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jsaxton86

626 karma · joined May 30, 2011

https://jsaxton.com/
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jsaxton86··on Sell Bitcoin, Save Lives: Some Bitcoin Simulators
I'm not convinced. Is there data you can share that backs up your claims?
jsaxton86··on Image Scrubber: tool for anonymizing photographs taken at protests
Thanks, I think that's a better term.
jsaxton86··on Image Scrubber: tool for anonymizing photographs taken at protests
This whole situation sucks because most people are rightly outraged about police violence, but their anger is totally misdirected. These businesses had nothing to do with the death of George Floyd.

I live in Portland, Oregon now. Without going into too many details, we have an expensive pension program. Many feel that the pension program is too generous, and there has been a lot of thought put into how we can fully fund both pensions and everything else. Last year there was a bill in the Oregon Senate (SB1049) that proposed some modest changes to how pensions work. It passed with bipartisan support, and the public unions went nuts. They said they'd never support a candidate who voted for SB1049.

Last month we had our primaries. The most important primary was the Democratic primary for the Oregon Secretary of State. If the governor were to step down for any reason (to take a cabinet position in the Biden administration, for example), the SOS becomes governor. Someone who opposed SB1049 joined the race at the last minute, got over half a million dollars of union money, outspent her candidate, and won the election.

This is just one of many examples. Even though the unions are only spending a couple of million dollars per year in Oregon, they're really smart about it, and as such, they get what they want. In the Secretary of State race they hit a home run. For half a million dollars, they pushed their preferred candidate through and sent a message that if you oppose them in any way, it will be a career limiting move.

The reason I mentioned that is because I think it is a good contrast to what we're seeing today. With smart leadership, we would have a better chance of solving this problem. But people are enraged and not thinking clearly. And there's no reason to believe that these riots are going to be more successful than the Baltimore riots, the Ferguson riots, the Oakland riots, or even the Rodney King riots.

jsaxton86··on Image Scrubber: tool for anonymizing photographs taken at protests
I agree, and I'd go a step further and say that if you destroy evidence of someone burning my city down or looting, you're an accomplice to that crime.
jsaxton86··on Gmail is having an outage
YouTube seems to be in this amazing degraded state for me where videos play just fine, but it isn't showing me ads.
jsaxton86··on Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?
It seems like the vast majority of employment contracts prohibit side projects like this, or at the very least, require explicit company approval. I'm interested in hearing strategies on how to best pursue side projects without violating one's employment contract.
jsaxton86··on Apple's desensitisation of people to fundamental security practices
I think the author's main point is that Apple's process violates the principle of least privilege. Technicians shouldn't require access to the software in order to repair a hardware problem.
jsaxton86··on ESPN Loses 621,000 Subscribers; Worst Month in Company History
One of the problems with Game Pass is that you can't actually watch live games.

You can listen to live audio. You can watch replays of games. In fact, you can watch replays from 22 different camera angles. You can watch condensed replays. You can even watch live preseason games. But you can't watch live games that matter.

jsaxton86··on Ask HN: How to handle a workaholic colleague?
Most of the comments in this thread are ridiculous.

Just as you (hopefully) get to choose how many hours you work, your coworkers also get to choose how many hours they work.

I'd ask yourself two questions:

1: Are you happy with your current work/life balance?

2: Can you achieve your career goals at your current workplace while maintaining your desired work/life balance?

If the answer to either of those questions is "no", you should have a conversation with your manager.

jsaxton86··on I quit my job, bought an army truck, and spent 19 months circumnavigating Africa
On /r/travel the OP said 4 km/liter
jsaxton86··on I quit my job, bought an army truck, and spent 19 months circumnavigating Africa
They were worried about safety, so they wanted to sleep in something more secure than a tent.
jsaxton86··on The real anti-Facebook is good old email
I moved out of state a couple of years ago, and when I stopped using Facebook, I realized:

1: Facebook never was a good way of keeping in touch with friends and family back home for a number of reasons

2: I needed to be doing a better job of keeping in touch with friends and family back home

My solution was to set up a newsletter. The idea is every 3-4 months I send out a mass email to friends and family describing what I've been up to lately. It's been a huge win for me for a few reasons:

1: Everyone uses email, so I can reach with friends and family who don't use Facebook. I think my grandmother is my biggest newsletter fan, and is always encouraging me to publish more frequently.

