Hacker News Reader

mixmaxon Forensic Ballistics: How Apollo 12 Helped Solve the Skydiver Meteorite Mystery

Submissions like this is the reason I frequent HN! A thorough well written and well researched article that point by point dissects an interesting event and comes to a surprising conclusion.

If you come across other articles of this calibre please submit them!

mixmaxon Did removing lead from petrol spark a decline in crime?

this is at best an anecdotal point, and seems more like something you just thought up. Is there any substance to this? Is crime in urban areas more prevalent because it is a shorter distance to walk for a potential mugger to get to a rich person he can mug?

This just doesn't seem very likely to me, but if you can back it up by numbers I'll gladly change my view.

mixmaxon Did removing lead from petrol spark a decline in crime?

Are these factors so obvious?

As an example poverty is most prevalent in rural areas according to this study: https://www.google.dk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd...

Be careful of citing "obvious", it can be deceiving.

Note that I'm not arguing that lead in gasoline proves a definite link between crime in rural vs. urban areas, just noting that there is the same correlation as stated in the article. I merely thought it was interesting, and that it might be the same effect at work due to the dilution of lead in rural areas because there are fewer cars.

mixmaxon Did removing lead from petrol spark a decline in crime?

If the theory is true it could also account for the fact that violent crime is more abundant per capita in urban areas compared to rural areas since lead from gasoline will obviously be more abundant in cities with lots of cars per square mile compared to rural areas with very few cars.

Here's a link (2 minutes of googling..) showing the difference. http://www.victimsofcrime.org/library/crime-information-and-...

mixmaxon How we got read access on Google’s production servers

If you want to look at it rationally you have to factor in the risks you are taking by selling it on the black market. These risk include:

- How will you whitewash the money? Alternatively how will you spend them on the black market? You can't buy houses, cars or stocks with black money.

- Will you get paid? - Secure anonymous payments that are guaranteed are not trivial. I don't know if there are escrow services for the black market, but this is definitely risky. We are talking about shady actors after all.

- Will you get caught? If do you will probably end up in prison.

When you take the above in to consideration I think most people would prefer $10.000 legitimate US dollars without risk to $100.000 that might end up giving you ten years behind bars.

mixmaxon How we got read access on Google’s production servers

In large production environments it's almost impossible to avoid bugs - and some of them are going to be nasty. What sets great and security conscious companies apart from the rest is how they deal with them.

This is an examplary response from google. They respond promptly (with humor no less) and thank the guys that found the bug. Then they proceeded to pay out a bounty of $10.000.

Well done google.

mixmaxon Coshx Labs is giving away $50k of development. No strings attached.

Here's the question I always ask when the idea vs. execution debate comes up: Can you give me one single example of someone having sold an idea for a sizeable amount of money?

I haven't heard any good answers yet.

mixmaxon The C.I.A. Torture Cover-Up

[edit] - sillysaurus edited his comment slightly - I hope this rely still makes sense...

I think your'e giving good reporters too little credit (note the good, which is unfortunately a minority). My experience is that these people are aggressive in their search for truth and the uncovering of corruption. Their problem is that to do their job they often need inside knowledge, secret sources and the ability to confront the potential perpetrators. So they need friends in the very places they are trying to dig up dirt. It's a very fine line.

To some degree I think media has always been like this, but it's gotten worse over the last 10 years. I see 2 obvious reasons for this:

1) The political game has moved, and there is much more emphasis on controlling the agenda than there was before. In the modern media world there is no way you'll get access to a high-standing official before having been vetted by media consultants, spindoctors and aides of all sorts. An impenetrable layer of spin between the reporter and the official has sprung up, and without some cooperation on the reporters side he won't get the interview/tip/story. This is a huge problem for truth and democracy. It also shows itself in how the news is being reported, since this layer of spin consumes so much attention. Note how the news is less and less about the story and more and more about the process. It's not "Why did Putin invade Crimea", but "Is Obama weak because Putin invaded Crimea". The layer of spin uses their power to throw dirt at the other side of the aisle.

2) Traditional media is in decline. This has some fairly serious consequences for the news landscape. Less and less time (money...) is allocated to producing more and more stories, and as an obvious result the quality suffers. Ironically this also means that often reporters know they are being fed a story by the spin machine, but they don't have the time to disassenble it or be critical of it if they are to meet their daily qouta of X articles. The editors also require more and more sensational stories, based on less and less research to keep readership and clickrates high. The recent story in Newsweek where they claim to have found the founder of Bitcoin is a good example.

