Hacker News Reader

big_youthon Uber Turns to Saudi Arabia for $3.5B Cash Infusion

This is not true in Austin. The city passed a fingerprint and registration requirement and uber and lyft both left the following weekend. Smaller competitors are growing fast. I miss the nice apps and cheap prices but the alternatives are ok.

big_youthon Marketers and ad buyers are moving away from Vine

From the article "Shockingly enough, Giphy is not yet monetizing."

At this point I would say it's more of a platform than a business.

big_youthon Concerns for global spread of Zika mean Rio de Janeiro Olympics must not proceed

Wow, Japan is generally known as being clean and corruption free. I can only imagine the type of bribes Brazil and Russia handed out.

big_youthon SpaceX lands rocket at sea second time after satellite launch

http://www.pbs.org/thinktank/transcript1292.html

WATTENBERG: I got to think a lot of illegals add a lot of value to the United States. You have been quoted as saying that you are nauseatingly pro American.

MUSK: Yes, that’s true.

WATTENBERG: What do you mean?

MUSK: Well, I mean, I think the United States is the greatest country that’s ever existed on earth. And I think that it will be difficult to argue on objective grounds that it is not. I think the facts really point in that direction. It’s the greatest force for good of any country that’s ever been. There would not be democracy in the world if not for the United States. We’re obviously falling in the recent few occasions -- maybe three separate occasions in the Twentieth Century -- democracy would have fallen with World War 1, World War 2 and the Cold War, but for the United States.

WATTENBERG: And perhaps the threat of terrorism would be much greater if it were not for the United States.

MUSK: Yeah, absolutely. I think it would be a mistake to say the United States is perfect, it certainly is not. There have been many foolish things the United States has done and bad things the United States has done. But when historians look at these things on balance and measure the good with the bad -- and I think if you do that and -- on a rational basis and make a fair assessment -- I think it’s hard to [unintelligible] that the United States -- is there anything better [speaking over each other]

WATTENBERG: I have a reputation of interrupting my guests. But when they say exactly what I believe, I just let them talk and talk. I think you’re 100 percent right.

MUSK: And -- you know I wasn’t born in America -- I got here as fast as I could.

big_youthon A week in Cuba was the most educational trip of my life

This absolutely true and I've heard it discussed in cooking shows about Miami. Thousands of cubans fled to Florida and started mom and pop restaurants, the people who stayed had to make due with meager rations and the culinary culture died.

big_youthon My love letter (and goodbye?) to Austin

While cool, LA has all the bad parts of Austin exemplified; actually ridiculous housing, insanely bad traffic, a lot more taxes, cool and weird people are greatly outnumbered by douches, a real serious drought, and I can't shoot guns.

big_youthon My love letter (and goodbye?) to Austin

What more affordable city did you move to, if you don't mind me asking?

I visit tech cities across the US often for work and in comparison I find Austin is incredibly affordable.

big_youthon Retirement Nomads: Too poor to retire and too young to die

Well she gets $1200 a month from social security, which is already essentially a basic income for old folks.

big_youthon Sit/Stand Desk: IKEA Skarsta Review

Can it hold a 27" retina?

big_youthon After Silicon Valley, Stockholm produces highest number of “unicorns” per capita

I believe you are incorrect on both counts. The Texas Medical Center and the Energy sector in Houston are massive industries that have created tons of large companies. Just not the hacker news type, they actually have solid revenue, ipo, and continue making money.

Austin as a liberal island is also a bad Texas stereotype. I live in Austin now but was born in El Paso which has been an entrenched democratic stronghold for decades. San Antonio, Houston(most diverse city in the US), and Dallas are all also blue-voting urban areas. The Texas state constitution is just notorious for giving rural districts a lot of power and blatant gerrymandering.

big_youthon Amazon rainforest was home to millions of people before European arrival

The Aztec were destroyed by the spanish, particularly Hernán Cortés.

big_youthon America's poorest white town: abandoned by coal, swallowed by drugs

Deep family and community support system.

big_youthon Socialist millionaire protocol

While not every wiki page has it enabled I find that the simple english really helps my understanding. For ex:

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

https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probability_theory

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

https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Encryption_Standa...

big_youthon Life in a Studio Apartment with My Wife and Two Sons

I live in Austin and have seen many of my coworkers and friends leave for the bay area. Besides interesting work I think there are more opportunities for career growth.

