Hacker News Reader

lotsofmangoson Web vs. native: let’s concede defeat

anyone advocating for less contrast needs a shovel to the head.

Or they have the thing where high contrast makes the letters jiggle and therefore difficult to read. I get that when tired.

Maximum contrast does not make for good general usability, even if you happen to like it.

lotsofmangoson Californians may have to drink their own sewage as last resort for water crisis

It works for Singapore - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEWater

lotsofmangoson Woz on Snowden: "Total hero to me; total hero"

They exported and funded their errant knights using those trillions. The main reason the Saudi government has been left alone by the more extreme elements in Saudi Arabia is that they are the main conduit for creating petrodollars, so if they were disrupted, the money hose might stop.

lotsofmangoson Woz on Snowden: "Total hero to me; total hero"

And now we are somehow enslaved to re-invading Iraq for a fourth time when it falls again.

Is about the seventh or eighth invasion of Iraq in the past 100 years for the UK. It seems that we have been in Iraq more often than not.

lotsofmangoson John Nash Has Died

I was talking to a cab driver in Bristol about that and it is apparently because drivers were getting robbed by people strangling them with the seatbelt.

lotsofmangoson Florida Classifies Uber Driver as Employee, Says He Is Eligible for Unemployment

If you find yourself telling a plumber which specific way a toilet should be fixed, you are either an employer, or should take some engineer pills.

http://dilbert.com/strip/1990-09-13

lotsofmangoson The defiant stand by Yanis Varoufakis in the E.U. economic negotiations

Austerity politics is bonkers. When there is a recession, the state is the entity that can still borrow and lend at reasonable rates. The money will still be borrowed, but with the state pulling back, it is borrowed at rates that would make a loan-shark blush.

lotsofmangoson Policing, Mass Imprisonment, and the Failure of American Lawyers

Your environment restricts your available choices and these things are tied back on themselves, so behaviour creates an environment that then influences behaviour. Looking for ultimate causes in current behaviours for social systems that have developed over evolutionary timescales is pretty pointless.

lotsofmangoson Teen invents a system to keep germs from spreading on airplanes

Makes it easier to roll.

lotsofmangoson Uber Tests 30% Fee, Its Highest Yet

They are the only serious company in the home computing space that realised design and ergonomics was more important than processor frequency. Which is interesting given there are many industries, like audio equipment, where there have been many design-led companies, but it seems to be a rarity in computing.

lotsofmangoson Building the Mad Max machines

Exactly my point. Dropbox shoudn't even exist as a business model.

edit - not crapping on dropbox particularly. Lots of things should be basic functionality by this point, sharing files being one of them. If stuff was more like plan9, for instance, things like skype wouldn't exist either.

lotsofmangoson Building the Mad Max machines

It is depressing. Networks are broken to the point where we have services resold back to us to provide the basic functionality that should be inherent in the protocol.

lotsofmangoson Companies in the U.S. are valued 10% above the cost of replacing their assets

I thought markets were designed for unhinging numbers from reality. Surely that's what leverage is all about.

lotsofmangoson UK government quietly rewrites hacking laws to give GCHQ immunity

I'm sure there must be somewhere nice in Kent.

lotsofmangoson UK government quietly rewrites hacking laws to give GCHQ immunity

Well, it would be funny, especially if you did it at the same time. Could become a sort of Singapore style city-state. Perhaps then have an English parliament back in York. Though Liz might then abdicate, though confusingly except for viewers in Scotland, and go live in Balmoral.

lotsofmangoson Silicon Valley hiring is not a meritocracy (2013)

You'd pay them. You'd take something small that needs doing, outlay a much larger than usual slice of money to it and hand it out to all of the last line of candidates.

lotsofmangoson UK government quietly rewrites hacking laws to give GCHQ immunity

So if,

The government defines extremism as 'the vocal or active opposition to fundamental British values, including democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and the mutual respect and tolerance of different faiths and beliefs'.

then surely

For too long, we have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens 'as long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone'.

is by their own definition extremism.

lotsofmangoson 4096 RSA key in the strongset factored?

