Hacker News Reader

zipwitchon The Google Squeeze

One thing I've noticed myself doing is that when I (increasingly rarely) stumble across a good, high-useful-information density website on anything I have even a passing interest in (typically either some sort of obscure fora, or a personal blog/website), I carefully bookmark and tag it on the spot, because I'll never be able to find it again otherwise.

zipwitchon California’s Criminal Cops

The Dayton Ohio shooter earlier this year was killed by police officers 32 seconds after he opened fire. He killed nine people in those 32 seconds. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Dayton_shooting

zipwitchon The Money Farmers: How Oligarchs and Populists Milk the E.U.

Scientific American recently had an article on how wealth concentration is inevitable, without active mechanisms to continually counter it:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-inequality-ine...

zipwitchon The Money Farmers: How Oligarchs and Populists Milk the E.U.

For me, I think that no matter what terms are used, the important point is that we don't automatically give "our" oligarchs, or Very High Net Worth Individuals, some sort of free pass on ethics simply because they aren't post-Soviet kleptocrats.

zipwitchon Some Blizzard employees are dreading BlizzCon

It wasn't just Activision-Blizzard banning Blitzchung and confiscating his prize money. The official Hearthstone account on Weibo also parroted the Chinese government party line, "We will, as always, resolutely safeguard the country’s dignity" in Chinese.

zipwitchon Teens are spending nearly half their waking hours on screens

Here's a 2018 article specifically on tv-watching time over years: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/05/when-...

For comparison, here's a 2004 paper on how teens spent their time from 1981-2003: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-w47wgdhso

(Short version: about 5 hours a day on tv, games, and computers.)

And, let us not forget when, in 1959, Scientific American denounced the vile scourge of chess: "A pernicious excitement to learn and play chess has spread all over the country, and numerous clubs for practicing this game have been formed in cities and villages...chess is a mere amusement of a very inferior character, which robs the mind of valuable time that might be devoted to nobler acquirements, while it affords no benefit whatever to the body."

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/19th-century-conce...

Speaking for myself, I'm not thrilled at the amount of screen time I and others spend... but the same has been said of various forms of print media and other things over the years; http://mentalfloss.com/article/52209/15-historical-complaint...

I doubt medieval crafters were thrilled about spending 10-14 hours a day in their workshops either. Ultimately, I think self-awareness is more important than anything, including how information-selecting creations like Youtube or Facebook are affecting our minds and our ideas, rather than focusing so much on time.

zipwitchon Bank of the Underworld (2015)

>Prosecutors dismissed the idea that many legitimate businesses used Liberty Reserve. After the takedown, they noted, users were encouraged to contact the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan if they wanted their money back. According to prosecutors, only 35 people did so.

Was that because only 35 users were legitimate, or because the users - even if completely legitimate - were reluctant to risk potentially destroying their lives by admitting their identities to federal investigators?

zipwitchon Space: A Major Legal Void

Lensmen.

zipwitchon A model for CEO excellence

One piece of data is that there's an inverse correlation between CEO pay and company performance: https://cooleypubco.com/2016/07/25/new-study-shows-inverse-c...

zipwitchon Gamers for Freedom: A handbook for protesting at this year's Blizzcon

Open protests at Blizzcon will do an immense amount of financial damage to Blizzard-Activision. At an absolute minimum, they will reduce the return from a massive publicity exercise.

Likely outcomes include damaging future sales of anything that gets revealed/promoted at Blizzcon, increasing awareness of the boycott and the reasons for it, and forcing Blizzard to anger both Blizzard fans (from Blizzard's own probably over-reaction to protesters) and the Chinese government (who are going to be unhappy about any level of protest).

zipwitchon Blizzard Postpones World of Warcraft 15th Anniversary Event in Taiwan

Corporations are allowed to exist by the public (via the representatives of their collective will, i.e. government) under the belief that doing so will, overall, result in a net benefit to the public. Making a profit or increasing shareholder value are secondary considerations. They can be motivations for why a corporation exists, but don't have to be (there are plenty of non-profit corporations). They are not the sole raison d'être for the artificial constructs we call corporations.

zipwitchon BlizzCon 2019 Protest “Full-Steam Ahead,” Say Organizers

Gamers in the rest of the world can all do our part to make sure Blizzard is wrong.

zipwitchon BlizzCon 2019 Protest “Full-Steam Ahead,” Say Organizers

No. The Asia Pacific region is 14% of their business. That certainly includes China, but it isn't all China.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/269665/activison-blizzar...

zipwitchon Antarctic ice cliffs may not contribute to sea-level rise as much as predicted

Was Brown predicting a rise in Celsius or Fahrenheit? The article doesn't say. (And we are up by ~1.5 degrees Fahrenheit.)

zipwitchon I Survived the “Destroying Angel” (2006)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mock_strawberry

They fooled me once. I picked and ate one, noticed it didn't taste right almost immediately. Once you look more closely, the fruit is quite obviously different in shape and texture, but the leaves are near-perfect and the fruit is the right color.

It certainly gave me a quick and fortunately danger-free reminder that there's a world of difference between "hey that looks like..." and "yes, after careful examination, this is...".

zipwitchon Sears Hasn’t Fared Better After Bankruptcy

Sears biggest problem is that the now-former CEO had been looting it for years.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-sears-lawsuit/sears-sues-...

zipwitchon We're in a Permanent Coup

Journalist Marcy Wheeler already did a nice takedown of everything wrong with this piece from Taibbi.

