Hacker News Reader

cmac2992on “1M Syrian customers, do you think they will ever forget Western Union?”

Interesting to see all the hate in the comments. I don't really know much about WU except for what I experienced when I volunteered at a refugee camp on lesvos. Western Union was a lifeline for many people. It was very common for people to get sent $ from friends and family for a ticket to the mainland or for some supplies. Asking for directions to the western union was one of the most common questions I received.

cmac2992on Please Make Google AMP Optional

I love AMP as a user. So many sites have brutal load time and jumpy pages, popups and sometimes crashes.

As a developer I'm not a fan. It's another thing to manage and maintain. And the last time I checked once you can't leave without some serious consequences.

As a marketer I like the increased CTR but dislike the higher bounce rate and limited features.

cmac2992on Ask HN: What podcasts are you listening to?

I really wish ezra and Sam Harris would do a podcast and resolve this "feud"

cmac2992on Ask HN: What podcasts are you listening to?

The weeds. It's a podcast about public policy and politics. Very technical which I like.

FiveThirtyEight politics for politics.

Voices of vr. Excellent podcast about VR news often with interviews the developers working on the cutting edge.

cmac2992on The Boring Company FAQ

>By placing vehicles on a stabilized electric sled, the diameter can be reduced to less than 14 feet.

Interesting. No chance of large commerical vehicles in tunnels at that size.

cmac2992on Uber board director and CTO under pressure in sexual harassment investigation

Did you read the article or Fowler's account?

>In Fowler’s account of her year at Uber, she says that she explicitly reported the incidents of sexual harassment directly to Pham when she ran out of clear remedies. Nothing came of her attempts, she wrote.

cmac2992on It’s now illegal in Russia to share an image of Putin as a gay clown

I believe thats a was not is

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/07/26...

cmac2992on Men and women can't be just friends

Am I crazy or is their surprisingly little quantitative data? Are we talking a 5% effect or 80%?

cmac2992on Study: Cannabis boosts risk of stroke and heart attack independently of tobacco

Luckily it's fairly easy to study the difference in chemical output between the different ingestion methods. Vaping vs Smoking is quite different.

>The new study used a gas chromatograph mass spectrometer (GCMS) to examine the gas components of the vapor. The analysis showed that the Volcano® vapor was remarkably clean, consisting 95% of THC with traces of cannabinol (CBN), another cannabinoid. The remaining 5% consisted of small amounts of three other components: one suspected cannabinoid relative, one suspected PAH, and caryophyllene, a fragrant oil in cannabis and other plants. In contrast over 111 different components appeared in the gas of the combusted smoke, including a half dozen known PAHs. Non-cannabinoids accounted for as much as 88% of the total gas content of the smoke.

cmac2992on Wikileaks is offering tech firms CIA files first

I'm not sure how we can square, "we are neutral", "we are optimizing for impact", "our goal is to create conflict within the government".

>WikiLeaks just publishes with minimal editing - any narrative from them is completely separated from the leaks

Wikileaks in king of clickbait and creating false impressions of what data they are and aren't releasing. Just look at their twitter account. There are even reports of withholding entire data sets when it doesn't fit their narrative.

I am on board for the premise of WikiLeaks is trying to do, but they have flatly failed in the execution.

cmac2992on Wikileaks is offering tech firms CIA files first

I have no problem with them optimizing for impact. But they refuse to admit that is what they are doing. It disingenuous at the very least.

It's not "mistake" if PII is revealed in every single release. It is incompetence or they are acting in bad faith. There are dozens of other organizations that have strong records on this. wikileaks is not one of them.

cmac2992on Wikileaks is offering tech firms CIA files first

Wikileaks has a terrible record on vetting releases and be "truly transparent". See the timing of the dnc and podesta emails...

There were social security #'s in those releases.

