Hacker News: feenix566

New comment by feenix566 in "Another death on trail to 'Magic Bus' from Into The Wild won't stop adventurers"

feenix566 — Tue, 30 Jul 2019 15:37:01 +0000

When McCandless began his journey he didn't know the bus was there. He just picked a random direction and started walking. If you're intentionally walking towards the bus, you're following his literal footsteps but you're not replicating the same conditions. If you wanted to really follow in his footsteps you should pick an equally random direction and start walking. Odds are you won't find a bus and no one will ever find your body.

New comment by feenix566 in "Another death on trail to 'Magic Bus' from Into The Wild won't stop adventurers"

feenix566 — Tue, 30 Jul 2019 15:29:51 +0000

Or they could just build a walking bridge over that river.

New comment by feenix566 in "Lambda School fined $75k by CA for operating without state approval [pdf]"

feenix566 — Tue, 30 Jul 2019 14:46:42 +0000

Instead of making everyone sign a stack of papers stating that their dog food doesn't contain human remains, the legislature could simply pass a law stating that you pay fines and/or go to jail if your dog food contains human remains. That way you avoid punishing people who act in good faith for the misdeeds of those who didn't.

New comment by feenix566 in "Magic: The Gathering is Turing Complete"

feenix566 — Tue, 07 May 2019 18:16:50 +0000

D&D has infinite cards.

New comment by feenix566 in "Amazon's warehouse worker tracking system can automatically fire people"

feenix566 — Fri, 26 Apr 2019 19:02:32 +0000

All they've really done here is automate their management. It's the next logical step. If you can automate the pickers with robots, and the managers' jobs can be replicated by an algorithm, why not automate the managers too?

If Bezos could find a way to automate himself, I'm pretty sure he would. And why not? He still owns the stock. Robot Bezos would do all the work and meaty Bezos would make all the money.

New comment by feenix566 in "How Apple, Google, and other tech companies conspired against their own workers"

feenix566 — Tue, 16 Apr 2019 13:03:31 +0000

> A corporation ... is a collection of incentives, with men inside directed or manipulated by those incentives ... "Finding more moral men" is not a plan.

I couldn't agree more, and that analysis applies to all systems of human interaction, not just corporations. I wish people would use that framework to understand everything, specifically government.

New comment by feenix566 in "How Apple, Google, and other tech companies conspired against their own workers"

feenix566 — Tue, 16 Apr 2019 12:57:43 +0000

Is there a law in California specifically prohibiting colluding with other employers? If there isn't, then you can't make the case they should have known they were breaking it.

New comment by feenix566 in "Jack Ma Again Endorses Extreme Overtime as Furor Rages On"

feenix566 — Mon, 15 Apr 2019 13:29:17 +0000

The most recent episode of the Motley Fool Money podcast featured an interview with David Kuo in which he said manufacturers are leaving China for other asian countries because wages in China are rising. Rising wages is typically correlated with falling unemployment, which forces employers to provide better working conditions. So I wouldn't be surprised if we started seeing Chinese tech workers moving to employers who treat them with more respect. That will be the end of 996.

New comment by feenix566 in "Why I Am Not an Austrian Economist"

feenix566 — Wed, 09 Jan 2019 14:37:57 +0000

Imagine you're the President and the economy just collapsed. You have two economists in your office offering advice. One tells you to spend a lot of money and go into debt to get the economy working again and the other tells you to cut back on spending and otherwise do nothing. Which one are you going to listen to? Obviously the first one's advice would be a lot more popular than the second.

If we begin with the assumption that politicians are selfless servants of the people who only want to do what's best for society at large in the long run, then you would conclude that politicians will carefully examine the theories and methods of the two economists' schools of thought. If we begin with the assumption that everyone, including politicians, is primarily self-interested, then you would conclude that a politician would just do what's popular with no regard for how the two economists arrived at their advice.

I believe people are primarily self-interested. From that perspective none of this discussion about economic theories matters because politicians are just going to do what's popular anyway.

The proposition that people are primarily self-interested is therefore in my opinion the only idea of value that's come out of the study of economics, which is the study of human behavior after all.

New comment by feenix566 in "Samsung Phone Users Perturbed to Find They Can't Delete Facebook"

feenix566 — Wed, 09 Jan 2019 13:57:27 +0000

Most people don't care. The money Samsung is getting from Facebook to pre-install the app is worth more to them than the goodwill they're losing from the minority of users who do care.

New comment by feenix566 in "What’s the rush? The power of a slow morning"

feenix566 — Tue, 08 Jan 2019 19:26:35 +0000

Yeah, and if you use your will power before work, you run out of it earlier in the work day and you get less done at work.

New comment by feenix566 in "Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub"

feenix566 — Mon, 04 Jun 2018 14:02:52 +0000

Not many people use git without Github though, whether it's Github proper or a local installation of Github Enterprise. It's pretty tough to do code reviews without it. There are tools out there to do it, but Github is the standard.

New comment by feenix566 in "The reason Facebook won’t ever change"

feenix566 — Thu, 22 Feb 2018 21:20:48 +0000

Facebook uses all this data to show you ads for things you might want to buy. Wouldn't you rather see that than ads for things you don't want to buy?

I occasionally watch the evening news and I am sick and tired of ads for drugs for old people. I'm not old and I don't need drugs. But the television stations can't target their ads at specific viewers (yet) so they target them at demographics. And old people tend to watch the evening news more than other demographics so that's what they show.

People act like Facebook (and every other company) is gathering data about people for some sort of nefarious plan for world domination. But all they're doing is improving the quality of connections between people making things (advertisers) and people who might want those things (consumers). Is that really so terrible?