Hacker News: 781

New comment by 781 in "Hacking My Mother’s Phone to Save Her Memories"

781 — Tue, 11 Jun 2019 19:16:03 +0000

> But also imagine all the wannabe journalists that would just do character assassinations on long-dead people revered as heroes

That's an easy one. Pretty much anyone of notice living today will be labeled a "savage meat eater" and canceled. They will say "many people were already vegan, why was he/she still eating meat? Clearly a monster. Cancel"

New comment by 781 in "US Customs Database Of Traveler Photos Was Hacked And Stolen"

781 — Mon, 10 Jun 2019 21:31:53 +0000

> In the private sector, they'd have been fired and probably legal action levelled against them

Tell me again one meaningful action against a data leak in the private sector. I'll wait.

New comment by 781 in "Plot to steal cryptocurrency foiled by NPM"

781 — Sun, 09 Jun 2019 00:22:44 +0000

This is a losing game (think halting problem). This exact scenario was played by antivirus software versus malware in the 90s/00s. The antivirus was trying to figure out if the binary did something like modify a file on disk, while the virus was trying to obfuscate that or find innovative ways of doing it.

A isolation/capability solution is the only one that could work, leftpad shouldn't have access to anything but basic CPU compute.

New comment by 781 in "Gaudí’s Sagrada Familia gets building permit after 137 years"

781 — Sun, 09 Jun 2019 00:14:09 +0000

And look at that height... This would never be approved in SF, ruins the local character.

New comment by 781 in "Singular “they” and the many reasons why it’s correct (2009)"

781 — Fri, 07 Jun 2019 22:15:13 +0000

They is overwhelmingly used for plural. See how the wikipedia article starts:

> They is the third-person plural personal pronoun (subjective case) in Modern English.

And only after that:

> Although still controversial,[citation needed] and not officially accepted in formal context,[citation needed] it is also used with singular meaning, sometimes to avoid specifying the gender of the person referred to: see gender neutrality in language.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They

New comment by 781 in "Book subtitles are getting longer because of SEO"

781 — Fri, 07 Jun 2019 18:12:58 +0000

SEO is one reason, but the reduced attention span of today's people surely is another. People just won't bother figuring out what a "mystery title" book is about.

New comment by 781 in "Putin’s Media Struggle to Deal with HBO’s Chernobyl"

781 — Fri, 07 Jun 2019 14:44:33 +0000

This is one thing that worried me during the Fukushima disaster, they were quite concerned about the safety of the responders and many things were delayed until they could figure out a way to do them safely.

If things deteriorated even further, a mega-disaster couldn't have been averted since the Japanese wouldn't have sent people to die to do what had to be done.

New comment by 781 in "Robo-reporter writes front-page news"

781 — Fri, 07 Jun 2019 00:18:45 +0000

Gives a new sense to "fake news"

Now we need a robo-reader who reverses the article back into the source data.

New comment by 781 in "New Evidence Suggests Satoshi Nakamoto Is Paul Le Roux"

781 — Thu, 06 Jun 2019 18:37:43 +0000

Well, none of his code is public. Furthermore, on his blog he wrote about a lot of topics - economics, history, politics, crypto contracts, but not even once about a programming topic.

New comment by 781 in "New Evidence Suggests Satoshi Nakamoto Is Paul Le Roux"

781 — Thu, 06 Jun 2019 18:26:12 +0000

The problem with Szabo is that nobody was able to locate any sort of code written by Szabo - ie, he doesn't seem to know how to program and the first version of Bitcoin is way beyond noob-level - crypto, GUI, distributed networking, ...

New comment by 781 in "Tokyo mechanical keyboard meetup photos"

781 — Thu, 06 Jun 2019 13:09:01 +0000

I worked at a software company where you were not officially allowed to bring your own keyboard/mouse, but the unofficial policy was that they would look the other way. However they would not support you or help you install it - that was much harder than it sounds, it took me 20 minutes to route the cable.

New comment by 781 in "The Forecaster: The Man Who Decided D-Day"

781 — Wed, 05 Jun 2019 18:29:37 +0000

Short reenactment of the final decision to postpone for one day this at today's ceremonies:

https://youtu.be/mSL9NJ8WJMM?t=3808

New comment by 781 in "Plausible Deniability and Gaslighting in Fighting Ad Blockers"

781 — Wed, 05 Jun 2019 13:23:48 +0000

This is truly one of the best long-cons in the tech industry history. Invest 10 years into creating a browser and get the whole industry and it's developers to love it, push it and develop solely for it, so that you can reap the benefits now. They learned from the best - Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. Even as recently as last year, saying that Google would eventually abuse Chrome market dominance would got heavy downvotes here.

New comment by 781 in "Apple's Audacity"

781 — Tue, 04 Jun 2019 18:08:46 +0000

With everybody now having an iPhone and Macbook, they don't feel that exclusive anymore. So they need to up the game, to show they are still a luxury product.

A $50k computer is certainly a good start from this point of view, Apple needs to reassert itself as a status symbol. They need to get the word out far and wide that they are selling a computer with the price of a good car.

New comment by 781 in "New Mac Pro"

781 — Mon, 03 Jun 2019 21:03:28 +0000

Does it have RGB? For that price it better have one RGB led in each of those holes.

New comment by 781 in "Boeing Built Deadly Assumptions into 737 Max, Blind to a Late Design Change"

781 — Sun, 02 Jun 2019 11:42:32 +0000

If it only were that simple. Airbus in particular has a lot of systems which PREVENT the human from doing things.

One plane actually crashed because the prevention system disabled itself and the pilots believed it was still there to protect them from bad actions on their part:

> caused the autopilot to disconnect, after which the crew reacted incorrectly and ultimately caused the aircraft to enter an aerodynamic stall, from which it did not recover

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447

New comment by 781 in "Google Just Gave 2B Chrome Users a Reason to Switch to Firefox"

781 — Sun, 02 Jun 2019 11:18:24 +0000

Google is famous for measuring everything. If you think they did this without extensive testing/polling/... you are naive.

New comment by 781 in "DeepMind Can Now Beat Us at Multiplayer Games, Too"

781 — Sat, 01 Jun 2019 20:27:36 +0000

> A benchmark for me would be a game that can handle a MMOPG like eve-online

I don't think they managed to connect Excel to their game environments yet.

New comment by 781 in "Is everything we eat associated with cancer? A systematic cookbook review"

781 — Sat, 01 Jun 2019 19:02:29 +0000

There are scientists who argue that what the mitochondria does is fundamentally cancerigenic on a long enough timeline, so in a sense, yes, everything we eat is associated with cancer.

https://www.nature.com/articles/cr2017155

New comment by 781 in "Justice Department Is Preparing Antitrust Investigation of Google"

781 — Sat, 01 Jun 2019 01:46:10 +0000

I'd be more interested in Google/Amazon/FB paying taxes than in anti-trust actions.