Hacker News Reader

jackgaviganon 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT

> Jobs, the man with a plan.

Not just a plan but the Plan, which Apple has followed ever since. It's fascinating to watch this section of Jobs's 1997 comeback presentation, knowing how successful this strategy was with the iPhone and the App Store: https://youtu.be/4QrX047-v-s?t=7m40s

jackgaviganon Rolling Your Own Crypto

I feel like no discussion of rolling one's own crypto is complete without a link to Renaissance artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder's painting of the subject (c. 1562): http://classicprogrammerpaintings.com/post/148027314949/we-r...

jackgaviganon The Security Behind the Birth of Zcash

Probably the authors of the Zerocash paper (http://zerocash-project.org/paper), the authors of the Zcash protocol (https://github.com/zcash/zips/blob/master/protocol/protocol....) and str4d.

jackgaviganon To Know If the Election Was Hacked, Look at the Ballots

You seem to be missing my point.

If Clinton wins Michigan, then the Florida result (i.e. that single state) affects the outcome of the election.

jackgaviganon To Know If the Election Was Hacked, Look at the Ballots

> It seems unlikely for the result of the election to change even if one state was hacked...

If Florida (where Trump's winning margin is less than 130,000 votes, which is less than 1.3% of the votes cast in that state) and its 29 electoral votes were declared for Clinton, that would put the two candidates in a dead heat, with 261 electoral college votes each.

jackgaviganon Silicon Valley’s Secret: Proximity, Stolen Parts, and the Kindness of Strangers

In addition to reinforcing my already-entrenched belief that Proximity and the Kindness of Strangers are key ingredients in Silicon Valley's success, this article TIL'd me that Nolan Bushnell, Larry Ellison and Ray Dolby all worked at Ampex (whose big sign I've driven past many times on 101). That explains why there are so many buildings in San Francisco with 'Dolby' signs.

jackgaviganon Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test

> Recruiter: that's not the answer I have on my sheet of paper.

That's not an interview. That's a waste of your time and an insult to your intelligence.

This reminds me of the time Google rejected the creator of Homebrew because he couldn't invert a binary tree: https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768

jackgaviganon NSA could put undetectable “trapdoors” in crypto keys

Original research paper: https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/961.pdf

It annoys the heck out of me when news sites bury the link to the source 2/3rd of the way through the article (nearly as much as when they don't link to it at all!).

jackgaviganon Zcash Integration Guide

There's a good overview of Zerocoin's disadvantages in the Introduction to the Zerocash paper - see the section beginning "Yet rather than a full-fledged anonymous currency...": http://zerocash-project.org/media/pdf/zerocash-extended-2014...

jackgaviganon Zcash Integration Guide

Transaction verification is identical to Bitcoin, modulo joinsplit verification (which is benchmarked at ~0.035 seconds on a Intel quad-core Xeon E3-1225 v2 3.2GHz).

jackgaviganon Hacker News London Meetup, October 2016 – Review

Dmitri (dmitri1981) and Steve (Peroni) deserve a huge amount of credit for HN London. It's one of the largest tech-focused meetup groups outside the US, and it's hugely refreshing to have an event that doesn't charge through the nose, and seeks to help the local startup eco-system instead of seeking to profit from it.

jackgaviganon The 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics

Some will be disappointed that this year's Prize was not awarded to Ronald Drever, Kip Thorne, and Rainer Weiss, in recognition of their work on LIGO. Ronald Drever is in poor health and there are some who fear that, despite being deserving of a Nobel Prize, he may never receive one.

jackgaviganon Finance is Not the Economy

Actually, when the central banks are so scared of the implications of letting companies fail that they start propping them up through QE, it's probably safe to say that Finance is the Economy.

jackgaviganon Apple in talks with luxury carmaker McLaren

I always expected that Apple would make an automotive acquisition but I assumed it would be Lotus Cars.

It'll be interesting to see whether the deal (assuming to goes through) includes the F1 team.

jackgaviganon Open Innovation Contests – Connect big companies with startups

Poorly-designed website. It won't let you see any details about the contests they list without handing over a _lot_ of detailed information, including some private stuff, like your phone number.

Feels spammy/suspicious to me.

jackgaviganon Washington Post Is First Paper to Call for Prosecution of Its Own Source

Glenn Greenwald clearly doesn't understand the difference between journalism and editorialising. Does he seriously believe that the WaPo should have ignored the Snowden revelations about legitimate overseas intelligence operations, despite the fact that they knew that other news outlets were going to publish them? Does he not understand that the newspaper's job is to report the news?

What a douchenozzle.

jackgaviganon Norway plans to cull more than two-thirds of its wolf population

This is sad.

Although the gray wolf as a species is classifed as "Least Concern" by the IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature), the Scandinavian wolf population is classified as 'Engdangered'.

Instead of killing wolves, we should be trapping them and redistributing them to help ensure genetic diversity in isolated populations like Scandinavia's.

jackgaviganon Ask HN: What's your favorite HN post?

No, my advice would be to read the in order of publication.

jackgaviganon The careless errors of credit reporting agencies

That sounds like a class action lawsuit waiting to happen.

jackgaviganon How Dropbox Hacks Your Mac

What Dropbox are doing may actually be illegal in the UK under the Computer Misuse Act.

jackgaviganon A giant pyramid hidden inside a mountain

> The Transamerica, the Shard, and the Ryugyong are considered pyramids?

If you shrink a side elevation of the Shard to 10% of its actual height, it looks like an eight-storey tall pyramid: http://imgur.com/a/Vslkl

jackgaviganon St. Jude Heart Devices Vulnerable to Hacks

Seeking to profit by short-selling a company's stock before revealing that their products have security vulnerabilities feels like a very grey ethical area to me.

I'm mildly surprised it doesn't fall under insider trading.

jackgaviganon Overselling A.D.H.D.

The article addresses this issues: One clinician quoted in the book more or less admits defeat: “We’ve decided as a society that it’s too expensive to modify the kid’s environment. So we have to modify the kid.”

jackgaviganon Ask HN: What book have you given as a gift?

Against The Gods by by Peter L. Bernstein

jackgaviganon The Golden Age of Open Protocols

> Underlying this wishful thinking I smell a frustration that investors can't make money from open standards.

The way to make money from open standards is to sell products and services that implement those open standards. SMTP is an open standard but Microsoft still makes money by selling exchange to corporate clients, and Google presumably manages to make money from Gmail.

The crypto-token model Fred describes is Ethereum with the serial numbers filed off. It's a model to support the provision of a decentralised, distributed platform, not an open standard.

jackgaviganon Central bank digital currency: the end of monetary policy as we know it?

> It strikes me that competent dispute resolution is not something that can be built overnight (though I suppose it could be absorbed from the top private banks).

What do you mean by "absorbed from the top private banks"?

jackgaviganon What if financial systems were hacked

Technically, Faster Payments can handle payments of up to £250,000 (and there are plans to raise that to £1m) but the individual banks place their own limits on the maximum amount they'll accept: http://www.fasterpayments.org.uk/about-us/transaction-limits

jackgaviganon Verizon nears deal to acquire Yahoo

> If this ends up going through for the reported 3.5 billion...

The article states that "Verizon is discussing a price close to $5 billion for Yahoo’s core internet business..."

jackgaviganon Verizon nears deal to acquire Yahoo

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1UHMfzlmE7HXY_ph9BN68...

jackgaviganon HSBC Currency Traders Got Greedy on Christmas

> The FCA might also be taking a view that...

These charges weren't brought by the FCA. I bet the FCA looked at this case and decided that no crime was committed (under UK law, at least).