Hacker News Reader

devrandomguyon Equifax Faces Multibillion-Dollar Lawsuit Over Hack

Nah, they'll just create expendable shell companies to decouple the risk from the profit.

devrandomguyon Cybersecurity Incident Involving Consumer Information

So, can anyone tell me, why are there three credit agencies? Why not one, or thirty? Could I start a credit agency, just by judging that certain people are level 9000 reliable, and others are just level 100 reliable? I swear it's not slander, everyone I refer to is reliable, it's just that some of them have demonstrated exceptional reliability.

devrandomguyon Bitumen balls could be a pipeline-free way to transport Alberta oil

What makes you think that any of those things, including plastics, must by made from fossil oil? So tired of being told that the only way to do things, is the way we are currently doing them. Heck, we don't even have to make so much stuff out of plastic at all, and considering where that plastic is turning up in the food chain, it might be worth the expense to start finding replacements. Aluminum recycles nicely, hemp makes some excellent fabrics, cows will do just fine on a diet of grass.

devrandomguyon Marijuana Compound Removes Toxic Alzheimer’s Protein from the Brain

Their marketing looks quite shady to me: no technical details, uses Facebook likes as a quality metric, defective link to the one third-party review. You definitely want to see a teardown and a proper review of something like this, before you buy it.

If I was going to experiment with a new extraction method, my choice would be to acquire a soxhlet extractor, and experiment with ethanol as a solvent, for producing budder. https://www.erowid.org/archive/rhodium/pdf/soxhlet4dummies.p..., page 2 shows a DIY version that doesn't require you to purchase glassware. I would recommend putting the whole setup in a larger pot of water, so that you can more easily control the temperature. You can use the same setup as a still, to extract ethanol from something like cheap vodka.

As for methods that I have actually tried, cold butane extraction produces spectacularly clear oil, which eventually dries to shatter. Do freeze the weed first, don't freeze your hand. Do leave the extract spread out in a thin layer to evaporate until it forms hard shatter, otherwise some very scary butane will remain in the product.

devrandomguyon Run Kubernetes on top of DC/OS

Could anyone point out the boundary between the open-source Mesos / Marathon stack, and the commercial DC/OS? The official documentation (https://docs.mesosphere.com/1.9/overview/what-is-dcos/) doesn't make it clear. What capabilities does DC/OS have that are not available in the open-source portion of the stack?

> As a distributed system, DC/OS includes a group of agent nodes that are coordinated by a group of master nodes. Like other distributed systems, several of the components running on the master nodes perform leader election with their peers.

This just sounds like vanilla Mesos masters and slaves. DC/OS "runs on top of" that, but what is it actually doing? Is the DC/OS another service that just enables the Mesos masters to initially discover and replace each other? Could it not be replaced with Zookeeper or Consul? That seems like a small piece of the puzzle, what would make it the one expensive thing, while the rest of the system is free? Is the overall stack actually shareware, rather than a community of independent open-source services?

The reason I am so curious, is because after running a small demo a year ago, the Mesos stack looked really promising. The only thing holding me back from proposing a large scale trial, for comparison to our sprawling Heroku/ECS/EBS setup, was the feeling that I was not understanding a crucial part of the architecture, and not understanding the pricing, if that is even applicable (couldn't find price info anywhere! How do I quantify that part?)

devrandomguyon Bank of Canada increases overnight rate target to 1 per cent

Who is George Parker?

devrandomguyon Bank of Canada increases overnight rate target to 1 per cent

Build nation-scale infrastructure? Surely a major bank would benefit greatly, if indirectly, from any improvements in the national economy.

devrandomguyon Radar reveals two moons orbiting asteroid Florence

Well, if the illumination was from the radio telescope, then the moon would be hidden behind the parent asteroid when it is eclipsed. We would not see it go dark, it would just be obscured.

devrandomguyon Radar reveals two moons orbiting asteroid Florence

Imagine heating and spinning it into a thin foil disk, and then curving it into a slight parabola by gently accelerating the center point away from the sun. Solar-cooker death-ray for anyone who disputes your claim!

devrandomguyon Category 5 Hurricane Irma Brings 180-MPH Winds to Bear on Caribbean Islands

The first number is the wind direction, in degrees, not velocity in a different unit. The UX could be improved with a ° symbol.

devrandomguyon How Seth Godin would launch a business on a $1,000 budget

Might be worth checking out the various issue-bounty setups, like Bountysource. Focus on documenting the design of your MVP in a public Git repo, then file issues with a bounty on them to get tasks done. As soon as you have something working, you can "Show HN" for a blast of dev publicity. If you are looking for small scale funding, without getting into a VC situation, then you could encourage supporters / users to contribute on issues that they personally care about.

