Hacker News Reader

fasteron Oregon’s prohibition on self-service dispensing of gasoline

Is it industry lobbying, or is it a jobs program for unskilled workers? How many people are employed pumping gas? What would it do to statewide employment stats if 80% of those people were no longer needed in those jobs?

The argument used to be highway safety; if your tire pressures are correct and your windshield is clean, you're safer on the road. Of course "not self service' is not equal to 'full service' so those things don't happen very often.

fasteron The Great $50M African IP Address Heist

From Wikipedia: "The standard size of a subnet in IPv6 is 2^64 addresses, more than 4 billion times the size of the entire IPv4 address space."

What he's saying is that one /64 address allocation is as useful to a spammer as a single IPv4 address.

fasteron To Wash It All Away (2014) [pdf]

Don't miss his tenure announcement: https://mickens.seas.harvard.edu/tenure-announcement

fasteron Frab – free and open conference management system

Or OpenConferenceWare: http://openconferenceware.org/

fasteron I Accidentally Uncovered a Nationwide Scam on Airbnb

I use a Chrome extension to show the true cost per night on Airbnb. I find the fees variable enough that I want to see the real price as part of my analysis of listings.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/airbnb-price-per-n...

There might be others, but this one has worked well for me. No affiliation, just a happy user.

fasteron Show HN: RoboTrump – I made a Trump text generator that is fully convincing

I suspect that because of the nature of his speech (repetitive, shallow, hyperbolic) he is easier to simulate than someone who communicates in other ways. I would love to see the same system used to simulate some of the people you mentioned (and others).

When it's trivial to build fake people with distinctive styles, though, bots will probably be even more effective. I think that may be a bigger risk than deepfakes.

fasteron Meetup.com alternatives

Calagator is open source. You can run your own if you want.

https://github.com/calagator/calagator

fasteron Hong Kong protest safety app banned from iOS store

Who should decide?

fasteron U.S. to leave global postal union next month barring last-minute action

Do you know what the rates are, relative to something like bulk mail? I can't think of anything else that has low delivery priority like these packages seem to have. Sometimes even after arriving in the US, the packages take 2-3 more weeks to be delivered though it's usually more like a week. I would say that indicates a lower priority than a comparable package that is sent within the US.

I guess I'm saying that China Post packages are not going from LA to NYC in X days, more like 2X or 3X and sometimes up to 5X. The rates are probably still too low, but I haven't found any authoritative numbers.

fasteron U.S. to leave global postal union next month barring last-minute action

It might be cheaper to ship from China to the US than to ship from Chicago to NY, but it is also far slower. I think it's fair to charge less for "as you have space" shipping. http://track-chinapost.com/?p=774

I've had a couple hundred small packages (components for prototypes, tools, etc.) shipped via China Post in the last few years, and only 2 of them arrived in less than 3 weeks. Several didn't arrive at all. I'm not willing to pay as much for that kind of service as I am to send a package from e.g. Chicago to NY with fast and reliable delivery.

The rates are probably unfairly low, but you can't look only at the price. You have to look at price, delivery speed, and reliability at a minimum.

fasteron Building a Reflow Oven

I built one of these about a year ago. I spent about 5 hours on it, over a little more than 2 days (some things need to dry or set up before going to the next step).

To reflow a small board (or 3) on an extreme budget, use a frying pan and an infrared thermometer. Not super accurate, but if your board is on a piece of foil you can pull it out before it overheats so your components don't cook.

I handled the ceramic fiber part by working in a room with a powerful vent fan that exits far from people, taping my cuffs to my gloves, and staying upwind of the insulation. I cleaned the room as soon as I was done. It only took a few minutes and the top cover goes on as soon as you get the insulation in place.

You can buy pre-built Controleo3 ovens, but you can probably get a used industrial oven for about the same price as the prebuilt kit. I guess it depends on what you consider a reasonable price, and whether you know people who like building things from a box of parts.

fasteron How not to get a $30k bill from Firebase

Assuming your revenue and your AWS bill are strongly correlated, I agree. However, when a free service or a bug can increase costs by orders of magnitude without a corresponding increase in revenue your choices are to eat it (not sustainable, for most of us), throttle, or stop. Throttling is hard, so stopping is often the best choice.

fasteron I froze the salaries of my executive team to benefit other workers

There are several metrics for unemployment. One of them is around 4%.

