Hacker News Reader

brianmurphyon Instacart director says she was fired for Democratic congressional campaign

Not any director. Her job is Director of Government Affairs. It's a clear conflict of interest for her to be launching her own political campaign while employed as a corporate lobbyist. Her frivolous lawsuit will get tossed.

brianmurphyon SoundCloud has banned VPN access

These vpn believers don't understand how concentrating all of the traffic thru a single chokepoint (the vpn provider network), they're infinitely easier to network monitor.

brianmurphyon U.S. investors, Trump close in on TikTok deal with China

Why do you want to exist in an echo chamber? Suppressing ideas doesn't make them go away.

brianmurphyon Temporary suspension of acceptance of mail to the United States

We've heard ad nauseam that the rich need to pay their fair share.

This goes for importers as well. Pay your taxes.

The real substance of these complainers is that they can no longer dodge import fees thru de minimis exemptions. Tough luck. Pay your fair share.

brianmurphyon NSF director to resign amid grant terminations, job cuts, and controversy

Your reply to me is all emotion, no facts.

As for "economic damage", this is where you really diverge from reality.

The S&P 500 has risen back to pre-Liberation Day tariff announcement levels.

Gasoline prices are down.

Egg prices are down.

April jobs report is out, beating projections by 44,000 jobs.

The media's economic fear-mongering never materialized.

So yes, the US economy effects me -- all in a good way right now. President Trump's agenda is working. The people wishing otherwise will be the ones who need to cope.

brianmurphyon NSF director to resign amid grant terminations, job cuts, and controversy

None of those things have happened.

brianmurphyon NSF director to resign amid grant terminations, job cuts, and controversy

Trump was elected on deporting illegals, closing the Dept of Education, removing men from women's sports and to stop sending money overseas. The insular HN community doesn't understand this is what the majority of American voters want. Many of us are very happy with the direction things have been moving.

brianmurphyon NSF director to resign amid grant terminations, job cuts, and controversy

Perhaps take some vacation days to get that "partner" of yours citizenship?

brianmurphyon NSF director to resign amid grant terminations, job cuts, and controversy

It's funny you say science requires a lot of honesty and trust, then point at what happened in the past 5 years.

Very few people believe "safe and effective" was telling the truth when it neither stopped someone from getting sick or from passing the virus on to other people. Now the lack of trust is spilling over into other v's that have been effective in eradicating past ailments like polio and measles. The "scientists" have no one to blame but themselves.

brianmurphyon Ask HN: Have the US revoking of visas affected you?

As a US citizen, revoking visas from criminals and people who espouse hate has been a huge net positive. We don't need visitors bringing their third world blood feuds to our homeland.

brianmurphyon Ask HN: How are you using technology to fight fascism?

The primary technology we are lacking an implementation for is voter ID. After we ensure only eligible voters can cast a single vote, the next valuable technology is education.

brianmurphyon When the physicists need burner phones, that's when you know America's changed

Across the board budget cuts say nothing about supporting the scientific method. These university could easily fund their projects out of their massive multi-billion dollar endowments. We should ask why they aren't.

brianmurphyon When the physicists need burner phones, that's when you know America's changed

Not that old talking point. American left and right are judged on an American left/right scale.

brianmurphyon When the physicists need burner phones, that's when you know America's changed

https://owl.excelsior.edu/argument-and-critical-thinking/log...

"A slippery slope fallacy occurs when someone claims that a position or decision will lead to a series of unintended negative consequences. These negative consequences are often bad and/or increasingly outlandish. The person using the slippery slope fallacy takes these consequences as a certainty and does not analyze the logic of their own position. A slippery slope fallacy can be used as a deflection to avoid discussing the merits of a position, shifting the field of debate."

brianmurphyon Washington Post editor resigns after accusing CEO of killing column

The article says her editorial was written to criticize her employer. Was she hoping to get fired instead of politely being told no?

brianmurphyon Apple unveils new Mac Studio

I would expect the M4 being a newer generation of the chip to be faster than a M3, but apparently that's not what Apple did.

brianmurphyon Suckless.org: software that sucks less

You have to see what already exists in X11-land before judging that simple wasn't hard to do. (e.g. xterm)

brianmurphyon DOGE puts $1 spending limit on government employee credit cards

But what did those 15k people do? If their job was to audit family and small biz returns, I don't think anyone will miss them.

brianmurphyon Origin of 'Daemon' in Computing

I have always pronounced lib like the word liberal.

