Hacker News Reader

smuson Spotify deletes 70 Joe Rogan episodes

Can you explain what a regulated free market is? Doesn't the market stop being free once it's regulated?

smuson Spotify deletes 70 Joe Rogan episodes

It's unethical to publish content that promotes white supremacists, even indirectly. Don't see how it's unethical to censor it though

smuson Switching to an N95 mask gives a 75x boost in Covid protection

The classic sniffles that kills millions a year that we all know and love, right

smuson An Algorithm for Passing Programming Interviews (2020)

> but facebook and google have very hard leetcode interviews and are known for the best software

...are they? whenever I go on facebook, I always have a slow, unresponsive, buggy experience just using the website, and that's on firefox with 32gb ram on a 10th gen core i7

smuson An Algorithm for Passing Programming Interviews (2020)

> If they pushed me hard enough at the start, I would tell them and then fail them on the algorithms/reasoning component of the interview.

I agreed with you up until this point, which seems unnecessarily harsh to me

smuson Indiana life insurance CEO says deaths are up 40% among people ages 18-64

>I think this approach is reasonable for any business

It's reasonable for business, but not reasonable for society (because healthcare should be more risk adverse than a business). That's why the hospital system for op of this thread, which is German, isn't a business, and why they get to complain about how it's deployed

smuson Wrapping Up 2021. Leaving C++

That doesn't answer the question. A language committee not implementing changes someone wants cannot be and is not the source of someone else's life-long misery.

I with the author the best in finding a more sustainable and healthy way of constructing meaning

smuson The Big DevOps Misunderstanding

Good point, devs should either just not write bugs OR be on call 24/7. That's a totally reasonable way of running things.

I understand if people's lives are on the line. Otherwise, recognize that bugs happen, and either be ok with that or come up with a process (QA) that finds these bugs before deployment or that allows you to roll back to a more stable version easily.

smuson The Big DevOps Misunderstanding

Totally, and I'd never suggest deploying on a Friday afternoon

smuson All Bitcoin private keys are on this website

hmm? Do you think the blockchain isn't also on a bunch of people's computers?

smuson The Scalar Fallacy (2011)

>But, though we have to do it all the time, no one has ever found a perfect way of assigning scalars to vectors and no one ever will.

Write the vector (x, y) in [0,1]^2 in its binary representation as (x0.x1x2..., y0.y1y2...), resolving any repeating sequences of 1s, and let f(x, y) = 0.x0y0x1y1x2y2...

Then f is injective and therefore bijective onto its image.

(I know this is incredibly pedantic and f isn't continuous/doesn't preserve whatever mathematical structure, but I think you're inviting this comparison when you write a blog post that is just saying "You can't represent everything 1 dimensionally" which everyone knows but unnecessarily couched in mathematical jargon)

smuson Ask HN: Moving from tiny websites to serious tech skills?

If you're not getting calls, it's your resume that is bad. That either means the format, or the content. Seems to me the only change to the content that you can make is working on and advertising well written open source personal projects that your interviewers can see, or contributing to large open source projects.

smuson All Bitcoin private keys are on this website

Bits on a server representing your account balance also have no tangibility

smuson The Big DevOps Misunderstanding

I'm glad there's a dichotomy. I (a dev) never signed up to be on call 24/7 for production and it's ridiculous to just assume that I should be. I have a life outside of my work. If the system needs 24/7 uptime, they better be paying someone other than me to ensure that's the case, because my time is too valuable to waste my already precious freetime on fixing bugs in prod.

smuson Tqdm (Python)

I'd chip in dramatiq as a nice python tasks/message passing library

smuson Pfizer and Biontech provide update on Omicron variant

Why are we talking about the mortality rate and not the overall mortality of the virus? Seems that the metric that matters is how many people it kills. Especially since we are actively fighting the virus harder than most in the past few years.

smuson Interview success can depend on how you schedule interviews

Does this apply for technical interviews though?

smuson PowerShell Inventor Jeffrey Snover Interview

>Even in the server world, Windows still has the highest market share.

Source? Seems to contradict this page. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste...

smuson Pfizer and Biontech provide update on Omicron variant

Yeah let's play this game! Let me count all the viruses that killed close to a million Americans in the last 2 years!

1. COVID

smuson Is the big tech era ending?

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/u-s-spends-public-money-hea...

We already spend more per Capita than countries with socialized medicine, so it stands to reason we should be able to socialize our medicine with a reasonable increase in expenditure on health care.

That extra money doesn't need to come from raising taxes. It can come from our incredibly bloated "defense" budget

smuson Hackers are spamming businesses’ receipt printers with ‘antiwork’ manifestos

Wow, 36k a year! What a livable wage! Even your cherry picked example doesn't really prove your point, but the vast majority of other service workers are treated worse. And if you're truly arguing society could function if we just deleted all jobs with poor working conditions, you're delusional. We haven't even mentioned factory workers in Asia yet.

smuson Hackers are spamming businesses’ receipt printers with ‘antiwork’ manifestos

Why not? There's a ton of people unable to live their life fulfilling due to their exploitative jobs. If we could remove some of the necessity of their job, then wouldn't their lives be improved? And isn't that a good thing?

smuson Hackers are spamming businesses’ receipt printers with ‘antiwork’ manifestos

> Why don’t they get another job? These people are inept and blame situations like getting cancer on their job?

You're suggesting that the entire service class get another job not in the service class? So now there's no more restaurants, fast food or otherwise, in the US? No more garbage men? If you agree that those jobs are essential to society's functioning, then don't you think we should treat and compensate them accordingly? It doesn't seem like your position is well thought out.

smuson Hackers are spamming businesses’ receipt printers with ‘antiwork’ manifestos

Our service economy that we live in is structured around there being a poorly paid and poorly treated underclass. Sure some in that class could leave but there aren't enough good jobs for everyone. We're talking about a structural problem, which can't be solved by individual action. I understand that can be hard to conceptualize for some.

smuson Is the big tech era ending?

The us government already could fund universal health care and chooses not too. People in the US are wary about taxation because we already have a comparable tax rate to other developed nations, with more prosperity, and yet we get comparatively far fewer public goods in return. It's a raw deal. Where's our high speed rail, our public transit, our health care, our public bathrooms? Why is that money going to Raytheon instead?

smuson Workers quit jobs in droves to become their own bosses

That whooshing sound is the goal posts moving

smuson Books that changed my career as a software engineer

What a narrow minded way of looking at things. You don't know other people's stories, or what their priorities are, or what situation they're in.

smuson The Joy of Cryptography

I think it's totally good and human to have preferences for one sort of math over another :)

smuson The Joy of Cryptography

Maybe it's the differential structure itself? Or an (over?)emphasis on the study of functions from space to space instead of the study of the space itself? Or the specificity of calculus (the study of one specific space) instead of the generality of topology (thinking about a lot of spaces and comparing them to each other)

smuson The Joy of Cryptography

I mean the notion of compactness is inspired pretty clearly from the continuum. I also have a degree in pure math and disagree strongly with your characterization of topology, which is literally defined up to homeomorphism which is itself defined by it's continuity. Arguably the whole point of topology is characterized by that which is preserved by continuous deformation, which clearly is inspired by more continuous math. I think you are using incredibly strong language and in a misguided way.