Hacker News Reader

rpgmakeron Confirmed: Walmart buys Jet.com for $3B in cash

I hope it works out for them. Amazon's age it's showing, their site it's clunky and unresponsive at times. Sellers misrepresent their wares all the time. They're outright banning some products which, for a store, it's a very opinionated move if you ask me. And don't give me the "the Apple Store doesn't carry the Fire" crap, Amazon bills itself as the "everything store". It works sure and customer service it's still miles ahead the competition (this is expensive and something that it's always overlooked by the competition) but they're neglecting the storefront by trying to be "everything".

rpgmakeron Confirmed: Walmart buys Jet.com for $3B in cash

Amazon turned a "small" profit just the other day. Overall I think it's still fair to categorize it as a money losing venture (so far).

rpgmakeron Confirmed: Walmart buys Jet.com for $3B in cash

> A public company like Walmart, there's some people doing some math here.

Translation: "I can't see how this deal makes sense but WalMart is a huge company so it has to make sense even if to me it doesn't".

By that logic no big company would ever fail or screw up. Every time there's a huge acquisition there are some people here making this fallacious argument or a variation of it. There are always people "doing some math" inside these companies, that doesn't mean that the success of any given strategy is a given.

rpgmakeron South Koreans use emoji to express playful sentiments they wouldn’t utter aloud

> Aw, come on, mentioning Kakao Friends without Apeach?

What about MSN Messenger Winks? They seem like a clear precursor to these Stickers and probably predate them by 5 years at least.

rpgmakeron Torrentz Shuts Down, Largest Torrent Meta-Search Engine Says Farewell

>There is also the argument that a large portion of those people would never have paid for your content in the first place

So? If you make a product you usually pay a lot of attention to price it in a way that your target market can afford. The people that can't pay for it aren't supposed to get it for "free" (if you everyone accepted this logic capitalism as we know it would crumble). I say this as someone who pirates something every now and then but I don't have to pretend that I'm somehow righteous when I do it. I do it for the same selfish reasons everyone else does even if they like to pretend otherwise.

rpgmakeron How to Write a Novel

> Is writing a novel all that different from writing a compiler from scratch or hacking on obsolete consoles like so many posts here.

Yes it is. But you're mostly right about your other affirmations.

rpgmakeron A Swede Returns to Silicon Valley from China

"But let's be honest - Silicon Valley is often a parody of itself, and it has lost some of the things that made it great. Where Silicon Valley was once heavily subsidized to be a place of technical innovation, it is now an expensive but well-funded hub focused on business execution."

I wonder how different can Beijing really be in this regard. It sure sounds like it's more gritty but I doubt everyone there has more high minded ideals than your usual SV sort.

rpgmakeron When It Comes to China, Google’s Experience Still Says It All

There is a massive amount of US wealth landlocked in China, there's no way a US president is going to risk having China appropriate all that wealth a la Castro. If you really believe Trump will go through with his childish bravado then I feel sorry for you and for all his voters but I get why it has made him popular. When it comes to China it's too late to do anything too drastic to reverse this situation and given the risks involved there probably isn't much will to rock the boat either.

rpgmakeron What’s Next for Multi-Process Firefox

It's so bad that they will actually push their loyal users to Chrome. The chromeization of Firefox has been awful and it seems like it's going to continue.

rpgmakeron Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

I agree. It's not easy to gracefully walk out of that kind of situation. At that point it was better to just go through the motions and maybe end the interview prematurely.

rpgmakeron Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

When I read that I immediately pictured a (very) pissed mob boss. What an asshole.

rpgmakeron Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

That's painful but also kind of funny because we all have been there one way or another.

rpgmakeron Massachusetts Bans Employers from Asking Applicants About Previous Pay

I work in software myself but come on, it's fair to say that being a surgeon is way less trivial and far riskier than being a programmer.

rpgmakeron How to Write a Novel

Thanks for the recommendation. I'll check it out!

rpgmakeron How to Write a Novel

I have read about that. And while it would explain the repetitiveness it's independent of how his writing appears to me. Needless to say, a lot of people disagree with my view of his writing.

rpgmakeron How to Write a Novel

Any recommendations?

rpgmakeron How to Write a Novel

I absolutely love "The Road", it's one of my favorite post-apocalyptic movies (I haven't read the book yet).

rpgmakeron How to Write a Novel

I agree. Ironically (since he is associated with the 'gardeners' type in the piece), his writing feels too methodical and lineal to me. Also very repetitive. Of his books I haven't liked the first one. The same happens to me with Neil Gaiman, who seems very heavily influenced by King. To me their style of writing is almost interchangeable.

rpgmakeron Climate Change Is Hell on Alaska's Formerly Frozen Highways

You're not just pointing out anything. You were excusing imperialism with a little bit of racism on the side. Both out of ignorance as usual.

rpgmakeron How to Read a Book [pdf]

There's also the fact that we demand way more from our fiction now (or maybe not so much if you look at the bestsellers of the past decade). Back in the day people got exposed to very few new stories in their lifetime, most of them were probably part of the folklore and some from books but now it's the other way around: thanks to the multimedia landscape it's very difficult to find a storyline pattern that you haven't already seen somewhere else (it can be a movie or even another book). The best books are way more than this but I believe that this is the reason why some of the "classics" are found to be profoundly boring by today's standards. They were edgy and original back in the day but by the time you're 30 you have been exposed to most (if not all) patterns and those books become boring.

rpgmakeron How to Read a Book [pdf]

> I think one more hack is stop reading a book you know is not worth the time. It's a hard habit for me, but I've finally realized there are too many great books out there to waste time on ones that aren't. Put the book down, it's OK.

