Hacker News: Frondo

New comment by Frondo in "Ord Phone"

Frondo — Mon, 17 Jul 2023 03:19:57 +0000

This should be the top comment.

New comment by Frondo in "First U.S. ban on sale of cellphone location data might be coming"

Frondo — Tue, 11 Jul 2023 03:52:37 +0000

Encryption will not keep you hidden from an authoritarian government for long, and certainly not for long if you're trying to build a movement with any sort of wide-spread support.

New comment by Frondo in "Ask HN: Stripe is holding 50% for 9 month"

Frondo — Tue, 11 Jul 2023 01:39:12 +0000

Sunlight only works reasonably well for waterborne pathogens, and only when you've got time.

As with disinfecting anything, and especially for societal issues, we need more than sunlight alone.

New comment by Frondo in "First U.S. ban on sale of cellphone location data might be coming"

Frondo — Mon, 10 Jul 2023 22:31:32 +0000

Life in an authoritarian hellhole almost by definition means technology won't save you. If they can haul you off when you're walking down the street, who cares whether your stuff is encrypted? They'll make something up.

Even if you're innocent, they'll make something up. I lived for a year in one of those authoritarian hellholes and in that time knew two people who were arrested and hauled from station to station til someone paid a bribe- these weren't the dissidents either, just some guys. The dissident was stabbed to death on his doorstep.

Encryption is good to save us from marketing, from megacorps making our lives hell. Laws and norms constrain the rest.

New comment by Frondo in "Thunderbird 115"

Frondo — Mon, 10 Jul 2023 13:22:54 +0000

> Most users don't care about the alignment and spacing and so on in isolation, but they do get a sense of quality from the overall impact. This stuff really matters in aggregate.

Red Letter Media has a great phrase that rolls around in my head to describe situations like this (they use it for media analysis), "You might not recognize it, but your brain did."

Where you might not be able to point to a problem, but you instinctively know something is off.

New comment by Frondo in "Stanford Graduate Students Won Their Union Vote"

Frondo — Fri, 07 Jul 2023 01:48:48 +0000

Organizing and demanding pay collectively seems to help in negotiations, so good for them for taking this approach. It's not like Stanford can move its grad programs to Mexico like a US car maker and its factories.

New comment by Frondo in "Stanford Graduate Students Won Their Union Vote"

Frondo — Fri, 07 Jul 2023 01:42:55 +0000

Democracy isn't perfect, but checking out is the quickest route to ensuring your interests are only minimally represented. True at all levels of democratic organization.

New comment by Frondo in "Hunting for Nginx alias traversals in the wild"

Frondo — Tue, 04 Jul 2023 03:13:41 +0000

I don't think you'd find a single woodworker anywhere who, if they could afford it, wouldn't prefer a table saw with Sawstop. How much are your fingers worth to you?

New comment by Frondo in "Twitter Is DDOSing Itself"

Frondo — Sun, 02 Jul 2023 19:27:06 +0000

Or as the great Stafford Beer put it, the purpose of a system is what it does.

New comment by Frondo in "Pixel fucked: Inside Hollywood's VFX crisis"

Frondo — Thu, 29 Jun 2023 01:46:30 +0000

I would rather businesses take a hit on efficiency and have our 15-hour work weeks. Maybe that'd provide an incentive for businesses to pursue making project management and hand-off among staff more efficient.

New comment by Frondo in "The Federated App Problem"

Frondo — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 05:50:35 +0000

I'm not being snarky--in the context of people wanting a place to make jokes and have fun with their friends, how is that a problem?

New comment by Frondo in "The Federated App Problem"

Frondo — Tue, 20 Jun 2023 07:00:25 +0000

There seems to be an assumption in your writing that people should use social media to challenge themselves, be exposed to different views, to "discourse" and so on. Nearly everyone I know via social media wants to hang out with their friends, not debate people. Whether something is an echo chamber is sort of beside their goal, they want to have fun.

If one seeks out something that explicitly isn't an echo chamber, I'm sure there are many places for that. I'm just not seeing that as, really, at all desirable for a lot of people.

New comment by Frondo in "Open source hospital price database"

Frondo — Thu, 15 Jun 2023 00:57:52 +0000

As someone who just tried to schedule an appointment with a new PCP and being told my first available appointment would be in August, I'm not at all sold on the idea that long queues are unique to public health care systems.

I'm not sure what kind of health insurance I could buy in the US that would give me short queues. Lower deductible, more ancillary services, sure, but what's the plan that says "no more than a week to schedule any kind of appointment you need"?

New comment by Frondo in "Pro-cash movement warns that people could be losing more than they bargained for"

Frondo — Mon, 29 May 2023 19:23:10 +0000

As for can't be tracked, does anyone else remember that website you used to see stamped on dollar bills, WheresGeorge.com? Early internet goofiness, crowd-sourced tracking of cash.

New comment by Frondo in "Amazon corporate workers plan walkout next week over return-to-office policies"

Frondo — Wed, 24 May 2023 06:00:25 +0000

> people need to roll up their sleeves and do legit work.

I don't like this kind of Calvinist attitude toward work. Increasing productivity via technological advancement should free us all up to do more of what we want.

New comment by Frondo in "The end of the accounting search"

Frondo — Mon, 22 May 2023 05:49:01 +0000

Very true and well said!

New comment by Frondo in "The end of the accounting search"

Frondo — Sun, 21 May 2023 18:37:45 +0000

My sister is an accountant and she genuinely enjoys working with the numbers. She finds it, not exactly fun, but kind of fun? She describes it like every situation is a puzzle she gets to solve, and then maintain. She also likes working with her customers and enjoys those interactions, like she gets a good feeling from helping her customers out. That's enough for her.

Not the vocation for me but it's very interesting to talk with her about her experiences, because they're so remote from mine...

New comment by Frondo in "IRS files $44B claims against bankrupt FTX"

Frondo — Fri, 12 May 2023 19:33:12 +0000

Actually, threatening physical harm to a con man has a long and storied tradition in this country; but more than that if SBF had mugged this guy I don't think anyone would call a physical response a bad thing, but because he mugged him with words you're going to posture about this is "just not ok"? Come on.

New comment by Frondo in "Google contractors vote to unionize in historic landslide election"

Frondo — Thu, 27 Apr 2023 04:19:24 +0000

Yeah, I guess things might have been different then. I was 3 at that time, and in doing occasional trade shows for the last 7 or 8 years (so, from mid 2010s on), I've just never experienced it; not in Seattle, San Diego, Baltimore, nor a handful of smaller cities in NY and DE.

Maybe the world has changed in the last 42 years, and it'd be helpful to qualify stories like these (where the original poster says he is not allowed, present tense) with where and when they've happened.

New comment by Frondo in "Google contractors vote to unionize in historic landslide election"

Frondo — Thu, 27 Apr 2023 02:56:14 +0000

I've done about a dozen trade shows and have done both of those things, from personal experience. (This anecdote comes up frequently in these discussions and I always wonder where from, because it's not anything like I've seen...)