Hacker News Reader

xyzzy4on Persepolis of ancient Persia rendered in WebGL

Well isn’t it better to safeguard things in the British Museum than let them get lost forever?

xyzzy4on Why are so many people going ‘goblin mode’?

Intentionally dressing and acting like a bum is a very American thing and it’s been a gradual descent towards that point. People used to dress up in suit and ties just to leave their house, a trend that began ending sometime in the 60s.

xyzzy4on Ask HN: What tangible benefits did you get from spending time on HN?

I learned about Bitcoin from HN in 2011.

xyzzy4on Robinhood is limiting purchases of stocks: AMC, Blackberry, Nokia, and GameStop

I agree. This seems like illegal market manipulation on the part of Robinhood.

xyzzy4on Parlor does not scrub exif data

Parler*

xyzzy4on Just three percent of adults own half of America’s guns

Classic power law distribution.

xyzzy4on Show HN: Is the stock market going to crash?

5% of the returns is the profit being reinvested (for example stock buybacks), 2% is inflation, 2% is real gdp growth.

xyzzy4on 20 year old jailed for 15 months for encouraging a friend to commit suicide

Well during fraud someone is being misled with false statements, so the victims don't know they will lose money until it's too late. In this case on the other hand, the guy knew he would die when he took his own life.

xyzzy4on 20 year old jailed for 15 months for encouraging a friend to commit suicide

I would have voted not guilty if I was on that jury. Seems like the First Amendment should protect your right to give advice.

xyzzy4on How I implemented my own crypto

I disagree. The way you get experience is by trying things. If everyone followed that advice then nobody would learn anything.

xyzzy4on Microsoft Paint to be killed off after 32 years

I wonder if they check the usage statistics before getting rid of it? Because surely there are millions of people using it every day. Don't they care about the users?

xyzzy4on Big Banks Had a Spectacular Quarter Despite All the Rules

It's difficult to say if there will be a financial crisis, but multiple current economic indicators are not predicting one any time soon (meaning in the next 6 months).

This isn't counted in those indicators, but also S&P 500 earnings are predicted to go up a lot by December 2018, according to S&P Global. Credit Suisse's Global Wealth Report predicts a 5% annual increase in wealth among all adults globally in the next 5 years.

Houses in major metropolitan areas have gone about 6% annually on average, counting recessions and popping of bubbles. Timing the market could help but it's very difficult. I predict they will keep rising at a 4-7% rate for the next decade, but I could be wrong. A recession is possible but I wouldn't delay buying a house right now. But I would definitely buy within your means and don't expect prices to rise, because the future is very difficult to predict.

xyzzy4on CoinDash’s ICO Website Has Been Hacked

Why is gold worth $5 trillion market cap? If someone steals your gold, you can't even get it back easily.

xyzzy4on People Who Hear Voices Could Be on to Something

If you want to hear voices, just take 400-500mg of Benadryl. Enough to hallucinate, not enough to hospitalize you.

xyzzy4on Take Naps at Work

Offices are much less natural than afternoon naps.

xyzzy4on Diving into the world of hash tables

Sets are just like hashes where the value is always "true" for each key.

xyzzy4on Tesla hires Andrej Karpathy

If A.I. can't fold my laundry, I wouldn't trust it with my car.

xyzzy4on Catfish Programmers

>Taking breaks to play games, chat around coffee, or taking a few minutes to walk around the office is a non-existent element of life. An 8 hour work day is exactly that: 8 hours of pure work.

I don't understand how some programmers can supposedly work for 8 hours straight. I often have to take breaks to think about how I want to best implement the next thing, or what exactly I should be working on.

xyzzy4on Why Whales, the largest animals on Earth, got so big

Well there could potentially be bigger animals in the future.

xyzzy4on Where have all the insects gone?

80% decrease isn't that much on a log scale. 99.99% decrease would be more worrying.

xyzzy4on strncpy() is not a safer strcpy() (2012)

It doesn't copy the null terminator because it's using memcpy. It's only copying the string without the null byte.

xyzzy4on strncpy() is not a safer strcpy() (2012)

Your code will only work if malloc() pads with 0s. Otherwise it will be missing the null character at the end of the out string. So I would switch it to calloc() which is guaranteed to pad with 0s. Or use memset to set it all to 0s.

xyzzy4on United Airlines Announces Changes to Improve Customer Experience

>I would be if I was asked to leave after getting on the plane but once the authorities get involved anyone beyond 10 years old should know it isn't time for a temper tantrum.

So it's fine for police to beat up non-threatening people when they don't comply with a business manager's decision?

xyzzy4on Should I fire an engineer for working on his side projects during office hours?

The biggest problem I see here is that employees can see eachother's screens. Give your employees more privacy and don't treat them like children. Measure them by their output.

xyzzy4on Let me take you through my dream office

Why do you need sprint planning? Just always work on things that are high priority.

xyzzy4on [dead]

Doesn't seem relevant to HN.

xyzzy4on Swift architecture at Uber

It seems the Uber app was extremely over-engineered. Call me crazy but I don't think you need 100 engineers to recreate the front-end of Uber.

xyzzy4on Prominent Venture Capitalist Chris Sacca Retires from Investing

>I think its your responsibility to keep reinvesting a portion of it in high growth startups.

Well then it wouldn't be your money if you are obligated to spend it on certain things.

xyzzy4on Do you have a pointless job? [video]

>Maslov's theory we have other needs as well

So you think every hunter-gatherer is extremely unhappy?

xyzzy4on Do you have a pointless job? [video]

All jobs are basically pointless except for agricultural jobs, which is all we need to survive.