Hacker News: hackissimo123

New comment by hackissimo123 in "How Tim Cook transformed Apple after Steve Jobs"

hackissimo123 — Tue, 16 Feb 2021 20:30:11 +0000

Vietnam might not be as bad as China but it still doesn't exactly have a stellar human rights record.

New comment by hackissimo123 in "California Exit Interview: Fleeing $17 salads and 'general lawlessness'"

hackissimo123 — Tue, 16 Feb 2021 12:20:45 +0000

Get outside of central London (and possibly some other big cities like Birmingham? I don't know, I never go there) and you'll never see armed police anywhere. I grew up in a small British town in the Southeast and I can't think of a single time in my entire childhood that I saw a police officer with a gun (or for that matter, anyone else with a gun) anywhere near my hometown, except perhaps for my rare visits to touristic hotspots in London. And again, it's only in central London, at least as far as I can tell. I live in non-central London now (Zone 3) and I never see armed police anywhere near where I live. Come to think of it, I rarely see any police at all around here, at least not on foot.

I can remember going on holiday to France as a kid and being unable to take my eyes off the guns I saw on the hips of French police, because it was such an unusual sight for someone born and raised in middle England.

I think in the UK we're so used to the idea of unarmed police that we forget how astonishingly unusual it is. In most countries the idea of unarmed police is unimaginable. We've really achieved something special by managing it, at least in most parts of the country most of the time.

New comment by hackissimo123 in "U.K. and Ireland Celebrate 50 Years Since 'Decimal Day'"

hackissimo123 — Tue, 16 Feb 2021 08:22:03 +0000

Reminds me of Sweden's famous "H day": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dagen_H

New comment by hackissimo123 in "How Tim Cook transformed Apple after Steve Jobs"

hackissimo123 — Tue, 16 Feb 2021 08:19:03 +0000

Does it make sense to compare an iPhone to "the average Android"? iPhones are a premium product; they're not available in the wide range of prices and qualities that Androids are. People who buy iPhones are the type of people who, if they bought an Android, would most likely buy a top-of-the-line Android at a high price. Those are the Androids we should be comparing iPhones to.

New comment by hackissimo123 in "How Tim Cook transformed Apple after Steve Jobs"

hackissimo123 — Tue, 16 Feb 2021 08:16:27 +0000

I find it hard to believe that people are choosing Apple products over competitors because of anything to do with "racial equality". Especially since most of the components are manufactured in China, therefore by buying an Apple product (or basically any other piece of modern consumer electronics), you're helping to fund a racist ethnostate that's currently committing genocide.

What has Apple done to promote racial equality beyond the same vague performative gestures as every other major Western corporation?

New comment by hackissimo123 in "California Exit Interview: Fleeing $17 salads and 'general lawlessness'"

hackissimo123 — Tue, 16 Feb 2021 08:08:56 +0000

I think his point is "Democrats bad!" or possibly just "lefties bad!"

New comment by hackissimo123 in "California Exit Interview: Fleeing $17 salads and 'general lawlessness'"

hackissimo123 — Tue, 16 Feb 2021 08:07:44 +0000

> Last year's fires were truly an aberration.

And, as climate change continues to get worse, they'll eventually be seen as unremarkable.

New comment by hackissimo123 in "California Exit Interview: Fleeing $17 salads and 'general lawlessness'"

hackissimo123 — Tue, 16 Feb 2021 08:02:19 +0000

> Pulling a gun is one thing, actually threatening to use it is another. It’s a difference in how police are in the US vs UK.

Well the most salient difference is that UK police don't carry guns at all.

New comment by hackissimo123 in "“Location-Based Pay” – Who are we to complain?"

hackissimo123 — Sun, 14 Feb 2021 15:08:26 +0000

London also has excellent public transport. (Some Londoners might disagree, but have they ever travelled? I've never been to any other large city where it was easier to get around by train and bus.) It's very easy to live in London without needing a car, which brings the cost of living down substantially.

New comment by hackissimo123 in "“Location-Based Pay” – Who are we to complain?"

hackissimo123 — Sun, 14 Feb 2021 14:39:50 +0000

If you're going to lie, make you sure you fake the timezone in your git commit timestamps.

