Hacker News Reader

skylan_qon Walmart Canada stops accepting Visa cards

That's only some of the consumers. Even if there's 5% less business/revenue to Walmart as a result of this decision, that's a huge hit.

skylan_qon The Web We Want

The web I want is free of junk loaders, javascript tracking ad garbage making my page requests crazy slow, unpleasant and hard to use.

You should try Brave if you haven't already.

skylan_qon Basic income plan clearly rejected by Swiss voters

I'd like to know why someone disagrees with what I've said.

skylan_qon Basic income plan clearly rejected by Swiss voters

The types of immigrants they're looking to bring in with reform aren't trying only to escape war, but looking for a free leg-up. i.e. Syrian war refugees going to Germany instead of any of the countries along the way that aren't experiencing war.

They'll be sure to vote established people's money for themselves.

skylan_qon Basic income plan clearly rejected by Swiss voters

They're voting for asylum reform, but against UBI. What's the point? In a generation, they'll have UBI.

skylan_qon Curbs on free speech are growing tighter. It is time to speak out

Everyone should accept gays. Everyone should hate paedophiles. Marijuana is good, heroin is bad. Democracy is the best form of government.

If you don't agree with all of this, you are literally Hitler.

skylan_qon Credit Suisse Warns That Workers Are Gaining Ground and U.S. Equities May Suffer

Pretty much. What's in it for the banks to loan out at incredibly low rates? Remember that there isn't only an aversion to high interest rates for people trying to secure loans. The banks want higher interest rates to make loaning worthwhile.

skylan_qon Thiel shows why tech billionaires are the new robber barons

Same here. But what I'm implying is that we've been fooled into believing untrustworthy people as trustworthy, and identifying some of those people as untrustworthy will get you in hot water.

skylan_qon Thiel shows why tech billionaires are the new robber barons

I wonder what's the connection, if any, between the author of the article and Gawker. I'm going to warn you: if you apply this pattern of thinking in all sorts of spheres of life you're going to lose a lot of friends.

skylan_qon Credit Suisse Warns That Workers Are Gaining Ground and U.S. Equities May Suffer

It's actually higher prime interest rates. Sure, people can borrow at 3% interest (or whatever is provided) but why would banks want to necessarily want to loan out at such a low interest rate?

skylan_qon Facebook and Twitter pledge to remove hate speech within 24 hours

Of course they are. Anything that doesn't praise and promote 100% homogenization of all peoples across all dimensions is hate speech.

skylan_qon I created Godwin's Law in 1990 as a warning

Calling regular people nazis make them associate more with nazis.

skylan_qon I created Godwin's Law in 1990 as a warning

You guys might not be noticing, but we've thrown the "Hitler/Nazi" stuff around so much that it doesn't have meaning anymore. It's actually been rehabilitating fascism and anti-semitism.

skylan_qon I created Godwin's Law in 1990 as a warning

WaPo, funded by Bezos, who has plenty to lose from a Trump presidency will obviously do anything he can to tout that Trump = Hitler.

skylan_qon GitLab Container Registry

These guys are f*cking killing it. Way to go!

skylan_qon In Japan’s Slow Economy, Rare Price Rise Prompts Surplus of Remorse

They kept the monetary base pretty steady for a while in the mid 2000's. It ended up hurting their ability to export and made it easier to import. They were unhappy with the slightly higher unemployment, the slight and constant price deflation, and the lack of GDP growth. Otherwise, things actually weren't that bad.

skylan_qon Zendesk and the Art of Trademark Trolling

Reminds me of Intel suing Yoga studio for being named "Yoga Inside" (infringing on Intel's "Intel inside" campaign slogan)

http://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Intel-forces-yoga-gro...

skylan_qon Russian Insider Says State-Run Doping Fueled Olympic Gold

I like getting my news on what Russia is doing bad from the New York Times. It doesn't get more credible than that.

skylan_qon Uber drivers, if employees, owed $730M more: U.S. court papers

"Riders have saved $730 million by using Uber"

skylan_qon Lessons learned from some of the best Ruby codebases

because some gem developer wanted to be clever

Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it? -Brian Kernighan https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Brian_Kernighan

I love Ruby. I hate Rubyistas that make code that's impossible for others to read or comprehend. I find the rails source actually pretty good here.

