Hacker News Reader

supermwon I Hit $115k/Month with a Status Quo Improvement

What year were you born? Because it's pretty clear there must be a generation of programmers who never grew up with the whole hacker mythos of the 90s or early 2000s. Some people's only experience with the word "hacker" is a person who makes cool nice things with code.

There was a time many ages ago when the word "hacker" was reserved only for the most dangerous and reckless breed of computer programmers.

supermwon Cancer death rates are falling, five-year survival rates rising

Having cloned organs ready for transplant won't extend life as much as you think. A lot of this doesn't mean much if you can't replace a faulty circulatory system, which will inevitably cause organs to fail even if they are brand new.

Unfortunately, a circulatory system is practically impossible to replace. It would cost tens of millions of dollars and you'd have to already be in great shape to survive the very long recovery time. And then you do all this, only to die eventually, all the same.

supermwon I Hit $115k/Month with a Status Quo Improvement

I'm not thinking of crackers.

Hackers do create things. Sometimes malicious things and sometimes things that offer no real benefit to society, but things all the same. In this definition you have to take the good with the bad.

supermwon I Hit $115k/Month with a Status Quo Improvement

This is Hackernews, as in whites, blacks, and gray hats.

Some people here make money through cool silicon valley startups that make for great success porn but don't forget that some people here also make money doing shady or even downright illegal things.

What we have in common in this community is our technology interests, not our morals or values. If you accept this fact, you can open your mind up to some great content and conversations.

supermwon Pee, Not Chlorine, Causes Red Eyes from Swimming Pools: CDC (2015)

Wouldn't it be very diluted, to the point it is no more harmful than whatever else may be in that river water?

supermwon Pee, Not Chlorine, Causes Red Eyes from Swimming Pools: CDC (2015)

If that's true then why do people go nuts if you shit in a river while camping?

supermwon Pee, Not Chlorine, Causes Red Eyes from Swimming Pools: CDC (2015)

Maybe there's a machine learning solution. If we could have devices that could somehow probe the temperature of the water on an X,Y graph and detect when the ambient temperature around an individual has changed we can sound an alarm to detect possible urination or even a laser that can draw a circle around the targeted area.

supermwon Grand Canyon Museum Had Buckets of Uranium Sitting Around for 18 Years

My mother still has old uranium glassware in her home. Not really sure if it's dangerous or not but it's pretty cool to see in person.

supermwon Y Combinator’s latest batch of startups is too big for one Demo Day stage

Too big to be interesting. As the cohorts grow in size, the returns begin to mirror the returns of the entire startup market.

It's the difference between having a large index fund, and having a portfolio of 5-10 good companies.

Basically it's like they're not even trying to filter much anymore.

supermwon Y Combinator’s latest batch of startups is too big for one Demo Day stage

The age of prestigious incubators and accelerators is coming to an end IMO.

As we wrap up the 2010s, I feel that a lot of the entrepreneurial wave in this decade was catalyzed by the founding of mobile app stores, the network effects of expanding social medias and cloud services making software deployments easier than ever.

Incubators seemed well poised to help this flood of new entrepreneurs navigate the changing landscapes and get exposure to investors, but by now people have become more savvy and this is mostly a solved problem.

Investors are also well aware by now that incubators do not magically produce unicorns or even great companies, and are looking for better returns elsewhere. Demo Days are mostly a lazy way to sit and listen to a bunch of pitches without really giving a fuck. I know at one demo day a couple of investors spent most of their time talking in the hallway while founders pitched on. Investors know all your tricks to make your company seem more appetizing: fake appointments in your calendars, strategically chosen metrics, name dropping, paper trails, etc...

supermwon Butterflow: motion interpolated videos from the command line

One good application of this tech is old movies with poor frame rates. The WW1 documentary They Shall Not Grow Old uses a technique like this.

supermwon Where is the universe hiding its missing mass?

Interesting: In some Christian SciFi stories the missing mass has been attributed to the mass of heaven and hell.

supermwon Amazon Pulls Out of Planned New York City Campus

What if another state gave the concessions, and then it worked out spectacularly for them, completely reviving a city and building up a new ecosystem that funnels in new wealth and new money. Would NY be kicking itself then?

supermwon You Don't Need to Quit Your Job to Make

Kids are tiny adults in progress, not your personal maker project. They should be afforded as much autonomy as possible, where your only role is to keep them safe and healthy until they can reach an age where they can do so themselves. If anything it's more like having an employer that you do work for free, or even out of your own pocket.

supermwon Why Do the Northern and Southern Lights Differ?

I want to believe, but I'm skeptical. Without any actual metric to measure how amazing the lights look, you have to rely on people's subjective opinions. One person's "amazing" light show could just be faint wisps to someone else.

I also think that pretty much any photo is going to look more intense that what anyone can see in real life. Look at the main photo in the article. The lights are so bright that the ground is illuminated green. Really? I doubt the lights can be such a strong light source. They are also very sharply defined as a result of the longer exposure, a human would probably see something blurrier and more ethereal.

