Hacker News: stevejones

New comment by stevejones in "The Independent Discovery of TCP/IP, by Ants"

stevejones — Mon, 09 May 2016 12:18:49 +0000

Actually it is. The article seems to describe an algorithm with a catastrophic failure mode where no (or not enough) ants return. Without retransmission the ants just hang around waiting for a returning ant. So there must be some sort of retransmission.

New comment by stevejones in "Bank Underground, the blog written by Bank of England staff"

stevejones — Thu, 05 May 2016 13:14:05 +0000

The big deal in the UK, a few years ago, was that a person would go overdrawn, deposit money to cover it immediately but then get charged an overdraft fee by an overnight process. This fee would put them overdrawn, leaving them liable for a second overdraft fee - which would be charged the next night...

This was ruled to be illegal and banks had to set up whole departments to process return claims. I suspect this is the main cause of the big headwind.

New comment by stevejones in "Solar is now cheaper than some coal, says India energy minister"

stevejones — Tue, 19 Apr 2016 15:54:31 +0000

One advantage of solar is the requirement for an electrical grid is lessened, when photovoltaics get cheap enough the requirement for a grid is eliminated.

New comment by stevejones in "What does it feel like to be fired from Facebook?"

stevejones — Mon, 07 Mar 2016 09:39:41 +0000

I don't know anyone who works for Facebook. I'm thousands of miles away from Facebook HQ. I keep careful tabs on who has what info about me and use many different email addresses.

New comment by stevejones in "What does it feel like to be fired from Facebook?"

stevejones — Sun, 06 Mar 2016 10:32:32 +0000

My inbox.

New comment by stevejones in "Bitcoin transaction processing takes up to 10 hours"

stevejones — Sun, 06 Mar 2016 10:32:12 +0000

IRC and email are federated systems, they have always been that way. The nature of the federation is different, email systems talk to each other, IRC systems don't. The issue with bitcoin is purely that it solves a problem no-one has, we don't need cryptographic gold. Consensus changes happen to DNS and email all the time, because they solve actual problems and have been made flexible enough to handle change.

The task is not to make a magic free-floating decentralised system, but one which is resistant to getting central points lopped off or controlled. For that look at bittorrent, or even DNS. Whenever the US government has flexed it's muscle, trying to assert control over DNS, other countries have threatened to make their own DNS root and the US has backed down. Anyone can run a DNS root, but that alone doesn't fix the problem, it takes people actually using that fact to prevent centralisation. Bitcoin is stuck in a place where the vast majority of users have to agree to a change before change can be made.

New comment by stevejones in "What does it feel like to be fired from Facebook?"

stevejones — Fri, 04 Mar 2016 16:12:42 +0000

> They made it very clear to us during HR onboarding that the only zero tolerance policy was on unauthorized access to user data.

Given that Facebook HR trawls user data to send job spam I find this claim quite ironic.

New comment by stevejones in "Apple ordered to bypass auto-erase on San Bernadino shooter's iPhone"

stevejones — Wed, 17 Feb 2016 10:21:48 +0000

Imagine you were to take the example further, unlocking the device required a sequence of fingerprint reads, with a precise ordering. i.e. left-ring finger, right index finger, right little finger, etc... That sequence would be a passcode, just as a precise sequence of keypresses would be. The government can insist on all your fingerprints, but not (in this argument) the correct sequence of uses of those fingerprints to unlock it. If it's only a single finger this same argument could apply.

New comment by stevejones in "Comets can't explain weird 'alien megastructure' star after all"

stevejones — Sat, 16 Jan 2016 21:57:14 +0000

Do any of them say it must be re-radiated omni-directionally as infra-red light?

New comment by stevejones in "Signs of Secret Phone Surveillance Across London"

stevejones — Fri, 15 Jan 2016 18:40:26 +0000

So we can safely say that IMSI catchers have been used as a matter of routine since 2002.

New comment by stevejones in "Signs of Secret Phone Surveillance Across London"

stevejones — Fri, 15 Jan 2016 18:37:57 +0000

It's almost certainly an offence under RIPA.

New comment by stevejones in "The 'hidden' cost of using ZFS for your home NAS"

stevejones — Tue, 12 Jan 2016 10:08:10 +0000

ITT: people who've never done an online resize

New comment by stevejones in "Fundraising values Skyscanner at $1.6B"

stevejones — Tue, 12 Jan 2016 10:01:59 +0000

It's a search engine, so it searches for prices among many providers such as Expedia and Travelocity as well as individual airlines.

New comment by stevejones in "How to C in 2016"

stevejones — Mon, 11 Jan 2016 04:27:17 +0000

"the way it would seem to"

{} initialises all elements to 0.

{0} initialises the first element to 0 and the rest to 0.

The latter form just introduces confusion.

New comment by stevejones in "How to C in 2016"

stevejones — Mon, 11 Jan 2016 04:25:58 +0000

I've not seen anyone use that construct anywhere.

New comment by stevejones in "A rant about application configuration"

stevejones — Mon, 11 Jan 2016 04:24:28 +0000

tl;dr: Stop using Node, it only encourages them.

New comment by stevejones in "A rant about application configuration"

stevejones — Mon, 11 Jan 2016 04:21:20 +0000

Works fine on my phone, yours must be broken.

New comment by stevejones in "How to C in 2016"

stevejones — Fri, 08 Jan 2016 15:06:01 +0000

The initialisers bit seems downright dangerously wrong. This code:

    uint32_t array[10] = {0};

Does not initialise every element to 0 in the way it would seem to. To see the difference contrast the difference you get when you a) remove the initialiser and b) replace the initialiser with {1}.

New comment by stevejones in "A blind woman who switched personalities and could suddenly see"

stevejones — Wed, 25 Nov 2015 16:39:32 +0000

I was kinda sceptical about the article until I saw the quotes advocating that DID is totally a real thing from the doctors.

Then I was very sceptical.

New comment by stevejones in "MI6 (SIS) Is Developing a Node.js, Angular, NoSQL, Hadoop System on Cloudera"

stevejones — Mon, 09 Nov 2015 15:35:51 +0000

Despite what everyone is saying here, the median salary in the uk is 26K. 40K puts you in the top 20% of earners. 100k would put you in the top 1%.

Although people are quite right in saying that on 40K you probably couldn't pay the rent in London.