ah yes yer honor, I did try to break in for research purposes!”

toufiqbarhamovon Arabsat-6A mission [video]

Yes, GPS too. It is after all what puts the “smart” in bombs. Again, this is something I broadly support, but I’m not in denial about it.

toufiqbarhamovon Jeff Bezos has confirmed Amazon’s growth is slowing

I can live with the unpleasant UX as far as that goes, but where it implodes for me is having to sift through endless fake reviews, counterfeits, and shit products. “Amazon’s Choice” is frequently garbage, and everything else is a coin flip at best. I have to use Fakespot just to sift through the more obvious dreck.

Of course it’s AWS printing their money, not retail.

toufiqbarhamovon Arabsat-6A mission [video]

Just the devices used to choose targets. It seems like splitting hairs when you effectively don’t build guns, you just build gunsights to use a metaphor. Note that I’m in favor of supporting the military, but I’m not in favor of pretending that support however it comes about doesn’t ultimately connect to killing people.

toufiqbarhamovon Julian Assange Deserves First Amendment Protection

That’s true, but you don’t get clicks from outrage by just saying the boring truth. I’ve also been reading rants from people who think the US is going to throw a bunch of other charges at him when he gets here, which is just hilariously wrong. In general a state can’t request extradition on charge A then throw B-Z into the mix when the plane lands. The only way to expand on the original charges are with permission from the country which received the original request on the basis of new information.

But again, that doesn’t feed the conspiracy-minded mob or generate clicks.

Edit response to emiliobumachar:

If the US broke international law and their treaties with the UK it would be a really bad look at the very least. Conversely if that doesn’t happen what are you going to be convinced of?

(Sorry about responding this way, but after two months of getting no response from the mods about rate limiting me, I’m just adapting.)

toufiqbarhamovon Google AMP lowered our page speed, and there's no choice but to use it

It feels like AMP is Google nailing its own coffin to me. It probably felt like a winning move when Bell and AT&T made people buy their own products to use telephone systems, but it led directly to their disruption by the DOJ. Even though some poeple at Google probably realize that, it won’t matter if they cash out beforehand, if working on a project gets them promoted, and if institutional inertia is in control.

Google is hurtling toward an antitrust case they won’t win, and it will really be all their fault.

toufiqbarhamovon Survey: 83% of US teens have an iPhone, Android 9%

I use an old SE and I love it. It does what I want a phone to do, and just works every time. For my desktop I want freedom, but on my phone I want to have a safe App Store and not spend a lot of time wondering if the app I want is malware or counterfeit or a scam. I just want it to be a working item and that’s it.

Maybe she feels the same way? No need to buy here an $800 model either, you can get really good iPhomes for a fraction of that price.

toufiqbarhamovon 737: The Max Mess

You keep adressing my secondary point. The one that seems to personally hurt you.

Here’s an alternative theory... I didn’t take it personally because I didn’t take the stance you’re criticizing. Now you’re left in the untenable position of assuming I was offended on the behalf of some strangers, or what bothers me is unrelated to “hurtfulness” and has to do with something else.

My top comment in this discussion has started being downvoted. This might change, but it will still be the case that a big part of the HN audience disagrees with me.

Again, perspective is your friend. Maybe people disagree with you, maybe they disagree with how you’re saying what you’re saying, or maybe they agree with parts, but not the whole. This is yet another illustration of the perils in treating s diverse community as a monolith. For example my problem with your original comment was the signal:noise ratio, best illustrated by the complete innacuracy of how you characterized the reaction of so many people. Your latter day hand-waving about “it changed over time” is more of the same.

toufiqbarhamovon 737: The Max Mess

You keep raising the issue of bias, but the one piece of supporting “evidence” for that bias doesn’t support your claim. You brush that off by saying it changed “after the story settled” as if that meant something.

I’m thinking that a mirror might help you with your bias concerns.

toufiqbarhamovon 737: The Max Mess

The first three top-level comments all laud the decision. That would appear to be the opposite of your central claim that May I remember that most HN jumped to defend Boeing and the FAA, without a shred of evidence?.

