Hacker News Reader

cascaon Is Google signing your chat messages?

Why does Google use the term "Off the record" when there is a product called Off the record[1] that has been used for end-to-end encryption of IM that pre-dates Google Talk?

Google does many good things, but it would be unreasonable for anyone to expect that they wouldn't store all your chat messages. "Chats that have been taken off the record aren't stored in your Gmail chat history, or in the Gmail chat history of the person you're chatting with. "[2]

[1] https://otr.cypherpunks.ca/ [2] https://support.google.com/talk/answer/29291?hl=en

cascaon U.K. Parties Prepare for 2015 by Erasing Web Histories

This is a very strange action. It's almost as if they thought that some simple technical tricks could remove things from the Internet. Now there will be even more interest in comparing what they've said in the past with what is said in the future, and other organisations - now familiar with the Wayback Machine policy will keep mirrors.

As a quick fix, the wonderful British Library has a service called www.webarchive.org.uk. Here are some speeches from 2008 : http://www.webarchive.org.uk/wayback/archive/20081209103831/...

They also seem to have done something with their YT channel. For example, this video is dated Mar 21, 2007, but when viewing the channel and sorting by oldest first, it's not there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbPpcuh7DF8

cascaon Dropbox Could Be A Bargain At An $8 Billion Valuation

This seems like a very convoluted way of coming to the valuation. Revenue != profit. I can easily create business that generates $1bn/month in revenue by selling dollars for 90 cents. Dropbox may be worth $8bn, but surely it makes more sense to assess the valuation based on the growth in profitability?

cascaon PlanMy.Travel wants to solve travel planning woes with human expertise

Better to use http://wikivoyage.org/ than wikitravel. It's a fork after there were some complaints about the owners of Wikitravel.

cascaon Writing a FUSE filesystem in Python

For those who don't know the space, ExpanDrive used to be SftpDrive. I've been recommending it for years to people who are not technical for accessing sftp shares and have never been let down. Thanks for a great product and sharing some detail about how it works.

cascaon It's 100 years since Fritz Haber found a way to synthesise ammonia

For those who like to listen to podcasts, Radiolab did a great show on the fascinating story of Fritz Haber:

http://www.radiolab.org/story/180132-how-do-you-solve-proble...

cascaon Can Snowden be targeted using the Adobe breach?

This is an interesting attack that uses other people's password hints to match a hashed password. However, it seems unlikely that the Edward Snowden would use such a weak password to protect any resource that he considered sensitive.

Please use a randomly generated password that is as long and complex as the site you're using will allow, stored in a password safe.

cascaon Nate Silver: What I need from statisticians

We need a new term for statistician and data scientist is as good as any. For many years, the terms "statistics" and "statistician" have had negative undertones within the general public and renaming is a great way to overcome that.

cascaon I lost years’ worth of Google Docs files because of a poor user interface

Everyone hates making backups. Everyone loves them when something happens.

There are many free online data storage systems. If you're happy with the privacy implications, it's not hard to run Google Drive, Dropbox and box.net on the same directory for some degree of resilience.

cascaon Why women lose the dating game

Great link, thank you.

cascaon Mozilla Lightbeam – Relationships between third parties and the sites you visit

Interesting that they use the list of trackers from TrackerBlock[1]. The license provided is:

    We reserve our copyright as to commercial applications but please contact us if you are interested in licensing for non-profit or educational uses.

    Our source code is available to review for your assurance.

In their extension, the "trackers.json" file is dated as 8/Feb/2012, so almost 2 years old now.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/trackerblock/

cascaon Finalterm - modern terminal done right

Been watching Finalterm for a few months - it looks interesting but it's still too unstable to use for production. The risk of it doing the wrong thing when running on a production host is just not worth the potential efficiency gains.

cascaon Only a few countries are teaching children how to think

For a more detailed understanding of the PISA system, there was a recent Econtalk podcast - http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2013/08/hanushek_on_edu_3.h...

cascaon Banksy artwork vandalized in New York

How can you tell? This looks like the kind of thing that would easily appear in Leake Street[1] and I'm sure NY has quality street artists as well.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leake_Street

cascaon Why climate change is good for the world

There are many decisions that need to be made around climate change. Is it worth the cost (financial, lifestyle, environmental) to mitigate it by reducing energy consumption and therefore reducing growth? How much warming is acceptable? Is geo-engineering a reasonably option? Should the countries that created the existing CO^2 bear the majority of the income costs?

These are reasonably questions to be asked by those who will be affected by the change, i.e. everyone. However this debate can only happen when there's an acknowledgement that climate change is happening. Sadly there appears to be a politically influential group who deny the science out of fear of a potential outcome.

(Not implying that I agree with the article, just that exploring these questions is a good thing)

cascaon Banksy artwork vandalized in New York

This happens in London too, although usually it takes a little longer. Banky's "residence" in New York is clearly not being as appreciated by the local street artists as he was intending.

cascaon Free Font: Norwester

Thank you for putting the license in the zipfile. We've had to avoid using certain fonts because it wasn't possible to identify the license.

Can you please put another file with a link back to your website and the request to donate to the International Justice Mission if used?

cascaon London’s Great Exodus

3 families are leaving London and that makes a trend? Comparing property prices in London to Williamsburg or SF and it looks like a similar trajectory to me. Cities are expensive because space is constrained (artificially in many cases) and lots of people want to live there.

