Hacker News Reader

Nahhh, it's just good business(tm).

"I have altered the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further." - DV

gulfieon Amazon destroys $1.5m of sellers inventory – now homeless

This is _exactly_ the situation that this society came up with a new agreement to avoid. E.g. Presumption of innocence, and Habeas corpus to mention two.

gulfieon Just some red flags. No big deal. Just ignore them

They do take it seriously. It's just like the Nigerian prince scams. The insanity acts as a filter. What you get out the other side doesn't know or doesn't care that they are being misused.

gulfieon Thinking About Smart Home Power Usage

https://permies.com/w/better-world : this covers this exact topic... in several different ways.

Most of the electricity being used in the Wisconsin winter is going to be for heating. The best dollar ROI is typically weather stripping and insulating followed by using a heat pump ( preferably ground looped ), and of course the best choice might just be a rocket mass heater.

For passive solar options : https://www.builditsolar.com/

gulfieon Amazon Has Just Registered to Sell Ocean Freight

Due to shipping company economics the ships are in port. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-01-11/nothing-moving-balt...

Amazon needs move product to make money. If others will not physically move that product to the US, then they'll have to do it. More expensive is better than none at all.

gulfieon Volkswagen and the Blame the Engineer Game

"The first rule of Fight Club is : You don't talk about Fight Club." -Tyler

You get into the gang by sharing an existential threat to the group. Be it killing someone to get into a gang, be it telling your life's secrets while lying naked in a coffin ( http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sociopolitica/esp_sociopol... ), attaining seat at the MAD ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction ) table by stocking nuclear weapons, or signing on to a hot new scrappy startup for just enough to live paycheck to paycheck and keep frozen burritos on the breakfast table.

When the sharks circle, they tend to go after the weaker pray spices rather than those able to draw serious repercussions. The consumer as chum. Line employees are next. Then maybe a scape goat or two.

Lots of managers use the phrases 'by whatever means necessary', 'it must be done', 'just ship it', "we'll fix it later", and M.V.P. . The naive will say that "management just doesn't understand!". To someone who is paying attention this is building a cut out of responsibility.

In the Kabuki theater of corporate politics this often suffices for blame shedding. Remember the goal is to accept garner credit for good things and blame shed the bad things, helping things get done a product to be made or whatever is ancillary to the individuals goals in the modern company due to the average length of employment being so very low.

"All this has happened before, and will happen again." -cylon

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming

gulfieon Google Earth Pro is now free

yes, but when will it stop crashing?

gulfieon Why Plan 9 is not dead yet and what we can learn from it (2005) [pdf]

We can learn that doing the right thing technically is often not done in business.

QNX is another great example of awesomeness squandered.

gulfieon Navy: Self-guided unmanned patrol boats make debut

The arc of development is clear. This is only a small beginning step.

Existing boats are an easy low risk low cost platform to develop on. Expect air, submersible, and larger surface units with the same capabilities within time.

Thought no sexy, the same sort of technology will be used in logistics. Some argue the truck and the liberty ship won world war II. Automated over the beach resupply without paying for air assets would be a large cost savings and allow resupply of larger and heavier inventory items like bulk fuel, food, aircraft parts and tanks.

gulfieon Will Misogyny Bring Down the Atheist Movement?

luckily that didn't happen with the hacker movement... oh wait.

gulfieon Recommended Security Reading

A quick review showed a lack of : Reflections on Trusting Trust Ken Thompson ( http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html )

Any list without it, is a list without it.

gulfieon Why doctors are sick of their profession

Everyone dies, no one gets saved forever.

Plumbers and garbage men saved more lives in the past century than doctors. (so I hear)

gulfieon When 'Right-Sizing' Vacant Properties Goes Wrong

People just need to rewatch robocop.

gulfieon U.S. Army Techniques Publication 3-39.33: Civil Disturbances

I'd rather have them focus more on content and less on spelling. Especially when we are talking about the procedures for avoiding killing lots of people. Priorities are important in life.

gulfieon U.S. Army Techniques Publication 3-39.33: Civil Disturbances

tldr; The mission is to avoid aggravating the local population any more than necessary, and they may be angry for good and valid reasons. Hurting/shooting people tends to anger people and turn the military presence there untenable(costly in material and lives).

okay, I mixed in a some background from other publications in the tldr, but whatever.

of course : " One of the serious problems in planning the fight against American doctrine, is that the Americans do not read their manuals, nor do they feel any obligation to follow their doctrine... " - From a Soviet Junior Lt's Notebook

gulfieon Billionaire's breakup plan would chop California into six states

Bull pucky. Have you ever been to Louisiana?

http://www.businessinsider.com/most-corrupt-states-and-terri...

and

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territo...

If the big government effect was large then California, with the most people in it should be the most corrupt. Check out Mississippi. With a paltry 2.9 million people it should be a bucolic bastion of upstanding government... And Alaska, with only 0.7 Million people must be the shining light of sanity in our world... ( ranks 5th in corruption, remember senator Ted Stevens? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Stevens )

The big government theory doesn't hold water.

gulfieon Billionaire's breakup plan would chop California into six states

1) business-friendly == 6 newly formulated rule books writen by the corporations will allow the corporations to help themselves to state resources without much in the way to stop them. Think about just a few. a) selling off state parks, b) no more minimum wage, c) no more pollution laws and California mandated MPG ratings for trucks. d) Smog everywhere... remember http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erin_Brockovich , niether will the new states. Contaminating ground water will be a new business right.

