Hacker News: rpmcmurphy

New comment by rpmcmurphy in "[dead]"

rpmcmurphy — Fri, 23 Aug 2019 15:14:37 +0000

My dad worked in a steel mill his entire life, and as a long term cancer survivor, would have been left for dead due to Koch's policies had they prevailed in his state of residence. He outlived him. Bye! (Nice to see that even if you have near infinite wealth, the grim reaper will still catch up with you).

New comment by rpmcmurphy in "8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service"

rpmcmurphy — Mon, 05 Aug 2019 19:01:21 +0000

Good riddance

New comment by rpmcmurphy in "Earnings Ceiling for Tech Professionals over 40"

rpmcmurphy — Mon, 24 Jun 2019 18:26:06 +0000

The bigger issue for us Olds is that we have serious financial and family responsibilities that make us highly undesirable employees in today's modern "I've got mine! Fuck you!" society.

Imagine that you have a close family member with Stage 4 cancer. Who wants to have you on their team? Nobody, that's who. And you better be living in a jurisdiction with solid legal protections, or they will fire you in a hot second.

That is a far greater concern than salary stagnation.

New comment by rpmcmurphy in "How Did WeWork’s Adam Neumann Build a $47B Company?"

rpmcmurphy — Tue, 11 Jun 2019 04:44:12 +0000

Ah, the magic of financial engineering. Mr. Neumann will cash out of his fictional decacorn in dribs and drabs and never have to work again. Everyone else will be left with a bit pile of shit (aka a commercial real estate venture that bet on ever upward growth and got ripped to shreds in the secular downturn).

New comment by rpmcmurphy in "Maker Faire halts operations and lays off all staff"

rpmcmurphy — Sat, 08 Jun 2019 03:32:16 +0000

This seems like a predictable outcome in a consumerist society driven by planned obsolescence and the need for infinite growth.

New comment by rpmcmurphy in "Similarities Between the Lion Air and Ethiopian 737 Max Crashes"

rpmcmurphy — Sun, 10 Mar 2019 20:51:56 +0000

Pilot here. I predict that airlines are going to soft ground the Max while this gets sorted out. They might not take them out of service completely, but would not surprise me a bit if they rely on other equipment where possible until this gets sorted out. Better to take a hit on increased fuel costs that risk the loss of an aircraft and all on board.

New comment by rpmcmurphy in "Yelp Fired Manager After He Didn't Take Calls, Check Email 24/7, Lawsuit Claims"

rpmcmurphy — Fri, 22 Feb 2019 15:10:30 +0000

I take the approach of telling people to call or text me if something is urgent (my number is in the company directory), because I likely won't notice an email quickly, and will ignore Slack/IM completely so soon as I walk out the door. The only time my phone buzzes is when something is actually on fire.

I remember previous jobs where late night emails demanding edits to someone's slide deck were routine (and anything is not urgent, it is editing some product manager's slide deck). That shit can wait until Monday, and if you are throwing it on me because you procrastinated, that's your problem.

New comment by rpmcmurphy in "Home-built 737 cockpit"

rpmcmurphy — Tue, 19 Feb 2019 05:07:54 +0000

Building the cockpit is fun, but you only have room for two. The next logical step is to buy interior panels and windows from a mothballed 737 (you can find them on eBay). I have been building out both the cockpit and front cabin (and passengers have a view out their windows). For my project I am putting more effort into the cabin, since it is for entertaining friends as much as it is a flight sim.

New comment by rpmcmurphy in "Reflecting on My Failure to Build a Billion-Dollar Company"

rpmcmurphy — Thu, 07 Feb 2019 16:47:29 +0000

Actually 20% per year would be great for most businesses, which just shows what an outlier VC backed businesses have become.

New comment by rpmcmurphy in "Google Tried to Patent My Work After a Job Interview"

rpmcmurphy — Fri, 30 Nov 2018 08:16:56 +0000

I was assigned as an inventor for a bullshit patent application our legal team did not even understand. I did everything I could to undermine it. The whole system is fucked and is all about who has more money for lawyers (who know fuck all about the matters at hand)

New comment by rpmcmurphy in "Carbon emissions from tourism are rising at an alarming rate"

rpmcmurphy — Tue, 08 May 2018 06:08:53 +0000

Maybe this is all not such a bad thing. The worst case scenario is a mass extinction that kills off large animals, clearing the way for whatever is next, not unlike the Cambrian explosion. We elected Donald J Trump. We (large animals at the top of the food chain) kind of deserve what's coming to us.

