Hacker News Reader

2000UltraDeluxeon Instead of paying adults more, states let companies hire kids for labor shortage

There's nothing wrong with that.

This isn't about that, though. This is about artificially creating a supply of workers by lowering standards, rather than increasing the price for the existing supply of workers.

With a looming demographic bomb looming at the horizon we need to value existing workers more and increase individual productivity rather than removing child protection or workplace safety regulations. Spare time jobs aside, children are the workers of tomorrow -- not means to short-term value for shareholders.

2000UltraDeluxeon Linux 6.4 Slated to Start Removing Old, Unused and Unmaintained Pcmcia Drivers

I don't think I've used PCMCIA since my Amiga 600. It was also quite popular for Wifi cards about 20 years ago.

But yeah, good call. No reason to support it in new kernels.

2000UltraDeluxeon Nearly 40% of software engineers will only work remotely

That's the thing, though; when you're bound by working hours and need to commute (which most people are), you don't really have much choice and will need to commute during rush hours.

Personally, I'd rather find a non-tech sector job close to my home than commuting to a tech job. I am very happy to be fortunate enough to have the option to work from home all of the time -- most people don't

2000UltraDeluxeon Nearly 40% of software engineers will only work remotely

Commutes are often filled to the brink with people, there usually isn't enough space for everyone to move freely, and depending on one's location, you might have nothing but a black tunnel wall outside the windows. Public transport often requires one to switch trains or buses, and traffic jams are a constant worry for drivers.

Travelling, as in actually going somewhere, is often a nice and relaxing experience. Taking a delayed filled-to-the-brink bus to the train-station, switching to a delayed train without a single free seat, switching to a hermetically sealed metro car an hour later and finally arriving at the office 30 minutes late is _not_ a relaxing experience.

I'd love to see my coworkers now and then, but commuting really neutralises any benefits from going to the office.

2000UltraDeluxeon EVs are far cleaner than gas-powered cars even if batteries require more mining

It's not just an American issue. Quite a few places in the world have similar situations (for various reasons). That problem is rarely a major issue, though; transportation in urban areas can be improved a lot and there's no reason to not implement different solutions for different circumstances, such as urban and rural areas. Fossil fuel-dependency _is not_ a problem we can solve with one single solution that fits everyone.

The tricky part is getting someone else to take the first step -- there's going to be a lot of changes if we really want to do this, and most people seems firmly convinced that someone else should take the lead.

2000UltraDeluxeon Vitamin D supplementation and incident dementia

Cries in Nordic

I take 30 minutes longer lunch breaks in winter the days the sun is out, just to be able to get outside.

It's more or less impossible to get natural Vitamin D otherwise -- any spare time will be during the dark hours.

2000UltraDeluxeon Europe pushing for lunar time zone

There's a whole lot of social conventions tied to local time, sunrise/sundown, and the circadian rythm in general.

Sure, it'd be possible but we'd have to concieve a lot of new cultural concepts to replace the ones invalidated by the shift to UTC, and find new ways to remind people that it's impolite to call people in the middle of the night.

In the long run, a list of time zones aren't that much more complicated to work with than a list of times when it's mid-day is in the major population centres on the planet.

2000UltraDeluxeon Masonry Heaters: 18-24 hours of heat output from a single wood fire

If you have a decent masonry stove, good airflow and dry firewood then most of the particles will simply burn. Once the stove is hot enough, the smoke will ignite and most of that soot is converted into heat and energy.

2000UltraDeluxeon Popular education in Sweden: much more than you wanted to know (2022)

The other Nordic countries have similar movements. I assume there are others too.

2000UltraDeluxeon BASF to cut 2,600 jobs as energy crisis hits German industry

There are some oil reserves in the Baltic and there's a reason the EU is very interested in getting Ukraine on board (Black Sea oil), but frankly, it's more likely we'll just buy it from somewhere else once fossil fuels have been phased out.

Until now there's been over-investment in renewables, but too little in modernizing the power grids. The result has been windmills being stopped during production peaks, because there's nowhere to send the power.

I'd guess investing in grid upgrades, storage and cheap baseload capacity will be the main focus for the European energy the next 20 years.

2000UltraDeluxeon BASF to cut 2,600 jobs as energy crisis hits German industry

I'd be surprised if we'd completely emptied the Baltic and Baltic seas of oil in 20 years, and if we do, there are alternatives.

2000UltraDeluxeon BASF to cut 2,600 jobs as energy crisis hits German industry

What we do need is that European politicians wake up and realise that maintaining stable supplies in time of crisis is more important than short-term profits during relatively good times. Some investments in self-sufficiency are definitely needed, but the EU as a whole should have no problem ramping up production of the basics like food, steel, concrete and energy. That is, of course, assuming someone does something about it. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has rattled a lot of people and while the EU is a slow moving beast it is already responding.

I'm more worried about how to make the economy of it all work out. Someone is going to pay for all that it's going to be through taxes, and whomever gets that lottery ticket might not respond as expected (big Tech may decide to leave, smaller business could decide to simply shut down, regular people may cheat on taxes or start building guillotine replicas in public places, and so on.).

