Hacker News Reader

throe37848on A small community of unofficial Apple technicians in Cuba

Apple service network is not so great, good reason not to travel with Macbooks. DigitalNomad subreddit is full of horror stories and international flights to get machine fixed.

PC has removable SSD and many cheap options to buy new machine.

throe37848on 64-bit bank balances ‘ought to be enough for anybody’?

You need to be also handle "origin" or "flavour" of money. Future governments may place various sanctions and limitation on money. So green dollars will be better, Russian dollars not so great and so on. Some money may be owed to local VIP, and should not be confiscated... All that may be mixed on single bank account.

throe37848on Tonga is running out of space for more than 30k abandoned cars

Maybe unpopular opinion:

Sort it, burn what you can for electricity, dump rest into deep ocean.

throe37848on FTC warns pharma companies about sham patent listings designed to delay generics

Maybe it was her surname. This "hipster antitrust" approach is a nice smoke screen big pharma needs. India and other countries already make generics, there is no need to wait several years for US manufacturers. FTC is just a road block that prevents cheap medical imports.

throe37848on Student-Loan Restart Threatens to Pull $100B Out of Consumers’ Pockets

But money would not disappear, money would go into universities and education! It will fund new campuses, research, stipends...

Imagine how many students from Africa could study at US universities, if all student loans were repaid. That could really restart economy!

Government has good ways to collect money. For child support debt it can confiscate driving license, passport, throw people into jail... Or even prevent people from quiting their jobs! University educated people have money!

throe37848on Update on KDP Title Creation Limits

I knew guy who made "generated" text books in 2010. He would absorb several articles, and loosely stitch them into chapters with some computer scripts and from memory. In a week he would produce 400 pages on new subject. It was mostly coherent and factual (it kept references). Usually it was the only book on market about given subject (like rare disease).

Current auto generated garbage is very different.

throe37848on To build ships that break ice, U.S. must relearn to cut steel

Does USA even have civilian dry docks to build ships? I thought everything was outsourced to Korea.

I know it can build military vessels, but at horribly slow pace. Australia will get their nuclear submarines some time in 2040. I can not imagine building civilian nuclear ice breakers in US.