2: I'd rather share a well-written email (with lots of links to my self-hosted photo gallery), than a series of short status updates that may or may not be read by people I want to keep in touch with. Also, a lot of the information I share in the newsletter I wouldn't share on Facebook. Not because it's super private or anything, but I'm not going to post a status update that basically says "My living situation is pretty good right now. I'm renting a nice house in a nice neighborhood, and my commute is fantastic!"

3: I never really enjoyed checking Facebook, but I did it out of habit/addiction. Quitting cold turkey has made me a happier person.

The feedback I have gotten has been overwhelmingly positive. I got a number of really good responses to the newsletter in which friends and family provided similar updates. It even inspired a friend of mine to write his own newsletter. These responses were great, and much better than any information I would have gleaned from Facebook.

The biggest downside is that people still try to contact me via Facebook. For the most part, it hasn't been a problem, except for the time I missed an invitation for a week-long hiking trip in Glacier National Park. I should probably cancel my Facebook account, but I'm not ready to do that yet.

Edit: I should add I don't use TinyLetter. I instead send out a mass email via gmail. It has worked well so far, but I don't have a good way of adding subscribers except via word-of-mouth. Maybe I should investigate TinyLetter.

jsaxton86··on Stalking Your Friends with Facebook Messenger
If you root your android device, you can install AppOps, which allows you to toggle the individual permissions on every application.
jsaxton86··on 30 Years Ago They Retired at 35: An Update
> in 1984 he was making in excess of $125,000 a year

According to [1], that works out to ~$285,000/year in 2015 dollars.

[1] http://www.davemanuel.com/inflation-calculator.php

jsaxton86··on CEO Wanted University Scientists Dismissed Over Link Between Fracking and Quakes
One of the biggest problems with politics is that politicians need to raise a lot of money to get (re)elected. That money comes with strings attached, which makes it difficult for our politicians to make good decisions.

I had never considered that the same problem exists in academia, but apparently it does. Hamm has donated tens of millions to the University of Oklahoma, and it's pretty obvious he's trying to use his money to influence the direction of the University. I'm surprised it isn't working.

jsaxton86··on FIFA 2014 World Cup live stream architecture
Interesting post! The author mentions that the first step was to "receive this input and to generate HLS output to a known folder". I have a couple questions about this step:

1: Did they re-encode the input? Or just repackage it?

2: I'm unfamiliar with EvoStream, but if it is ingesting RTMP and outputting HLS, why did Globo need to bother generating an HLS manifest? Couldn't they just use the one EvoStream created?

jsaxton86··on Lessons I Learned from Co-Founding a Tech Startup
Taxation is a huge part of it. Employees don't have to pay taxes on the benefit.

I think with the ACA, some small business can claim a tax credit for providing health insurance to their employees, but I'm not 100% sure about that part.

jsaxton86··on 10X Programmer and Other Software Engineering Myths
Do you believe anyone can become a 10X programmer? Or do you need a certain level of talent in order for the hard work to pay off?

My high school had an introductory programming class. Most students hadn't done any programming before, yet there were a couple of students who quickly understood the concepts and could solve weeks worth of assignments in a single day, whereas the rest of the class struggled. Those students, for whatever reason, were able to learn programming much more quickly than the average student, and I believe those students they'd see a greater return on their investment of hard work.

Here's another anecdote: do you know any experienced engineers who work 12 hours a day and still struggle to do relatively easy jobs? I do. Talent is an important piece of the puzzle. Hard work is also an important part of the puzzle. Both are important.

jsaxton86··on University of Illinois issues DMCA takedown for previous years' homework
This seems reasonable to me. Pretty much every academic code of conduct requires students not to publish solutions to homework problems. This doesn't prevent the use of git, just git public repositories.

