Hacker News Reader

Semirhageon Amazon follows Google and Apple and bans system-wide ad blockers on app store

Perhaps some people who want to be "forgotten" are not criminals, but when you look for specific cases of people who are making these requests they are frequently white collar criminals who are hoping they can sweet talk somebody again into another chance to lie, cheat and steal to pay for gambling or cocaine or whatever.

This seems like a slightly modified version of the old, “if you have nothing to hide...” saw and I don’t like it.

Semirhageon Michael Jackson Estate Turns the 'Fair Use' Tables on Disney

To be honest, and I admit that this is just me, but you described a whole lot of media I don’t consume and never will. I didn’t even realize that my viewing/listening habits amounted to a Disney boycott, but there it is. I guess they helped me along by being such crap.

Semirhageon If our particles have no identity, how can we? (2015)

The same way that a pile of identical bricks can have no identity, but a home you build out of it could?

Semirhageon Bitcoin backlash as ‘miners’ stress power grids in Central Washington

Those bargain rates are possible largely because the Basin’s five dams generate around six times what the region can use locally. Much of the surplus is exported, at premium prices, to outside buyers such as Puget Sound Energy, and those outside sales subsidize local rates.

But if the utilities are selling more of their power to local Bitcoin miners, they’re exporting less power at those premium prices, which makes it harder to keep local rates low. Further, because much of the surplus is currently committed in long-term contracts, supplying miners with all the megawatts they want might require the utilities do something virtually unprecedented: buy power on the open market, at prices far above what locals have come to expect.

Solution: pass a law to charge miners export prices. It’s not as though Bitcoin mining helps the local economy, so you either return revenues to pre-mining levels, or drive the leeches out. Either outcome is equivalent.

Semirhageon GDPR: Programmatic ad buying plummets in Europe

But ads are not viable unless they are driven by information about the audience - down to the individual.

Oh totally! That’s why ads have never been a thing until the internet, and why there have never been print ads, television ads, and ads on the radio. No individual data, no ads, it all adds up.

(/s)

Semirhageon GDPR: Programmatic ad buying plummets in Europe

The press is viable using ads, just not ads that are targeted by spying on people and selling their information. In the long run it also might be the only thing that reduces use of outright ad-blockers, which could kill industries.

Semirhageon GDPR Version of USA Today Is 500KB Instead of 5.2MB

You can run ads without 5mb of tracking scripts. The options are not “invade evryone’s privacy to maximize profit” or “become a charity” after all. Most of the history of advertising functioned without probing the virtual rectum of your customers.

Semirhageon The Old Robots

Oh cool! I have a StarStrider that still works, and I love it. This is a terrific site.

Semirhageon The Philip Cross Affair

Wikipedia is a fantastic resource for math and science, less so for the lives of contemporary figures. Whatever you use it for, remember to check sources, and treat it as a starting point for further research only.

Semirhageon Several species of flatworm have made a home in metropolitan France

You forgot the classic third option, “Can I have sex with this?”

Semirhageon Move deliberately, fix things: How Coinbase is building a cryptocurrency empire

So far they’re long on talk and short on results, with no indication that’s likely to change.

Semirhageon WHOIS blackout period likely starting in May

For what it's worth, FATCA, DCMA , et al really suck too, and I think those have terrible unintended consequences. But this post was about GDPR because that's what the topic of the oringinal post is.

And before you go off on Americans having to comply with a law OUTSIDE OUR JURISDICTION, how about we hold all of our crappy laws over your head. And fine you 4% of revenues for one of our bullshit laws?

Kind of hard to reconcile those two positions, given that the former is just a perfect example of the latter.

Semirhageon Bitcoin estimated to use 0.5% of the world's electric energy by end of 2018

It should be Proof or Waste, or Proof of Heat/Entropy. The work being done is difficult, yet trivial and only valuable because it yields coins. Miners convert free energy into heat, for funny money, and it doesn’t scale well. Sure, maybe PoS could work (I doubt it) and maybe renewables could be the future of mining. Unfortunately we’re stuck with a majority of miners burning coal in China to show off the required volume of entropy to cash in.

When this fad dies, it will have been historically significant in terms of pure waste.

