Hacker News Reader

24gttghhon Mass cellphone surveillance experiment in Spain

Solution: Faraday cage. They can't make radio waves break the laws of physics! (that I know of...)

24gttghhon Instagram now forces people to sign in to view public profiles

wtf. that is creepy as hell.

24gttghhon Instagram now forces people to sign in to view public profiles

Is that in the "anti-facebook list"?

24gttghhon $15 minimum wage didn’t hurt NYC restaurants

The minimum wage went from $7.25 in 2013 to $13.50 last year, finally increasing to $15 last year as well. It didn't all jump last year, so the data of 2013-2018 still appears valid.

http://www.centernyc.org/new-york-citys-15-minimum-wage

actual report:

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/53ee4f0be4b015b9c3690...

At least talking about restaurants with tipped employees, the $15/hr includes a $5/hr tip wage! If a server makes enough in tips, the min wage the restaurant pays is only $10/hr. See appendix figure 1, page 22 of the pdf.

24gttghhon $15 minimum wage didn’t hurt NYC restaurants

Do you mean the clean air everyone gets to breathe when they go out to eat now? I'm pretty sure a lot of people have been enjoying that.

24gttghhon My own private Iceland

Wow that dude is a real POS. Good on the UK from banning his ass. I didn't find the GP's link to that article funny. GP must have a very out-dated sense of what is considered "funny".

24gttghhon Why iOS 13 and Catalina Are So Buggy

#2 is infuriating. If they don't fix this I'm going to have to stop using the phone. It's asinine such a list isn't customizable. I text my girlfriend the most, and she isn't even in that list half the time! At the very least it should be a list of whoever you texted last, in chronological order, but it's fucking random.

24gttghhon Ranked-choice voting is on the ballot in New York City

Which would mean we should have up to something like 11,000 representatives given our current population. Clearly something is wrong when the average representative:constituent ratio is 1:700,000! It was originally 1:34,000.

11K is perhaps far too many to be manageable, but 435 is clearly far too few.

Edit: the 14th amendment may have changed this math before the 1911 Apportionment bill fixed it at 435, but 1:700K is still far too high.

24gttghhon Equifax securities fraud class action [pdf]

So bullet point # 225 from that complaint basically says the same as the PDF we're discussing:

>Likewise, Equifax “protected” one of its portals used to manage credit disputes with the username ‘admin’ and password ‘admin.’ This portal allowed access to a vast cache of personal information, including employee names, emails, usernames, passwords, consumer complaint records, and the Argentinian equivalent of Social Security numbers. The portal also granted administrative access allowing intruders to add, delete, or modify records. A November 15, 2017 article in Forbes quoted cybersecurity expert Wes Moehlenbruck, who stated that this was one of many “very grossly negligent security practices” at Equifax. The article continued, “‘Admin/admin’ as a database password is a surefire way to get hacked almost instantly,’ Moehlenbruck says. ‘A production database with this account smells of poor security policy and a lack of due diligence.’

Seems to agree with that GP was saying.

24gttghhon Equifax securities fraud class action [pdf]

So, the footnotes for the "admin" "admin" (46. Id. ¶ 225 (emphasis omitted) points at footnote 1. Am. Compl. ¶ 3.) claim refer to the amended complaint, paragraph 3? Any idea where this amended complaint is, which most of the early footnotes are referring to?

24gttghhon California power outage triggers chaos in science labs

I mean..it's a bit of A and B. From the outside (i.e. from a non-CA resident), PG&E appears pretty incompetent and/or insolvent and can't properly manage it's infrastructure. Is their main driver still really about saving money?

24gttghhon California power outage triggers chaos in science labs

You almost lost me at the apocalypse metaphor but I catch your drift. Weeks at a time of no power aren't easy to be prepared for, but I feel like this event should be one more reason we need more distributed power generation in the US. Less single points of failure.

24gttghhon California power outage triggers chaos in science labs

To be fair, this particular power outage in California isn't to save money. It's to prevent forest fires. Also, how important can these experiments be (in CA) if they don't have sufficient backup power at a university??

Edit: If a Uni has a multi-million dollar laser, it should have a few thousand dollar backup generator!

24gttghhon China Says ‘Stay Tuned’ for Retaliation over U.S. Tech Blacklist

>It's not a question of switching to Brazil. China was already buying from Brazil. But Brazil doesn't have the capacity to make up for a cut-off of American supplies.

This literally already happened as another poster said...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-05/china-ask...

