Hacker News Reader

SheepSlapperon They bought a Caribbean island to start their own country

"And I don't know about you," says Mayer, "but I certainly can't afford to buy an island on my own!"

Again, best of luck to them. They had to crowdfund $250,000 for the tiny piece of land, they're a LONG way from being able to do anything ambitious with it. That takes DEEP pockets that they themselves admitted to not having.

It'll be a fun little campsite for a few years though, until it's underwater. Then it's just a heck of a story to tell at the bar.

SheepSlapperon They bought a Caribbean island to start their own country

"By December 2019, the group's aspirations became reality, raising over $250,000 to complete the purchase of Coffee Caye, a 1.2-acre, uninhabited island off the coast of Belize"

Good luck putting any of that on a single acre

SheepSlapperon Pfizer board member suggests end to mask, vaccine mandates

It's been a while since this was a "covid countermeasure", but how about food curfews! Government mandated intermittent fasting between the hours of 8pm and 8am :)

SheepSlapperon More Americans are saying they’re ‘vaxxed and done’

> Define "outside".

Read the quote I pulled: outside = "open-air environment".

> People are abusing these declarations in ridiculous ways.

And this is being obtuse about "these declarations" to avoid acknowledging the fact that the person at the top of this thread is correct: COVID, statistically, almost never transmits outdoors. It's been studied, multiple times, all coming to the same conclusion.

SheepSlapperon More Americans are saying they’re ‘vaxxed and done’

Hopefully people are waking up to this, because it's been true since the beginning. If enough people say "kick rocks" when new restrictions appear from on high, there's nothing a government can really do.

Maybe this will open some eyes, and next time a government comes around saying "stop earning a living, stop being social, listen to us and everything will be fine" we can collectively shrug our shoulders and get busy living. There WILL be instances where the kind of response we had over the past 2 years is justified, but COVID wasn't one of them.

SheepSlapperon More Americans are saying they’re ‘vaxxed and done’

https://medical.mit.edu/covid-19-updates/2021/08/how-safe-ou...

"A Japanese investigation of 110 cases found the probability of transmission to be 18.7 times higher indoors compared to an “open-air environment.” And a more recent study, which looked at transmission between 18 infected construction workers and 496 of their close contacts, showed that the infected individuals were nearly 25 times more likely to spread the virus to coworkers in enclosed spaces compared with outdoor settings. They transmitted the virus to 26 percent of their indoor coworkers while infecting only 1.4 percent of their outdoor workmates — this despite being significantly more likely to share meals and talk loudly while working outside."

Does it EVER spread outdoors? Sure. Is it very likely to? Not even close. We've known this for a long time, and yet we still have municipalities welding basketball hoops shut and filling skate parks with sand.

SheepSlapperon Media Owned by Wealthy Are Quick to Tell You Wealth Taxes Are a Bad Idea

Of course opinions are shaped by outside factors, but the reason those kind of responses are annoying is because they're just so... uninteresting.

I'm not the guy from above, but responding with "I disagree with you so are you sure your opinions are your own" is dismissive and doesn't lead to a more interesting or thoughtful discussion. Instead, asking WHY he believes gives you the opportunity to engage in the discussion, maybe change your views a little or change the other persons' a bit.

That's why comments like that are annoying, they're a way to dismiss discussion instead of engaging in it, and engaging in discussion is the point of this silly site.

I'm someone who also isn't wealthy and disagrees with wealth taxes. Responses like that one aren't an honest attempt to engage, and I'd also ignore it and move on :)

SheepSlapperon AWS and their billions in IPv4 addresses

You're right that it indicates a range of addresses, the number after the slash is the number of starting bits that the addresses all share.

Check out CIDR Blocks for a more complete answer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classless_Inter-Domain_Routing...

SheepSlapperon The default branch for newly-created repositories is now main

Github -> Settings -> Repositories -> Repository Default Branch

This will let you override this change, so you can set whatever default name you want for the first branch of new repos

SheepSlapperon Rideshare operations are being suspended in California

Hopefully the companies and government can come to a middle ground that solves both problems. There are quite a few people that drive for supplemental income and don't need all the stuff that the law is now requiring, and there are some people that do it full time and would benefit from the perks of a more traditional full time job.

The bummer is, as usual, the policy makers aren't seeing the nuance between the two and now drivers have to suffer the consequences and lost wages until the dust settles. Either the politicians are ignorant, or they're willfully ignoring the facts. Honestly neither would surprise me, it is CA after all :)

SheepSlapperon Back pain is a problem which is badly treated

Squats and deadlifting is what got rid of my back pain, which had been mild to moderate for years. Highly recommended, as long as you are VERY mindful of your form.

SheepSlapperon The first chosen-prefix collision for SHA-1

"You can’t hide secrets from the future with math. You can try, but I bet that in the future they laugh at the half-assed schemes and algorithms amassed to enforce cryptographs in the past."

Didn't expect to see Front on HN today, what a pleasant surprise.

SheepSlapperon The front end of an example full-stack app built using Vue and Node

You're correct, v-if in Vue is for conditional rendering. If the statement evaluates to false then the button isn't added to the DOM.

And you're doubly correct, the back-end better verify those requests as well. Can't trust user input, which includes HTTP requests from client apps...

SheepSlapperon Gab will become a Mastodon fork

None of the things you mentioned are "rights", that's just muddling the language. Freedom of speech is a capital-R Right.