This sort of requires you to open-source your project, but maybe you can isolate the secret sauce in one tiny little backend service? Or, maybe the true value of your startup isn't in the source code, but rather in relationships with / between users, in which case you don't really need to worry about someone scooping your work with a simple `git clone`.

devrandomguyon No Man’s Sky One Year Later

A lean startup, done right, plans the MVP and promises only that, as a first iteration. Then, if necessary, they can pivot in a new direction with another MVP v2, or use the credibility from the execution of their first, viable, release, to raise support for a major expansion or three.

devrandomguyon North Korea nuclear test: Hydrogen bomb 'missile-ready'

Put it at the bottom of the ocean in shallow water, on top of a fiber optic line. You get free cooling as a bonus! Not sure about backup power, though.

https://news.microsoft.com/features/microsoft-research-proje...

devrandomguyon The Nuclear Potato Cannon, Part 2 (2006)

I think that the Lofstrom loop is way more realistic than an orbital elevator, mainly because the cables "only" need to span ~100km, rather than the ~36,000km required for a geostationary elevator.

Also, I see that there are improvements in that part of the design: the cables could be replaced with counterweights, and those counterweights could be accelerated upwards and dropped, in order to dampen the waves generated by the release of vehicles.

http://launchloop.com/Counterweights

I don't see why this has a flattened middle segment at all - wouldn't it work better if it was a continuous parabolic arc, like an elliptical orbit that intersects the Earth at the locations of the base stations? That way, the working mass wouldn't have to make sharp turns wherever support cables are pulling on the loop.

devrandomguyon When it comes to internet privacy, be afraid, analyst suggests

Sounds to me like the GP believes in minimally constrained competition, where monopolism is one of the many undesirable constraints on their way of life. They are correctly identifying large corporations as analogous to overbearing governments. That, to me, is a classic right-wing belief, and one that I can empathize with, as a staunch Decentralist Green.

devrandomguyon When it comes to internet privacy, be afraid, analyst suggests

Can you recommend a good source of info about running a personal email server? I have heard that it is extremely difficult to get mainstream email providers to accept email from unrecognized sources, but if that is not the case, or if there is a good method for dealing with that madness, then I am very much interested in managing my own email.

devrandomguyon 6502cloud – Bringing the 80's to the cloud

Synthwave intensifies

devrandomguyon Privacy Respecting Services and Software

When did Tor Browser start enabling JS by default? It was blocked by noscript by default for me, when I started using it years ago, and that was still the case the last time I installed a new workstation OS, earlier this year.

I use TBB for about 20% of my browsing, a habit that I cultivated while traveling and working overseas. Now, with all the crazy identity politics going on at the major data companies, I think that anonymity is becoming much more important for the general public.

Thank you for playing devil's advocate. The fact that the project is funded by the US govt is certainly concerning, no doubt about that. I can only hope that their motive is just to enable their own agents to operate online without being identified, profiled and social-graphed by the private sector.

devrandomguyon Privacy Respecting Services and Software

IMO, requiring a mobile number is grounds for disqualification, because it strongly identifies a person, and can be abused quite badly. Telegram demands a mobile number, even though it does not need to place calls. Check out Wire for an alternative.

http://wire.com/

devrandomguyon After governance breakdown, Node.js leaders fight for its survival

If people are leaving because they are unable to unilaterally execute politically motivated purges, then I would say that over the long term, this bodes well for the Node community. It's a technology platform, not a political platform, SMH. Hopefully, the people who left will be welcomed back in, after they have had a chance to cool off and reflect on their professionalism; I am sure that they are all technically excellent engineers.

