Hacker News: realcertify

New comment by realcertify in "Physical cash is dying–and you don't need to be a conspiracist to worry"

realcertify — Sat, 03 Feb 2024 16:04:32 +0000

The current trend is to move from cash to electronic money controlled by the banks. Previously the money deposited to a bank account was the clients money that the bank just kept. Now it's the banks money that can be frozen by any reason and it's the client's responsibility to prove his innocence.

Next step is a blockchain-based crypto, controlled only by a single structure, such as Fed. Total control directly by the government, no banks involved. Full access to the history of all purchases and means to immediately lock out anyone who does anything "wrong".

Personally I'm going to move out of the country as soon as it forbids the cash transactions, as I don't want my kids to be slaves to the government.

New comment by realcertify in "Air travel is not ready for electronic warfare"

realcertify — Thu, 11 Jan 2024 05:05:41 +0000

My phone is supposed to support GPS, Glonass, Beidou and Galileo, so apparently all of them were jammed.

New comment by realcertify in "Air travel is not ready for electronic warfare"

realcertify — Thu, 11 Jan 2024 04:44:08 +0000

For the past 10 years I've been travelling to Russia occasionally. Normally during a flight I like opening up my GPS app to check the location, altitude and speed of the aicraft.

About a year ago I noticed that shortly after crossing Russias border the GPS stopped working. Initially I thought it was a glitch, but after a few flights it became obvious that something was going on, probably the signal was baing jammed.

Interesting that close to landing when the altitude is lower than 200m, the signal is restored.

It's unclear to me how the plane is navigating though if the GPS is jammed. Very weird...

New comment by realcertify in "Compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT"

realcertify — Sun, 31 Dec 2023 05:40:19 +0000

You must be kidding, Google is becoming worse every day. Still better than useless Bing though.

New comment by realcertify in "Why banks are suddenly closing down customer accounts"

realcertify — Mon, 06 Nov 2023 10:44:28 +0000

Wow, that's so terrible! Cashless society is a real threat.

New comment by realcertify in "X says it is worth $19B, down from $44B last year"

realcertify — Tue, 31 Oct 2023 00:27:39 +0000

"Destruction of value" assumes that Elon paid what Twitter was worth back then, which is not necessarily true.

New comment by realcertify in "Leveling up in job interviews for software engineers (2022)"

realcertify — Sat, 01 Jul 2023 21:00:55 +0000

2 hours slot was allocated for that task. There was an API that I had to use to perform some operations and that made the task easier, as there was no need to study the entire code. C was used as the programming language, with a few thousands lines of code total. I completed the task in 2 hours successfully. I liked the fact that this method required zero preparations from the candidates side, and tested the actual abilities to code, as opposed to solving abstract problems.

New comment by realcertify in "Leveling up in job interviews for software engineers (2022)"

realcertify — Sat, 01 Jul 2023 12:33:10 +0000

The best interview that I ever experienced was when I applied for a Software Engineer position at VMware. The interviewers brought a laptop with an IDE and a project with a bunch of source code (based on one of their real in-house projects), and the task was to understand the exising code base and add a few new features to it. A real everyday task, no crazy algorithms or other menthal gymnastics.

New comment by realcertify in "The Casino-Chip Society"

realcertify — Thu, 01 Dec 2022 11:44:31 +0000

Recently I opened an IRA account at Fidelity. I had my 401k with them for more than a decade. Soon after I opened it they locked my account demanding ID and papers proving my residential address. I'm not sure what else they may request, but fact is I can't use my hard earned funds at this moment.

I experienced similar locks at a bunch of other websites. It looks to be a norm nowadays to randomly lock accounts. Now if similar things start to happen to bank accounts and retirement funds it's easy to understand that it will ruin people's lifes.

Bottom line is - we shouldn't fully rely on electronic money. I will do everything to avoid living in a cashless society.

New comment by realcertify in "Debugging bare-metal STM32 from the seventh level of hell"

realcertify — Mon, 08 Aug 2022 05:34:39 +0000

There's plenty of STM32 of any flavor in China. Alibaba is a good source. There may be fakes though, but reputable resellers (pay attention to reviews and tenure) normally sell genuine chips.

New comment by realcertify in "Half of Americans anticipate a U.S. civil war soon"

realcertify — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 20:23:43 +0000

Absolutely agree. The amount of hate increased significantly over the last few decades. A lot of people became absolutely intolerant to other's views. Many of my friends stopped talking about politics, because it quickly becomes drama. I don't remember society being so divided before. This is very concerning.

New comment by realcertify in "Russian gas flows to Europe"

realcertify — Sun, 10 Jul 2022 21:37:56 +0000

Absolutely agree. And one more thing that looked incomprehensible just a short while ago was that Russia could completely shut down the gas flow to Europe (Russia needs money for the war in the end, so why would it do it?). However it seems quite a possible scenario as of now. Stakes became quite high, and unfortunately very little (if any) work is carried to stop the conflict and start negotiations.

New comment by realcertify in "Theranos former president found guilty on all fraud counts"

realcertify — Fri, 08 Jul 2022 08:03:52 +0000

Adjusting your attitude to stop telling people to adjust their attitude might actually result in a much healthier atmosphere, not the woke madness we see now.

New comment by realcertify in "Former Apple exec who enforced insider trading rules admits to insider trading"

realcertify — Fri, 01 Jul 2022 08:04:40 +0000

This adresses the problem partially. The insider often doesn't trade the stocks of their corporation, instead they tip others to trade it. There are networks of C-execs constantly tipping each other.

New comment by realcertify in "Keysight UXR 110GHz Oscilloscope Teardown [video] (2018)"

realcertify — Sat, 18 Jun 2022 05:03:24 +0000

You don't need to be into electronics to appreciate the beauty of such high-end devices. Overall the teardown videos of this Youtube channel are amazing.

New comment by realcertify in "US quietly urges more use of Russia fertilizer to ease food crisis"

realcertify — Tue, 14 Jun 2022 20:03:51 +0000

Bad diplomacy in recent times has the same roots - a lot of people stopped accepting balanced views. They think that solely their own opinion is correct, and they start calling names (racist, sexist, troll, etc), downvoting whenever someone expresses a different point of view. Being good diplomat requires very mature and balanced behavior, which a lot of modern politicians lack.

New comment by realcertify in "US quietly urges more use of Russia fertilizer to ease food crisis"

realcertify — Tue, 14 Jun 2022 19:04:43 +0000

Absolutely agree. Moreover, it's the diplomatic incompetence on both sides that led to this war, which in my opinion could be easily avoided.

New comment by realcertify in "US quietly urges more use of Russia fertilizer to ease food crisis"

realcertify — Tue, 14 Jun 2022 18:54:16 +0000

Total number of howitzers, MLRS etc across all NATO countries combined is in the same range as what Russia posesses. So that is not going to end the war, just more people will die. This is not a soccer game.

New comment by realcertify in "Americans are poorly served by their grocery stores"

realcertify — Sat, 04 Jun 2022 03:14:01 +0000

Yes, but the taste of the veggies, fruits, berries and meat is far worse in supermarkets vs buying directly from growers / butchers.

New comment by realcertify in "What science says: Could humans survive a nuclear war between NATO and Russia?"

realcertify — Sun, 10 Apr 2022 16:51:02 +0000

To me the most worrying is the number of articles with opposite point of view popping up recently stating that the nuclear exchange wouldn't result in anything catastrophic. Like someone said here in the comments "just sit in a basement for a week and all would be well". Heck there's even no basements here in Bay Area, but I doubt that would help. I'm concerned that such point of view if getting more popular could result in much higher chance of a nuclear war eventually.