Maybe you would be able to make a better point if you dropped the jingoism and histrionics. It can also be helpful to not lump the tens of thousands of people here into one bin of “HN did x” when trying to make that point.

toufiqbarhamovon One night of telescope time rules out black hole/dark matter idea

To be fair, this is after years of lending surveys already closed the loophole for MACHO theory down to the pinhead closed by this last survey. Still a good read.

toufiqbarhamovon Facebook are 'morally bankrupt liars' says New Zealand's privacy commissioner

If they’re like 99.9999% of people they’ve literally never heard of it.

toufiqbarhamovon Facebook are 'morally bankrupt liars' says New Zealand's privacy commissioner

Why does that bit of nonsense get repeated so often? It’s a myth.

https://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti...

Debunking the Shareholder Value Myth: History Although many contemporary business experts take shareholder primacy as a given, the rise of shareholder primacy as dominant business philosophy is a relatively recent phenomenon. For most of the twentieth century, large public companies followed a philosophy called managerial capitalism. Boards of directors in managerial companies operated largely as self-selecting and autonomous decision-making bodies, with dispersed shareholders playing a passive role. What’s more, directors viewed themselves not as shareholders’ servants, but as trustees for great institutions that should serve not only shareholders but other corporate stakeholders as well, including customers, creditors, employees, and the community. Equity investors were treated as an important corporate constituency, but not the only constituency that mattered. Nor was share price assumed to be the best proxy for corporate performance.7...

So where did the idea that corporations exist only to maximize shareholder value come from? Originally, it seems, from free-market economists. In 1970, Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman published a famous essay in the New York Times arguing that the only proper goal of business was to maximize profits for the company’s owners, whom Friedman assumed (incorrectly, we shall see) to be the company’s shareholders.9 Even more influential was a 1976 article by Michael Jensen and William Meckling titled the “Theory of the Firm.”10 This article, still the most frequently cited in the business literature,11 repeated Friedman’s mistake by assuming that shareholders owned corporations and were corporation’s residual claimants. From this assumption, Jensen and Meckling argued that a key problem in corporations was getting wayward directors and executives to focus on maximizing the wealth of the corporations’ shareholders.

Don’t repeat outright bullshit like it’s a fact.

toufiqbarhamovon China’s clampdown on religious freedom

As a counterpoint religious affiliation and attendance of religious services has fallen across the developed world space with education. I’m not sure that cherry picking a list of names can stand up to the overwhelming demographic shift we see today.

toufiqbarhamovon Battery Power's Latest Plunge in Costs Threatens Coal, Gas

Of course the insulation part of the equation is a double-edged sword. You want insulation, but you always want air circulation at a rate conducive to low CO2 levels. Maybe a compromise using something like Sheetrock with extra paraffin, and the whole thing painted Anti-flash white, with air exchange passed through heat exchangers underground.

It would be pretty expensive to maintain though.

toufiqbarhamovon MIT cuts ties with Chinese tech firms Huawei, ZTE

Chinese culture encourages sharing ideas, not copyrighting ownership. Some things I've read say it comes from Confucianism. Regardless, they think it's good to spread and remix existing ideas instead of giving one party exclusive rights for 20-100+ years for their own profit.

Except the communist party which controls all of China, and takes a highly authoritarian stance on the free spread of information they dislike and fear of course. They have a literal and digital Great Wall, I’m not sure how your square this fact with what you’re claiming is a cultural bias to collective information policies.

toufiqbarhamovon Google cancels AI ethics board in response to outcry

They stand up to all sorts of things when their bottom line is at stake, see AMP. When it comes to things they never cared about to begin with though, they fold like a cheap suit.

toufiqbarhamovon Ethiopian Airlines 737 MAX Investigation Preliminary Report

Mother of god, that’s equal parts funny and just plain accurate.

Dell wonders if maybe their hiring process can be improved. Hackernews debates whether this is a cynical attempt to mine talent from previously-overlooked seams or a genuine attempt to treat human resources as human beings. Some Hackernews consider labeling such personnel so their specific status is on display at all times, an idea that nobody got from Nazi concentration camps.