Rather than just issue DMCA takedown notices, it might be useful for the University of Illinois to provide students with access to private git repositories. Of course, I suspect many students have drank the "github is your resume" kool-aid and would be less likely to use private repositories.

jsaxton86··on BMW fixes lock security flaw
3D printing will make old locks obsolete.
jsaxton86··on Police Can Seize and Sell Assets Even When the Owner Broke No Law
What should I do if I am in the United States and a police officer asks me how much money I have?
jsaxton86··on The Amazons of the dark net
According to The Guardian[1]:

In John Markoff 's 2005 book What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry (even the book's title is from a hoary old Jefferson Airplane track) he reveals that the world's first online transaction was a drug deal:

In 1971 or 1972, Stanford students using Arpanet accounts at Stanford University's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory engaged in a commercial transaction with their counterparts at Massachussetts Institute of Technology. Before Amazon, before eBay, the seminal act of e-commerce was a drug deal. The students used the network to quietly arrange the sale of an undetermined amount of marijuana.

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/apr/19/online-high-n...

jsaxton86··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (November 2014)
Has anyone had success with this lately? I once posted a description of the company I work for, stating interested users should apply online. I also offered to answer any questions people had via email, which was a mistake. I probably got a dozen resumes from users unable to follow simple directions, mostly from kids in India that were going to finish school in 1-2 years. I also got spam from a few firms looking to fill our positions.
jsaxton86··on I’m Terrified of My New TV
Do you think destroying technology and flipping cop cars is going to end the surveillance state? While an interesting thought experiment, it seems unlikely. If anything, it would give the pro-surveillance lobby enough political capital to further reduce whatever legal privacy protection we already have.
jsaxton86··on Can Authorities Cut Off Utilities And Pose As Repairmen To Search A Home?
The worst case scenario for the FBI is that the evidence gets thrown out in this one case. No one will lose their job. No one will get seriously punished. As such, I fully expect the FBI and other law enforcement agencies to continue to come up with creative ways to perform unreasonable searches without probable cause.
jsaxton86··on Don't run 'strings' on untrusted files
Consider the case of a buffer overrun, a vulnerability that can often cause segfaults. A clever attacker could write a bunch of nasty code to that buffer, then use the buffer overrun to insert a jump statement back to that malicious code. Maybe they added the equivalent "rm -rf $HOME`" or something. Or maybe they decided to dial home with a reverse shell on your system. You have no idea, since you have no control over what code is being executed.
jsaxton86··on Show HN: Media Compression that actually means something
Thanks for taking the time to run that test. It is an extremely impressive result if it truly is lossless. I'd love to be able to independently verify it, so if you ever get a Linux compressor/decompressor, feel free to get in touch with me (contact info is in my profile).

If you're looking for another challenge, HEVC content can be found here: http://www.elecard.com/en/download/videos.html

jsaxton86··on Show HN: Media Compression that actually means something
Cram makes an extraordinary claim: "Cram is a state-of-the-art media compressor that is able to significantly reduce (by more than 20%) the size of audio, video, and images losslessly without the need to re-encode or convert."

Decades of research have gone into media compression algorithms, and they claim to get a 20% improvement for free. I'm skeptical.

I don't run OSX, so I can't try out their binary, which they're distributing via email only. I challenge the Cram team to losslessly reduce the size of "The Simpsons Movie – 1080p Trailer" by 20%, available here: http://www.h264info.com/clips.html

jsaxton86··on Why Apple's iPhone encryption won't stop NSA
I had no idea, sorry. Most of what I said about direct-linking doesn't apply if you're affiliated with the website you're direct-linking to.
jsaxton86··on Why Apple's iPhone encryption won't stop NSA
Friendly reminder: don't embed images from other people's websites, especially if you're looking to get on HN/Slashdot/reddit/whatever.

First, it's rude. The owner of the second website has to deal with the burden of hosting traffic on your site and gets nothing in return. In this case, the blog kept downloading an image from siliconpr0n.org, effectively DoSing the website and taking it offline. Horrible. Hopefully tomorrow everything is back to normal and the owner of siliconpr0n.org isn't stuck with a massive bill from his host.

Second, there's no guarantee the image will stay online. Maybe the directory structure on the site will get reorganized or something. Maybe the website will go offline for good, only to get picked up by a domain squatter. Maybe the owner of the website will decide to change the direct-linked image to something else you weren't expecting. You have no idea.

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