2000UltraDeluxeon Dusting off Dreamcast Linux

The most obvious abuse would be to use it as a simple proxy.

2000UltraDeluxeon NameCheap's email hacked to send Metamask, DHL phishing emails

The Metamask spamming campaign primarily use their own list -- compromised credentials are mainly used to get SMTP access and then spam away until they get caught.

2000UltraDeluxeon Windows 11: a spyware machine out of users' control

And yet, XP was a bloated pile of bugs when it was launched. It required a massive 64 MB of RAM and used much more CPU than Windows 2000.

2000UltraDeluxeon EU’s proposed CE mark for software could have dire impact on open source

From the draft:

> In order not to hamper innovation or research, free and open-source software developed or supplied outside the course of a commercial activity should not be covered by this Regulation. This is in particular the case for software, including its source code and modified versions, that is openly shared and freely accessible, usable, modifiable and redistributable. In the context of software, a commercial activity might be characterized not only by charging a price for a product, but also by harging a price for technical support services, by providing a software platform through which the manufacturer monetises other services, or by the use of personal data for reasons other than exclusively for improving the security, compatibility or interoperability of the software

2000UltraDeluxeon Wolfenstein 3D with a CGA Renderer

The requirements are on the official web site: http://legacy.3drealms.com/wolf3d/index.html

You need to decrease the window size a bit if want it to be playable on a 286, though. At full size, I tend to get a headache.

2000UltraDeluxeon Tech Layoffs Shock Young Workers. The Older People? Not So Much.

I'm from that age bracket. That one teenage mom from my in-group as a kid is a grandmother now.

The majority of children from that group of parents are just about old enough to apply for uni now, though.

2000UltraDeluxeon An aggressive, stealthy web spider operating from Microsoft IP space

WordPress uses a lot of resources for 404 pages. It's dumb but WordPress is everywhere.

One site being hammered is one thing. Thousands of sites being hammered at the same time is another. The issue in the article is a current and live problem. Blocking the requests saves a lot of CPU cycles.

2000UltraDeluxeon New Norwegian land could emerge from the Atlantic Ocean

I'd buy that album!

2000UltraDeluxeon Did the Music Business Just Kill the Vinyl Revival?

I love vinyl. And yes, it's a gimmick in the sense that the value is mostly in the novelty value rather than vinyl as a medium. Quality-wise, most new records seem sturdy and well-made but the mastering is generably horrible, and records from before the loudness wars sound much better.

If I wanted audiophile quality I'd buy a FLAC download instead.

2000UltraDeluxeon Tell HN: Gmail's spam filters have gone bonkers

I get that it's a black box. After all, nobody wants to tell the spammers what the ingredients of their secret anti-spam sauce are.

The problem is that it's obviously not working; the amount of false positives are staggering and from what I've heard they're still letting a lot of actual spam through.

But, as the sibling comment mentioned, there's little to no incentive for the freemail giants to improve the situation when they're themselves offering paid services with better spam filtering.

2000UltraDeluxeon Dell Tried to Hide Bad Capacitors Problem 2003-2005 (2010)

A few years earlier, Compaq, my first helpdesk job, had similar issues with caps in their PSU's. The normal problem statement would be that the computer simply went out with a loud bang.

One client once called regarding 80 Evo's who'd all gone out, one after another, over the course of a single day.

2000UltraDeluxeon Tell HN: Gmail's spam filters have gone bonkers

This is a well-known problem in the industry. Gmail's spam filtering is a black box with no apparent way to prevent emails from randomly ending up in spam.

2000UltraDeluxeon Marriage rules in Minoan Crete revealed by ancient DNA analysis

Politics

2000UltraDeluxeon Ask HN: How do you trust that your personal machine is not compromised?

First, take a deep breath.

Second, unless you're in a situation where you've pissed off/threatened some rather large actors, you should be fine assuming you follow best practices for backup, software, update and password management and you avoid using things like cheap IoT devices to connect to your cloud services.

Third, when disaster strikes, keep calm, rely on backups, change affected passwords and notify others who might get affected.

2000UltraDeluxeon Ask HN: How do you trust that your personal machine is not compromised?

Not the GP but I use ZFS snapshots for such things. Should the files be overwritten or deleted I can always fetch an older copy from snapshots.

The trick is to make sure nothing has access to the backup storage, which is obviously easier said than done.

2000UltraDeluxeon Grain farming goes indoors

The big deal here is the yield; the field outside my window yields 6 tonnes/hectare/year on a good year. The article mentions 117 tonnes/hectare and I assume it's on a yearly basis.

I can't imagine the production being more energy efficient than a regular field, but it sure saves space. I can imagine places like Singapore would benefit greatly since it could produce food locally.

2000UltraDeluxeon I disconnected from the electric grid for 8 months in Manhattan

They're horrible places to live, though. Pollution, noise, light pollution, they're crowded -- it's impossible to get away from others even for a few minutesb-- and the stench is just awful.

Efficient, yes, but quality of life is unacceptably low.

2000UltraDeluxeon DNS4EU

Performance is lower when there isn't enough requests to keep the more common lookups cached. A more busy resolver with the more common entries cached will have a significant performance advantage.