The author makes note of the low "property taxes" in London which is just spurious. In the US, property taxes are often used as a way to pay for many local and state government services for a number of historical reasons. This is often the only income that some states collect. In the UK, council tax is to pay for a much smaller set of services. A £5m house does not generate 10x the garbage of a £500k house. It's a cheap shot that tries to make a false point for US readers.

It's true that the current state of the global economy has meant that fearful foreigners have brought their money and bought property, but this tends to be at the very high end of the market which shouldn't be affecting the middle class that he's referring to. Greater demand by many people wanting to live in one of the world's great cities might.

cascaon Ask HN: Why do all payment processors charge 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction?

Processors have upstream costs to Visa/Mastercard/etc that are charged in similar ways. The idea behind them using a percentage is that it relates to the risk. The more you spend, the more could be fraud and might need to be written off. The $0.30 is effectively a lower bound to stop micropayments. Otherwise people could do a $0.10 transaction and only pay $0.003. This could be to avoid system load.

While it might seem expensive, until a few years ago, taking card payments required getting a merchant account at a bank with high monthly fees which could take months. Now you can pay similar rates but without the misery of dealing with the banks.

cascaon Apple should buy big companies, says Scully

This touches on the issue of why companies have amassed such huge reserves and seem unwilling or unable to spend them. Clayton Christensen (of Innovators Dilemma fame) gave an interesting talk at the RSA last month[1] where he described a possible reason for this. Unfortunately only the audio is up but they do often have video so perhaps that'll be there soon as the slides were very important.

The high-level summary is that in order for companies to develop market-creating changes, they need to be willing to make long-term investments with high probabilities of failure. This hasn't happened because the incentives of the management of the company are to provide short-term results which means they choose to only deliver incremental improvements or cost-savings as it has a greater improvement in the short-term on share prices and their remuneration.

He went into far more detail - listen if this sounds interesting to you.

[1] http://www.thersa.org/events/audio-and-past-events/2013/the-...

cascaon Apple should buy big companies, says Scully

Given Sculley's time and "success" at Apple, the data suggests that doing exactly the opposite of what he proposes would be in Apple's best interests.

cascaon Going beyond vulnerability rewards

Interesting idea. Try get people who are considering selling exploits to get a little money from Google instead. Michal Zalewski (lcamtuf) is highly respected in the security world - The Tangled Web and Silence on the Wire are excellent reads.

It would be very surprising if this didn't lead to a few new BIND and ISC DHCPD bugs coming out in the near future.

cascaon Things You Can Do That Will Make You Happier

1. Exercise more – 7 minutes might be enough

2. Sleep more – you'll be less sensitive to negative emotions

3. Move closer to work – a short commute is worth more than a big house

4. Spend time with friends and family – don't regret it on your deathbed

5. Go outside – happiness is maximized at 13.9°C (57°F)

6. Help others – 100 hours a year is the magical number

7. Practice smiling – it can alleviate pain

8. Plan a trip – but don't take one

9. Meditate – rewire your brain for happiness

10. Practice gratitude – increase both happiness and life satisfaction

cascaon Go Away PayPal

TL;DR: OP received marketing email from Paypal and is angry

cascaon Don’t email me

For some context, Daniel Stenberg is the lead developer in the widely used curl and libcurl OSS. He is extremely responsive on the mailing lists and will often provide detailed answers to difficult questions.

cascaon Interactive visualization of 2013 Thomson Reuter's Global Innovators Study

Pretty use of D3.js. Obviously this is your business but it would be great if there was some sourcecode to share with the community.

The report that the data is based on is not worth much. They claim to use Volume, Success, Global and Influence as measures. Apply this the Blackberry and Symantec and decide the value.

cascaon Tell, don't Ask.

This is an interesting post, thank you.

cascaon Why Malcolm Gladwell Matters and Why That's Unfortunate

I believe that the biggest problem with Malcolm Gladwell's writing is that one may be left with the impression that it's journalism. To understand why he does not provide critical analysis of the topics he writes on, this quote from last week's NY Times Sunday Book Review is enlightening:

I also like to steer clear of writing about people whom I do not personally like. My rule is that if I interview someone, they should never read what I have to say about them and regret having given me the interview.[1]

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/06/books/review/malcolm-gladw...

cascaon Facebook Requires Social Fixer Browser Extension to Remove Features

Social Fixer is great - I've been using it for a while and it makes my infrequent forays onto Facebook less miserable. From what I can tell, Facebook has removed the Social Fixer page on Facebook and are requiring the author to make significant changes in order to return it. The author is going to make those changes.

Why not just lose the page on Facebook and keep developing Social Fixer? If they threaten legal action, throw the code on Github and stop development on it under your own name. Or put it in an LLC or equivalent and just liquidate if they sue. Why does capitulation seem to be the most appealing option?

cascaon A cluster of start-ups in east London is thriving

"We have 100 vacancies, but we’ll be fortunate if we can fill half with hires in the UK,” says Errol Damelin, the boss of Wonga. Often talent has to be imported from America or elsewhere, but immigration rules for hires from outside the European Union are still “extremely cumbersome”, he complains

Another reason is that Wonga is morally bankrupt as it takes advantage of the desperate and the ill-informed. It's harder for them to hire as they want good engineers but need them to be unconcerned with what their skills are being used for.