No it doesn't. What is even going on in there?!?

LOL didn't you read lines 385-472 of some_ruby_interpreter_file.c on MRI version 2.2.1p347?

...

When we're looking to write programming languages to make our ability to program more concise and powerful, clever tricks and hacks defeat the purpose. Those belong in the 90's and earlier.

skylan_qon Secret Court Takes Another Bite Out of the Fourth Amendment

Why go to the other side of the world? What about Canada, where we have hate speech laws and the CHRC?

skylan_qon A Protocol for Dying

Some other reading on the topic for those who are interested: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ars_moriendi "The Art of Dying"

skylan_qon U.S. Suicide Rate Surges to a 30-Year High

our hugboxes aren't working.

skylan_qon Intel made a huge mistake 10 years ago

Itanium was a RISC-y endeavour by Intel and it had it's problems but you can't really say it died because of x86_64. Microsoft adopted it and dropped IA-64 like a hot potato. Intel dropped Yamhill and other projects that attempted to bring IA-64 to the desktop as soon as they realized MS wanted x86-64. Performance didn't factor in because AMD would have never had the chance to provide the world all the CPUs it wanted (supply constraints)

skylan_qon Intel made a huge mistake 10 years ago

But the thing I don't understand is why Intel gave up on XScale, their ARM-compatible effort This isn't the first time Intel sold off a slice of itself. I remember AMD doing this many, many times. For over 40 years, the form factor didn't matter. All that mattered was having the fastest and most performant CPU in the entire world. There was a real demand to crunch numbers and move bits since the 70's, so that's the world Intel, AMD, and everyone else knew.

To sell off a division that sold low-power chips for tiny margins in an industry that never, ever, ever explodes (until it did) was just plain normal. He would have gotten pressure and funny looks from the industry and shareholders if he didn't sell it off.

skylan_qon Wealth doesn't trickle down – it just floods offshore, research reveals (2012)

Consumption drives investment. There's always demand.

Savings fund investment. The more savings there are, the cheaper it is to find funds for investing in a project. The cheaper the capital expenditure, the easier it is to turn a profit.

Or are you talking about the paradox of thrift?

skylan_qon Daily Mail owner considering Yahoo bid

Under Meyer's tenure it's actually much worse: you don't know when you're going to lose your job. With DM, you know if you're in or you're out.

skylan_qon Panama Papers Leak Signals a Shift in Mainstream Journalism

They're not reporting on a shift, they're announcing a shift. Special interests, more than ever, are now going to manufacture the news and release what news they want to in order to pull the strings behind the curtains. Remember that the Panama Papers weren't journalistic in any sense. US corps make the most use of these tax haven schemes in Panama, but hardly anyone in the US was implicated; Nationalists and Putin were primarily implicated.

This isn't about democratization of data and journalism, and it's not about "everyone has a press"

It's about large monied institutions using strong news brands to provide news not for enlightening people, but for their consumption so that they can continue feeding narratives that people already believe. It's not news, it's programming.

skylan_qon Wealth doesn't trickle down – it just floods offshore, research reveals (2012)

Something is wrong and broken with "modern capitalism" if a mere 90,000 people have more wealth than 90% of the planet. All the arguments about investment and job creators falls flat; we have gobs and gobs of excess capital desperately seeing some productive investment. Capitalists don't need any more capital at the moment. The wealth they have isn't doing nothing. It's in investments. Secondly, if it was in nothing, that would only reduce the velocity of money, effectively making your money worth more. You could spread that money around, but the likely result of that is less investment and more consumption.

skylan_qon The rotational North Pole is moving east at 14 cm per year

All actions and decisions have numerous and unpredictable outcomes

Every time you blink, you blow up a planet with life on it