Hacker News Reader

cubicle67on How Apple and Amazon Security Flaws Led to My Epic Hacking

My bank and a few other companies I deal with require some sort of pin/password in order to speak to someone over the phone. When I call, the conversation usually goes something like

    "Hello Mr 67, before we start I'll need your pin"
      "I have a pin?"
    "Yes, when you set up this account you were given a pin required for phone access"
      "Really? I have no idea what it is..."
    "That's ok. If you can just answer these other few questions.         
     What's your mother's maiden name"
       [redacted]
    "and your birthdate"
       [also redacted]
    "thankyou Mr 67, now how can I help you today? ..."

cubicle67on How Apple and Amazon Security Flaws Led to My Epic Hacking

the weakness with 2-factor auth is that almost all of us with a smartphone use that phone for email. And that phone is the same one google sends the sms to...

cubicle67on A new vehicle interface

Yes, you might be right about the volume. I was looking at the buttons here [1] but the volume one looked more like a round push button than a dial. I guess it could be a dial

As to the ring around the number, well I'm more confused going back and looking at it again. Sometimes, like [2] it's a single colour, and others, like [3] it's divided into multiple segments. 12/14mph is slow, so I'd expect to see the ring extend not as far as it does. I'd expect it to extend that far around for speeds like 70mph

Another thought - the little mpg/regen graph is prominent but largely useless. However, if speed and acceleration were added it could be a very useful tool in working out which driving conditions give best economy

[1] http://www.minimallyminimal.com/storage/post-images/doko/d13...

[2] http://www.minimallyminimal.com/storage/post-images/doko/f07...

[3] http://www.minimallyminimal.com/storage/post-images/doko/d10...

cubicle67on A new vehicle interface

Normally I enjoy this sort of thing, but this I'm not taking to. As commented by others, it looks like it was designed by someone who drives very little

First up, the speedo is not only about the number, but also the position of the needle. I don't need to know if I'm doing 110 or 111, but the position of the needle will tell me at a very quick glance if I'm venturing towards 120 or slowing to 90

Second - I thought we'd decided adjusting volume by anything other than a physical turning dial was a poor way to do it about 10 years ago.

Then there's other odd things like 83% oil - what sort of use is a figure like that? Is that good or bad? Oil pressure is what I need to know, and even then a simple binary ok/not ok is sufficient

Possibly the main problem is that there's not really much wrong with displays as they are. I can see my speed and rate of acceleration, rpm, warning lights etc at a glance. I can dim them to my liking. And, importantly, anyone else driving one of my vehicles can very quickly acclimatise themselves and feel confident driving it. With the way things are currently, there's really only two things I need to figure out when I hop into a car i haven't driven before - which side of the steering column the indicators are on, and where the headlight switch is

cubicle67on Miles Davis – blind listening test

If he were a modern programmer he would hate Rails

oooh, them's fightin' words...

If languages were music, Rails would be something gloriously bombastic like Dream Theater's live performance of Six Degrees on their Score album. C would be BB King - timeless and simple yet complex. I think Perl would be that guy with the funny haircut who sounds like a modem

cubicle67on RoR in the browser (Heroku + Code-academy)

the slight irony here being this was something you could do with heroku when they launched in 2007

cubicle67on Facebook e-mail mess: Address books altered, e-mail lost

iOS6 is still in Beta. be nice to see Apple haul Facebook through the hot coals (?) for this.

anyone else think Apple and Facebook make interesting partners? They're both doing their best to get users into their own domains to the exclusion of all else

cubicle67on Someone Stole Sherlock's 300,000 Likes

I don't downvote often, but I've downvoted your comment here because it's just sanctimonious empathy-free wankery that adds nothing at all to the conversation.

cubicle67on Surface: Between a Rock and a Hardware Place

for anyone like me who had no idea what 5by5 was, it seems like it's a talk show that Gruber was part of, then he left to do another, or something like that. meh

was unable to find reference to said shenanigans though, which was disappointing

cubicle67on 2:40

interestingly, here in Australia an electric kettle is one of the required basics of any kitchen. Even the cheapest nastiest hotel room will contain a toaster and an electric kettle

cubicle67on Microsoft Introduces New "Surface" Tablet

Given the last statement, it appears the marketing has done something right

No, the engineers etc have done something right. His intrigue is despite the marketing effort, not because of it

cubicle67on Microsoft Introduces New "Surface" Tablet

which redirects to http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/pixelsense/default.aspx

I see the old Surface is now known as the Samsung SUR40

cubicle67on Microsoft Introduces New "Surface" Tablet

no flash here and it (yt link) played fine

edit: no flash or silverlight, and yet both the MS video and the youtube one play fine

cubicle67on Final thoughts on Windows 8: A design disaster

My experience with the Win8 preview

looks ok. click on something, which launches an app. cool, but now how do I get back.

spent probably 10 minuted getting increasingly frustrated at not being able to exit back to the home screen (or whatever it's called. it's obviously not the desktop, because there's a tile called "desktop" that should be called "normal windows"). In the end I gave up and gave it to my wife, who did manage to figure it out (hint: you have to move the mouse to the very bottom left hand pixel)

Also - it appears I'm unable to use the email client at all unless I sign up for a live account. What's up with this?