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm

fasteron How to Make Other Developers Hate to Work with You

It has taken me a few years and I still fail sometimes, but I have learned to let people finish and then ask questions instead of telling them they're wrong, even when it's totally obvious to me. "What if that fails in this way?" instead of "that will fail in this way!". It makes the discussion collaborative instead of assuming that it's my job to point out everyone's failures. The punch line in one of my favorite comic stips is "It's not healthy to keep your problems bottled up inside me." It took me a long time to see how that applied to my own interactions.

fasteron We Lost Our Ability to Mend

One of the most valuable things my dad taught me was that it's hard to break something so badly that it can't be repaired. That's not true of everything any more (I have a decent electronics bench, but I won't even try any but the most basic cell phone repairs), but for your list (Furnace, A/C, House appliances, Home repairs, Furnitures, Cars, computers, even clothes & shoes), I'd rather repair than replace.

It is harder to teach kids this attitude now. So many things that interest them are seam-welded or potted or otherwise inaccessible. It's still possible though. My daughter and I disassembled old DVD drives and made laser pointers from the diodes that still worked. She was excited to take things apart after school.

fasteron FCC threatens carriers with 'regulatory intervention' over robocalls

It would depend on what constitutes a valid caller ID.

At least some of the robodialer operators programatically check out a block of numbers from a VoIP vendor, make a bunch of calls, then release the numbers. If all they have to do is correctly report the number they're calling from, that's pretty useless. The called party has practically no recourse because the number that called them never accepted inbound calls, and has been disconnected by the time you call it back anyway.

How could 'valid caller ID' be defined so that robocallers can be identified?

fasteron Letter in Response to Jan. 17 Article in The New York Times

it's also trivial to distinguish news articles from opinions and editorials

It turns out that's not true for most people any more.

https://www.bu.edu/research/articles/native-advertising-in-f...

fasteron Ask HN: How do you organise your hard drive?

I use Classifier to manage file in my Ubuntu Downloads directory; it moves files into subdirectories by extension. I run it daily from cron, and my backup script runs it before backing up.

https://github.com/bhrigu123/classifier

fasteron How the CIA Trains Spies to Hide in Plain Sight

Amazon has 'Close Protection' for $1229 and 'Surveillance Tradecraft' for $54. My library has neither book, which is not terribly surprising. Sadly, that means I'm unlikely to get a chance to read either one.

fasteron We Should Teach Media Literacy in Elementary School

My late uncle flew airships during WW2, and was always looking for new things to learn (look up elderhostel; he averaged 1 per year for his last 30 years). He remembered peoples' names, spent time getting to know people who he had no reason to be nice to, and was generally considerate and generous. He also regularly emailed the most blatant propaganda to family and friends. I replied to one and said that I appreciated that he was trying to educate people so they could be better-informed citizens, but that the stuff he was sending was definitely not having that effect. I told him about Snopes and other ways to check on things before passing them on.

He replied, saying "let me know if you want me to take you off my list". And then he put "fact-checked at snopes" on every email. Yes, all the same crap.

Not all elderly people are lacking the skills to detect BS. Some pass it along with full knowledge that it's garbage. And they're not all sociopaths.

fasteron Scaling Engineering Teams via Writing Things Down and Sharing – Aka RFCs

I could probably find them, but we used Framemaker and I don't know whether I have anything that can open them now.

fasteron Scaling Engineering Teams via Writing Things Down and Sharing – Aka RFCs

The most successful company I ever worked for (late 90's, the founder was a billionaire for a few months after the IPO, 99.9% of HN readers use an evolution of what we built every day) had a policy of rejecting any proposal for a tech feature or significant improvement unless it was properly documented.

We had a collection of templates for the types of documents we used. I could create a feature proposal in an hour or two, and the template ensured that all first-round questions were answered out of the box, saving many hours of staff time.

The tech founders set this up and forced everyone else to use it and once we saw the value, peer pressure kept it going. It worked incredibly well.

We weren't writing RFCs, but we had a doc process that respected (and saved) everyone's time and attention. That helped us move fast together. It really worked.

fasteron Introducing Cloudflare Registrar

Yay for porkbun.com! My office is near theirs; nice people, great price. The admin site is pretty bare-bones, but I've never had a problem with it.

fasteron I worked in an Amazon warehouse. Bernie Sanders is right to target them

The idea of employees receiving food stamps seems like a clear case of manipulating the system. But I think there is more nuance than the 20%/$14B numbers describe.

