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Tyrannosauron What Dockless Bikes and Scooters Are Exposing

I would imagine this problem would be really easy to solve with bike sharing- to use it you have to register and pay a deposit. If a bike checked out with your name is never returned or is abandoned, they keep your deposit...

Edit- I suppose I have just invented docking.

Tyrannosauron Ask HN: What percentage of your users are using social login?

3rd party knowing about your social network is one thing; do you not also worry about Facebook knowing about all these 3rd party things too?

Tyrannosauron Guide to Slack import and export tools

Because one of them is almost literally a paper trail and the other is ephemeral?

Tyrannosauron Guide to Slack import and export tools

Really? I like to consider myself much more privacy-minded than most, but I would expect an email assigned to an employee to be used for official business purposes should definitely have a paper trail that higher-ups can audit if necessary.

Tyrannosauron An Analysis of the Impact of Arbitrary Blockchain Content on Bitcoin [pdf]

You keep saying this as if it isn't beside the point. Creating illegal content by extracting specific digits of pi or rearranging specific pixels of normal images is completely different than taking already-illegal content and uploading it to somewhere it can never be deleted without compromising a lot of other stuff.

Your arguments seem to be of the nature of "information is information; you can't suppress it and you can't make it illegal" but that's not really what this discussion is about.

Tyrannosauron Lessons learned while developing Age of Empires 1 Definitive Edition

Cool blog post, but light gray text on white is literally unreadable. How are people still doing this?

Tyrannosauron How Banks Could Control Gun Sales If Washington Won’t

None of those things are free to me. It's something in the range of %1-%3 of all I spend. Despite the fact that a lot of the time those charges are hidden in the price of the items I purchase, I pay them even if I use cash.

Tyrannosauron In Switzerland, it's now illegal to boil a live lobster

There being "many cultures" that do this, I'd like to hear some examples. The only ones I can come up with are fictional

Tyrannosauron Why the world needs OpenStreetMap (2014)

I recently started mapping, and scaled the learning curve that surprised me how high it is. I downloaded streetcomplete and Vespucci for my phone, but when I came to a road (on my bike) that didn't exist on the map it wasn't obvious to me how to add it (I still don't know how to do it on either app).

When I finally hopped on my desktop computer and did the iD tutorial, a lot of things became much easier. I learned how to add roads and buildings, and started doing so. Then I noticed that my map software (osmAnd) didn't announce my freeway exits.

To figure out how to mark freeway exits properly was terrible. I found the motorway wiki page and the motorway link page, but from those pages I didn't feel like I could tag an exit properly still. When I finally found the exit_info page things made a little more sense why they are confusing: there are conflicting ways of doing it! I started tagging freeway exits near me.

One thing that would have been helpful for me (although would probably be a bit of work to implement) would be more overview-level tools. Like "I want to..." a) add a missing building, b) tag a freeway exit, c) give addresses to these buildings, etc. Granted, some of this is already done. I suppose it's really the exit tagging that is a new example.

I also have been worrying about my changes being erroneously modified by other people, without a way to "take ownership" of an area and be notified of changes- I will take a good look at that OSMCha change set tool.

Tyrannosauron How Long Is Long Enough? Minimum Password Lengths by the World's Top Sites

I always wondered about that too- I recently came across a discussion somewhere that the password limit should be the max allowed for the POST to that website. Or maybe a bit less, to help prevent DOS attacks.

I always thought the password should be hashed client-side. Supposedly that has some problems and it would still need to be hashed server-side as well.

So I have a proposal: client-side, hash the password. Can use any hash, although hash selection does limit the password security to its output. That hash is the new password sent over the wires to the server, that does proper password handling, but it is guaranteed a password of (say for SHA-256) 256 bits; if it receives a password that doesn't look like SHA-256 output it can automatically throw it out without even checking.

The client can then store the hash-input in his password manager, and it can be literally anything that can be thrown at the SHA hash. Is this feasible?

Tyrannosauron NSA’s top talent is leaving because of low pay, flagging morale, unpopular reorg

Might it also be because of the cost of overcoming their conscience? I understand that there are multiple groups in the NSA that do things other than illegal surveillance and hacking, but I would have an even higher price than other companies' offers I would require in exchange for my moral values if the NSA ever offered me any position at all...

Tyrannosauron Don't Talk to the Police (2012)

"There was a shooting. Please send police and ambulance" and then hang up?

Won't the police show up expecting an active armed gunman? Is there anything you can say to show that there is no new danger of violence without implicating yourself?

Tyrannosauron How a U.S. citizen was mistakenly targeted for deportation. He’s not alone

Signatures can be scanned and compared, but are they? I imagine this would only happen during a full audit, which doesn't sound like it happens a lot.

It is kind of like saying a door can be locked.

Tyrannosauron US Senate Bill S.1241 to Criminalize Concealed Ownership of Bitcoin

...on my hard drive? If I am running a node, that is.

