Hacker News Reader

gramstrongon A California mall operator is sharing license plate tracking data with ICE

It's government surveillance. The mall can collect and record whatever data they want on their property, who cares. We can compel our government to not accept and blindly process this data en masse. It's the same as taking bulk data from Facebook, or Google, and looking for the .0001% that points to a criminal. Many, myself included, believe that this is wrong.

gramstrongon How to Live in a Dystopian Fiction

This quote from Atticus Finch has made the rounds recently, so I'm feeling very trite in reposting it, but:

I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do.

Also, avoiding social media helps. If you want to hear someone's opinion (whether you agree or disagree), talk to them in person. Play WoW as a release, but don't give up on your convictions, whatever they may be.

gramstrongon Show HN: Mimicking the Bloomberg menu widget without JavaScript

Judging by some of these popular comments, I never want to show HN anything that I build in my free time, ever.

gramstrongon How to get rich without getting lucky

This makes me feel really sad. While my grandparents were still alive, I put off visiting them for literal years. They lived overseas and I combated for too long trying to justify the cost of travel for the length of time that I could afford to take off work and see them...unfortunately they both passed away very quickly. I've since realized that if I had a chance to spend just a few days with them again, I wouldn't even think twice about spending the money to do it. A hard lesson to learn.

gramstrongon Mussels test positive for opioids in Seattle's Puget Sound

When humans ingest opioids like oxycodone, they ultimately end up excreting traces of the drugs into the toilet. Those chemicals then end up in wastewater. And while many contaminants are filtered out of wastewater before it's released into the oceans, wastewater management systems can't entirely filter out drugs. Thus, opioids, antidepressants, the common chemotherapy drug Melphalan -- the mussels tested positive for all of them.

Source: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mussels-test-positive-for-opioi...

gramstrongon Apple rejects Valve’s Steam Link game streaming app over ‘business conflicts’

Android has had split-screen for a while (and anecdotally, it works with google apps)...just sayin'

gramstrongon Show HN: HyperApp – 1k JavaScript framework for building web applications

Just curious what intrigues you about this framework in ways that React does not?

gramstrongon Using the Web for a Day with JavaScript Turned Off

Maybe it's overkill, but hardly anymore than the V8 engine is for most websites. Compilation to WebAssembly will be at zero or little cost to the developer, so it shouldn't matter either way.

gramstrongon Say yes to the progressive web

I will say that our marketing and sales teams probably did a poor job of communicating the capabilities of the app to our customers. I'm not even sure if most of them knew how it worked.

I don't think our customers found the PWA features "organically", either. If they saw the install prompt, they most likely didn't understand it, ignored it, or both. I tried showing it to some at a conference, but like I said, they were uninterested in those features in comparison to the app itself.

gramstrongon Say yes to the progressive web

I'll pipe in with my experience. I worked for a company that built applications for a mostly non-technical customer group. We built a very small PWA for them to perform some daily record entry, which often occurred out in the field or in rural areas where connection is spotty. We thought it was a great use-case.

They couldn't have cared less about the offline use or having the option to install it. They just liked the app.

I think service workers and PWAs in general definitely serve a purpose in enhancing web applications in ways that the user might not explicitly realize, though.

gramstrongon Pocket Casts acquired by NPR

You can't donate to NPR (at least, not easily)...

You can argue that donations to local NPR stations helps free up revenue for NPR the organization, but donations don't directly translate in to anything that NPR does.

gramstrongon Hello wasm-pack

This is great. Wasm really seems to be picking up steam. Any examples of a Rust crate that has already been published to the npm registry?

gramstrongon You Can’t Do Data Science in a GUI

Phooey. This comes off as unnecessary gate-keeping. How does anyone do science, ever? They use tools for measurement, tools for analysis, tools for record keeping...all of these functions can be captured within a GUI. Doing science doesn't ever require you to be doing something "new" or innovative... in fact, most of the time you are applying age-old techniques. The only thing new is the problem, and that's not dependent on what types of tools you are using to solve it.

gramstrongon Time for developers to address the chaos of Node.js and NPM

> inherently secure

Who told you that? I don't think "inherently secure" is a thing in the tech industry.

gramstrongon We need a nationalised alternative to Facebook

Are we really at the point of "needing" Facebook?

edit: BBC taking the "Social" part of "Social Networking" too literally.

gramstrongon Washington state has passed the country’s toughest net neutrality legislation

Bellingham had a local provider (PogoZone) pop up and they seem to be becoming more and more competitive with Comcast around here. Unfortunately, they service from a cell tower from which my house is obscured by a large hill. I have heard great things about them, though.

