Hacker News Reader

mattstreeton How Advertisers Convinced Americans They Smelled Bad

People didn't have access to convenient running warm water and soap as much back then either.

mattstreeton How Advertisers Convinced Americans They Smelled Bad

Of the people I've met that claim to have sensitive noses, they seem to usually complain about artificial scents, like too much cologne, "deodorant" or after shave.

The only times I've heard them complain about smelly BO was when everyone else could too and the person in question should have had wiggly smell lines draw around them if they were in a comic.

mattstreeton How big is the entire universe?

I think you make a very important point. Even if the universe was infinitely large, there might be a point where past that the conditions can't exist that would allow something like our planet to function. For infinity to grant you duplicates of yourself the possibility must exist within that "zone of infinity". Gravity for example might be stronger or weaker.

mattstreeton 3-D Printing, robotics swing manufacturing might from China back to the U.S.

"The wars of the future will not be fought on the battlefield or at sea. They will be fought in space, or possibly on top of a very tall mountain. In either case, most of the actual fighting will be done by small robots. And as you go forth today remember always your duty is clear: To build and maintain those robots."

mattstreeton Lessons learned from MITx’s prototype course

It makes it look bad to people who judge it based on the attrition rate.

mattstreeton China: Nvidia Loses Face and a 10 Million PC Order over Linux Drivers and NRE's

Who said it was a crime? Just that a company might not want to give away it's source code because they don't want to make it easier for another company to make knock offs.

This has been a big issue for companies dealing with China, you sell your product their for awhile, until they can reverse it (or even hack your servers for info) and make their own.

In this case, the legality wasn't brought up, just the motivations for one company not sharing with another.

mattstreeton John Carmack is making a virtual reality headset

I get that augmented reality needs to be portable for most applications, I'm not so sure VR needs portable CPU power.

Other than that I agree with you.

mattstreeton Megaupload User Asks Court for Files Back. Again.

No reason to make anything easier for them than you legally have to. Plus the issue here isn't the government wanting anything from you. The problem is when you have no legal issues with the government but unfortunately the cloud provider you choose does.

mattstreeton Fatal Collision Makes Car-Sharing Worries No Longer Theoretical

I agree, the agency that is supposed to be screening these people is called the DMV.

mattstreeton The world's first HTML5 SIP client

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

There are 2 main VOIP protocols right now you can choose from. H323 and SIP. H323 was developed my the telecom industry and its a binary format so its more of a pain in the ass to develop form.

SIP looks like HTML where all the commands it uses, like to register, call, hangup, add someone to the conference, all are in ASCII and are human readable.

Heres an example of a SIP packet:

Via: SIP/2.0/TLS client.biloxi.example.com:5061;branch=z9hG4bKnashds7

Max-Forwards: 70

From: Bob <sips:bob@biloxi.example.com>;tag=a73kszlfl

To: Bob <sips:bob@biloxi.example.com>

Call-ID: 1j9FpLxk3uxtm8tn@biloxi.example.com

CSeq: 1 REGISTER

Contact: <sips:bob@client.biloxi.example.com>

Content-Length: 0

If you were looking at the data of a SIP REGISTER it would look just like that, whereas H323 would just be a bunch of crazy gibberish without the proper decoding.

mattstreeton How to Not Kill a Cyclist

There are different laws for bikes, it isn't just bike == vehicle.

Example: http://bicycling.com/blogs/roadrights/2009/07/28/a-stop-sign...

mattstreeton Are Stanford Students Just (Really Excellent) Sheep?

There would be even more kids with no father in their lives.

mattstreeton Apple responds to NYT: "We're among top payers of U.S. income tax"

I would agree, except that the crazy rules that favor the large companies are pretty much written by the large companies aren't they? Its cool that they're just following the rules in a way that makes the most sense for them, but not that they corrupt the political process.

mattstreeton Autofill abuse allows websites to grab sensitive userdata

Though to grab this info with ajax it doesn't have to fire off an event when the auto-complete changes it. It could just check every second itself if the form changed and if so send off the info.

mattstreeton Sixty Years Old - is my future short and messy, or long and glorious?

What if you've purposely taken yourself out of the gene pool? Thereby the several children you aren't having are "spots" for someone else's kids.

mattstreeton EU wants to criminalize "Hacking Tools"

Yes you can't break into government buildings to show they are insecure, but you could buy the same kind of door as they have, and show how insecure it is.

I think this is how a lot of the e-voting machine hacks are done.

mattstreeton Notch's next game is an MMO

I think it would be really hard to secure that as far as an MMO goes, not that there aren't a few tricks that might be worth trying. (Like having a player's CPU emulated on several different peers and comparing the output to find errors or hacks)

mattstreeton Notch's next game is an MMO

Letting the clients handle the simulation would have a lot of problems for a MMO. Extra problems if you were doing the work for other players as well.

I think part of the point of it being a special emulated CPU set at a certain speed is to make it fair for each player, rather than the player having more processing power just because they have a better computer.

The easiest way to secure all that is to run it on the server. Anything going to the client or trusted coming from the client eventually gets hacked if there's much interest in doing so.

mattstreeton Cursor:none abuse (trick users into clicking Facebook 'like')

I think NoScript's clickjacking protection works even if the site is whitelisted or you have javascript turned on for all sites, it still checks for XSS type behavior.

mattstreeton Google to Sell Heads-Up Display Glasses by Year’s End

Makeup?

mattstreeton Google to Sell Heads-Up Display Glasses by Year’s End

Are you referring to how awesome the AR seems to be in snow crash, or the horrible brain viruses they were vulnerable to.

mattstreeton V for Vendetta and the Rise of Anonymous - by Alan Moore

Fuck it bothers me to no end how almost no one knows that side of the story. Keep telling it bro.

mattstreeton SOPA sponsors return: "think of the children"

Why don't you submit a business proposal to them?

mattstreeton Why I Hate Android

I agree with you, but the fact that you have to root your phone and only a few of the handsets seem work well with the open source builds limits how open it can be.

Not saying this is google's fault.

mattstreeton Ask HN: How to pick a good XMPP server?

I'll have to check it out, if you remember I'd love to hear how well the migration went and if prosody is working better for you.

I only mentioned Openfire because it was something I knew that didn't require learning erlang to configure and was easy to setup chat rooms and such with.

mattstreeton Resolutions for programmers

There is plenty of evidence that running is good for your knees as long as you aren't making an injury worse.

Also the only way to have a six pack is have low body fat, one of the many ways to achieve that is through running.

I don't think one should assume exercise means running but your points against running are wrong as well.

mattstreeton Windows Phone Is Failing Because It’s Great

With how aggravating games for windows live is, I don't have much faith in a well integrated system either.

mattstreeton Ask HN: How to pick a good XMPP server?

I've had pretty good luck setting up openfire which is a java based server. It was fairly easy to configure as I remember and this was on a system I did not have root on and I'm not much of a java guy.

On the other hand we didn't end up using the server very heavily so it wasn't thoroughly tested.

mattstreeton Scribd Protests SOPA By Making A Billion Pages On The Web Disappear

I think a good start would be filtering out access to all government IPs.