Hacker News Reader

RyanZAGon Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

They were profitable in 2008, but by 2016 they were running at a loss.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-15/github-is...

I'm guessing it was from corporate mismanagement, overbalooned salaries for initial employees, and probably hiring too quickly to meet demand.

RyanZAGon Cisco says 90% of internet traffic goes through Erlang-controlled nodes

What about lists? Eg, an immutable list of packets.

RyanZAGon Cisco says 90% of internet traffic goes through Erlang-controlled nodes

It's more about forecasts and assurances. If you're financing the network that is currently doing X traffic, but expect it to grow by quite a bit soon, you're going to ask "is this solution going to cover everything?"

The Cisco guy is going to sure 'Sure! We can cover everything!'

The OSS off the shelf guy is going to ask 'Well that depends on the growth.'

At that point, most of the businesses just throw some money at Cisco so they don't have to worry about anything.

RyanZAGon The Marshmallow Test: What Does It Really Measure?

> Even if it is heritable, making the knowledge public can only lead to a sense of fatalism.

That's a really terrible way to look at the world, and has caused a lot of suffering. It's the very basis of the term 'heretic' that has caused so much loss throughout human history.

No human ever has the right to deny knowledge to another for their own benefit, because humans are not able to accurately determine what knowledge is or is not harmful for others to hold. Often their choice to withhold knowledge causes the most harm of all.

EDIT: Thinking about it more, 'the right' is not correct. Withholding knowledge can be a malicious or competitive activity, but can never be a beneficial one. Ie, you have the right to withhold knowledge from your enemies to harm them, or withhold knowledge from competitors to increase your chances of winning. But you need to be clear on this with yourself: you're not withholding knowledge for anyone's benefit but your own.

RyanZAGon Ready for Production Apps: Flutter Beta 3

Chicken and egg, right? If Google declares it not ready for production, then nobody uses it for production apps, so it never gets the kind of testing it needs to really be production ready.

If Google declares it out of beta, then people assume nothing will change, and if things do change they complain.

So the current wisdom is to have a 'production ready beta' which indicates an in-between period where things can change, but you're encouraged and expected to use it in production.

RyanZAGon Facebook moving away from React Native?

Flutter is very much in beta still for the next couple months at least, so you'd expect that.

If I was choosing between RN and Flutter as something to learn, assuming I had no prior experience in either, then Flutter is probably a better choice. I'm sure there are arguments both ways though, but Flutter is very 'solid' for lack of a better term.

RyanZAGon OpenDUNE – An open-source recreation of the game Dune II

WW1 trench warfare. Trenches generally had pillboxes which could be described as defensive structures, and the entire trench warfare was about slowly building these defensive structures towards the enemy.

RyanZAGon Facebook photo-scanning lawsuit could cost it billions

That's what court cases are about, and why we don't declare innocent or guilty before the verdict. The evidence (or lack of) will come up during the court proceedings, you'd expect.

RyanZAGon Comparing the C FFI overhead in various programming languages

Is there a reason Dart is so badly performing here? And wouldn't that have a big impact on Google's new Flutter project that they're building an OS around? I'd assume Flutter would need to be calling into FFI for each access to the Chromium graphics stack that it is built on.

RyanZAGon FBI tells router users to reboot now to kill malware infecting 500k devices

Here's a fairly recent one, I guess. The 3 lines of javascript do most of the work.

https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2013/10/11/anatomy-of-an-ex...

RyanZAGon Evolving Chrome's security indicators

Likely next step: mark only pages that are present in Chrome's preloaded HSTS lists as secure (including their new premium .app domain).

RyanZAGon Does growing up poor harm brain development?

Assuming intelligence is the best predictor of wealth (not sure if true), and that intelligence is highly genetic as said elsewhere in this thread (not sure if true), then parent's wealth being a good predictor of children's wealth would already be explained by intelligence being genetic.

So just because parent's wealth predicts children's wealth doesn't in any way make it impossible that intelligence predicts wealth too or that they'd necessarily be in conflict.

RyanZAGon Introducing .app, a more secure home for apps on the web

I think the idea would be that Chrome would sooner or later mark non-HSTS sites like .app as 'half secure' or add a special extra greener bar for .app sites. Given Google's track record, I wouldn't really doubt it.