I was mind-blown the first time I heard someone pronounce etc as "et-see".

et-see rolls off the tongue so much better than ee-tee-see that it makes perfect sense now.

brianmurphyon Starship Flight 5: Launch and booster catch [video]

I think that is only part of it. Musk gave an interview where he talked about how the woke medical establishment trans'd one of his kids. They falsely told him to do the transition or his child's death was a near certainty. European countries are now restricting this "treatment" for children. The US has been slow to follow. There is a lot of money and political pressure from the left to keep the medical intervention industry alive.

brianmurphyon Twitter/X will let people you've blocked see your posts

Elon is not getting an artificial boost. The people reporting about Elon's posts being artificially boosted either don't know how X's features work or they are engagement-farming for clicks.

X has two user feeds controlled by tabs at the top of the screen. The "For You" feed is the algorithm recommending high engagement posts to you. This is mostly accounts you follow but it's also highly interacted with posts. Love him or hate him, Elon's posts get massive engagement so naturally it gets recommended a lot.

Even if you have never personally engaged Elon's account, if the algorithm sees the people you follow have engaged with a post, it will be put into your "For You" feed. Same is true of posts from any user. This is not something specific to Elon.

The other feed, the "Following" tab contains content from only the people you follow. The "Following" feed is also chronological which is super nice and a rarity in today's algorithm driven social media world.

So if you're seeing random posts, chances are you're reading the algorithm feed, not your Following feed.

brianmurphyon Twitter/X will let people you've blocked see your posts

I don't know what kind of content these other people are curating with their X accounts, but I never see bots.

I primarily follow entrepreneurial & fitness accounts.

Honestly X, youtube and HN satisfy just about everything I need for user generated content.

brianmurphyon A brief interview with Awk creator Dr. Brian Kernighan (2022)

The big difference was in C you had to implement it yourself. Choosing a hash function and managing memory with malloc() was a hang up for a lot of people. It was quite common to say hashes and the various tree data structures weren't worth the complication if you didn't absolutely need to have a hash table or tree.

In later languages like perl, the syntax for hashes was built into the language.

That was a huge step forward.

Perl was slowly adopted for other reasons (illegible write once syntax). Other popular scripting languages like PHP adopted hashes from perl. This greatly helped make associative arrays common knowledge among the majority of programmers.

brianmurphyon No one should use the AT&T syntax (2021)

I guessed it was about the (Hayes) AT Command Set for modems.

AT vs AT&T phone company and childhood memories.

(Clearly this was wrong after clicking into the article)

brianmurphyon Do we live in a society without a counterculture?

Promoting the dominant culture doesn't get you fired from your job. The dominant culture took him out.

brianmurphyon Do we live in a society without a counterculture?

The dominance of queer culture goes much farther than simply existing.

Criticize it in even the most mild way at most companies and expect to be fired from your job.

The dominance goes even further. Direct criticism isn't necessary. Try to promote straight culture and you'll also get dogpiled and fired. (Brandon Eich)

brianmurphyon An undersea art gallery that ensnares illegal trawlers

The same question remains. Enforced by whom?

It seems solvable with a consensus of the stakeholders.

brianmurphyon Twitter Blue for $8/Month

Your mistake is looking at what twitter has been in the past and not what it could be with a fast moving entrepreneur driving the ship.

Twitter has been too complacent in the market of communication apps. By all reports, including from Elon himself, big changes are on the way.

brianmurphyon Ask HN: Should I Leave My Startup Due to Lack of Interest?

There is no way I could stay in a job where I loathed waking up every day.

Remember fail quick, fail often? This is a fail quick situation. See it as an opportunity to find something new that you really enjoy.

brianmurphyon Ask HN: What's the best mail hoster for a startup?

Plus a few hours every week to chase down reports of emails not being delivered, spam, etc.

As someone with many servers and a previous career managing an email service for a university, I would never run my email through anything except G Suite or Office 365. The benefits of those services being "too big to block" is immeasurable.