Hacker News Reader

walkonon SBF Arrested by Bahamian Authorities

Consider an edit to your post since it’s at the top?

walkonon Netflix's “Love Is Blind” Wants Unpaid Photographer for Five Weddings

> If you offer someone with the expectation they can't say no, that is in fact predatory.

In the absence of coercion or fraud, the offering party's expectations are irrelevant.

walkonon Netflix's “Love Is Blind” Wants Unpaid Photographer for Five Weddings

If someone makes you an offer and you say, "no" and they walk away, that isn't predatory.

walkonon LabCorp’s at-home Covid-19 test kit is the first to be authorized by the FDA

Ok, why don't you make a test and sell it at cost?

walkonon Tell HN: Toilet paper, hand sanitizer, and now web cams

Allowing the price to move up with market demand will encourage increases in production. It just takes some time, especially in a pandemic, for the production to catch up.

walkonon Tokyo Olympics “looking at a cancellation” if coronavirus not contained

Indeed. Hopefully he didn't mean "fun distraction" in a positive way and was trying to convey it was interesting to watch develop. Especially considering he has friends in the area.

> in part because it's been a fun distraction, in part because I have friends in Wuhan

walkonon Monsanto Weed Killer Roundup Faces New Doubts on Safety in Unsealed Documents

> I do wonder why "working the fields" cannot be made a good job for humans?

You'll get your answer by working in the fields for a few weeks.

walkonon TN Could Give Fastest Internet for Free, Will Give Comcast and AT&T $45M Instead

How can the infrastructure be built for free? Volunteer labor and donated capital?

walkonon YC will hold interviews in Vancouver for founders who can’t get US visas

Canada welcomes everyone* with wide, egalitarian arms - regardless of age, race, gender, identity, etc.

* excluding the disabled: http://www.ccdonline.ca/en/socialpolicy/immigration

walkonon Blog Little Things

I'd like to read it - post the link here when you're done!

walkonon Picture this: A fresh approach to Photos

And when we say a lifetime of memories, we really mean it. With Google Photos, you can now backup and store unlimited, high-quality photos and videos, for free.

In Google parlance, a (free product) lifetime is somewhere between 2 - 7 years.

Looks like the unlimited free storage is for high quality, but not original, versions of the images and videos. Original quality is subject to storage limits/pricing:

https://support.google.com/photos/answer/6220791?p=storage&r...

With some sort of revenue, maybe this product will be sustainable.

walkonon Tesla Energy

A property would be assessed at a lower value if it didn't have any HVAC appliances installed in it. Since most properties start with such appliances, replacing them or upgrading them to similar, or even more efficient models, is likely considered a nominal effect on property value, i.e. an act of sustaining the properties existing value. A real battery backup system, assuming one didn't already exist on the property, would be considered a significant addition to property value.

walkonon Microsoft Launches Its .NET Distribution for Linux and Mac

The runtime, Core CLR is is open source with MIT and porting is underway:

https://github.com/dotnet/coreclr

walkonon Amazon Dash Button

My wife likes to order some detergents, soaps, and other supplies from Amazon, but one rather cumbersome aspect is all the extra packaging that has to be torn down and recycled or thrown away. Since my wife doesn't like to bother with such things, I end up spending 5-15 minutes a week deconstructing Amazon packaging. I would rather pick up these types of supplies while getting groceries, but for some products Amazon is cheaper.

walkonon Abandon your DVCS and return to sanity

Logic: claiming to be a current apologist of DVCS while simultaneously positing that DVCS should be abandoned.

walkonon Firefox 36.0 released

Good to see they fixed this security bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1095859

A proxy could inject cookies on a 407 response and even bypass the authentication prompt - could have been used for session fixation attacks.

walkonon Code Review Checklist

> Are all functions commented?

No.

walkonon Deal forcing Microsoft to offer browser choices ends

Are you saying Microsoft should have intentionally excluded a means to browse http content and instead directed customers to be on the lookout for consumer magazines with a demo disk containing a browser? Where and how do they draw the line to being a useful distribution and alienating their users? For example, certain ICMP utilities were included by default with Windows.

walkonon Deal forcing Microsoft to offer browser choices ends

I was there in the 90s. Only having access to Windows when the Internet became common, guess how I went about learning there were other browsers out there and downloading Netscape?

