Hacker News Reader

What's the point? It is not like they will actually delete your data.

> implying 4chan is one person

anonymouson Jeremy Hammond sentenced to 10 years for Stratfor leak

Person says overly angry thing on the betweentubes

Yeah, stop the presses. If commenting online and especially on places like 4chan has taught me anything, it's that anonymity lets people vent their emotions in ways they never would face-to-face. I'm sure you can find a similar list of shit I've said online and acted like a psychotic asshole. I can probably compose part of that list right now off the top of my head. Sometimes you need to say the angry words and let people tell you you're wrong to learn things once your head cools down.

anonymouson Jeremy Hammond sentenced to 10 years for Stratfor leak

I actually agree with him, but I'd word it somewhat differently: Rules and legislation are made for a reason. Before you break a rule for your own self-interest or due to your own beliefs, make an as big an effort as you can to imagine how and why the rule is sensible and how following it could actually be better. Then, break the rule.

Of course this can sometimes take about 2 seconds and you conclude that the rule is utter crap in your situation's context.

anonymouson Vi Hart: cramming G+ into YouTube has made comments even worse, I'm leaving

As the old adage goes: NEVER EVER build your business as completely dependent atop a Microsoft product. Or if you must, expect to go out of business at some point. In the 21st century, you can replace Microsoft with Google or Facebook or whatever else pops up that gets to their level. I'm willing to bet people will next be burned by relying too much on AWS.

anonymouson Modelling a Basic Income with Python and Monte Carlo Simulation

My opinion is that we're not sure how the social dynamics will change with a guaranteed basic income, so making predictions like this is not really constructive. I favour the experimental approach - roll it out and then follow through with surveys to see its impact. Maybe try it out in only one or two states at first, if possible ones with a good mix of people with various incomes and ethnicities.

anonymouson FTL: Advanced Edition

I have done all of that, except tried different ships. I only played with the starting ship, on hard difficulty, because I wanted to finish the main game before trying the extra modes.

Yes, I have maxed out dodge and shields. I have actually grinded enemies until I had every crew member maxed out on every possible stat. It doesn't help one bit, because you can still get hit 10 or even 20 times in a row, even though you have a 20% evade chance, and 20 hits from anything is pretty much enough to sink you.

It is honestly the most frustrating game I have ever played.

Also, I'm not struggling, I just gave up on it for good. I haven't played it in a year, if not more.

I bought into the hype and bought the game and it turned out to be ... that. I just want to give my perspective so other people don't get it and then feel misled.

anonymouson FTL: Advanced Edition

Too bad the unfair, uncontrollable, unmitigateable randomness turns this otherwise excellent game in a poor joke. There is no planning you can do, since every shop is random and there is nothing you can do if the game just decides to spawn precisely the kind of enemy that can kill you right then and there. All the different combat systems and options are good, but given that you have no idea what weapon drops you'll get, you can't do any planning ahead. Additionally, if you start having to run away from battles you fall behind the curve and there's no going back. You can't just scout the sector to find easy enemies to beat, because you have a very tight limit on how much exploring you can do. Once you fall behind the resource curve and have to run away from more and more encounters you're already dead.

I spent 15 hours with this game, did close to 40 attempts and only once got to sector 7. Usually I'd die around sector 4 or 5.

If you already have the game and like it, good for you. I just want to warn other people. My final opinion is: the devs don't understand statistics and randomness; go play nethack, it's easier.

anonymouson Why are Amazon, Facebook and Yahoo copying Microsoft's stack ranking system?

I'm more interested in why employees don't band together to game the system and ensure a given outcome, then split the winnings. Like a sort of a pyramid scheme - you and a buddy agree that this quarter it will be you who gets promoted and split the bonus/raise with your buddy. Then you get a third buddy and get him in on it if he agrees to let the second buddy be promoted this quarter. Now you're splitting 3 raises among 2 people. Then you get a fourth buddy in and promote the third one and so on. The system ends once the group has too many people at a high position. At that point any new employee joining the company at a low position is screwed, probably. Also at this point infighting will probably break out from people who don't want to split their raises with the ones with less money, given that they don't have a way of advancing any further. Obviously the only way to win at this is to be the very first person who, after everybody leaves, gets left with the highest position and highest salary. Which is why I called it a pyramid scheme.

anonymouson Python 2 vs. Python 3: A retrospective

All of these things, including the int division "thing" are present in python 2.7 already. For division, you need to import it:

    from __future__ import division

And then dividing numbers works a bit more logical (well I think it's more logical). You can do division with rounding with the // operator: a // b, and it even works with floats: (3.9 // 1.2) == 3

anonymouson Is it ethical to read programming books on the clock?