New comment by hackissimo123 in "“Location-Based Pay” – Who are we to complain?"

hackissimo123 — Sun, 14 Feb 2021 14:37:15 +0000

> London is easily as expensive, if not moreso than San Francisco.

As a Londoner, I find that hard to believe. London is a huge, diverse city with many industries other than tech, and the vast majority of London's population don't make anything close to an SF tech salary. If London was as expensive as SF then I know I wouldn't be able to afford to live here.

New comment by hackissimo123 in "“Location-Based Pay” – Who are we to complain?"

hackissimo123 — Sun, 14 Feb 2021 14:32:07 +0000

That doesn't contradict what I said. "Remote-first" was more common in my experience too than "100% remote".

New comment by hackissimo123 in "Cancel The New York Times"

hackissimo123 — Sun, 14 Feb 2021 14:30:06 +0000

Don't forget this, also within the last week:

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/ayaan-hirsi-ali-and-the-...

And that's just recent events, without getting into the disgrace that was the 1619 Project.

New comment by hackissimo123 in "“Location-Based Pay” – Who are we to complain?"

hackissimo123 — Sun, 14 Feb 2021 13:10:18 +0000

I'm applying to jobs now (in the UK) and I'm yet to speak to a single company that plans on a full return to the pre-pandemic normal. Everyone is either staying 100% remote indefinitely, or they're hoping to adopt a hybrid approach like what you describe.

It's a bad time to own city-centre commercial real estate.

New comment by hackissimo123 in "Short fat engineers are undervalued"

hackissimo123 — Sun, 14 Feb 2021 13:08:30 +0000

Previously: Rails. New job: Elixir.

New comment by hackissimo123 in "“Location-Based Pay” – Who are we to complain?"

hackissimo123 — Sun, 14 Feb 2021 12:57:45 +0000

I can't find it now but I read an article once with a title like "The $10,000 Shirt" or something like that, which argued that in medieval times, the amount of labour that it took to produce a single shirt would cost about $10,000 at modern minimum wage.

If you were a peasant back then you might have owned two shirts: your regular one that you wore every day, and a 'fancy' one for church, weddings etc.. When your shirt got too ragged you cut it up and tailored it into clothes for your children, or used the material to patch up holes in other clothing. When even those got too decrepit you'd use them as kitchen rags etc. until they literally disintegrated. Cloth was too valuable to waste!

We truly do live in a world of abundant excess in the modern era, and we should appreciate it.

New comment by hackissimo123 in "Short fat engineers are undervalued"

hackissimo123 — Sat, 13 Feb 2021 10:42:22 +0000

I'm in the opposite position; I've spent almost my entire five-year career focusing on one quite narrow tech stack and I'm good at it but I'm also sick of it and desperate to learn something new. I just changed jobs and I took a substantial pay cut for the chance to get professional experience in a new tech stack, which isn't ideal, but I really want to work with a new language and I don't know what else to do (there was no possibility of diversifying at my previous position.)

My point is that both the "short and fat" and "spikey" approaches have their pros and cons.

New comment by hackissimo123 in "Killer Whales: 'Transient' Orcas Are Thriving"

hackissimo123 — Sat, 13 Feb 2021 10:02:44 +0000

Sharks rarely attack humans too, despite the popularity of Jaws. I was always taught that sharks generally only bother to attack humans when they mistake us for another animal.

New comment by hackissimo123 in "How to Revive a Dead Language"

hackissimo123 — Sat, 13 Feb 2021 09:58:25 +0000

To add to this, "endangered" languages aren't necessarily those with few speakers, and languages with few speakers aren't necessarily endangered. What matters is how many children are being raised to speak the language; some languages are rare but are in no danger of dying out (at least not within the next generation) while others are more common but the speakers are disproportionately old and few children are learning it.

I don't know much about Yiddish but I believe it's in the former category. Yiddish was by far the most common language among Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust; there are still fewer than 10% as many Yiddish speakers in the world today as there were in 1930. But according to Wikipedia "the number of Yiddish-speakers is increasing in Hasidic communities."

New comment by hackissimo123 in "MasterCard to open up network to cryptocurrencies"

hackissimo123 — Thu, 11 Feb 2021 17:10:29 +0000

Is that the case in the whole EU? Because my AmEx gives me 1% cashback here in the UK, and that's been true since long before Brexit.