How much more difficult would that have been if IE wasn't included by default with Windows?

walkonon Are You a Robot? Introducing “No CAPTCHA ReCAPTCHA”

And some unison whistling at the end to complete the cliche. Weird they would even have a video for something like this, leading me to be more suspicious of the mechanisms and data they are using behind the scenes to make this work.

walkonon Microsoft takes .NET open source and cross-platform

The open sourcing moves were in the works well before Nadella was CEO.

walkonon Getting rid of burnout permanently

Hours worked doesn't always contribute to burnout. I can easily feel burnout working 40 hour weeks filled with unsatisfying work (e.g. bureaucratic paperwork, interruptions for unimportant issues, unchallenging problems, etc). Conversely, if I am actually able to code and develop an application that is semi-interesting, I could easily go past 40 hours a week and not feel any burnout because it is fulfilling and/or enjoyable. I could also stay at 40 or a little below.

The key consideration is (perceived) fulfillment. Time spent is involved in determining this, but isn't the only variable - importance of work, enjoyment/satisfaction, sense of accomplishment, etc.

walkonon Mark Cuban: If Your Company Is Moving For Tax Reasons, I'm Selling Your Stock

The resources they are consuming are for the ultimate goal of satisfying consumer demand in an efficient enough way to profit from it. Are you a consumer? If so, you're an direct and indirect consumer of those resources.

walkonon Microsoft laid me off after 15 years of service. Life after Microsoft?

Buying a parallel policy could help. I don't understand why the U.S. government has a tax code that effectively makes the most important type of insurance the easiest to loose.

walkonon Ember Tutorial

> We use Ember at work, although I wish we used React.

Could you expand on why you prefer React? I have not tried React yet, but am interested to hear thoughts from someone who's used both.

walkonon T-Mobile USA storing passwords in clear?

That evidence isn't conclusive. They could be entering the password into an application that verifies with a hashed value.

walkonon Hangout with Martin Fowler, Kent Beck, and DHH: May 9th, 11am ET

This post has dropped from the front page of HN to the 3rd in about 15 minutes? I don't get HN at all.

walkonon Amazon Fire TV

Do these convex/rounded remotes that this and the Roku have bother anyone else? They seem to slide off the couch easier and if I set it down on a flat surface, it rocks back and forth for several seconds.

walkonon Announcing Two Scoops of Django 1.6

Good point on the PDF version, especially if Amazon allows PDF sales (instead a Kindle version). I am a bit surprised that pirating was a significant issue with the first book. Didn't they offer free or discounted versions if people requested they didn't have the money? If so, that might have gave people the impression that passing around copies wasn't a concern of the authors.

walkonon Announcing Two Scoops of Django 1.6

I do agree that the current price seems a bit high, but there are significant changes from the first edition:

http://twoscoopspress.com/pages/two-scoops-of-django-1-6-cha...

In the comments of the announcement, PyDanny lists their reasons why they skipped an ebook format this time:

- The print version of Two Scoops of Django 1.5 has been by far the most popular version of the book with readers, selling several times more than the e-books. In addition, the feedback we've gotten has been that technical books are generally better to have in print than as an ebook.

- Creating and proofing each ebook format is not a trivial effort. It involves reformatting every code sample to work on every ebook reader, accounting for differences in screen contrast, accessibility testing, and proofreading the text and code samples several times on each device. Instead of spending our time struggling with reformatting, we're choosing to focus on improving the technical material.

- Considering that we publicly offered a free electronic copy to those who requested it, seeing piracy of the electronic editions from the first day of sales has been disheartening. As indie authors, it hurts to see this happening.

They can't produce a digital edition without extra cost and it would be frustrating to make that investment only to see people immediately circulating copies. Yes, they'll loose readers, but they've estimated that is an acceptable trade off at this time.