cubicle67on Lego - the Largest Tyre Manufacturer in the World

Now here's a case where having points visible would help those not-in-the-know to see what those-who-are-in-the-know think of the he said/she said between DigitalSea and hartror above

Given you can't see points, hartror is correct, and here's a collection of tyre retailer names as evidence

Kmart Tyre & Auto Service

Welshpool Tyre Service

Berry's Tyres

Fremantle Tyrepower

Ian Diffen World of Tyres & Mufflers

West State Tyre Service

National Tyres

(you get the idea)

cubicle67on Show HN: My 1-year project, iPad IDE with GitHub and Heroku integration

Have you seen Codea (nee Codify)? It implements what looks like the standard keyboard with an extra row on top containing things like parenthesis, quotes, tab and left/right cursor keys. Screenshot here http://www.twolivesleft.com/Codea/Talk/discussion/206/progre...

cubicle67on London traffic lights rigged to win International Olympic Committee's favor

or aid your getaway?

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064505/

cubicle67on Automatic programming: write code that writes code

I'd argue that method_missing isn't metaprogramming at all.

What about ActiveRecord (Rails' default ORM)? That makes great use of code-writing-code to generate a ton of methods on your class all based on db fields.

cubicle67on Automatic programming: write code that writes code

not sure what makes code "real" or not to you, but I used this as a very simple example of "code that writes code" that probably all Ruby users have used, possibly without thinking about what it's doing

and yes, pretty much all code we write is mandatory syntactical verbiage

cubicle67on Automatic programming: write code that writes code

Ruby's attr_accessor is a great example of this. When you add the line

    attr_accessor :age

a bit of nifty metaprogramming kicks in and generates the following getter/setter methods in your class

    def age= value
      @age = value
    end

    def age
      @age
    end

cubicle67on Why HBO's president panned Internet streaming (and Forbes' linkbait)

It's not really HBO's fault that Game of Thrones is pirated so much

interestingly, Game of Thrones, Season Two, is available on iTunes here in Australia and follows only 10 days after US release. We pay rather more here than in the US, but at $28 for a season pass, it's cheaper than the cost of the DVDs when they come out

cubicle67on JQuery knobs

this could be solved by requiring a minimum cursor movement before the value changes. If you want only a small change, you need to move it beyond the trigger limit, then back again

the same idea would help with getting exactly 100 or 0 values - if moving back set the "zero" zone between 0 and about -10, or going the other way once you hit 100 you need to progress significantly past it, say to about 10, before it wraps value

cubicle67on CISPA Just Got Worse, And Then Passed On Rushed Vote

http://imgur.com/Tb5GM

cubicle67on Something is deeply broken in OS X memory management

3 year old (non 'pro') macbook here, 5GB & 7200rpm drive, avg uptime is 30+days or whatever the time between service packs is. No issues at all.

Came with Leopard, upgraded to Snow Leopard (not a fresh install) and them app store upgrade to Lion

machine is snappy as, unlike my coworker who has a brand new quad core i7 w/ 256GB SSD that runs Lion like a dog. no idea why, but my humble old macbook is faster in every way than his shiny new mac mini

cubicle67on Day 1 of Oracle v. Google trial

the jury selection process seems designed to ensure that instead of a jury of your peers, you end up with a jury of people completely ignorant about what's involved in the case.

cubicle67on Oracle/Google: You looked at our code before to build Dalvik. Is it not smart?

actual title Oracle tells jury "you can't just step on somebody's intellectual property"

cubicle67on Day 1 of Oracle v. Google trial

Here's the arstechnica's take http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/04/oracle-tells...

cubicle67on IKamasutra: Apple Hates Brunettes

Youtube is stricter than TV on nudity

except for stuff like this (very NSFW just after the 8 minute mark) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLjRExyIBNM which somehow is still there

[Edit - it's Penn & Teller on Taxes, part 3]

cubicle67on 3 Major Publishers Sue Open-Education Textbook Start-Up

The bigger question is why does teaching subtraction require a textbook at all? Surely if I asked anyone here to think of six ways to teach a child subtraction, none of the ideas would involve a textbook (or a worksheet).

cubicle67on The Beer Game -or- Why Apple Can’t Build iPads in the US

are you referring to this?

‘I Want a Glass Screen’

In 2007, a little over a month before the iPhone was scheduled to appear in stores, Mr. Jobs beckoned a handful of lieutenants into an office. For weeks, he had been carrying a prototype of the device in his pocket.

Mr. Jobs angrily held up his iPhone, angling it so everyone could see the dozens of tiny scratches marring its plastic screen, according to someone who attended the meeting. He then pulled his keys from his jeans.

People will carry this phone in their pocket, he said. People also carry their keys in their pocket. “I won’t sell a product that gets scratched,” he said tensely. The only solution was using unscratchable glass instead. “I want a glass screen, and I want it perfect in six weeks.” †

This is a anecdote that now seems to be repeated as fact, but I have serious doubts about it. For starters there was a six month gap between the first demo and launch, and the iPhone was demoed with the glass screen, as evidenced by this quote from David Pogue from January 9, 2007 Apple went through numerous iterations of the glass surface, trying to find one that’s not too slick or too rough, or that shows grease and fingerprints too much. ††

† http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/business/apple-america-and...

†† http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/01/09/some-hands-on-time-...