RyanZAGon Another Scam ICO? Savedroid Founder Exits with $50M to Chill on a Beach

Agree - your life in a 3rd world country with $50 mil is going to be far better than in a 1st world country. I don't think that one was a good argument.

The only good argument is that stealing from people is immoral.

RyanZAGon Report of Active Shooter at YouTube HQ

I guess I'm not so much speculating as calling on companies like Youtube to hire more protection for their staff. They're really putting themselves out there, and if this is or isn't somehow related to Youtube's business, they are eventually going to get hit. Read the comments on any of the interviews Youtube staff have done, and weep.

My point was more: Youtube is taking remote action on people they don't know that can have life altering effects through their policies. The kind of content Youtube blocks is almost definitely created by at least a few damaged people. Eventually they are going to be the target of violence from such people.

They need to be proactive and realize the risks they place their employees in simply by virtue of their scale and policy choices. And this goes for other similar companies too. Security for employees should be more of a priority than it is - their employees become public figures.

RyanZAGon Multiple Android apps use combined permissions to siphon personal data

> The first amendment wasn't written with social media in mind, just like the second amendment wasn't written with semi-automatic rifles in mind.

This doesn't seem terribly likely. In the case of the second amendment in 1791, things like swivel guns were available, and at the time the second amendment was written, swivel guns were permissible. Now even an old swivel gun from those days would do measurably far more damage than the kind of semi-automatic rifles used in today's shootings. Such weaponry would only be banned far later in 1934, and probably the original authors of the 2nd amendment would not have banned it. So there is no reason to believe that the 2nd amendment was not written with semi-automatic rifles in mind. It almost definitely was: it was written so that the common man could band together into a militia and be able to take on the full might of the army and government.

Now certainly such an idea may be flawed and you are free to disagree with it. But the authors of the 2nd amendment were certainly aware of the existence as such things as guns that could kill a lot of people very quickly, and they very much covered them with the 2nd amendment.

RyanZAGon Theranos and Zenefits are a feature, not a bug, of Silicon Valley

I think most startups understand this implicitly, and therefore most pitches are lies. Most of the rest of the comments are about "it doesn't have to be this way!", but it's almost an inescapable local max. The previous big breaks in technology were nearly always the 10X in 1 year types, but it's extremely hard to tell who is actually a 10X in 1 year because they are so extremely rare. Probably impossible, since more likely than not, the 10X is pure luck on the part of a competent 1X than any kind of real difference.

So the sensible 10 years for 1X that will make you profit but not overwhelming profit don't get funded, so the 10 years for 1X have no choice but to lie and get the funding they need, and investors get stringed along with all their sunk costs because most of the time that 1X payout is still a lot more than their sunk costs.

RyanZAGon Facebook denies it collects call and SMS data from phones without permission

Consent can be tricky when you create a path of higher and lower resistance. This is especially so for people who try to avoid conflict (teenage girls here especially). They may give consent simply because it's what is expected of them, and rather than what they actually want. UI design for such consent forms has to be carefully considered so as to make it 'socially acceptable' to decline.

That specific popup is a clear example of how to maximize acceptance in a big portion of the population. I can almost guarantee you that popup design was chosen based off A-B testing, and had the highest rate of acceptance among designs.

RyanZAGon Propaganda on Tumblr

Has it gone up, or have you only been made aware of it now?

RyanZAGon Medium suspended our account and blocked access to all our published stories

Something can be both bad (in a moral sense) and useful. In fact, most bad things are useful.

RyanZAGon Heat loss from big corporate projects

> Why would you say no to them?

Maybe you misunderstood my point, but I certainly wouldn't say no! Planned economy is far worse: it's mostly the same thing, but without the smiles.

RyanZAGon Heat loss from big corporate projects

The whole system where all of these projects generally go towards some form of advertising where we convince people to buy things they don't really need is a far worse form of heat loss than this. Buying the latest shiny smartphone every year isn't just the heat loss of thousands of engineers making it slightly thinner, it's the actual loss of all the resources that went into last year's batch of smartphones that end up in a landfill somewhere.

And yet, none of this is really a loss as people need something that feels important to do with their time, and building that new smartphone that is the world's thinnest definitely feels like you're making accomplishments. And people are pretty happy when they open the box and see their new smartphone.

Moving corporate resources around is just one more step in a world we don't truly need, but which we create for ourselves anyway. In this case, it's part of the game of proving that our company has the biggest numbers so that our share holders get a smile on their faces when they open their retirement portfolios.