One example: "Those abuses, the ones he's outraged about? With very few exceptions, they all happened in 2017, under Trump. There's good reason to suspect one of them came bc Trump demanded FBI crack down on leaks (a crackdown Taibbi pretends to be ignorant about)."

https://twitter.com/emptywheel/status/1182792966416621568

zipwitchon I’m Convinced We Found Evidence of Life on Mars in the 1970s

Mars is getting contaminated in the near future, whether we find life on it or not. Whether we collectively want it to be or not. Given the ever-decreasing cost of launches into space, the increasing access to small satellites, I think suspect it's inevitable that some collection of Earth microbes will get a ride to Mars within the next century. Whether it's a motivated team of grad students, an obsessed billionaire, or a small nation that doesn't decontaminate its lander before launch, it's going to happen.

zipwitchon I’m Convinced We Found Evidence of Life on Mars in the 1970s

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle

zipwitchon NASA aims for first manned SpaceX mission in first-quarter 2020

Or very small amounts of mass and a whole lot of time.

zipwitchon Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments

There are non-Blizzard alternatives to most (if not all) of Blizzard's offerings. Magic: The Gathering Online instead of Hearthstone. League of Legends or other MOBAs instead of Overwatch. SW:TOR, Shroud of the Avatar, or even Destiny to scratch the MMO itch.

zipwitchon Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments

Yeah. China won't ultimately care whatever we do, but Blizzard can me made to feel it. Their own annual gaming convention is coming up in less than a month, and hopefully this will backfire on them badly.

zipwitchon How the world will change as computers spread into everyday objects

Do you want a hot shower after your long day? Touch here to transfer $1 to the malware that just hijacked your plumbing. Try to remove it, and it will do $5000 in damage. A professional home IT security fix will run $1000 and take 3 days, while you camp in your back yard or live out of a motel.

zipwitchon Saudi Arabia Shuts Down About Half Its Oil Output After Drone Strikes

There's a relevant Latin quote from the era of the Punic Wars (if I recall correctly), Qui vincit non est victor nisi victus fatebur - "The victor is not victorious if the vanquished does not consider himself so."

zipwitchon US experts propose having AI control nuclear weapons

From the fine article you linked (for which link I thank you):"Time compression has placed America’s senior leadership in a situation where the existing NC3 system may not act rapidly enough. Thus, it may be necessary to develop a system based on artificial intelligence, with predetermined response decisions, that detects, decides, and directs strategic forces with such speed that the attack-time compression challenge does not place the United States in an impossible position."

Had the Soviet Union had such a system in place in September, 1983, human civilization would not be around for us to be having this discussion.

If the situation is so dire as to call for serious discussions about AI control of nuclear weapons, it is dire enough for us to initiate, sponsor, and encourage global discussion over massive multi-lateral nuclear weapons reduction.

zipwitchon Americans Have Shifted Dramatically on What Values Matter Most

>If there is no afterlife, then what IS the point of this life?

If there is no afterlife, no elsewhere, then the takeaway is not that nothing matters, or that life has no point. Rather, it is the opposite: what we do in the here and now is the only thing that will ever matter.

zipwitchon Visionary Bitcoin Creator Satoshi Nakamoto to Reveal Identity

I agree. Feels like someone registered "Satoshi Nakamura" as a company, and is trying to run a scam from there.

zipwitchon Finding Amelia Earhart’s Plane Seemed Impossible – Then Came a Startling Clue

You've touched on the core problem of everything Earhart-related that TIGHAR does. (And most of what they do is Earhart-related, and most all modern Earhart-related news originates with TIGHAR). They start with the premise that "Earhart and Noonan crashed at the edge of Nikumaroro" and then check every single piece of evidence they find to see if maybe it might support that assertion. This is a completely backwards way to do such an investigation.

The Skeptoid link in the current first reply goes into all this in detail, here it is again if anyone missed it: https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4295

And another follow-up from Skeptoid: https://skeptoid.com/blog/2012/03/20/more-amelia-earhart-non...

zipwitchon On Costliest U.S. Warship Ever, Navy Can’t Get Munitions on Deck

You're touching on something unspoken but very present in the modern US military machine. It's great for wrecking anyone who isn't on the short list of China, Russia, the EU, Japan and maybe India. Every other nation could see their infrastructure and military devastated within a month, with little they could do to stop it. (See Libya for one example.)

But the American people aren't being sold a military that can act as the international equivalent of mafia leg-breakers. We're told, again and again, that we are paying for a military that is "the best" and that can, if needed, stand up to our global peers and near-peers and win. There's a disconnect between rhetoric and expenditures on the one hand, and demonstrated performance, capabilities, and operational plans on the other hand.

That seems like a huge problem to me. At the least, it's a massive fraud being perpetrated on the American public. And at worst, it might lead to a terrible conflict as decision-makers operate with very inaccurate assessments of what our military is really capable of.

zipwitchon On Costliest U.S. Warship Ever, Navy Can’t Get Munitions on Deck

The US Navy is under-equipped for the possibility that a hostile power might mine key harbors or waterways.

The existing, decades-old, minesweeping force is in the process of being decommissioned. https://nationalinterest.org/blog/america-getting-rid-their-...

The replacements - involving the problematic LCS-class ships - are in even worse shape than the Ford and are currently scheduled to be operational in 2022. https://news.usni.org/2019/01/25/lcs-mission-package-office-...