Hacker News Reader

wedowhatwedoon Facebook whistleblower says she wants to fix company, not harm it

I went through the process to delete my account but I still get emails from facebook occasionally about the account that they "deleted". I don't think it is possible to delete a facebook account.

wedowhatwedoon Healthcare in America Is Simply Extortion (2019)

The bottom 25% of Americans don't have free health care. They won't be treated for anything that is not an emergency. There is a huge difference. Some die because diseases aren't detected until it is too late.

wedowhatwedoon Turing Oversold?

Best I can tell, von Neumann stole the design that bears his name from John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert. von Neumann doesn't seem to deserve as much much credit as he is given. I'm not saying he does not deserve credit for his other work.

wedowhatwedoon What if we could transpile COBOL into Elixir

Mainframes aren't just about computing power. In a mainframe, almost any component or subsystem can fail with no downtown to the applications at all. That is worth the money and complexity to some people.

You don't understand mainframe systems well if you think they "choke on laughable volumes of documents".

The mainframe isn't the bottleneck in systems like this. It's all the stuff around it that wasn't designed to the same specifications.

wedowhatwedoon How I store my files

I have used restic for quite a while. Once in a while, I test that I can restore my backups. That's an important step that lots of people miss.

I had a client that asked me to setup their system. I setup the system, they got a tape drive and I had them rotate tapes daily. There was a cronjob to tar everything to tapes.

It was great until their hard drive failed and I found I had a typo where it was only backing up the current folder, not the whole drive. Needless to say, they found a new IT provider and I learned an important lesson. If you haven't tested your backups, you have no backups.

wedowhatwedoon How many American children have cut contact with their parents?

Religion is causing serious harm to many families. I kind of have a relationship with my parents but I know my opinions are not welcome on politics and religion. They know their opinions are 100% infallible and I'm completely wrong.

We've kept it a secret that their step-grand-son is gay because then I may have to make a choice between my step-son and my parents and my parents won't like the decision I'll make.

At least they aren't part of one of the many sects that require disconnection from all those that don't agree.

I encourage people to support their local LGTBQ support organizations because some religious parents tell their LGTBQ kids that they are not welcome at home at a young age because they were born LGTBQ.

It's very sad.

wedowhatwedoon Bezos donates $100M each to CNN contributor Van Jones and chef Jose Andres

What's up with this complete lack of empathy mindset lately? We hear this all the time "if you don't like it, leave". Quite often employees have very few options and their only leverage is to leave but not many people have large amounts of cash available to be unemployed.

wedowhatwedoon Sublime Text 4 [video]

I completely disagree.

I didn't pay $80 for an editor that doesn't provide updates. I paid $70 for 5 years use of an editor that has updated a major version and a few minor versions and that I've installed on many workstations and VMs through the years. I use it every day so I'm glad I paid.

The parent commentor said they are already using it and will continue to do so without paying. Neither of you need to pay for the editor if you don't like it. Just use a different one.

wedowhatwedoon Sublime Text 4 [video]

I completely agree.

wedowhatwedoon Sublime Text 4 [video]

No, the downvotes are because you aren't willing to pay a very fair price for the product and have admitted you depend on it and use it without paying and will continue to do so.

wedowhatwedoon Sublime Text 4 [video]

I bought the product in 2015. I don't remember the cost but let's assume it was $80. (EDIT, I just looked and it was $70 at the time) That's $16 a year. If you use even 5% of the functionality, isn't it worth that? I don't know what country you are from and there my be economic differences but sublime text has been one of the best software purchases I've made. It's worth every cent.

If you don't feel it's worth $80, you can use Visual Studio Code for free.

wedowhatwedoon Universal Radio Hacker: Investigate Wireless Protocols Like a Boss

https://www.saleae.com/

wedowhatwedoon Radio users reminded not to use radios in crimes

If you have been reading sites like www.qrz.com for the last few years, you will see that there were perhaps lots of licensed amateur radio operator terrorists there.

wedowhatwedoon Building Your Own C Interpreter (1989)

https://archive.org/details/dr_dobbs_journal_vol_14/page/n52...

Page 528

wedowhatwedoon Autodesk Fusion 360 becomes almost useless for hobbyists

You can use word processing software like Microsoft Word to create documents or you can write the Postscript code that your printer requires to print documents. Both can produce nice documents but it is much more difficult to write Postscript.