Tyrannosauron All You Need to Know About Bitcoin's Rise, from $0.01 to $11,000

So... I totally agree that the transaction fees are much too high. But it doesn't bother me as much as it bothers many people because every time I start getting upset, I remember that VISA's fees are 1.5%, PayPal's fees are 3%; basically everything has transaction fees and the world has not come crashing down on them.

Tyrannosauron Why Did ProtonMail Vanish from Google Search Results? (2016)

https://protonmail.com/pricing

They have several tiers, including a free tier. The free tier is pretty limited; I wonder what percentage of their userbase stays there.

Tyrannosauron The Poor Man's 3D Camera

While reading about the evolution of the camera and pushing away from the wall (or not) it strongly reminded me of the game Tremulous. The initial alien class is a very short spider that moves very quickly and can walk on walls. When running into a corner the camera does a (user-adjustable speed) rotation. The same happens if you jump into a wall. But in this game the solution seems to be more direct- you are always headed straight for a wall, and there seems to be much less wall-walking as "wall-flinging."

Tyrannosauron Ask HN: What are your favorite browser extensions/add-ons for Firefox or chrome?

Ghostery- I basically block all tracking cookies and ads and social media widgets

Adguard- for ads not caught by ghostery

Youtube Magic Actions- Makes the youtube experience way better. Although the recent changes to youtube seems to have temporarily broken it :(

Tyrannosauron A Surprise from the Supervolcano Under Yellowstone

Oh come now. You can't expect writers and editors for a company like The New York Times to know and use proper spelling and grammar, can you?

Seriously though. So annoying.

Tyrannosauron Amazon and Apple hit by EU tax crackdown

What I don't understand is why Amazon and Apple are getting the punishment. They were abiding by the laws of the country they were in, and now getting punishment. Surely if any party were to be punished it would be the governments of Ireland and Luxembourg which sanctioned these agreements in the first place? It seems that the EU is less interested in law-abiding and more interested in that sweet, sweet U$D. Ex post facto law at its finest.

Tyrannosauron Man convicted after preventing counter-terrorism police search

As well as "the border" including any international airports, it is difficult to find a heavily populated area that is not in this zone

Tyrannosauron What the Rich Won't Tell You

You seem to be under the impression that for one person to receive wealth, another has to lose it. That's not actually how any of this works and is an incredibly dangerous way of thinking.

Tyrannosauron Suing California for Throwing Out 45k Ballots Over Handwriting 'Mismatches'

Wait- handwriting is actually used for something? IIRC, handwriting analysis is not allowed in US courts of law because of its supposed inaccuracies. Why are we using it for any other legal uses?

I mean, using a signature as a legal, "I was there and I approved this document" is all fine and dandy, but for authentication? There are much better methods

Tyrannosauron Suing California for Throwing Out 45k Ballots Over Handwriting 'Mismatches'

I was told that if that was once the case, it is the case no longer- really the signature is only to verify that someone was there to have made the purchase, to decrease the store's liability if it is a fraudulent charge.

This is why the charge to the card goes through before you have to sign anything. Even on pos systems where you sign on the screen, I get the text message notifying me that my card was charged even before I start to sign on the screen.

Tyrannosauron Even if we don’t love starlings, we should learn to live with them

For those wondering, there is a specific term for this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect

Tyrannosauron European Parliament Draft to Enforce End-To-End Encryption for Citizens' Privacy

I often take a pessimistic view to such good-looking things too.

But taking a look at your first link, it appears to already not be in force anymore? For the same reasons that the new recommendation is being drafted- government surveillance violates fundamental rights to privacy.

"On 8 April 2014, the Court of Justice of the European Union declared the Directive 2006/24/EC invalid for violating fundamental rights. The Council's Legal Services have been reported to have stated in closed session that paragraph 59 of the European Court of Justice's ruling "suggests that general and blanket data retention is no longer possible".[15] A legal opinion funded by the Greens/EFA Group in the European Parliament finds that the blanket retention data of unsuspicious persons generally violates the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, both in regard to national telecommunications data retention laws and to similar EU data retention schemes (PNR, TFTP, TFTS, LEA access to EES, Eurodac, VIS)."

Tyrannosauron Court to Grandma: You Shouldn't Lose Your House Just Because Your Son Sold Weed

Glad the courts are doing something. Civil forfeiture is one of the most horrifying abuses of police power and very directly contrary to the Constitution; one of the reasons the American Revolution happened in the first place!

Tyrannosauron Ask HN: Which news reader/source do you rely on most?

Besides hacker news- slashdot.

Tyrannosauron Americans from Both Political Parties Overwhelmingly Support Net Neutrality

Very true, but despite the distrust of the government, Americans tend to have even more distrust of Comcast

Tyrannosauron Intersex patients routinely had diagnoses withheld by doctors

How do doctors, parents, anybody think this is a good idea? Hiding things from kids that are guaranteed to become a problem later in life is rather a guarantee that the person will be traumatized when they do find out, and have major trust problems from there on out.