Hacker News Reader

abaloneon Stripe valuation soars to $95B after latest fundraising

Low pricing is not a moat.

abaloneon Chomsky – The Machine, the Ghost and the Limits of Understanding (2012) [video]

That is Chavez supporting Chomsky, not Chomsky “unconditionally” supporting Chavez. You offer no support or citation for your claims.

abaloneon Chomsky – The Machine, the Ghost and the Limits of Understanding (2012) [video]

Sure, Kristeva, famously.[1]

[1] https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/was-the-philosopher-...

abaloneon Chomsky – The Machine, the Ghost and the Limits of Understanding (2012) [video]

Here is Chomsky describing what Libertarian Socialism is, how such a highly organized society would be constructed, and that it is “traditional anarchism” while noting that “anarchism” is a broad term.[1]

[1] https://youtu.be/b3m4aRQ9QvQ

abaloneon Chomsky – The Machine, the Ghost and the Limits of Understanding (2012) [video]

This is a completely reasonable and realistic premise. Within the Left community there are plenty of Marxist-Leninist academics and there was a significant overlap with postmodernists, perhaps owing to its roots in the Parisian intellectual scene. Chomsky is a Libertarian Socialist.

abaloneon Chomsky – The Machine, the Ghost and the Limits of Understanding (2012) [video]

Source? Chomsky has been quite critical of Chavez.[1] As with most things in the world there are pros and cons but I would be interested if you could cite an example of “unconditional support.”

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/jul/03/noam-chomsky-h...

abaloneon Tesla says “Full Self-Driving” software doesn't make cars autonomous

True about the product. Highly dubious about the social. While there are enthusiast communities for every kind of car, Teslas also get a lot of hate for various reasons. In my view it’s the biggest obstacle (that and the ho-hum design).

I will probably buy anyway due to no other EV being even close functionally, but it’s a vulnerable position. Once platform-halo-bearing competitors like Apple enter the market and close the product gap, it’s a whole different ballgame.

abaloneon Beyond Meat signs global supply deals with McDonald’s, KFC and Pizza Hut

This is so misinformed. Much cattle production is in South America yet you cite only US figures which is less than 10% of headcount.[1] Even the US bison figures you cite predate the massive rise in industrial CO2 emissions, greatly reducing our budget. And you claim “wild life” is declining without sources — commercial cattle still number > 1B worldwide.

> One item worth noting is that the decline in U.S. inventory since 2008 – 3.1 million beef cows – has been met with an opposite expansion in Brazil of almost 4 million beef cows during the same period.

[1] https://www.progressivecattle.com/topics/management/what-us-...

abaloneon Github1s – One second to read GitHub code with VS Code

This is cool and I hope they don’t run into copyright issues with the domain, which they probably will. Trademark lawyers basically have to go after violations otherwise they risk losing control of the mark. Maybe GitHub could be nice and license it to the project for free.

abaloneon Apple Car expected to shake up auto industry in Asia and world

It’s a bad article. The crux of it is Apple’s a hypocrite because they haven’t banned Facebook or worked hard enough on Maps. Give me a break. They just rolled out privacy nutrition labels, restrict geolocation, do more than any other platform. They’ve been investing heavily in maps for years.

Your E2E argument is poorly supported as well — “marketing value” doesn’t explain why it’s for messaging and keys but not photos and files. They have one of the strongest E2E encrypted messaging systems, it even works securely in China. There are technical reasons why E2E is not a good choice for all consumer data namely the impossibility of data recovery.

abaloneon Apple Car expected to shake up auto industry in Asia and world

Apple is one of the most privacy-forward large tech companies and regularly tries to engineer systems in a way that denies them and central governments control over your data. For example they designed iCloud Keychain to work securely on adversarial clouds controlled by hostile governments.

They do very tightly control the features available on their products, so your question really hinges on how they will perceive automobile travel destinations: like features or like personal data?

(Also, HN etiquette tip: don’t complain about downvoting.)

abaloneon Response to “WireGuard: great protocol, but skip the Mac app”

Maybe dumb question but why are they distributing through the Mac App Store? Seems like a lot of these problems are due to the review process. It is possible to just do direct downloads on the Mac.

abaloneon Average Rent in San Francisco Has Dropped $1k This Year

Your unsupported claim (a YIMBY propaganda line) is false. The most progressive supervisor has approved over 5K units in the past year alone.[1]

[1] https://twitter.com/uhshanti/status/1311469878604263424?s=21

abaloneon Average Rent in San Francisco Has Dropped $1k This Year

Literally is a tax specifically constructed to target sellers (not buyers) of >$10M properties, otherwise known as rich people. With an exemption for sales to affordable housing nonprofits. This issue, passed by a wide margin, demonstrated that SF YIMBY is little more than a real estate lobby front at this point.

abaloneon Anonymously call out the bad behavior of “ghosting” by recruiters

I’m not following your logic here. How does driving a bidding war constitute “mind games”? How does your own internal sense of value affect the offers you get? This is just Negotiation 101.

abaloneon Average Rent in San Francisco Has Dropped $1k This Year

> This is a mischaracterization of the YIMBY position. Most YIMBYs are not opposed to raising taxes so that the city can pay for the construction of affordable housing units.