Hole in one. Sometimes the best thing to do is just log off and remember that some people would argue about the correct oil used to boil them alive.

toufiqbarhamovon Komodo Island Is Closing to Tourists Because People Are Stealing Dragons

That was... impressive. Those dragons really are impressive killing and eating machines, and people who want to own one are out of their tiny minds.

toufiqbarhamovon Bezos Investigation Says the Saudis Obtained His Private Data

Depending on the reactor tech I can see two problems. First, can it be produce plutonium? Second, it can certainly be used to make some tremendously dirty bombs. Given the issues with rich Saudis funding and aiding terrorists, I’d be concerned. There is also the issue of just how stable the Saudi government is long-term, and what happens (or needs to be done) if it falls.

toufiqbarhamovon Lockheed’s D-21 Tagboard Supersonic Spy Drone

Other way around, this preceded the SR-71.

toufiqbarhamovon In Beijing, it’s often cheaper to have food delivered than to get it yourself

Plus massive VC investment I’d assume, but freely admit I don’t know for sure.

toufiqbarhamovon EU to ban plastic plates, cups, and cutlery by 2021

Here is the paper the statistic is based on.

https://twin.sci-hub.tw/7148/507066f35e75c25d1b1e160ada5693c...

ABSTRACT: A substantial fraction of marine plastic debris originates from land-based sources and rivers potentially act as a major transport pathway for all sizes of plastic debris. We analyzed a global compilation of data on plastic debris in the water column across a wide range of river sizes. Plastic debris loads, both microplastic (particles <5 mm) and macroplastic (particles >5 mm) are positively related to the mismanaged plastic waste (MMPW) generated in the river catchments. This relationship is nonlinear where large rivers with population-rich catchments delivering a disproportionately higher fraction of MMPW into the sea. The 10 top-ranked rivers transport 88−95% of the global load into the sea. Using MMPW as a predictor we calculate the global plastic debris inputs form rivers into the sea to range between 0.41 and 4 × 106 t/y. Due to the limited amount of data high uncertainties were expected and ultimately confirmed. The empirical analysis to quantify plastic loads in rivers can be extended easily by additional potential predictors other than MMPW, for example, hydrological conditions.

It’s worth pointing out that this is a single study, and I’m unsure of the accuracy of their methods of inference and sampling. The link to a previous comment in this thread implies that it’s incorrect, so keep that in mind as well.

toufiqbarhamovon 2017 saw highest rate of death due to alcohol, drugs, suicide in US history [pdf]

It’s not a simple issue, and everyone is at risk, but higher risk groups are this on the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder.

https://aspe.hhs.gov/system/files/pdf/259261/ASPEEconomicOpp...

(1) The prevalence of drug overdose deaths and opioid prescriptions has risen unevenly across the county, with rural areas more heavily affected. Specific geographic areas, such as Appalachia, parts of the West and the Midwest, and New England, have seen higher prevalence than other areas. (2) Poverty, unemployment rates, and the employment-to-population ratio are highly correlated with the prevalence of prescription opioids and with substance use measures. On average, counties with worse economic prospects are more likely to have higher rates of opioid prescriptions, opioid-related hospitalizations, and drug overdose deaths. (3) Some high-poverty regions of the country were relatively isolated from the opioid epidemic, as shown by our substance use measures, as of 2016.

Still as 3 can attest and as you said, it isn’t simple.

toufiqbarhamovon On Tolstoy's “War and Peace”

A screaming comes across the sky.

toufiqbarhamovon Autonomous Cars Can't Recognise Pedestrians with Darker Skin Tones

Agreed, although I’d add to: When we get to the point that facial-recognition systems don't recognize black people, autonomous cars won't even stop for them and law enforcement risk assessment AIs automatically tag them with a x2 modifier for criminality, this stuff stops looking like naive techie ignorance and starts looking like malice.

I strongly suspect that it looked like malice long before this point if you were for example, black yourself. In the same way that people familiar with the history of TLA’s and tech were concerned about the behavior of the NSA long before Snowden confirmed our worst fears, I’m sure that black people saw this coming based on warning signs typically dismissed by people who can afford to do so.