devrandomguyon Search/Compare all housing options at once (Craigslist, AirBnB and other startups)

This is only for San Francisco. It would be nice if we could get that mentioned in the title, this is a more significant piece of info than the list of sources.

devrandomguyon Cooling the Earth with a cloud of small spacecraft near the inner Lagrange point

If I was given a few $trillion to solve atmospheric CO2/CH4, I would move mining to the moon, and move manufacturing and agriculture into orbit. Then smother the Earth-side economy with cheap/free stuff to discourage the remaining entrenched industry, and offer habitat space to anyone who prefers doing physical work for a living, over living in a highly regulated paradise on UBI + patreon.

For perspective, Gerard K. O'Neil gave a ballpark estimate of $31B (correction: $31B in 1972 dollars, $172B in 2013 dollars) for a v1 O'Neil cylinder made of steel. http://www.nss.org/settlement/physicstoday.htm

devrandomguyon Destroy All Monsters: A Journey into the Caverns of Dungeons and Dragons (2006)

Check out Nerdarchy on YT if you want to level up your DM skills, just let them chat in the background while you flesh out the campaign. Try not to squirrel too hard; if they give you an awesome idea, just make a note for next week and then carry on with what you meant to work on, if you can.

https://www.youtube.com/user/Nerdarchy, goes well with beer and colored mechanical pencils.

devrandomguyon Dreamwidth Banned by PayPal in 2008 for Refusing to Censor Users

I don't believe that government is seriously hindered by free speech, but rather by it's lack of profit-incentive and by the perverse incentives of our current implementation of democracy. We should expand the free speech rights, and other basic human rights, to cover all people in all situations.

Actually, that profit incentive thing is debatable, I take that back. A for-profit government could be quite horrifying.

devrandomguyon The U.S. is risking an academic brain drain

What I mean, is that it does not really matter that Canada is not the highest paying country in the world, because money is not the only factor in determining where academics choose to live. If we can offer an environment that is conducive to intellectual work (low financial stress, spiritually uplifting environment, a culture of mutual assistance, minimal neurotoxins in the food, water and air, good schools for their kids, freedom of thought and expression, minimal discrimination, no threat of war, etc) then academics will try to come here despite the fact that they won't be as financially wealthy in the global market.

We can offer many of those features simply by leaving the huge local ecosystems intact and accessible, and by avoiding changes that cause parts of the population to become desperate.

devrandomguyon The U.S. is risking an academic brain drain

When the last tree has been cut down, the last fish caught, the last river poisoned, only then will we realize that one cannot eat money.

We don't have to pay as well, someone else will always be willing to ravage their own country to beat us at that game. We just have to not screw up the local society and environment as badly as the superpowers.

devrandomguyon Dreamwidth Banned by PayPal in 2008 for Refusing to Censor Users

That argument becomes weaker as responsibilities and power are transferred from the government to the private sector. How many of the rules that we follow are currently dictated by a corporation, rather than a government? Do we not want checks and balances on all rule-makers?

devrandomguyon Pybind11 — Seamless operability between C++11 and Python

So, sanitize your `/add?a=1&b=2` endpoint inputs by making sure that they don't add up to something greater than... wait a sec. Actually, let's just return an unsigned int. No wait! We might get a negative number as input. Hmm, can I bitbang my way out of this? Can I be sure that the signed ints are two's complement?

Man, these languages are seriously !!fun!!

devrandomguyon Pybind11 — Seamless operability between C++11 and Python

Looks fine to me. Are you supposed to check for integer overflow before doing the addition, or something?

devrandomguyon 'Environmental Nightmare' After Thousands of Atlantic Salmon Escape Fish Farm

The local Coast Salish natives have been successfully farming oysters and other shellfish in the tidal zone for thousands of years. This actually improves the nearby environment by filtering the water, and sequesters carbon in the CaCO3 seashells. We could probably scale this up safely, if the DFO is still capable of regulating anything effectively.

We need to repair the DFO, the gutting of regulatory agencies is a root cause for many of these problems.