New comment by rpmcmurphy in "Theranos Lays Off Most of Its Remaining Workforce"

rpmcmurphy — Tue, 10 Apr 2018 21:47:34 +0000

But she wears a black turtleneck, just like Steve Jobs.

New comment by rpmcmurphy in "Grindr Shares Personal Information With Third-Parties"

rpmcmurphy — Tue, 03 Apr 2018 07:14:04 +0000

Somebody needs to write a Peter Thiel / Not Peter Thiel script, and cross reference the photos with his Friendster profile pic where he was shirtless on a boat advertising for twinks (pro tip for people who think he was outed by Gawker, he was one of the most obvious closet cases in San Francisco).

New comment by rpmcmurphy in "50M Facebook profiles harvested for Cambridge Analytica in major data breach"

rpmcmurphy — Sat, 17 Mar 2018 17:11:02 +0000

A substantial percentage of the US population installed that "cow clicker" app at some point, and who knows what data they harvested. Even if they did not access your full profile, they could probably learn a lot about you based on when and how often you were clicking on cows.

New comment by rpmcmurphy in "Like Peter Thiel, Tech Workers Feel Alienated by Silicon Valley ‘Echo Chamber’"

rpmcmurphy — Sun, 18 Feb 2018 19:23:42 +0000

Just a friendly reminder, Gawker did not out Thiel. He had a public profile on Friendster that clearly described him as interested in men. Gawker's editor at the time remarked that people like him thought the web was this super ultra secret bat cave, and that if you posted something there it wasn't really public.

New comment by rpmcmurphy in "What It Felt Like in Hawaii When Warning of an In-Bound Missile Arrived"

rpmcmurphy — Mon, 15 Jan 2018 10:46:14 +0000

This should give everyone serious pause. If this false alarm had been sent by NORAD (it has happened before, read Command and Control), it's very likely that several million people in both Koreas, Japan and possibly the US would be char-grilled nuclear krispies right now. There needs to be a serious re-evaluation of our alert systems and launch on warning posture.

New comment by rpmcmurphy in "The Worst Job in Technology: Staring at Human Depravity to Keep It Off Facebook"

rpmcmurphy — Sat, 30 Dec 2017 09:11:07 +0000

The internet really is an incredible cesspool. It would be interesting to see how the public reacted if YouTube and Facebook turned off their content moderation for a week. It would make the goatse meme look like a Sunday school picnic.

New comment by rpmcmurphy in "SoftBank Succeeds in Tender Offer for Large Stake in Uber"

rpmcmurphy — Thu, 28 Dec 2017 19:13:00 +0000

If you want a forecast of how ridesharing companies will settle out, tear the route map out of an inflight magazine. There is no global airline, but many regional airlines that provide international connectivity to other regional airlines.

It makes sense that each major region will have 2 or 3 dominant operators including local taxis. In the long term, a local operator will have advantages due to better local knowledge, government relations, etc.

Roaming agreements will take the equivalent of Star Alliance, and primarily of value for international travelers. Most users will interact with their preferred local operator. Note this has been tried already, but failed due to parties not trusting each other, but will probably be tried again once territories are more nailed down.

New comment by rpmcmurphy in "I Got Paid $0 from the Uber Security Bug Bounty"

rpmcmurphy — Sun, 24 Dec 2017 20:13:18 +0000

^^^ What he said. How about "eBay for car rides"

New comment by rpmcmurphy in "Why Don’t Americans Understand How Poor Their Lives Are?"

rpmcmurphy — Fri, 22 Dec 2017 19:12:22 +0000

The author's basic problem is he does not understand the United States is comprised of over 3,000 counties. The differences among them are vast, and most of the country is sparsely populated. To understand America, you'd have to spend time in places outside the big cities, like Appalachia, much like Great Britain is not just London.