I'm in exactly the same situation and do the same thing. There's nothing that reminds me more of my mortality than looking at my (digital) library of books that I have yet to read. It's obvious now that unless I make it very big I won't ever have the time to read all of them so it's very important that I do not waste time reading books that aren't worth it (technical books are mostly exempted from this though). Like you say it's a hard habit but it's the most efficient thing you can do since time is such a scarce commodity and books are dime a dozen these days.

rpgmakeron Climate Change Is Hell on Alaska's Formerly Frozen Highways

> The main problem wasn't US companies but rather a very backward uneducated population.

The US isn't full of racists but you clearly are racist. Can't say I'm surprised since I could smell it in your first comment.

It may surprise you but Latin America had its share of intellectual leaders, many of which had to flee their own countries because of the brutal dictatorships propped up by the US govt. The ones who didn't were simply "disappeared". It's very convenient that you only think of United Fruit as the only beneficiary of subservient local dictatorships, it betrays a lack of knowledge about how neocolonialism (or even neoliberalism) works. Either that or you just did a quick "banana republic" google search and completely ignore that the term can be used independently of the United Fruit case. Which, again, betrays an ignorance about the whole subject.

rpgmakeron Microsoft sued over Windows 10 update campaign

I wasn't suggesting that HIPAA compliant businesses were "blase" about data protection, just that (like many other businesses) they place way too much faith in Microsoft, sometimes sidestepping important and legitimate debates about their OS and where it's going.

rpgmakeron Climate Change Is Hell on Alaska's Formerly Frozen Highways

> Why? Because we are all going to be there (we would have been there if we'd be as strict as Latin American countries are about their own immigration). Japan can lead the way for us and for others on how to deal with this issue (population decline).

Why isn't immigration a valid solution to population decline? This seems like a classic paean to the old white country to me.

Immigration in Latin America is actually not very restrictive. Organized crime (from anywhere in the world) can come and go as it pleases in the region. Whatever you may have read on right-wing media, illegal immigration is rampant in Latin America.

The irony of some Americans complaining about Latinos now is rich. You didn't care much about them when the US govt was promoting dictators and doing everything it could to undermine the democratic will in the region (predominantly left wing in response to the incredible levels of legacy inequality) and why would you? It made many of your companies super rich which in turn provided you with nice, cushy jobs managing your "banana republic" natural resources. The local population though was saddled with no voice and (usually) murderous psychopaths as their "leaders". As a result they migrated in droves to the US, the richest nation on earth that also happened to be the closest. And now you complain. It would be funny if it wasn't racist too.

rpgmakeron Berlin’s Startup Hub Wants to Prove It’s More Than Just a Scene

> My wife needed a few weeks to be able to speak Norwegian on a conversational level, I didn't need much more than that for German (difficult to count exactly due to travelblah).

You guys must be both geniuses. Either that or those "learn X language in 14 days!" books actually work.

rpgmakeron Microsoft sued over Windows 10 update campaign

It's safe to say that whatever worries the DoD may have about Windows 10 are going to be readily addressed by MS but most people/businesses won't have that luxury.

rpgmakeron Microsoft sued over Windows 10 update campaign

> Win10 is not going to be installed in any business that needs high data security either for operations or regulatory requirements like HIPPA or the SEC, etc.

Nah, I have worked with HIPAA compliant businesses before and as long as the data MS collects isn't (demonstrably) leaked to malevolent third parties they won't care. They upgrade to whatever MS tells them to upgrade and these kind of OS issues aren't discussed at all. They care about the privacy of the information they deal with directly but whatever the OS does under the hood it's assumed to be proper.

rpgmakeron Ireland jails three top bankers over 2008 banking meltdown

Actually they were all junk. Even the "good ones" and they knew it. When the pool became so shitty that the rating agencies were about to start rating them as junk they changed their rating "algorithm" at the behest of the banks. It was straight up fraud all around but the govt just didn't want to prosecute the anyone that mattered.

rpgmakeron FreeBSD Myths

> edit: while I think about it, most large changes in FreeBSD are discussed in private. Public discussion on patch and technical discussion is frowned upon.

Ugh. That sounds pretty bad for an open source OS.

rpgmakeron The Melancholy of Infinite Space (1996)

Sometimes I think that, sure, the universe it's huge and it's very possible (in my mind, almost certain) that there are other planets with advanced life forms like we can find here on Earth. If we accept this then it's safe to assume that not all life in the universe evolved at the same time. Most of the time we implicitly assume (probably because of sci-fi) that there must be a more advanced species somewhere but what if we actually are the more advanced species? From what we know right now it's just as likely for us to be the more advanced as it is for, say, the habitants of Kepler-22b. And somehow that feels more disappointing than if we were completely alone in the universe.