The ongoing conversation is pretty fun too - http://log.bitcoin-assets.com/?date=17-05-2015#1134741

lotsofmangoson Silicon Valley hiring is not a meritocracy (2013)

Give them a small project to do, something that should take about 3-5 days.

lotsofmangoson Decoding the Enigma of Satoshi Nakamoto and the Birth of Bitcoin

Bitcoin is hardly untraceable. The blockchain is a public ledger.

lotsofmangoson Decoding the Enigma of Satoshi Nakamoto and the Birth of Bitcoin

Well, if we are including all millionaires, I doubt the majority of them have a security detail, as that would eat into a million fairly quickly unless you underpay them, in which case you are probably increasing your risk.

lotsofmangoson Decoding the Enigma of Satoshi Nakamoto and the Birth of Bitcoin

Satoshi has lots of bitcoin. People are worrying about Nick getting threatened for money, not killed for the creation of the software.

lotsofmangoson Decoding the Enigma of Satoshi Nakamoto and the Birth of Bitcoin

The papers publish lists of the world's richest regularly, most of them are still walking around.

People on those lists do sue the papers sometimes, but not usually for having their wealth overestimated - http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/06/07/us-britain-saudi-b...

lotsofmangoson Decoding the Enigma of Satoshi Nakamoto and the Birth of Bitcoin

My personal bet is that Satoshi Nakamoto is probably the creation of a security agency. Bitcoin has done wonders for illuminating vast swathes of the black market, especially for anyone with a good network overview.

lotsofmangoson [dead]

Well, I am tempted to bid for a laugh and I am in the UK and unlikely to move there.

lotsofmangoson Why Billionaires Don't Pay Property Taxes in New York

London has similar issues -

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/sultans-tax-d...

http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/news/uk_news/National/ar...

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/jan/31/inside-london...

lotsofmangoson Game theory’s cure for corruption

On a very similar theme I was discussing the merits of requiring police to have personal professional insurance that pays out for a portion of any civil liabilities and is priced accordingly.

It seems somewhat perverse at first glance, but might actually be a good incentive if carefully structured and actuaries are also one group of people that might actually get somewhere with demanding actual figures from police.

lotsofmangoson Matrix HiFi – Blind testing high end full equipment

"When I played in a band, we had to work with the club’s sound engineer or bring our own to get a balanced sound setup before the audience showed up. The more recent gigs showcased an interesting technology, a system that generated pink noise through the actual sound system, from the original sound sources before the mixing board, all the way through power amplifiers to the speakers at front of house. The engineer put a reference microphone in a strategic position, turned on the pink noise generator, and twiddled equalizer knobs to get a roughly even spectrograph (plus unavoidable “sound-guy magic” to de-equalize somewhat for specific gig purposes like dancing or seated listening) for the whole room, using the actual speakers and sound-reinforcement equipment we would be using."

For stage shows, having a proper computer driven sound system with a large array of small transducers would let you do stuff like having the audio follow the position of the instruments and voice accurately, as well as doing some really silly things, like rotating 3d soundfields. It takes some reasonably serious hardware and knowhow though. A good starting point is here - http://www.york.ac.uk/inst/mustech/3d_audio/ambis2.htm

edit - that Behringer thing sounds really cool though, makes me wonder how hard it would be to code something like that in pure data or similar. https://puredata.info/

lotsofmangoson Wind Power Without the Mills

It does have moving parts, the article says 'no moving parts that come into contact with each other'.

The tower waggles and is made of piezoelectric materials, so the electricity comes from the deformation of the tower.

Edit - I got sideswiped by marketing. The current one is electromagnetic, the future ones are proposed to use piezoelectrics, but they do not have the materials available to do this.

lotsofmangoson A machine that speeds up evolution is revolutionizing genome design

It seems to me that a shotgun approach to evolving organisms could be as dangerous.

Viruses are well ahead of us in that.

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