SheepSlapperon Shame Storm

AKA the "we don't negotiate with terrorists" strategy of dealing with social outrage mobs

SheepSlapperon How faking your feelings at work can be damaging

You can be genuine without being emotional

SheepSlapperon Tildes – A non-profit community site driven by its users' interests

Maybe I phrased that poorly, because you're right that we've engaged in this 'otherization' since the beginning of time (for good reasons and bad). Maybe a more important factor is that we're increasingly putting OURSELVES into boxes, which increases the polarization of discourse (because now WE identify as a group and not a whole, and those OTHER groups aren't US so clearly they're wrong/bad/etc).

This ebbs and flows throughout history (or rather the US and THEM changes, based on circumstances). There are plenty of unifying events in US history that lead to more of an 'American' identity (wars, 9/11, generally dangerous times or shitty events drive unification out of necessity). Those aren't the times we're in now, but it's cyclical. Some day we will be again, then not, ad infinitum. The pendulum always swings.

SheepSlapperon Tildes – A non-profit community site driven by its users' interests

It's a shift in culture, with an added heap of laziness. We're in a time where people like to compartmentalize people/views/ideas in order to dismiss or demonize, because it's easier to do that than challenging ideas (someone else's or your own).

We went from one identity in the US (American) to putting ourselves and others in boxes (black, white, man, woman, whatever) to the detriment of us all. Identity politics: a curious game... the only winning move is not to play.

SheepSlapperon Talent, luck and success: simulating meritocracy and inequality

Free markets are as close to egalitarian as is possible with markets. Supply and demand set prices while skill set and productivity set wages. It's not perfect, but it's better than anything else we've tried.

Interested in why you think the playing field isn't level, outside of the "luck" aspects I mentioned earlier (since there's nothing to be done about that, life doesn't care about fairness unfortunately). I'm open to new info :)

SheepSlapperon Talent, luck and success: simulating meritocracy and inequality

All the things you mention are forms of luck, yes. And there's no way to control for them outside of some nightmarish eugenics scenario. It's a fact of life that people are different, and will excel in different facets of their lives to different degrees.

In a free market system there will always be winners, losers, and a lot of us in the middle. That's a result of the system BEING an equal playing field, talent and money are correlated. It'll never be the case that we all go into the workforce on equal footing, because we all start out in different places, with different genetics, and different upbringings. That doesn't mean someone from a poor upbringing can't work hard and raise their market value (thus making more), but it means that not everyone is going to be a millionaire.

SheepSlapperon Show HN: Making good Steam games discoverable again

I've owned Starbound for at least a year now, and only just started playing last week. Hell of a learning curve, but definitely worth checking out if you liked Terraria.

SheepSlapperon How and Why Athletes Go Broke (2009)

Skates are more expensive than cleats. Hockey sticks break or are grown out of, and decent ones are a few hundred bucks.

SheepSlapperon VLC 3.0 release

Oh man that's awesome! I saw the Vetinari name and wondered if it was a Sir Terry reference or something else, respect to those folks at VLC.

SheepSlapperon Blizzard Courts Controversy with New 'Overwatch' Anti-Toxicity Measures

It'll be interesting to see how this plays out. If bans start coming in for activity outside the game, it'll be a complete shit show (and rightly so), but if the info they collect is just another data point to strengthen/weaken the case of reports it might improve the system as a whole... time will tell I suppose.

SheepSlapperon Soon, Cars in Denmark Will Only Be Taxed at 100% (2017)

It takes me 40 minutes one way to get to/from work, more if the traffic sucks. The US is spread out, not having a car is not an option for a majority of our society (outside of high population density cities).

SheepSlapperon Half of the US government's financial assets are student loans

I sit at a desk getting carpal tunnel and fat. I've got respect for my buddies doing what they do, and being successful without a college degree. That's more or less my point, college isn't a good investment for everyone.

SheepSlapperon Half of the US government's financial assets are student loans

It depends on the degree. I'm a Millennial and got my CS degree for $15k, which was a smart investment (and make no mistakes, degrees ARE investments). At the same time I have a friend who is going into a few hundred thousand dollars worth of debt to get a PHD in History. That's not a good investment, when you look at time + money vs return.

"Just get a degree" is bad advice. I know electricians that make more money than me, and work shorter hours. "Get a skill" is good advice, and college is only one way of doing that. But you can't dismiss personal responsibility when it comes to decision making, both good and bad.

SheepSlapperon Half of the US government's financial assets are student loans

> Millennials are the most educated generation in history. Yet there are record numbers of them working off student debts as waiters and bartenders, and supplementing their income on the side with ‘gigs’ (like being an Uber driver)

We're the most educated in history, but many people decided to use that education to learn topics that aren't lucrative/in demand. Personal responsibility plays in a ton here, and some people made bad decisions. It's still simple/easy to get a good education at a state school, entirely paid for by loans, and come out with a degree that will allow you to pay those loans back in a few years. People who plan accordingly benefit in a HUGE way from the availability/accessibility of student loans, the barrier to entry is that much lower.

As far as SS goes, I'd be happy to see it fail but I'm also happy to keep paying into it without a guarantee of return in order to ensure my parents generation doesn't find themselves destitute. There are so many ways to plan for your future, having the government come in and force you to participate in SS is far from ideal. Not sure how my fellow Millennials feel about that, though...

SheepSlapperon Free Speech Leftists Still Exist

It's a shame that the left has strayed so far from classical liberalism. The pendulum will eventually (hopefully?) swing back the other way.

SheepSlapperon Meet the man who deactivated Trump’s Twitter account

Because the truth is boring, and boring doesn't make much money :/