I could perhaps believe that under the right conditions and dark adaption a human could see the lights a bit more colorful instead of just white, but I don't see how the sky could dance with clear and crisp ribbons of green and purple for miles unless the solar activity was so strong all our electronic hardware was being fried. (A long time ago there was an event so strong the lights could be seen all the way down near the equator, luckily before we had computers)

supermwon Linux Reverse Engineering CTFs for Beginners

Capture the File.

supermwon Whitespace killed an enterprise app

You're right. It's like when people lump IT and Software Engineers together. I should have said UI.

supermwon U.S. National Debt Soars to a Record $22T

How about neither?

supermwon U.S. National Debt Soars to a Record $22T

The United States has the greatest reward for those who fight in its military: You are an American hero, a soldier of the greatest most powerful country in the world, and not just because we say so.

supermwon Why Do the Northern and Southern Lights Differ?

> Dazzling green and red light displays regularly dance across the night sky-

OK I'm going to stop this right here.

The Northern Lights do not dazzle you with the incredible green light displays you see in pictures. In real life, you might not even realize you are looking at a Northern Light unless you know what to look for.

The only way the lights appear so vivid is by taking a photo of them with a camera with a long enough exposure. When I saw the Northern Lights I had mistaken them for bright clouds illuminated by the moonlight. Only when I took a photo with my iPhone did I realize they were the Northern Lights.

The fact that I was not made aware of this until I arrived at my final destination after a journey of thousands of miles across the world has made me bitter about it.

With such an inaccuracy on the very first line of this article, I can't bring myself to continue.

supermwon Whitespace killed an enterprise app

I see this all the time. It is a symptom of blowhard UX designers who don't understand there's a difference between mass consumer and enterprise app design. They look at a shitty looking enterprise interface and snort "I can make this so much better! Let me introduce you to Material design!"

If you want to make pretty little apps that get you tons of likes on Dribbble or whatever, go make consumer apps.

When it comes to enterprise apps boring is beautiful. I'm talking dense data displays, esoteric shortcuts, NO optimistic saving behaviors, etc. Everything that classical consumer app designers hate. The point of an enterprise app is all business.

supermwon U.S. National Debt Soars to a Record $22T

Relax. The United States could easily pay off its debt if it should be necessary. Inflation makes it cheaper to delay paying it off for as long as possible. There are still debts out there from the 1600s being paid off. In the 2400s, we will likely still see debt from today being paid off, should we be alive somehow.

There will be another market crash, it’s not a big deal it happens every so often and life moves on.

If there is a war, the size and strength of the US Military virtually guarantees we will win.

It’s not so bad. Nothing can touch us.

supermwon Mars One, which offered 1-way trips to Mars, declared bankrupt

Instead of offering dumb 1-way trips to Mars why not create round trips to the Moon and back? You can see Earth from the surface of the moon, see the lunar lander, drive a lunar rover, bounce around for a bit then hop in your module and head back home and live the rest of your life with a new perspective. More interesting than Mars, and doesn't take months to get there.

supermwon Ask HN: How bad is freelancing?

You would probably earn more if you marketed as a consultant or agency.

supermwon None of my projects want to be SPAs

With context api and hooks you don't need redux or mobx.

Not that either one was really all that necessary in the first place anyway.

supermwon None of my projects want to be SPAs

Why do people insist on comparing the initial frontload of a SPA to the page load of every page in their SSR web app?

Once a SPA is loaded you can send tiny crumbs of data faster than any significant SSR.

supermwon Ask HN: How bad is freelancing?

He's not a freelancer, he's a consultant. Freelancers are hungry and pressed for money. They are commodities competing for jobs around the world which go to the lowest bidder. They are the opposite of free, they are always on the hunt.

supermwon The Case for Transmissible Alzheimer's Grows

Not so certainly. Climate change could ravage the world hard and natural resources could dwindle to almost nothing, putting the race in a crude survivalist mindset where there is no time to improve modern medicine or even learn it. Generations of the future may just as likely be looking back at our tech today in awe.

supermwon Ask HN: What’s your laptop?

I used to own Macs as well and then I got a Thinkpad, which has long been hailed as the ultimate hacker's laptop. If you are looking for something that is of the quality of a Macbook this is what you want. Personally I've also wanted a nice minimalist looking black laptop for a long time so that's a bonus.

I have a T480s, fully maxed out specs except no dedicated GPU (this will give you dual heat pipes instead for better thermal performance on an i7 core). 24GB RAM. Keyboard is incredible compared to Macbook. I recommend non-backlit version for better textures on the keys. Case itself is military spec compliant and probably stronger than Macbook unibody. Hard drive is a terabyte NVME ssd, and I added a Toshiba RC100 480gb NVME ssd into the WWAN slot (runs at 1x performance though, but still good). I upgraded the wifi card to the latest intel 9260 so I can achieve gigabit Wifi speeds at work, an easy swap. I run linux distros and windows in dual boot depending on work requirements.

Thinkpad laptops can also open ALL the way flat which has actually come in handy a few times. You won't know though until you experience it yourself.