This is false. YIMBYs opposed the recent prop I to tax >$10M real estate sales to fund “emergency rent relief and permanently affordable housing.”[1]

[1] https://ballotpedia.org/San_Francisco,_California,_Propositi...

abaloneon Anonymously call out the bad behavior of “ghosting” by recruiters

Red flag for me is “next week”. That’s a really long space in between contacts. Ideally the whole interview marathon at multiple companies should be packed into a couple weeks so you can drive a bidding war so to speak.

If they know you are interviewing elsewhere then it should be closer to 2-3 days max contact gap. Tip: If you don’t hear back from A, maybe you’ll have an on-site scheduled with B, and then you can ping A with that info “for scheduling purposes” and trust me you will suddenly hear back if they are interested. Again, urgency is your friend here.

abaloneon Anonymously call out the bad behavior of “ghosting” by recruiters

Can somebody explain this problem for the uninitiated? Is this just about not hearing back about the next step in the interview process or why you didn’t get an offer?

I mean I think it’s pretty clear why recruiters would keep their options open up until the last second and limit information sharing.

The way to respond to that is to create urgency by having multiple parallel interviews in the pipeline and letting them know your deadlines. This works like magic if you are even a moderately strong candidate. That will have about a infinitely greater effect than sending whiny anonymous emails.

abaloneon Average Rent in San Francisco Has Dropped $1k This Year

This is just wildly incorrect. Landlords are very strongly opposed to left wing groups in SF, based on political funding. Landlords are the number one target of progressive legislation. The most left wing supervisor is literally a tenants rights attorney who ran on protecting rent control and wrote the law banning evictions.

abaloneon Average Rent in San Francisco Has Dropped $1k This Year

You’re mischaracterizing the left-wing / long term renter position here. This is a very common tactic among local SF “YIMBYs” for some reason.

Progressives are not objecting solely on the basis of “character of the city” and in fact regularly poll in favor of development. What they fight for is affordable housing development.

Underlying this problem is a massive income disparity between techies and working class folks. Essentially the YIMBY position is if you build market rate housing for techies it will trickle down to the working class because “supply and demand didn’tyoutakeeconomics???” But Econ 101 has within it the concept of inelasticity that explains why increasing supply does not always move the price much under certain conditions. Like those of say a massive boom economy where tons of high income earners and speculators from around the world are waiting to snatch up new inventory. SF has had many experiences with such boom/bust cycles.

It’s a real estate developer’s dream and it helps us rich-ish techies (hence heavy YIMBY presence on HN) but it doesn’t necessarily translate into lowering rents for the working class. Thus, progressive supervisors are focused on public investment in affordable housing and taxing the rich to fund it, not just serving the needs of the wealthy.

YIMBYs absolutely hate this characterization because they like to claim they are on the side of the poor. But they are 100% aligned with and politically funded by the real estate industry, and that’s why they prefer to mischaracterize progressives who are actually prioritizing the needs of the most vulnerable.

abaloneon Air-FI: Generating Covert Wi-Fi Signals from Air-Gapped Computers

Or perhaps encase the computer in a faraday cage.

abaloneon Air-FI: Generating Covert Wi-Fi Signals from Air-Gapped Computers

The range is only a few meters. The bigger problem is people bringing compromised devices within range. Limestone won’t stop that.

abaloneon Google is getting left behind due to horrible UI/UX

This is not a high quality article. It’s more fodder for people to share their views in the comments but the article itself is not really HN caliber. Mostly just saying things suck without much specifics.

abaloneon A spellchecker used to be a major feat of software engineering (2008)

> A program to load /usr/share/dict/words into a hash table is 3-5 lines

Nooo.. For gods sake at least use a trie. This kind of thing makes me want to like “annoying” algorithm interview questions.

abaloneon Yelp Is Replacing Restaurants’ Phone Numbers So Grubhub Can Take a Cut (2019)

Oh this is not the first time Yelp has done this. Back in the day they tried charging businesses a fee to list a number and iirc it was per call. So they listed a proxy number so they could track and bill.

The crazy thing is to prevent search engines from indexing it (and getting sued for false billing) they rendered the number in an image-that-looks-like-text instead of text. I wonder if they are doing anything to prevent indexing of these false numbers or if they just don’t care now.

abaloneon Keeping Netflix Reliable Using Prioritized Load Shedding

For me this link just opens the Medium app and fails to load the article. I had to force it to open in a browser.

Seems like a pretty bad Medium bug.

abaloneon Stripe Climate

You misunderstand. The protest was over environmentally-motivated taxes on fuel which didn’t take into account the impacts on the working class. It was the tax strategy that failed. This was a direct lesson for the crafting of the GND. We must also uplift and include the working class in the economic transformation we must undergo.

More detail (linked from the Wikipedia article): https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/nov/16/gilet-jaunes-y...

abaloneon Stripe Climate

That’s a failed theory. This is what happens when you try to address carbon output without looking at healthcare, finance, labor laws and the impacts on the working class:

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

It failed. We have to approach this as a complex sociopolitical problem and it will likely require some broader changes to our 200 plus year old economic system.

(And did you say you think GND calls for more power to oligarchs? That’s a weird take.)

abaloneon Stripe Climate

> Government investment is essentially a form of planned economy. There's lots of examples of that not working so well.

You mean like this?

https://unherd.com/2018/06/government-agency-made-silicon-va...

abaloneon Stripe Climate

Climate change is a “controversial issue” so that line of reasoning is DOA.