Hacker News: WilliamEdward

New comment by WilliamEdward in "Google deletes “communist bandits” from comments on Youtube"

WilliamEdward — Mon, 18 May 2020 16:50:18 +0000

Not even the most anti-china, anti-communist person in the world operating on half a brain cell would call china communist. How are you buying things from china with capital if they're communist?

New comment by WilliamEdward in "Google deletes “communist bandits” from comments on Youtube"

WilliamEdward — Mon, 18 May 2020 16:44:40 +0000

You won't ever see a youtube competitor. Youtube is running with google's proprietary search engine and has a decade and a half of content a competitor simply wont have. It will always be better than its competitors and some nonsense ban on a word won't stop anyone except 10 or 11 people on hackernews.

New comment by WilliamEdward in "Ask HN: Is there still a place for native desktop apps?"

WilliamEdward — Sun, 17 May 2020 20:37:19 +0000

It was the ambiguity of the word 'web' that tripped me up. You still need a network of computers for email to be useful.

New comment by WilliamEdward in "Ask HN: Is there still a place for native desktop apps?"

WilliamEdward — Sun, 17 May 2020 18:00:58 +0000

Achievement is a big word here. They had to shove it down people's throats with a bloated, buggy, and expensive app suite.

New comment by WilliamEdward in "Ask HN: Is there still a place for native desktop apps?"

WilliamEdward — Sun, 17 May 2020 18:00:02 +0000

Email doesn't naturally involve the web? What?

New comment by WilliamEdward in "Amazon is handing out 'Thank you' t-shirts to warehouse workers as it cuts pay"

WilliamEdward — Sun, 17 May 2020 17:45:18 +0000

If your execs earn a billion dollars a year collectively, and you have 200000 employees, you can distribute 2500 dollars to them all and the execs would still earn more than the low wage workers. So if simple arithmetic is your thing, there you go.

Amazon has around 570000 employees, and 22 executives. One of those executives actually earns a lot more than 1 billion dollars. Nevertheless, with just 2 billion dollars you can give a decent pay raise to every single one of those employees. Some don't need it as much as others, but whatever.

New comment by WilliamEdward in "Amazon is handing out 'Thank you' t-shirts to warehouse workers as it cuts pay"

WilliamEdward — Sat, 16 May 2020 09:54:26 +0000

It is ridiculous that you've boiled it down to those two options. The 3rd is cutting executive salary and paying low wage workers. Also amazon is not cheap compared to my local competitor and aliexpress, people buy from amazon because of convenience.

And amazon makes profit on non-AWS products as well, don't be silly. I can literally google their financial statements to prove this.

New comment by WilliamEdward in "Coronavirus Is Making Universal Basic Income Look Better"

WilliamEdward — Sat, 16 May 2020 08:58:48 +0000

You realise in this case the money is coming from existing taxes being used on stuff like military anyway? These are also incredibly rich nations with reserves of money that were produced sometimes centuries ago. No one thinks it's coming from thin air.

New comment by WilliamEdward in "Coronavirus Is Making Universal Basic Income Look Better"

WilliamEdward — Sat, 16 May 2020 08:40:51 +0000

This is so vacuous. Does it imply that UBI money is coming from thin air? That's obviously false.

Also the article says a type of UBI is being used to stimulate job creation and work for industries that are rapidly losing in these areas. This is literally on par with what Elon said, how could it be a counter argument?

This is the rare Elon quote where I don't even have to attack his behaviour to discredit. It's just not applicable in this context as a counterpoint.

New comment by WilliamEdward in "Five Years of Rust"

WilliamEdward — Fri, 15 May 2020 12:52:38 +0000

Plenty of big name companies (discord, amazon) and even universities (georgia tech) are using and teaching rust. That's enough for me to say you should jump on the train.

New comment by WilliamEdward in "Next dream job can be in an HTTP header"

WilliamEdward — Fri, 15 May 2020 07:11:30 +0000

It didn't have any value to begin with, honestly. Websites have the exact same message in their code simply by inspecting source or opening a console, and that certainly doesn't show you have any sort of skill or curiosity.

It's not like the sites are offering you a job, they're saying you should interview with them. I have not heard of anyone getting hired because of this.

New comment by WilliamEdward in "Senate narrowly rejects plan to require a warrant for Americans’ browsing data"

WilliamEdward — Thu, 14 May 2020 09:08:27 +0000

It's a pandemic, and as far as i remember they didn't finalise a rule to allow senators to vote remotely[1]. I don't know if this is why Bernie missed it, but 3 other senators besides him missed it too.

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/techtank/2020/05/12/congress-...

New comment by WilliamEdward in "The modern HTTPS world has no place for old web servers"

WilliamEdward — Wed, 13 May 2020 10:51:14 +0000

I like that HTTPS forces you to actually care about improving and maintaining your website. Somehow, leaving your site alone forever to gather dust is considered a good thing. The author totally missed that one.

Yes, some sites serve basic content that can stay up forever without change (thistothat.com comes to mind as a good example) but it really doesn't hurt to force people to put a little bit more care into their sites.

New comment by WilliamEdward in "The modern HTTPS world has no place for old web servers"

WilliamEdward — Wed, 13 May 2020 10:46:29 +0000

Users are all about privacy and security until they realise they have to actually maintain their websites to achieve it, then it becomes an unnecessary chore.

New comment by WilliamEdward in "The modern HTTPS world has no place for old web servers"

WilliamEdward — Wed, 13 May 2020 10:37:26 +0000

Yes, making websites secure requires work and maintenance and modernisation. The author even admits this. I think i'm ok with what's being lost in this transition.

New comment by WilliamEdward in "Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever"

WilliamEdward — Tue, 12 May 2020 18:02:20 +0000

This is essentially the same as saying "the sky is blue because it just is"

New comment by WilliamEdward in "The most prized degree in India became the most worthless"

WilliamEdward — Tue, 12 May 2020 16:12:21 +0000

I think you're right, it just feels a little wrong to claim a title so easily when others work hard in a specific practise to earn it and have standards designated by law for it.

New comment by WilliamEdward in "The most prized degree in India became the most worthless"

WilliamEdward — Tue, 12 May 2020 16:09:03 +0000

I was going to say the solution is to raise the bar for software engineers, but it seems the problem here is the culture around prestige and money which has prompted millions of people to go after programming careers. It's not easy to change culture.

Still I think there should be some needed post-grad accreditation for software engineers if they want to actually be called engineers.

New comment by WilliamEdward in "[dead]"

WilliamEdward — Sun, 10 May 2020 12:25:22 +0000

This is clickbait and will lead to a flamewar.

New comment by WilliamEdward in "AWS services to avoid"

WilliamEdward — Sun, 10 May 2020 11:34:14 +0000

I know it still makes sense but 'amazon web services services' is funny