Comcast recently upped my bill after 12 months (which they said they wouldn't do). I wanted to downgrade to just internet (currently internet/basic cable), and they allegedly can only offer me 1 package for $110/mo and 400Mbps. I don't need that. So of course I will probably get roped in to paying for another internet/cable package, or internet/cable/phone, just to save a bit of value.

gramstrongon Earth has lost half of its wildlife in the past 40 years (2014)

Not by tracking, really, but I'd assume by population sampling. Rough counting of a species in an area or on a migration path, and then comparing it to historical data.

gramstrongon GDB 8.1 Released

I might have used it to debug Ada, which is like Pascal, back when I was in school.

gramstrongon U.S. Regulators to Subpoena Crypto Exchange Bitfinex, Tether

We're talking crypto investors here. The ones that preach diversification, and then sell every single one of their alt coins when the bitcoin bubble is deflating.

gramstrongon Apple plans new U.S. campus, to pay $38B in foreign cash taxes

A short term domestic investment for a long-term tax benefit. The headlines made immediately after the new legislation is passed are what will stick with people the most.

I'm not saying this is definitely the case, and I would love to be proven wrong. I just don't see how a tax cut would have corporations scrambling to return jobs to the U.S., instead of having both a tax cut AND cheap foreign labor.

gramstrongon Website Glitch Let Me Overstock My Coinbase

I accidentally left a (mostly) empty application service running on Azure for about 7 months on their Pay-As-You-Go plan. I racked up over $500 in charges that I didn't know about, and I felt robbed. In reality, I'm just kinda dumb.

gramstrongon College is so stupid expensive that universities are setting up food pantries

Hmm, if the parents were paying tuition, rent and other expenses, how could they have possibly qualified for food stamps as dependents?

gramstrongon Will Cash Disappear?

This is hardly my experience at all. Maybe in the first ~6 months after they rolled out the chips nationwide, but not anymore.

gramstrongon How we do Vue at GitLab: one year later

Once web components become standardized.

So...2030.

gramstrongon Julian Assange confirms Cambridge Analytica sought WikiLeaks' help

Yet when the entire primary source is published the only bias is between your own ears.

This was true, up until the point Julian Assange started providing political commentary every day on Twitter. There are also other ways of being biased..

gramstrongon Angular 5.0.0

This isn't v5 of "Angular" though, this is more v4 of Angular 2. Angular 2 became just "Angular" a while back, and Angular 1 became "AngularJS", I suppose to distinguish them as two separate products. There really isn't much going on between major releases as their confusing dichotomy would have you believe.

gramstrongon Software Engineering is different from Programming

That's a poor analogy for agile. A better one would be knowing that you need to build a bridge, pave a road, and demo a building.

You determine that for this sprint, you need to build that bridge, because it's blocking off commuters and hurting commerce. You KNOW how to engineer a bridge, and you've just decided to dedicate this next iteration to doing that.

Next sprint, let's say you still haven't finished the bridge...but the building that needs to be demo'd has deteriorated to the point that it is an immediate threat to public safety. So you decide to pause the bridge building and focus on the demolition. But you KNOW how to engineer a demolition.

Understanding business requirements is different from engineering, anyhow. But don't conflate re-prioritizing with not knowing business requirements. Agile doesn't describe how you should do something, it just determines when you should do it.

gramstrongon More Americans Support Aid When Told Puerto Ricans Are U.S. Citizens

Plenty of U.S. citizens have their own baseball team. Mine is the Seattle Mariners (and they STINK).

gramstrongon Betting on the Web – Why I Build PWAs

Apple and Microsoft are actually dragging their feet to embrace PWA's until they can be regulated by their app stores and monetized. It's actually really annoying if you're interested in developing PWAs, because one of the nicest features is that it's a pseudo-native app that is cross compatible and doesn't have to be registered in any app stores.

gramstrongon Stencil – A reusable web component generator

A custom element is just an HTML element, so it is a part of the HTML standard. If you log the object you can see it has all of the same properties as an HTML element, plus whatever you've extended it with. So all emitting events and event callbacks will behave the same as a standard element (except for any custom event listeners and emitters that you add).