I learned enough of OpenScad to create simple models but if I need something complex (and especially models that move), I used Fusion 360. I knew that it would cost $60 a month to me at some point and will need to evaluate if it is worth that much to me. While it's not pleasant to get something for free and then have to pay for it, it's not the first time it's happened and won't be the last.

wedowhatwedoon Schools Should Exclusively Use Free Software (2014)

At my university, we are heavily dependent upon Microsoft. The reasoning is that it has more features than the open source equivalents. It was pointed out that the over $1 million a year given to Microsoft could be used to implement those features in the open source tools and it wouldn't take long to get there. That was in the 1990's. We now give Microsoft many more millions a year and have ever since.

wedowhatwedoon Macy’s to Furlough 100k Employees

It's hard to accomplish something when half the team is paid to stop the project at any cost.

wedowhatwedoon Picardy Third

If you donated the money and specified your donation was only to fix the player on the web site and they accepted it, then yes, you have say in how they spend it. You don't have a lot of leverage if they don't spend it on that but you could possibly sue them.

If you donated the money without telling them what they have to spend it on, they can spend it on anything they want.

Good luck finding a lawyer to represent you in this law suit and good luck spending many times your original donation on said lawyer all because you don't like the look of the audio player on the web site.

wedowhatwedoon An Update on Bradfitz: Leaving Google

Why does it matter if it is a single building or multiple buildings? My university has a library that has book space, quiet study areas, group study areas and multiple overpriced food/drink vendors.

wedowhatwedoon My fridge has an RFID chip in the water filter, so a generic filter doesn't work

Interesting. My 2012 Chevy Volt has the exact same range today it had in 2012 when I bought it. Maybe I got lucky.

wedowhatwedoon Ask HN: How Can I Learn Music Theory?

The David Byrne book is great but it doesn't cover music theory. It covers music in general with a focus on how the music industry works. I highly recommend it but it will not teach music theory.

wedowhatwedoon Learning at work is work, and we must make space for it

You do not understand what it is to be a programmer. Programmers fix bugs. It might be boring but it's required. Programmers document. It also might be boring but it's required. Programmers write unit tests. We've hired people that don't want to do the non-fun stuff. They don't last long, they generally come in, cause problems for the team and then leave. The people that are willing to do what's needed even if it isn't fun are much better to have on a team.

wedowhatwedoon Being a good guy boss left me £1.2m in debt

That's what the students of the day are doing. Education is so expensive so I might as well live great while doing it. An extra $10K or $15K a year in living expenses on my loan is no big deal, right? That adds up when you need to start making payments on a loan that is ~$40K higher than it could have been.

wedowhatwedoon Being a good guy boss left me £1.2m in debt

It's interesting that "Millenials got shafted". When I went to college in the 1980's, it was much cheaper than now - I admit that. I lived in a very small dorm room with 4 guys in it and one bathroom on a whole floor of dorm rooms. I worked part time during the school year and full time during the summer to pay for it. I had no car, no TV and only ate food the school provided via my meal plan.

I now work for a large public university. Let's compare. Most students don't have jobs at all. Most students live in high end apartments (lots of these apartments cost more than my mortgage payment for my 4 bedroom house - per person). These students visit the town restaurants quite often and we have bars that are overflowing on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights with college students. When I've asked how this happens, I'm told that college loans let you pay for room and board so they happily get the most expensive housing possible because it's "free". Almost all students have cars and lots of them have a "parking ticket budget" so have no problems parking illegally and paying for it. It's also "free" because of their student loan.

Who is shafting whom?

wedowhatwedoon EasyJet bans peanuts on all flights

What is it about peanuts that you require them on your flights even if it could hurt people on that flight?

wedowhatwedoon Finland’s Basic Income Experiment Shows Recipients Are Happier and More Secure

Basic income can be engineered in a way where this doesn't happen.

wedowhatwedoon Piano Tuning

I disagree. A sine wave has no overtones but we can still easily perceive the octave notes.

Also overtones don't have to be even multiples of the fundamental. Many organs have stops that are not multiples of the fundamental. 2-2⁄3′, 1-3⁄5' are common flute stops.

wedowhatwedoon Ask HN: Developers aged 50, how have you gotten around age discrimination?

Age 53. At my last job, I was doing React front end work. When I argued against Redux, Coffeescript and Typescript because our app didn't need them, I was told I wasn't a team player and that I wouldn't succeed in that company.

I now have a new job at much much less salary.

wedowhatwedoon Nobody Cares About OAuth or OpenID Connect

The author of this article cannot be trusted. He regularly writes articles that compare non-best practices of JWT to best practices of other technologies to make JWT look bad. Because of him, I would not trust Okta at all. Take any article by Okta with a grain of salt.

wedowhatwedoon Serial Port SDR

Can you quote the FCC regulations that make this transmitter legal? (I'm assuming American law, the law in other countries obviously vary)