Hacker News Reader

lunchableson Zen 2 Missives – AMD now delivering efficiencies that are double that of Intel

I always felt Apple was good at this, in the Steve Jobs era, anyway. Everyone said the iPhone would kill the iPod, but that didn't matter in reality because the iPhone opportunity was so much larger.

lunchableson ‘They Get Fired All the Time. And They Have No Idea Why’

>What's worse, one of the biggest overarching rules is "it is better to preserve social harmony and/or not risk embarrassment than to engage in honest discussion". Which means compared to Westerners, Japanese people rarely talk about their true feelings.

Which is where the Japanese concept of honne and tatemae come from:

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

lunchableson Manufacturers want to quit China for Vietnam, but find it impossible

>US police are the 6th leading cause of African American deaths.

No it's not.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/233310/distribution-of-t...

Only 215 black people were killed by police last year.

>https://www.theroot.com/here-s-how-many-people-police-killed...

lunchableson Off-Facebook Activity

I think you overestimate how engaged and educated the average american is on what facebook does, and I say this as an american. I don't think most people made a conscious evaluation of the pros and cons of Facebook and the trade off between privacy and value. The vast majority don't know or care. I think the large number of people you see leaving Facebook are people who are more informed.

lunchableson Off-Facebook Activity

Nearly 50% of the country voted for Donald Trump, too. I don't know what you think that suggests.

lunchableson Mozilla takes action to protect users in Kazakhstan

There is FTTH in more places than you might realize:

https://broadbandnow.com/Fiber

I live in Nashville and we have FTTH from both AT&T and Google as well as gigabit service from Comcast. I think the problem is the US is really, really big and we widely deployed cable which has been "good enough" (DOCSIS 3.x at 300, 500Mb/s or more) that there historically hasn't been much incentive for people to deploy really expensive fiber networks.

But it is certainly improving all the time. I think services like Starlink and fixed 5G are really driving carriers to start deploying more fiber to compete.

lunchableson Mozilla takes action to protect users in Kazakhstan

I use my VPS for several other things and because it already runs ssh, this was easier for me, so I've never looked into openvpn. I keep telling myself once wireguard is merged into the kernel I will really invest some time into getting up to speed on it.

lunchableson Singapore Says Musk's Electric Cars Are About 'Lifestyle,' Not Climate

Nope, it was just due to congestion. You have to pay tens of thousands of dollars to get a certificate that allows you to buy a car in Singapore.

lunchableson Burnout – All-in-one workspace for startups

This is absolutely satire and the comments here and wonderful.

lunchableson Mozilla takes action to protect users in Kazakhstan

I don't know if this is helpful, but I'll mention it because it works well for me.

I use a Digital Ocean droplet and local forwarding.

$ ssh -q -D [port] [droplet-hostname]

Then setup my browser to use a proxy at localhost on [port]. Works great. You can get a "droplet", in Digital Ocean Parlance (i.e., "VPS") for as little as $5/mo, which includes 1TB/mo of data transfer. I assume other options like Linode, Vultr, etc would work as well.

lunchableson Show HN: Procrastinating? Take a 5min break without leaving your computer

If you are a procrastinator, I can't recommend The Now Habit enough. It's totally changed my life.

lunchableson Show HN: We track Reddit, Google trends, Twitter, etc. to find trending topics

Sorry I thought it was obvious. I don't want to receive any more emails. I just want to go to a website to view information.

lunchableson AMD EPYC processors come to Google, and to Google Cloud

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/296307-epic-win-amds-6...

>Intel can cut its prices, to be sure. Beyond that, it has limited maneuverability. Ice Lake servers will not arrive for another year. Pricing on these cores is simply amazing, with a top-end Epyc 7742 selling for just $6950, or roughly $108 per core. An Intel Xeon Platinum 8280 has a list price of over $10,000 for a 28-core chip, just to put that in perspective. If you want a 32-core part, the Epyc 7502 packs 32 cores, 64 threads, higher IPC, and an additional 300MHz of frequency (2.5GHz base, versus 2.2GHz) for $2600 as opposed to the old price of $4200 for the 7601. AMD doesn’t segment its products the way Intel does, which means you get the full benefits of buying an Epyc part in terms of PCIe lanes and additional features. AMD also supports up to 4TB of RAM per socket. Intel tops out at 2TB per socket, and slaps a price premium on that level of RAM support.

lunchableson Alphabet overtakes Apple to become most cash-rich company

You are certainly welcome to attack someone if you want, but that doesn't change the fact that your post doesn't speak to the argument at all. Thiel can both have an agenda AND be correct, they aren't mutually exclusive.

lunchableson Show HN: We track Reddit, Google trends, Twitter, etc. to find trending topics

>and we send out curated trend reports via email.