They try and play both sides of the fence: -we dont "editorialize", redact or make decisions on what is and isn't released -release specific info with sensational headlines timed for optimal impact

cmac2992on Pirate site with No Traffic attracts 49m bogus DMCA notices

This hits close to home. I worked on a music blog and we got thousands of bogus DMCA takedowns. You basically have zero recourse from the SEO punishment.

cmac2992on Heating houses with high performance servers

I've been heating my room by running stanford's folding at home. Silly but it actually works

cmac2992on Ask HN: What new development technology in the last 3 years is worth learning?

+1 on this. I had taken catia classes in college and have built a number of models in different programs for 3d printing. But building models for games is WAY more difficult. a AAA level gun can take weeks to build and model.

cmac2992on Google AMP Cache, AMP Lite, and the Need for Speed

I think they have been trying to push people in that direction. They penalize you for having slow load times and too small of touch zones among a variety of other ux factors. But the progress has been slow.

cmac2992on Our continuing commitment to your privacy with Windows 10

I'm with you. Its objectively a move in the right direction. is it far enough? maybe not. Seems shitty to chastise a company for moving toward better privacy and transparency while listening to customer feedback. Seems like "a damned if you do, damned if you don't" scenario.

cmac2992on Uber Doesn’t Want to Give NYC (or Anyone) More Data

"Taxis already share all the data the commission is requesting from Uber."

I think that's the key detail

cmac2992on Ask HN: Most Sites Don't Use a CMS Like Wordpress – What Non-CMS Do You Use?

Keystone.js

Its basically a node/express app with a nice backend. I really enjoy it, incredibly flexible. I've even used it without a front end as internal CRM.

cmac2992on Marketing automation is getting out-of-hand

I think you'd be surprised to hear that a lot of these emails aren't automated. Templatized definitely. automated, maybe.

Fortune 500 companies employee fleets of just out of college marketing majors to do just this sort of thing.

cmac2992on Reddit cracks down on abuse as CEO apologizes for trolling the trolls

The fiber example is one of the big reason regulating broadband as a utility was important. It prevents this exact scenario

cmac2992on Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/early-lead/wp/2016/09/12...

Even though they aren't claiming these claims are true, its at the very least, incredibly misleading. They spend most of the article talking about how Putin has poisoned people in the past, and talking up the Drs credentials. There should be a disclosure that the claims are unsubstantiated. Or it should never have been posted.

That said the Washington post did some of the best reporting this election season.

cmac2992on Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say

It becomes a finer line when you have the Washington Post reporting (more accurately reporting an "expert" claim) that hillary Clinton may have been poisoned on 9/11 by Putin.

cmac2992on Be Very Skeptical of Stolen Election Claims

"A reform of the Electoral College system would require a Constitutional amendment, and to get a Constitutional amendment passed, it’s necessary to have support from two-thirds of the House and the Senate, or two-thirds of state legislators. That’s an incredibly difficult task, and the Republican party currently holds a majority in both the House and the Senate and state legislators, making it quite unlikely to happen. After all, the party in power has little incentive to change the system that got them there in the first place."

Republicans will pretty much never go for it. They are required to get it passed

cmac2992on The forces that drove this election’s media failure are likely to get worse

And house, Senate, governers and state legislators

cmac2992on Is the online advertising bubble finally starting to pop?

Its very possible to do this on most ad platforms. Some people are just lazy or aren't good at their job.

cmac2992on Is the online advertising bubble finally starting to pop?

There is a ton of information that is objectively wrong.

"A customer who has already made a purchase may be bombarded with redundant repeat ads wherever he roams: what we might call the phenomenon of “repetitive irrelevance."

Its pretty easy to not do this on a lot of ad platforms. Facebook calls it "exclusion audiences".

cmac2992on Grade Inflation at American Colleges and Universities

Ah yes.... Purdue. Almost no grade inflation. When I was there, everyone saw this graph and it made them pissed because other schools had become 'easier' and Purdue had not. That was back before I realized no one gives a shit about GPA.

cmac2992on CyanogenMod Installer Release

Back when I used android, I would have loved this. Sense was total garbage, and cyanogenmod setup wasn't the most streamlined process.

cmac2992on Blogging vs. Building

Building your personal brand is very underrated!