RyanZAGon WhatsApp co-founder tells everyone to delete Facebook

Sorry for that - you can't believe my surprise that you really do have an actual Nazi running. That's honestly unbelievable. I hope you can understand why I assumed you were being hyperbolic.

RyanZAGon WhatsApp co-founder tells everyone to delete Facebook

> They just elected a Nazi in Illinois.

I know nothing about American politics or what's going on in Illinois. But that you jump straight on calling someone you disagree with a "Nazi", while also saying how different what Obama did with no explanation and a lot of insults, does not give me much confidence in what you are saying here.

Just letting you know in case you were trying to convince anyone of your viewpoint.

RyanZAGon Researchers Learned to Use Facebook ‘Likes’ to Sway Your Thinking

> I could infer that you are male from the way you type, and I guess you're somewhere between 25 and 35. I haven't looked up your username or anything else, it's just a "feeling".

I think you only really need one or two obvious tells for something like that. The guy you replied to used ", etc.". I think that alone puts him into the bracket you've given, so I'm fairly sure you're correct here. Looking forward to hearing if you are.

RyanZAGon Researchers Learned to Use Facebook ‘Likes’ to Sway Your Thinking

With the new ease of access to people with opinions different from your own, most people now require some self-consistent reason for not interacting with them and their views. The idea that other rational people can have differing views from our own is deeply unsettling as it allows for the possibility that our own views are incorrect.

Pre-social media, this was easy enough: the people with different opinions were just less educated or less informed, and once they became informed they would hold the same views that we do. Social media changed all that by bringing those with different views into direct confrontation where you could immediately connect with someone with different views to your own and educate or inform them.

This fails to work. As soon as we try that, we quickly realize that those with other views are already informed and have just taken a different judgement. So we're left with the problem: either our views are wrong or their views are wrong. Deeply concerning as it's just as likely to be our own views. The only solution then is to shift the blame - it's not our fault or people with other views at fault: it's that there are 'evil actors' working to 'brainwash' people. Therefore our views are correct, and it's just people with other views who have been brainwashed. Simple and clean, no need for self reflection or difficult questions.

RyanZAGon Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street

Great points and extremely important.

But at the same time, I don't personally want to go back to an age before automobiles became commonplace. They're too useful to me.

Is that selfish? Sure. But our lives are all shaped by our wants, not by our needs.

RyanZAGon Why Cities Boom While Towns Struggle

> There's some upper limit on what you can accomplish as a sequestered lone-wolf genius. I don't deny that people with such working styles have made impressive contributions, but the bar for "innovation" is rapidly climbing and will soon surpass what anyone can do in isolation. That's a pretty normal thing to happen as a field matures.

I don't think this part is up for debate. It's more about how that social collaboration is handled in the best manner for everyone involved that would be up for debate.

Just because social collaboration is needed, doesn't mean everyone has to go out for drinks together or live together in a small apartment. That part is obvious, right? But just because social collaboration is needed doesn't mean people have to be together in the same physical space either.

RyanZAGon Why Cities Boom While Towns Struggle

> I don't think it's terribly controversial that collaborating in person is much, much easier.

It's fairly controversial, especially among engineers. Not all engineers, but a sizable percentage of engineers are not comfortable in social collaboration - especially forced social collaboration stretching over multiple hours for difficult tasks.

As far as 'easier' goes, 'easier' isn't always 'better'. While that online collaboration across a slack channel may have higher friction, it would also have many benefits as well. Other people can follow the entire process, so continuous status updates aren't required. The chat can be stored so if the issue happens again, it's easy to reference back to what was done.

> But it's entirely unsurprising to me that innovation is more likely to come from collocated teams.

I don't think this is proven anywhere, and may be one of those things where you think it is correct, but it really isn't. Fully integrated remote work as we have today is a very new phenomenon and there hasn't been much research into it. Further, many quick growing startups that are looking very promising are taking the 'remote first' approach and seem to be benefiting from it from an outsider's perspective.

RyanZAGon Protecting Against HSTS Abuse

Trying HTTPS first would still help a lot in other cases, such as the one in the article. None of the super cookie HSTS techniques would have worked in the first place if the browser had just always tried to use HTTPS first.

Probably other unknown vulnerabilities could be averted by just trying HTTPS first too. Not doing so should be considered bad practice, with or without HSTS.