I am in security (but it's similar in many specialties) and while there are very good companies in Austin if I want to to rise become a security architect or director of information security I have to go to the tech headquarters. Companies like Google and facebook may have regional offices but the core innovative security/ai/pl work and executive decision making is being done in the home campuses.

That being said, I would never leave Austin for the SF bay unless it involved a $350k+ salary.

big_youthon Reconsider

Not at most enterprise companies. Maintaining an extra set of clothes is expensive, especially when they require frequent dry cleaning. I also found it was a hassle to 'match' all the time, I was called out for wearing a black shoes brown belt combo while running out of the house a few times.

Additionally, after work most of my friends have to change outfits to participate in social events. Business casual dress is useless, now I wear jeans, athletic shorts, and t-shirts to the office.

big_youthon CITE: A $1B city that nobody calls home

No. I've seen Google's cars driving all around Austin recently.

http://www.theverge.com/2015/8/31/9233435/google-self-drivin...

big_youthon Million Dollar iOS9 Bug Bounty

Apple doesn't pay money for security bugs.

big_youthon Yankees Suck: The punks who made the most popular T-shirts in Boston

To be fair, the rivalry has now existed for over 100 years.

big_youthon Alex Stamos to Become CSO of Facebook

While Neal is good the type of people Alex staffed while at Yahoo are insanely good. I only worked under Alex for a few months before he moved to Yahoo but he can staff very strong teams. For example, he bought out Leaf Security to work for Yahoo.

big_youthon Mac OS 7.5.5 running on Apple Watch [video]

What you call useless other people call brilliant. I was at RECon this past weekend and one of the coolest talks was about compiling malware using only MOV. Good luck reversing that.

https://recon.cx/2015/schedule/events/55.html

big_youthon Guide to x86 assembly

This is a useful tool to view the assembly of code in the browser.

http://gcc.godbolt.org/

big_youthon DEA Orchestrates Disinformation Campaign to Conceal Surveillance Powers

This is a good article and describes how dynamic the drug war is. Currently the Sinaloa Cartel is really struggling to keep it to together, they can't even control their hometown of Culiacan.

big_youthon DEA Orchestrates Disinformation Campaign to Conceal Surveillance Powers

> So, the only people who can survive in that business are these large Medellin cartel kind of people who have enough money so they can have fleets of airplanes, so they can have sophisticated methods, and so on.

This is actually the opposite of what's going on in Mexico. The large drug organizations have splintered into regional groups. There is no need for fleets of planes, Mexicans drive drugs the border and smuggle them the same way they have for hundreds of years. (Through underground tunnels, empty parts of the desert, and by bribing/sneaking in through customs.)

big_youthon The guy making it easy to 3D print yourself a real gun

>... it becomes a lot more like trying to smuggle drugs over borders. It still happens, but not so casually.

I don't think the legality matters much. Drug prices have across the country have dropped significantly despite a ballooning war on drugs. A quick google search shows that cocaine has dropped 80% in price since the 80's.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/20...

big_youthon Students are fleeing US law schools and pouring into engineering

I think it's more like an api. You hack it to get what you want.

big_youthon Dumb Ideas in Computer Security (2005)

Yes, you are correct. All ios apps must be code signed by Apple which is pretty stringent in it's reviews. This is why you won’t find any apps in the app store attempting to spawn /bin/bash or mimic its functionality.

I believe apple is now requiring all osx apps on the app store be code signed as well.

big_youthon I was asked to crack a program in a job interview

Most pentesting distros run as root by default, check out Kali Linux which is the industry standard. It makes it a lot easier to run all the strange applications we use. As long as you keep it in a VM you'll be pretty solid.

big_youthon Drug Market ‘Agora’ Replaces the Silk Road as King of the Dark Net

I dislike Agora. The site is rarely up and when I do manage to login most of my requests time out.

What I'm interested in is how much money the major sites are making. The much smaller Cannabis Road was recently hacked and robbed of $130k in bitcoin from various escrow and user wallets. I can only imagine what the major players are making.

big_youthon California Governor Signs Law Requiring a ‘Kill Switch’ on Smartphones

I hate to be that guy but a phone is not worth a small brick of gold. Half an ounce of gold is about $700 and has the same mass as a nickel.

big_youthon California Governor Signs Law Requiring a ‘Kill Switch’ on Smartphones

So the actual equivalent is locking the phone?