2) Solve the states water issues. Dogma. Free markets fix everything. Thus by implementing free markets for water (and first removing historical water rights) everything is solved, because markets are good at that sort of thing.. We just have to start charging people for water ( http://seekingalpha.com/article/213157-how-the-free-market-c... ) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_trading , and http://worldsavvy.org/monitor/index.php?option=com_content&i... , and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_privatization

3) Ease traffic congestion : Two ways this works out. a) free markets logic on cars. Toll ways, road privatization, time of use based pricing etc. or b) free up the environmental regulations to start building more lanes on all the highways everywhere (though that doesn't really help).

If it was done well then maybe the 6 states would be a good thing. More likely than not it is simply a way shake up the political apple cart so some people can get more apples than they had before.

gulfieon Microsoft Will Soon Bring Back The Start Menu In Windows 8.1

Yet another stunning advancement in the computer sciences. I wonder how Knuth will respond to being one upped.

gulfieon Why Puppet, Chef, Ansible aren't good enough

https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedin...

(speaking from second hand knowledge) They don't go into much of the really interesting detail in the paper. The awesome part of all of that was that everything an application required to function was under it's own tree, you never had any question of providence, or if the shared libraries would work right on the given release of the OS you might be using. And it worked from any node on the global network. This problem has been solved, most people didn't get the memo.

gulfieon Microsoft Joins the Open Compute Project, Shares its Server Designs

Bankrolled purchasers are attempting to commodity the server landscape into a platform that choke smaller companies.

Something about embrace, extend and extinguish... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish

SSDD

gulfieon San Francisco Techie Says "Lower Part of Society" Should Be Segregated

He moved to SF in late 2011. I'm guessing he moved to or was in the cheaper hipper places, which is exactly where the crazy, homeless, drug dealers, dropouts, and trash hang out. They were there before he was. How long has the Tenderloin been the way it has been, specifically how many decades?

This is a rather standard gentrification wedge issue rhetoric being regurgitated without understanding the background. At least the PR people got to him this morning to start working on fixing the damage.

gulfieon San Francisco Techie Says "Lower Part of Society" Should Be Segregated

The notion of two tiered economy is overly simplified. It allows people to believe that they might be on or close to the upper side of the divide. Wealth and money (richness) distributions seem to follow power laws.

He moved to SF in 2011 and maybe has a few million dollars from a founding few startups. That sure seems like a lot to people below him. That is peanuts to the people above him who run the city.

The simplistic two tier breakdown is a hindrance to understanding unless it is understood as the divisive control structure it is.

gulfieon Make-A-Wish Foundation Turns San Francisco Into Gotham for 5-Year-Old Batkid

So how can we get the same people motivated to work for a cure?

gulfieon Ask HN: what would you do with $750k that you just inherited?

Durable goods, that $750k took a lifetime to build. The least you can do is see it last another lifetime to hand off to someone else.

Things that will decrease your monthly out of pocket expenses. E.g. if you have a home, solar panels, and a solar hot water heater. Extra bonus if you convert to solar powered hydronic heating.

http://www.reddit.com/r/buyitforlife

gulfieon Disruptive Innovation vs. Harvard: Who Will Win?

My 32 Billion dollar guess is Harvard.

http://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/the-short-list...

Harvard students? Faculty? huh? Why would $32 Billion USD care about that?

gulfieon How to remain secure against NSA surveillance

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_Trojan

gulfieon How to remain secure against NSA surveillance

APT in a flash drive is just a cute trick. Just because you wrote zeros over it doesn't mean that the APT thumb drive firmware won't give you a trojan next time you read a the right kind of file off of it.

Or maybe it waits a week before it starts injecting binary, just to wait out your test and validation procedures...

gulfieon You Can't Fix People

1) In this case fixing seems to be behavior(or thought) modification. 2) We fix people all the time. 3) Industries are built on it. 3) Fixing people is what pays for the internet of today.

$557 Billion USD, of fixes just this year alone.

http://nielsen.com/us/en/newswire/2013/global-ad-spend-grows...

We fix people all the time.

gulfieon You Can't Fix People

The comments were better than the article.

gulfieon Ask HN: How to secure a server without physical control of the hardware?

We are increasingly finding out that even owning and having physical control over the hardware isn't enough to insure secure a physical device.

Google 'BIOS based Advanced persistent threat' and 'Hardware Trojan'.

Oh but wait, it gets worse. Even "well thought out" industry standards are horrible security problems waiting to happen. Cypher 0 , who thought this was a good idea?

http://fish2.com/ipmi/

The solution you are looking for may be known as homomorphic encryption, which is still rather far out in the theoretical place.

The horse has been out of the barn so long it has had a good life, grown old and has great grand children playing in the fields.