In my view, if you actually do 8 hours of work in a single day regularly, meaning you perform a physical action which is directly attributable to your work description for a total of at least 8 hours every day for at least 5 days in a row, then you are one of:

* a physical labour worker

* a genius

* a sucker

* working crunch time to deliver a release (a potential sucker if the crunch time doesn't actually pay off)

* someone whose mind is too alien, that I cannot form a theory of mind (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind) for

anonymouson They Loved Your G.P.A., Then They Saw Your Tweets

I highly suspect that impersonating someone online fall foul of the CFAA.

anonymouson They Loved Your G.P.A., Then They Saw Your Tweets

If I am not mistaken, I personally maintain at least 3 distinct identities on the net. I think I might have more than that, one-off accounts made with a one-off email for some site that I've forgotten. And I make VERY certain to never ever mention anything about one identity on a communication channel used by the other identities. One of those I only ever use through private browsing mode to avoid leaking cookies to sites that track these things. Relatedly I suspect some of the people I know online are one and the same physical person, but since I know them through different channels, I cannot actually ask if this is the case, plus it would be extremely rude to do so.

I hope somebody some day comes up with a better way to keep threads of identity separate, so you don't face the situation where you're denied work or university because you woke up in a bad mood one day and said something angry about someone online to a friend of yours.

anonymouson It's the Umami – Why the Truth About MSG is So Easy to Swallow

"Chinese Restaurant Syndrome" is real though. Or rather I personally can't eat most things at chinese restaurants and this article was the first time I heard that this is actually a named thing, i.e. this is the first time I hear of CRS. Though I think it's more to do with the fat they use to fry rice in -- there is one place around here which serves chinese-style stir-fried noodles, but eating there reliably does not trigger any symptoms. They are also the priciest noodles around. Maybe CRS should just be named "bad cheap fried food syndrome". It's not a TLA, but you can just smush all the words together and call it bacheff syndrome.

anonymouson Pyret: A new programming language from the creators of Racket

Indeed you can https://github.com/lihaoyi/macropy

anonymouson That Guy with a Thousand Inconsequential Objections

You took the metaphor explaining a part of the original argument, not the argument itself, a metaphor used to illustrate the argument better, a metaphor that was just there to make a point clearer, then you expanded it needlessly and painfully for all involved, muddled it a great deal, turned it around and attacked the original point. With a metaphor. That you used way past its place of purpose.

I actually have no idea where this tactic should even be on the hierarchy of disagreement. It's shockingly effective in practice though - you're basically redefining the meaning of the words I use for your own purpose. I can't disagree with you, because I'm trying to say something which cannot be exactly defined, leading me to use metaphors or allegories or other kinds of inexact language, but whenever I say something like this you switch it around so it now doesn't mean what I intend it to mean. I literally lack the words with which to disagree in this situation.

anonymouson Sustainable Micro Home that Costs Less Than $30,000

I think your first two points are mostly trivial to address - put a board going beneath all the steps and add a handrail.

The bed seems a poor idea to me too though. Maybe if it were just for one person or if you used a futon that you'd roll up. Isn't a futon more in-line with the micro home concept anyhow?

anonymouson Get Shit Done: The Worst Startup Culture

Kind of offtopic, but it really grinds my gears when a site is perfectly functional without javascript, but then it has a noscript element blocking you from reading it. I know how to hide the noscript element. Even if it's not a noscript element, I know how to delete it from the DOM tree. Why would a site writer purposefully block people with js disabled from viewing their site? It's not like you can accidentally disable js in a browser, if it's off, it's off because I went out of my way to turn it off. And I can hide your opaque fullpage div just fine.

anonymouson Javascript RAR reader

A more likely explanation is that the author frankly doesn't give a damn about such restriction.

anonymouson TSA union calls for armed guards at every checkpoint

Why not this: You book a flight. Then when the day of your departure comes, an armoured van with 3 paramedics, 15 SWAT officers, a dog unit and a team of anaesthesiologists come to your house, put you to sleep, load you in a crate, then you spend the entire trip to the airport asleep, along with your entire flight and you only wake up at your destination. Hopefully your luggage wasn't misplaced and neither were you. You're required to fast for at least 2 days before a long flight, since bedpans aren't provided. For short trips, only chloroform is administered. Waking up in the middle of flight is a federal crime.

anonymouson Can Snowden be targeted using the Adobe breach?