I'm out.

lunchableson ‘Just four dudes’: Inside EasyList, a community-run ad-blocking list

>but I wonder if someday we'll look back on the era where web content was paid for by the 90 percent of people who don't block ads so the 10 percent could block them effortlessly as a sort of golden age.

Yes! I think what has staved it off is the lack of adblocking on mobile devices. I use uBlock on every computer I have, but on my iPhone? Not so much. I think as more traffic moved to mobile it has offset ad blocking to some degree. I can't imagine that 25% of people are blocking ads on mobile?

lunchableson Alphabet overtakes Apple to become most cash-rich company

I think most people would agree he has an agenda, but your post is just an ad hominem attack against Thiel and doesn't address the original poster's question at all.

lunchableson Apple Reports Declining Profits and Slowing Growth Again

You said this:

>AAPL seems to have hit its peak in the device market, and can only grow revenues at this point by effectively raising prices on existing customers (that’s what the services category amounts to). This strategy can only take them so far.

Which is inaccurate. They have continued to add new products, like the Watch and AirPods. So when do you think they hit "peak device" ? You mean peak iPhone? No argument from me, they might have. But there are ways to grow revenue without just increasing prices, as those other products have demonstrated. They have also proven that the can grow revenue with their services, which is now a bigger revenue generator than iPhone.

lunchableson The iPhone is no longer Apple’s most important product

The iPhone has been the most expensive, premium product since the day it was launched (see the incredulous Balmer video about the $599 subsidized price). It was also the primary engine that drove Apple to being one of the richest companies on earth, ever. For years people have said it was doomed to failure because it was overpriced, but here we are, with an iPhone that is more expensive than ever, probably even adjusted for inflation.

lunchableson The iPhone is no longer Apple’s most important product

Now look at the revenue per device that is generated for developers.

https://themanifest.com/app-development/android-vs-ios-which...

Not only is it easier to build and maintain apps for iOS, people spend a lot more money on that platform. That Android market share is, in large part, driven by developing nations that aren't going to spend a lot of money on buying software on their mobile devices.

That could certainly change in the future, but I just want to illustrate why just talking about the number of devices might not be the best indicator for which platform you should develop applications.

lunchableson The iPhone is no longer Apple’s most important product

Apple has a recycling program you might want to consider:

https://www.apple.com/recycling/nationalservices/

lunchableson Equifax removed the $125 claim payout option after millions submitted claims

In the US you can request your credit score once per year from each credit rating angecy at no cost.

lunchableson Apple Reports Declining Profits and Slowing Growth Again

Airpods and Apple Watch are both relatively new products in Apple-terms and have many years of incremental improvements ahead of them.

If you are looking for something as big as the iPhone, I think you might be disappointed. But, it is a pretty poorly kept secret that they are working on self-driving cars and some kind of "TV".

And Apple has been pretty clear about focusing on growth in services now that they have this massive base of deployed devices.

lunchableson Apple Reports Declining Profits and Slowing Growth Again

I have an iPhone X and have no problem unlocking my phone when wearing sunglasses.

lunchableson Apple Reports Declining Profits and Slowing Growth Again

I really disagree. With TouchID my phone was unlocked before it even got to my face. With my iPhone X (which I've had since launch) I get lots of false positives. It also means I have to raise it, swipe as I raise it, phone gets in front of my face, small pause, faceid success, phone unlocks and displays home screen. This takes probably 1/4 to 1/5 of a second longer than TouchID where the device is already unlocked and at the home by the time I get it in my field of view.

Personally I would like to see an iPhone X with TouchID under the display WITH FaceID. So if I have gloves on or my finger is wet, no problem, FaceID takes over. If I'm laying in bed and holding my phone to close to my face, no problem, TouchID authenticates. It also means I can unlock my phone without picking it up off my desk with my finger.

You would get the best of both worlds and none of the drawbacks.

lunchableson Apple Reports Declining Profits and Slowing Growth Again

Or continue to invent new products (iPod, iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, Watch, Airpods ...) then iterate on those products over years and years. Also while simultaneously driving their services revenue, which continues to be a growth area for them.

lunchableson As crime dries up, Japan’s police hunt for things to do (2017)

The best part is that it is more likely they just think they left change in the car but forgot they spent it.

lunchableson The art of interrupting software engineers

Software engineers are constantly delivering products to customers. I assume the timeline for an electrical engineering project can be many months or even years, so this isn't very surprising. When you work in an environment using continuous delivery and you are shipping features to customers every day/week, there's no way you can not have more communication. These things have to be documented, support staff trained, project goals tracked, etc.

lunchableson How Turkey Purged Its Intellectuals

>GDP in the US is high and we have more suicides than ever.

I think this is my favorite new "correlation does not equal causation" example.

lunchableson We built a SaaS company to make email better

Congratulations, that flashing title with UNREAD MESSAGE is new most annoying thing on the internet. You reinvented the blink tag I hope you're all proud.