Hacker News Reader

harshpotatoeson Confirmed: Mountain Lion sends some 64-bit Macs gently into that good night

On the other end of the spectrum, I work with lab equipment that are more than 15 years old but still work great. The software which interfaces with it is old, but still works with Windows. Would such a thing be possible with Apple, or would Apple's insistence on upgrading every few years force the lab equipment to be replaced at significantly greater cost?

harshpotatoeson Secret messages on the web: How to do steganography in JavaScript

All images have some amount of random noise in them due to the thermal fluctuations of the sensor. With some clever techniques, I wonder if it could be possible to hide the pseudorandom encrypted message in the image to make it appear slightly noisier? Or maybe hide the message in images with already low SNR?

harshpotatoeson List of Unexplained Sounds

Not true. While some of the radio spectrum has been reserved specifically because of the lack of absorption in the atmosphere, the 1420MHz line is the famous 21cm line frequenctly measured by cosmologists to look at the epoch of reionization. It is due to the hyperfine structure of hydrogen, and would not be of unique importance to our civilization.

However, we don't broadcast anything. Any broadcasts from earth would hugely overshadow any small signal we're trying to read.

harshpotatoeson Apple Isn’t The Only Disruptor: How Amazon Is Killing Publishers

There are some disturbing thoughts that arise from this. For example, what if in a thousand years from now, all information about this century is forgotten, because it was written in a digital format which can no longer be read. Or some sort of technological apocalypse occurs, and there are no non-digital sources to be read.

harshpotatoeson The Rise and Fall of PC Platforms

I don't think it is appropriate to have the smartphones and tablets as a %market share competing against desktop platforms such as mac/pc. For one, while in general people either own a mac xor a pc, people in general don't own a smartphone xor a desktop (I assume).

The graphs at the beginning showing sales seem to be the least misleading in this case, and don't show the sudden drop in sales which existed for other older systems such as Amiga, atari, etc. In this sense it seems pcs are still going steady with a nearly saturated market, and people are now adopting both a smartphone and a desktop.

At least, that is my interpretation from a single graph, presumably other opinions exist.

harshpotatoeson Earth actually has two moons.

I don't see how this and Kepler's laws fit together. The moon's mass is significantly different from the earth. How could the moon have the same orbit as the earth if the earth wasn't there?

harshpotatoeson Apple and the Kindle

I can't speak for the ugliness, but as for the slow to react...

I think the reason it feels sluggish are two reasons: The screen technology has a slow response time. This is alittle difficult to fix, due to the nature of the technology: an electic field turns on or off causing tiny balls to be pulled to the top or bottom of the screen causing light to be reflected/absorbed. Due to the size of these balls (microns), it can take much longer to reorient these balls then the molecules in liquid crystal (nanometers).

The other reason it probably feels sluggish is that the processor is a little slow. Fortunately, amazon has been able to work around this a bit by caching the next few pages. (But if you go backwards it can sometimes take a bit longer to load).

harshpotatoeson [dead]

I assumed he was referring to the large recession in the early 80's. Which would be about 20 years after the 60's.

harshpotatoeson [dead]

In his section talking about the brute force method of solving the puzzle, he seriously overestimates the number of possibilities for the whole puzzle.

Example: For grid2, he lists square A2 as having 4 possibilities (1679) and A3 as having 5 possibilities (12679). Which is true, if you ignore the rules of sudoku. Specifically, not all of those combinations are worth trying. If you choose a 1 for square A2, you would not choose a 1 for square A3.

Wikipedia lists there as being 10^21 unique sudoku puzzles, which is many orders of magnitude smaller than his listed 10^38 different combinations for grid2.

In short, I think a proper brute force method would be significantly faster than what he initially thought it would be.

harshpotatoeson Dark matter may be an illusion caused by the quantum vacuum

Basically, there are some knowns: The universe expands according to the fried,am equation. Different percentages of matter, energy give rise to different expansion rates. Expansion history of the universe is known via looking at supernova (which are equally bright at the source). Knowing matter is mostly hydrogen/helium and energ is mostly photons allows us to calculate the density of matter/energy in the universe. These don't match the terms found from measuring supernova leading the differences to be called dark matter/dark energy. Additionally, gravitational lensing is seen by objects which can't be seen. Meaning, they have mass, but don't appear to absorb/reflect light. Additional additionlly, similar effects are seen affecting the formation of galaxies: extra matter is needed to give the structure we see, but we apparently can't see that matter. So it was originally dark because we knew nothing about it, but the name stuck once it appeared we could not see it. It is definitely matter.

harshpotatoeson Xkcd Password Generator

It's a good idea, and would work well, if only websites would let me choose passwords longer than 12 characters!

harshpotatoeson Facial recognition false positives lead to license revocations in Massachusetts

I think in this situation, more arguements should be made that driving is not a privilege, it is an unfortunate necessity of modern life. What percentage of Americans could work without a car?

harshpotatoeson Courtney Love does the math (2000)

I don't think the issue is that she's a wild woman from the era of grunge, but rather she was addicted to heroine and cocaine for a while.

harshpotatoeson The Capacitive Button Cult Must Be Stopped

Another issue people don't bring up: the weather. Living in Seattle I frequently wore mittens. With the physical buttons it would not be a problem to operate the phone, with the touchscreen there is this long ordeal of pulling off the mitten to answer the phone. If it is raining (or rather, when is it not raining?), the rain will mess with the touchscreen, making it sometimes impossible to answer a call. You might say there is a solution: either cut off the fingers or sew in some conducting thread to the tip of the mittens. This doesn't solve the rain problem though.

