Hacker News Reader

umeshunnion Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's letter to staff about affair

The person he has an affair with turned out to be a Chinese spy and he's being investigated by the government for this.

umeshunnion MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display and Touch

Doesn't matter. Google killed Chromebooks.

umeshunnion It's now official, tech is the new tobacco

that's about the maturity level the average reporter has

umeshunnion Microsoft offers mass buyouts for roughly a quarter of its workforce

Curious if they still do the daily triage and war rooms. I left in 2010 but those practices seemed like a remnant of the 90s era desktop computing paradigm than web or cloud.

umeshunnion Microsoft offers mass buyouts for roughly a quarter of its workforce

Oh honey, I have news for you https://www.fastcompany.com/91552571/elon-musk-twitter-x-dea...

umeshunnion Microsoft offers mass buyouts for roughly a quarter of its workforce

https://www.fastcompany.com/91552571/elon-musk-twitter-x-dea...

Wut?

umeshunnion 90% of US working hours are spent on tasks not covered well by AI benchmarks

Chesterton’s Fence

umeshunnion America didn't lose its rare earth industry, it sold it

Once you make it hard to build something, the incentives to build the thing goes away. Can you imaging trying to build a factory in California in 2026? Or 2006? The NIMBYs can barely stand building an ice cream store.

umeshunnion Show HN: Use your OpenAI subscription to create audiobooks

I did an even simpler thing. I had it connect to gmail MCP and email it to me as an .mp3 file which I then play on my phone.

umeshunnion Muse DAU dropped and Meta insiders decided to sell

richardttang probably a bot trying to drive traffic to his site.

umeshunnion [dead]

This is a pretty stupid take.

1. DAUs didn't drop, but DAU growth did. You'd think someone posting on HN would know the difference. 2. Insiders always sell RSUs. That's not news.

umeshunnion Hackers activate automatic defrosting in supermarket fridges across Europe

I would expect a refrigerator to work 20+ years. What does a legacy product even mean this situation?

umeshunnion The Deeply Impersonal Personalized Recruiter Mail

Won't that also block anyone who copy-pastes your name? I often copy paste names so that I don't make typos.

umeshunnion Everybody’s home. No one’s coming over

> Between 1975 and 1998, the share of Americans who gave or attended a monthly dinner party declined by half.

Interesting. I would have assumed the correlation is with the rise of the internt and smartphones, but it looks like the drop precedes that.

umeshunnion MongoDB CEO resigns to join Meta

data point #3 if you include his stint at Symantec 10+ years ago.

umeshunnion Toyota is taking the Corolla electric

motor vehicle

umeshunnion OpenAI agent hacked Australian government website, PM says

that's adorable. what happens why a Chinese model hacks the australian govt?

umeshunnion Astra for Law

That's already the case in law because you could just hire the best or most lawyers.

umeshunnion The American Religion of Self-Storage Facilities

> If my parents had done that I would have been pissed.

I was pretty pissed when I went off to college and my parents threw away my 80s computer that would now be considered a classic.

umeshunnion 'Offensively cheap': solar power is looking up

> manufacturing usually happens on a different continent, in a different currency, different regulatory regime

that's irrelevant. They're selling panels at a profit and are churning them out by the millions daily.

umeshunnion Silicon Valley is transforming the military-industrial complex? (2024)

There's a class of people in the West who have forgotten that wars happen and that defense is necessary. American especially benefit from two oceans separating them from the rest of the world and having never seen a war except on CNN.

Some of them, esp in central/eastern Europe, were rudely woken up in 2022 when Russian tanks rolle into a neighboring country. Others still have their heads buried in the sand and will not wake up even when Chinese robots march in Taipei in a few years.

umeshunnion What do Visa and Mastercard do? An intro to card networks

Not to mention the crime risk of cash

umeshunnion ChatGPT outage – Resolved

I believe it now uses the MAI models

umeshunnion Has early Scratch experience led to fulfilling careers?

I was inspired to learn programming when I first saw Logo on my school computer in the 80s. Till then I thought computers were something that only offices had and grown ups used. Not sure how any of this can be measured at scale but I'm sure some nontrivial % of students got into computers at an early age thanks to these tools.

umeshunnion How Bluesky draws its logo on screenshots

Today I noticed that Amazon Pharmacy decided to blank out my prescription info that I was screenshotting to send to my doctor. WTF.

umeshunnion India has paved the way for charging merchants a fee on UPI transactions

> it's been an absolute nightmare for a tourist to play along.

But the solution to this should be to simplify the tourist experience and to allow payments from foreign banks and cards. Traveling to China has a huge hassle in the late 2010s due to everyone local switching to WeChat/Alipay but it not being available for tourists, but in the last few years (I last visited in 2023), you could use WeChat/Alipay with a non-China bank card.

umeshunnion Every Fucking Website (2020)

It's the EU equivalent of the California Prop 65 warning that tells you that every building causes cancer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1986_California_Proposition_65...

umeshunnion Chartreuse, a case study in how scarcity and authenticity can drive desirability

saved you a click: It's Chartreuse

umeshunnion France to ban unsolicited telemarketing calls

But in this case, that's essentially what's happened. No one gets legitimate telemarketing calls anymore. They're all scam calls from some slave compound in Cambodia.