Note that I'm from Europe, and the dynamics here are a bit different - namely that we often have public radio and TV (like PBS) that don't have a political agenda or affiliation, and that we often don't have the media conglomerates that you do in the UIS that try to push a political agenda. This is a very serious problem b.t.w.

mixmaxon The C.I.A. Torture Cover-Up

While I agree with your sentiment the real world isn't so simple.

The primary qualification of a good reporter is access. Access to sources, access to documents, access to hints from people in power and access to confront and interview people in power.

For a reporter there's a fine line between gaining and keeping access and using it to do reporting. Access relies on trust, reporting often relies on breaking it.

Since people in power have the ability to cut you out of the loop you need to be very careful about what you write else you'll find that your calls aren't being returned, you aren't being invited to press conferences and can't get interviews. Which makes you useless as a reporter.

Source: A lot of my friends work in media, and quite a few of them have relations to the political game, have interviewed heads of state, etc. Most of them are truly troubled by this state of affairs, but what can they do?

mixmaxon Writing The Snowden Files: 'The paragraph began to self-delete'

The cursor moved rapidly from the left, gobbling text. I watched my words vanish. When I tried to close my OpenOffice file the keyboard began flashing and bleeping.

To me and Occams razor that sounds more like a stuck key than the NSA openly deleting stuff in a manuscript while you're writing it.

mixmaxon MtGox.com HTML comment tag: "put announce for mtgox acq here"

Yes probably - I've often seen acq as shorthand for acquisition in various notes and drafts over the years.

mixmaxon Are Tiny Houses the Key to Fighting Homelessness?

send me a mail if you have any questions - it's in my profile.

mixmaxon Are Tiny Houses the Key to Fighting Homelessness?

It's incredibly cheap, but you need to spend some time doing boat-things like painting fixing rust, etc. Timewise it's probably comparable to a house.

I bought the boat in Holland for around $50.000 in cash and spent around $10.000 fixing it up with insulation, heating, toilet etc. So basically all I pay now is marina rent ($100 a month) and diesel for heating and electricity.

This is in Copenhagen btw.

mixmaxon Are Tiny Houses the Key to Fighting Homelessness?

I live on a boat, which has quite a lot of similarities to this. I have even less livingspace than these houses, but I've managed to fit everything I need and more into it. The marina I live in has a clubhouse which is the social hub, much like the common space that's talked about in the article.

Although the circumstances are very different (I live where I do entirely by choice, and don't suffer any of the other problems that I presume homeless people might) the physical living space is comparable, so I'll offer an opinion:

- Living in a small space is much less of a problem than people think. You quickly get used to it. You tend to be outside more though (which I think is a good thing)

- If you do live in a small space light is important. Small spaces without natural light don't work. I suspect that's one of the architectural reasons why the houses are seperate. The same goes for having a semi-private outdoor area.

- A common space is great because you meet other people. Again, the circumstances are very different but I've really enjoyed meeting people I can now call friends in our clubhouse.

- When living in a small space you have less belongings for obvious reasons. This is a good thing, which surprised me. Tyler Durden from Fight Club is spot on when he says "The things you own end up owning you"

This is a great project, and I hope it succeeds and spreads.

mixmaxon [dead]

I thin the point of the post is, as Louis Pasteure said it:

"Luck favors the prepared mind"

mixmaxon Will Work for Food and Lodging

Number 3 on the leader board[3] and yet banned from posting

I'd say that this is actually a good thing. It proves that the moderators don't favor oldtimers and/or high-karma users: If you break the rules you get banned. No matter who you are.

mixmaxon Who posts on Hacker News?

I think you're being a bit hard on yourself here.

While patio11's post are certainly worth reading your posts are more like essays. Complete with references and all. They have obviously taken some time and thought to compose, and I'm sure I'm not the only one that appreciate them.

mixmaxon Who posts on Hacker News?

That's probably a correct observation. DHH, Bjarne Stroustrup, Rasmus Lerdorff and Anders Hejlsberg all moved to the US.

Seems like all we have left is Poul Henninng Kamp (Varnish and BSD)

mixmaxon Who posts on Hacker News?

There are 2 on the list, and if it is from the leaderboard (which I presume it is) I'm one of them.

I think Denmark is quite an interesting case. Unknown to most people a lot of great technology is written by Danes (The V8 javascript engine in Google Chrome, Google maps, Google wave, Ruby on Rails, C#, Varnish, PHP, Turbo pascal, Delphi, C++, and probably more that I can't think of right now) yet we don't really have much to show for it in terms of entrepreneurial success, large technology companies or worldwide esteem. Obviously there are some fairly tech-savvy Danes around, so it would only be natural that a few of them hang out on HN.