Imagine a single mom who wants to be home when her kids get home from school. She's working part time, and not making enough to feed her family. Who is responsible for her shortfall?

In a community where Walmart is a big employer, many people may work part time and one consequence of that is that more people have jobs. Walmart benefits from that but so do those employees, even when they don't make enough to eat well.

Sure, the system can obviously be manipulated. Yes, people (and company leaders) make bad choices. Who decides who pays?

fasteron The truth about auto dealer invoice prices (2017)

My sister bought a new car in 2014. She used one of the services that shops your requirements to dealers within your area. The night before her scheduled test drive with the dealer who had the best price and didn't seem sleazy, a friend of hers told her to check with a fleet broker. Within a few hours, the fleet broker sent her a price that was about $100 less than the dealer's.

I went to the dealership with her, we both drove the car and made sure it would fit in her driveway (steep with sharp angles, a recipe for ripping off front trim). On the way back to the dealership I asked how long the paperwork would take. The salesman (actually the sales manager) said it takes a couple hours because of 'state requirements'.

She asked him to match the fleet broker's price, he said it had to be a scam and refused so we drove away. On the way to lunch, she called the fleet broker and had her insurance agent send him proof of insurance (she already had financing arranged). As we sat down to eat, the fleet broker called back and asked when she wanted the car delivered. She got it delivered 2 days later and spent less than 5 minutes doing the paperwork.

I have always fantasized that the next time I buy a new car, I'll figure out a reasonable price and take a cashier's check for that amount to the dealer. I imagine telling them that I want to be on my way out the door with the keys in my hand in 15 minutes or I will leave. But really, why waste time on that when I can just call a fleet broker?

fasteron Ask HN: Have you lived abroad for an extended period of time? Was it valuable?

Moved from the west coast of the US to France for a year. I would unreservedly recommend living in another country for an extended period of time, preferably before you're 30 or 35. I was in my 50s when I did it, and it was a little too late. My ability to acquire language skills was much better when I was younger.

I think the most valuable lesson I brought back with me was that I sometimes speak in vague sound bites. I didn't notice before living in France because everyone around me seems to do the same thing. I'm not going to call it 'an American cultural trait' but it might be. Noticing that has inspired me to focus on clarity in my thoughts and communication.

Other useful lessons: people are pretty much the same all over; ease of travel between EU countries is so much better than when I backpacked around Europe in the 1990's; a lot of things we take for granted in the US are full of incomprehensible friction in many other countries (e.g. opening a bank account). And vice versa, to a smaller degree.

fasteron Amazon warehouse workers 'peed in bottles' fearing punishment for taking breaks

I'm not ignoring your point, but I use a Chrome extension to sort by number of reviews.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sortem-for-amazon/...

fasteron Ask HN: How did you become fluent in English?

When I started learning French, a native speaker told me to exaggerate the sounds. It turns out that I was softening the sounds that are uniquely French because I lacked confidence in my spoken French.

I imagine that the same thing would work for learning to speak English with less of an accent.

That obviously doesn't help you learn the language, but I found that it helped me to speak better (or at least more confidently), so I spoke more. More practice is definitely helpful.

fasteron Supreme Court Takes Up Internet Sales Tax Conundrum

I'd love to have some support for a real number. I found a source [1] for the cost to retailers to collect a tax (about 4.23% of tax collected in WA) but while most states make it pretty easy to see how much sales tax was collected they don't make it easy to see what it cost to collect that tax, separate from the other taxes they collect (income tax, corporate tax).

If you have any insight into this, or suggestions that are less painful than "read the state budget detail", I'd love to have a cost number that is based on facts.

[1] https://dor.wa.gov/content/retailers-cost-collecting-and-rem...

fasteron Supreme Court Takes Up Internet Sales Tax Conundrum

My understanding is that a state sales tax can't be less than about 3.5% because that is the cost of operating the sales tax collection bureaucracy. The article's suggestion that the federal gov collect a uniform tax and redistribute it makes me wonder what it would cost them to run the program.

And what about the 5 states that currently have no sales tax? A federal sales tax would probably have to be close to 10% to be useful, and now everyone in those 5 states has that much less buying power.

I don't think the solution proposed in the article is a good idea. It may be the least bad idea though.