harshpotatoeson Those 500K Bitcoins that caused the flash crash weren't real

I don't know of a single person unable to withdraw their money from WaMu as it went under. All of WaMu's accounts were then passed on to chase, and chase honord them. If WaMu went under, the savings accounts would have been FDIC insured. None of that will happen if Mt Gox is compromised in some catastrophic way.

harshpotatoeson LulzSec releases trove of AZ law enforcement documents

Most of their targets have been US based websites, and they have probably not made a lot of good will with European leaders. I would be very surprised if there was a European country that would not extradite them.

harshpotatoeson Sound Based Near Field Communication without NFC Chips

My girlfriend's heart rate monitor uses a similar technology to transmit her heart rate data to her computer. It's a neat idea, but it also leaves me skeptical that such an idea would work well for purchases...

harshpotatoeson How I almost got a Criminal Record

When I began reading the story, I was worried it would be about a NAT problem (since it involved his phone).

While I'm glad this guy got his situation cleared so easily, I wonder how you would defend yourself in this situation. Police ask telecom, "who has this address?" Telecom says: "this person has that address" (while failing to mention who else has that address). How would you refute such charges, since it would be true that you did have that ip address in this hypothetical situation?

harshpotatoeson Guy makes a knife from scratch. He has to make a smelter first.

I think if random individuals from today were to go into the past, we would mostly look pretty stupid. However, I think if a large enough group traveled into the past, we would have enough useful knowledge to wow them/revolutionize their society.

harshpotatoeson [dead]

What happens to the 8999 remaining bitcoins? Does a server somewhere think they are allocated to a person (although it doesn't have any name attached to them), effectively taking them out of the pool forever? Or are the bitcoins forgotten and free to be mined again or allocated to somebody else?

Or is this just a question that's so bad it's not even wrong?

harshpotatoeson Glasgow’s parking lot thugs get entrepreneurial

Homeless people in Miama have been following a similar scheme for a while now, albeit less scary and more annoying. Of course, now the city is beginning to replace the machines that print tickets, with those that electronically keep track of funds, the homeless people disappear and the city increases their income by forcing people to pay for a spot which a previous car had payed for.

harshpotatoeson CyanogenMod Adds Support For Revoking And Faking App Permissions on Android

Well, the problem isn't that Android isn't 'ours', you can still do whatever you want with it. The problem is that the hardware you buy is never really your, thereby making it more difficult to install custom android onto.

harshpotatoeson New bill upgrades unauthorized Internet streaming to a felony

If my understanding is correct, Megavideo is the person streaming the video and you are the person watching the video, meaning Megavideo would be the one with the felony.

harshpotatoeson World population projections: Growing pains

The chart sort of makes sense based on my limited knowledge on population growth, but two things pop out at me.

1) Can the US really continue to expect such growth over the next 100 years? I was under the impression that the fertility rate of the united states was below replacement levels (perhaps near 2?), and that the immigrant population makes up the difference to bring our fertility rate above replacement levels (ie growth). With many states bringing in anti-immigration bills, I could see this possibly hurting US population growth.

2) Why does Brazil have an odd inflection point near 2050?

As to the main topic regarding Africa's population. I can't help but wonder if a more natural solution will find itself. With some many countries predicted to have a declining population, I can't help but think immigration will be the solution to fill the probable labor shortages caused by declining populations in nearby countries (China, India, Russia, according to the graph).

harshpotatoeson Tech experts, including Google, to discuss future of the USPS

As with the rest of the modern world, junk mail (advertisers) are the backbone of the USPS. Cutting down the amount of junk mail might be bad for the post office.

harshpotatoeson Dear Record Labels: Focus on Buyers, Not Thieves

It seems plausible, but it doesn't explain some of their actions.

Example: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2007/10/riaa-jury-finds/

Why would they seek such large damages? According to your source, they believe on some level that these lawsuits won't deter piracy, and I find it difficult to believe that she will be capable of paying the damages in full, or that the win will offset the legal costs of Capitol records.

In fact, fast forward to the present, and we see that this has gone through several retrials (meaning she probably hasn't payed a cent to capitol records), and the damages have been upped to $1.5million.

So, what are the short term gains from these sorts of lawsuits, are the precedents they set enough to get damages from other suits?

harshpotatoeson Netflix CEO: In Ten Years, “We Will All Have A Gigabit To The Home”

As has been mentioned, there are many communities who still are only served by dialup, or slow-ish cable/dsl connections.

I wonder if the telecoms are waiting to roll out fiber optics to the everybody, and potentially skipping over installing the intermediary fast dsl/cable connections for the rural communities.

harshpotatoeson The REAL Death Of The Music Industry

I can't see the soundscan charts, but some of the later charts are inflation adjusted, are you comparing those to Nielson's possibly non-inflation numbers?

Regardless, I think it's more interesting to look at the proportions from one year to the next than to compare the dollar value.

harshpotatoeson Guy unknowingly live tweets the Osama raid in Abbottabad

http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/05/02/press-...

The White House transcript "Press Briefing by Senior Administration Officials on the Killing of Osama bin Laden" mentions that the raid happened 'earlier this afternoon'

SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: Thank you. Earlier this afternoon, a small U.S. team conducted a helicopter raid on the compound.

harshpotatoeson Secure password storage – a myth?

I was under the impression that even these are vulnerable, because both MD5 and SHA1 are computationally efficient, meaning you really should be iterating the hashing process many times over, or using something like blowfish. Also, I think MD5 has collision problems?

Which really just brings us to our final solution, which is use a system that is designed by others and has been thoroughly tested and trusted.