Actually you maybe don't even need the key. I don't know what algorithm Adobe used to encrypt these passwords, but for most standard ones it holds that if you have two encrypted messages A' and B' corresponding to plain texts A and B, then B = A ^ A' ^ B'. You really only need to find one password of length N to be able to decrypt all passwords with length <= N.

Edit: Of course I mean two messages encrypted with the same key and initialisation vector. Do not reuse IVs kids, you'll get hurt.

anonymouson Lua: Good, bad, and ugly parts

I wasn't trolling. It feels positively deranged. Like having all numbers be written in Roman numerals for instance. I don't get your point about Fortran. Deeply flawed languages have existed for a long time?

anonymouson Time to move on? The case against daylight saving time

I'm a youngish carefree man and I fucking hate DST. In the summer everybody switches to going to work one hour earlier and, unfortunately, that perfectly screws with my sleeping habits. In the winter, I naturally get up on time to arrive between 10 and 11, but in the summer, if I'm to get enough sleep, I'd have to be at work after 11! And since nobody else has trouble with it, I basically spend 6 months out of every year struggling to get enough sleep.

anonymouson The BadBIOS Analysis is Wrong

I would like to point out that the modern way to er.. "sidestep" the windows activation process on a UEFI system is to simply install a new bootloader. This is accomplished simply by writing a compiled EFI program to the EFI boot partition and setting it as your bootloader. It them lies to the kernel and makes it think it's running on an already-activated OEM system. Look up WindSLIC, I can't really give a link here for obvious reasons.

To note: this is a single binary that works on all x86_64 UEFI systems and can be written to the boot partition as any other file. Additionally, you can write a program to change boot order on UEFI bioses from within a running OS; example: efibootmgr. So while it is probably infeasible to infect the BIOS itself, it is somewhat trivial to infect the bootloader and do whatever you desire.

anonymouson /dev/null as a Service

Probably the site is under load, but I loved that when I clicked on "features", I got back an Error 500 - Internal Server Error.

anonymouson This Isn't Capitalism, It's Growthism, and It's Bad for Us

So then isn't the sustainable option to grow until you can, then leave the last stages of "grow, crash, burn" to some fool and then start the exact same company but with a different name (i.e. RougeChapeau) and recapture your old market by doing exactly what you used to do, but now you're in a growth position compared to your old self that crashed and burned?

anonymouson The Median-of-Medians Algorithm

Or, since we have enough cores, run both in two parallel threads, keeping the original list read-only.

anonymouson Lua: Good, bad, and ugly parts

1-based indexing is insane. In the literal sense. I can kind of conceive of a mind that doesn't run away when introduced to a 1-based language. Some young, inexperienced mind which doesn't understand numbers yet. I cannot at all conceive what madman would actually like 1-based indexing. Their mind must operate on principles completely alien to the rest of us and should, preferably, not be allowed to write programs.

anonymouson The Decline of Wikipedia: As More People Rely on It, Fewer People Create It

Well you can keep his edit and send the guy a polite message that he ought to cite his sources soon or you'll remove what he added. I mean, at worst you'll just have an article without a citation for a short while, without driving people away. What you are doing right now is this:

          .-.     
          |U|     
          | |     
          | |     
         _| |_    
        | | | |-. 
       /|     ` | 
      | |       | 
      |         | 
      \         / 
       |       |  
       |       |
       FUCK  YOU

anonymouson What's Up With BBM's Android Reviews?

So could this be the next step in forcing people to leave you good reviews? Set the app up so if you leave a good review there's a 70% chance it will unlock some optional features. You get a ton of good reviews and plausible deniability: I mean, it's not like leaving a good review always unlocks the app. Obviously this isn't some brilliant scheme to jump to the front of appstore rankings.