24gttghhon Protester shot in chest by live police round during Hong Kong protests

It's not as simple as more CO2 = better plant growth. In fact it is likely the opposite for C3 plants. [0] Things like Corn, which uses C4 photosynthesis will hardly be affected by more CO2 in the atmosphere. I could go on and on, but this thread is the wrong place for this discussion.

[0]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4036122/

https://science.gu.se/english/News/News_detail/increased-car...

https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/effects-of...

24gttghhon Protester shot in chest by live police round during Hong Kong protests

GP is clearly talking about France, not Russia.

24gttghhon Protester shot in chest by live police round during Hong Kong protests

>they nearly bankrupted themselves

They did bankrupt themselves. The Crown treasury was completely empty in 1788.

24gttghhon Egypt’S 1.8 Gigawatt Benban Solar Park Nears Completion

Not a stupid question! I think it depends on the quality and makeup of the sand, and what the design of the solar panel is. They're not pure silicon.

24gttghhon Egypt’S 1.8 Gigawatt Benban Solar Park Nears Completion

That place is absolutely massive! For a simple comparison, add about 6,500 more solar parks of that size, and we would generate enough electricity* for the entire planet. That would cover an area of 242,000 square km (which granted, is about the size of the UK, or a bit smaller than Texas). 2,500 solar parks of that size would replace all coal plants globally. 1,500 would replace all natural gas plants. So that is 4,000 of those to replace all fossil fuel plants that now exist.

Of course things like base load generation and you know...night time need to be taken into consideration, but I think it really puts it all into perspective. A few more years at their current growth, and renewables will be generating more electricity than coal globally. Coal is also decreasing which helps.

I used some data from here to make rough estimates:

https://www.iea.org/statistics/electricity/

I did this to make myself a little less depressed about global warming. Fight for renewables in your towns!

edit: oh yah, that would cost $26 Trillion...but that's for ONLY solar panels which isn't practical.

24gttghhon Fairphone 3 Teardown

https://www.ifixit.com/smartphone-repairability?sort=score

There is only one other phone from the last five years (that isn't also a Fairphone) that has a score better than an 8/10 on ifixit's 'repairability score'. Well done!

24gttghhon Hong Kong leader to announce formal withdrawal of extradition bill

So, Portugal is not a functioning democracy now? That's news to me.

24gttghhon Compasses to point true north for first time in 360 years in UK

Looking at a map someone else linked to, the pole has shifted drastically in the last 50 years. Could that be an indication that it is in the process of shifting? It's been moving North in a straight line for the past 100 years, and now it's actually heading South towards Siberia.

https://maps.ngdc.noaa.gov/viewers/historical_declination/

24gttghhon The Mobility Trap: Why We'll Never Fix Congestion by Speeding Up Traffic

I'm pretty sure the negative externality of burning more fossil fuels because we're driving farther than ever before is a big enough problem that no positives like being able to live in a house with a big lawn is worth it.

24gttghhon GM Is Now Detroit’s Smallest Auto-Making Employer

>Honda says it has received no reports of fires, crashes, or injuries related to this issue.

Got any evidence one of those has actually caught on fire in a car wash?

24gttghhon GM Is Now Detroit’s Smallest Auto-Making Employer

Okay, drop a building on a Ford Ranger and clear the rubble away and try to drive it away after. That is, after you've drowned it in the ocean and set it on fire.

https://www.drivingline.com/articles/top-gear-tries-to-kill-...

24gttghhon Civilizational Collapse, Part 4

>but nothing will keep our gigabytes of data alive and intact for future archaeologists

Not so, it seems:

https://www.archmission.org/5d-optical-memory

24gttghhon A Fine Map from Alexander von Humboldt (1851)

I am surprised also. People had sailed to at least around the entire continent in 1820.

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

24gttghhon U.S. tech companies are building a Chinese-style social credit system

>Also, what if you disagree with me politically about illegal immigration - does that give you a "right" to ban me from your establishment?

If the owner said that in the US? Well, probably not. If this hypothetical establishment is open to the public, they aren't allowed to discriminate based on political beliefs AFAIK.

They could just kick you out for 'no reason', but that seems hard to do without pretext.

24gttghhon Cooling a house without air conditioning

Not sure how far down you can go in Houston before you're under water. Downtown is only 15m above sea level apparently.

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

24gttghhon Time to Get Serious about Tick-Borne Diseases

If anything, the prevalence of Lyme should promote gun-related activities to hunt the huge deer populations in Lyme-heavy areas! OP is way off base I think...