Semirhageon Hacker News Points Inflation

I turned on “see dead” for a day, and my impression is that s lot of spam is caught. I think it would be very hard to spam this site for long, automated or otherwise.

Semirhageon The myth of ‘mad’ genius

The article focuses exclusively on mood disorders, which frankly isn’t what most people think of or mean by “mad” in any case. Nikola Tesla for example was mad as a hatter, but it appears to have been a delusional disorder. While depression for example can be psychotic, it tends not to be, and I think psychosis or at least delusional beliefs are the hallmark of what is commonly meant when the public talks about “madness.”

Semirhageon YouTube rolls out new tools to help you stop watching

If only you had said that instead of the single line, Reddit-like bit of venom you actually wrote!

Semirhageon YouTube rolls out new tools to help you stop watching

As a baseline it adds more than yours, right? He is for example, using humor to make the point that a toothless gesture doesn’t address the core issue. By contrast you’re just being pissy and reactive.

Semirhageon YouTube rolls out new tools to help you stop watching

While these changes to YouTube are opt-in, it’s an interesting – and arguably responsible – position to take in terms of helping people manage their sometimes addictive behaviors around technology.

It would be easier to make that argument if they weren’t opt-in, and layered on top of an attention-monetizing economy.

Semirhageon Subscription Hell

The irony of saying that on a popular site that does neither of those things should be lost on no one.

Semirhageon GNU Mcron

Oh? Thanks for the information, I love to learn about English, it has so many quirks!

Semirhageon GNU Mcron

The Latinate -ix suffix becomes -ice/s when pluralized, as in matrix and matrices, or dominatrix and dominatrices.

Semirhageon Tesla Plunges After a Conference Call

Oh my god, I didn’t know that and to be honest, I’m surprised. My first reaction was that must be a satirical site, but no it’s a real and claims of legality are accurate.

I don’t know what to say.

Semirhageon Tesla Plunges After a Conference Call

He’s also getting away with it because it was a propane torch mounted in an airsoft gun, not a dangerous weapon. It’s a tool in a toy, so basically... who cares?

Semirhageon Tesla Plunges After a Conference Call

But then, acting within the confines of normality isn't really the trait that may bring the dawn of a new era of humanity.

Truly, this sounds divorced from the reality of anything Elon Musk is involved in. He’s making electric cars, rockets, and solar panels, not fusion power or immortality pills. Let’s be realistic! I think it’s important to separate what he actually does from what you desperately hope he may someday do.

Semirhageon Medium tries to prevent people reading deleted articles on the Wayback Machine?

Me too, and I don’t rely on cloud or streaming services. If I really like a song or article or book, I buy it some form and then download (if necessary through alternative channels) a copy. I bought a bunch of audio books from Audible years ago, and taking the time to convert them to MP3 has made my life much easier.

Streaming, clouds and DRM protection are fine for discovery, but if you love something, archive it. Storage is so cheap after all!

Semirhageon A puzzle that tiles infinitely across both sides, based on the Klein Bottle

The coolest part is if you put a few them together you open a non-orientable wormhole and pass into an Alice Universe.

Semirhageon 'Biohacker' Who Injected Himself with DIY Herpes Treatment Found Dead

For his friends and family this is a tragic loss. For everyone else a... “loss”... to the community of irresponsible self-promoters who take pointless risks and denigrate the name of genuinely self-sacrificing experimenters. Biohacking gives a bad name to medicine and hacking, and I wish the title reflected that accurately. This was not a “herpes treatment” or even an experimental treatment; efficacy had not even been established in vitro.

Semirhageon Fully Homomorphic Encryption: Secret Key Homomorphic Encryption Over Integers

Obscurity is a valid layer, it’s just not valid as a sole means of security.

Semirhageon Researchers are keeping pig brains alive outside the body

Apparently in my VR simulation, most major Linux distributions have adopted systemd and the UK is leaving the EU.

So trippy! You’ll never believe mine though, Donald Trump is president of America and Dick Cheney outlived Robin Williams. I think I got a bad vat.

Semirhageon Kazakhstan is changing its alphabet from Cyrillic to Latin-based

Hungarian (and Finnish) are unique cases; you haven’t identified a pattern, but the Uralic exceptions. It’s a language family only 25 million people on Earth speak, it is the proverbial exception proving the rule.