Maybe we're just bad at marketing...

mixmaxon Inside the Saudi 9/11 Coverup

A democracy is defined by how it treats those it disagrees with - not those it agrees with.

mixmaxon [dead]

While I don't know the facts it doesn't seem unreasonable to me that the police has never killed anyone in Iceland. It's a small and peaceful country.

I'm from Denmark, which is culturally fairly close to Iceland and we still talk about the riot in 1993 where the police fired 111 shots in the most violent encounter with rioters since the second world war (noone was killed or seriously injured). We're a country of 5 million and we have less than one person a year that gets shot to death by the police. In Norway they're right now discussing whether the police should even be allowed to carry weapons.

If you're American I can understand your disbelief, since it's an extremely violent country, but as a scandinavian it seems quite believable.

mixmaxon Government Chemist Tampered With 40,000 Cases

your hypothesis is backed up by this story claiming that at least one other chemist has also been tainting evidence and that 180.000 cases now need to be reviewed.

http://filmingcops.com/breaking-another-government-chemist-a...

mixmaxon Ask HN: Give me some PHP project or web app ideas

The Oxo measuring cup is indeed very clever and solves a real problem.

Here's a picture for those (like me) that couldn't quite picture it from nate's description: http://www.amazon.com/OXO-Grips-2-Cup-Angled-Measuring/dp/B0...

mixmaxon Dear Google, Thanks For Copying My Startup But You’re Doing It All Wrong

This is a terrific post - If liveninja doesn't work out Will should start an PR agency.

Note these points he manages to get across in a subtle way:

- We're disappointed that Google with all their resources couldn't make a better product. (Our product is superior)

- You made the exact same mistakes we made a year ago (we're a year ahead of you, and you don't know what you're doing)

- We're glad Google entered the scene and validated the market. (this is now a validated market niche, investors take note)

- We really hope for the sake of Googles customers that they'll stick around and not make this an experiment like buzz, wave, etc. (We're in it for the long haul, Google will shut down their service and leave you hanging if they don't see instant success)

- You're dealing with customers who need this tool and are willing to pay for it (Investors, did you read this?)

- I'll be visiting tomorrow because I won an award and the prize was a trip to Google. I'd be happy to have a conversation and help you out. (Why don't you buy my company instead)

Never does he condemn Google for stealing his idea, bullying or entering the space. He comes across as happy for the competition because he knows his product is better. (whether it is is another matter, I don't know)

This is a textbook example of how to deal with a large competitor entering your business niche.

mixmaxon Can I Be Trusted?

So far, I haven't seen the good reasons why I might be untrustworthy. I'd help, but that seems unfair.

The better question to ask would be "Why might I be trustworthy" which he could then try to answer. Not that I don't think Schneier is untrustworthy..

mixmaxon Why we revert to original titles

The easy way to solve this problem would be to add a sub-title field on the submission page. For many submission it could be left blank, but for the ones where the submitter wants to draw attention to something special or non-obvious, like a bug in the submitted page, he could fill out the sub-title.

mixmaxon Introducing TogetherJS

That would depend on how much money they will pay me.

mixmaxon What happened to "rate my startup" posts

Maybe they are. My understanding (and this may well be false) is that show HN is more for cool tech demonstrations and side projects, whereas rate my startup is for launching and rating startups.

Rate my startup may well be hidden in a subset of show HN though.

Another reason may be that they don't get voted onto the frontpage? A quick search shows that there are quite a few show HN posts, but they don't get traction. https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=%22sho...

mixmaxon What is the best way to programatically detect porn images? (2009)

detecting all porn seems to be an almost impossible problem. Many kinds of advanced porn (BDSM, etc.) don't have much skin - often the actors are in latex, tied up, or whatever. It's obviously porn when you see it, but detecting it seems incredibly hard.

Detecting smurf-porn(1) (yes that's a thing...) is even harder since all the actors are blue.

http://pinporngifs.blogspot.dk/2012/09/smurfs-porn.html?zx=7... - obviously very NSFW, but quite funny.

mixmaxon The Economist Who Thinks Owning a Home Is a Terrible Investment

"It can't be true that homes rise 10 percent a year. If they did, in the long run no one would be able to afford a house."

This is such an obvious observation, but one most people miss completely. Math doesn't lie.