Hacker News Reader

mmaroon Facebook Tries To Silence Lamebook: Removes Its Page, Blocks Links And Likes

You can't even send private messages that have a lamebook URL. At least Facebook makes it obvious that we shouldn't trust them with private communication / Facebook Messages.

mmaroon The Great Unwashed

There are some ways to mitigate the problem during the transition: showering more frequently, furious manual hair-cleaning in shower, natural shampoos, washing with just conditioner.

mmaroon The Great Unwashed

Most people are used to putting copious amounts of detergent in their hair every day. This makes the scalp's oil production go into overdrive. Stop shampooing and your hair is like an oil slick. This effect takes many months to go away, thus making most of us dependent on shampoo.

mmaroon James Cameron on “Avatar 2″ and the Impending Environmental Crisis

I didn't say I'm not worried, I just think it's counterproductive to promote environmentalism in emotional ways. If people think of nearly everything we do as bad, they'll make decisions based on good intentions instead of rational analysis.

I don't understand your analogy. Programs are human constructs. The Earth is a chaotic system, with or without us.

Do you have any evidence for our infrastructure being a ponzi scheme? (I think it would be hard to find, given that this same infrastructure will probably soon give us fusion power).

FYI: deserts are defined by the amount of rainfall they receive, not by whether they have plants or not.

mmaroon Disneyland with the Death Penalty

Thanks for those numbers. Singapore's (official) homicide rate has gone down even further in recent years, but maybe the others have too. (edit: never mind; my memory/googlefu is failing me)

A nitpick: Germany (and many other countries) don't really have free speech because of Holocaust denials laws; the laws are written rather broadly [1]. But sure, it's less onerous than in Singapore.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_against_Holocaust_denial

mmaroon James Cameron on “Avatar 2″ and the Impending Environmental Crisis

Let's try to take apart this muck, which I seem to have read a hundred times before:

> we’re becoming disconnected from nature and that we are on a precipice.

Why is it bad to be disconnected from nature? What's wrong with going in the opposite direction towards increased artificiality, given that our very artificial infrastructure keeps us alive?

> take control over our stewardship of our planet / the planet [...] will be in significant danger

What the heck does that actually mean? Can we just admit that these statements are religious, but wrapped in non-religious language?

> 70% of species will be extinct by the end of this century if we do nothing due to the rise of world temperatures

I wish it were as fashionable to care about runaway AIs, nuclear attacks, geologic events, etc.

mmaroon Disneyland with the Death Penalty

It's not possible to guarantee that nothing bad will ever happen to someone. But I am definitely more free if the government actually prevents (ex-?)criminals from harming me. A sovereign is responsible when criminals harm people; they have the ability to institute high- and low-tech measures to vastly reduce crime. The government I'm familiar with (USG) does very little, because of structural problems.

mmaroon Ask HN: Should I drop out of high school?

Things to consider:

1) If you drop out (to work on a business), nobody's making you jump through hoops every day any more. It can take about a year to adjust to this. You'll probably be doing nothing useful for a while.

2) Doing real things in the real world is much, much harder than it looks. If you don't have visible achievements that make you employable, don't drop out.

mmaroon Disneyland with the Death Penalty

This is a famous article from 1993, notable enough to have its own Wikipedia entry:

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

What I find interesting is that this piece doesn't include the words "crime" or "murder". There are what, one or two (solved) murders per year on an island of 5 million people? Freedom includes bad things not happening to you.

Other freedoms you can enjoy (as far as I know): not having to drive anywhere, being able to hire whoever you want [1]

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1307133

mmaroon A Hacker's Story: Let me tell you just how easily I can steal your personal data

Someone is eventually going to go to prison after stupidly uploading evidence of themselves wiretapping a wireless network they don't own.

There's also an interesting double standard here: would it be quite so acceptable to casually listen in on people's GSM calls or wireless house phone calls?

mmaroon Firesheep: Easy HTTP session hijacking from within Firefox

There are antennas[1] that let you sniff wifi from ~4 miles way. Some routers can be configured to drop clients more than N meters away, though.

[1] http://www.radiolabs.com/products/antennas/2.4gig/long-range...

mmaroon Greg Mankiw: I Can Afford Higher Taxes. But They’ll Make Me Work Less.

Out of curiosity, does anyone know what tax rates looked like in the 1800s? Zweig's 'The World of Yesterday' says it was in the single-digits in Vienna, but I'd like to have better numbers for more places.

mmaroon The race to buy up the world's water

If you're trying to extract the maximum value out of a resource you own, why would you not preserve it?

mmaroon Man jailed over computer password refusal

This entire story smells fake. If TrueCrypt just saved your life, would you really go tell reddit? The dialogue feels constructed; there's no insight about the experience. It's more likely that it's a fabrication by a district attorney, to be cited in the future (just as you have here).

Edit: further evidence for this being a fake:

* This supposedly happened in Februrary 2004, back when TrueCrypt was version 1.0a and barely known.

* His story suggests that his laptop's system drive was encrypted. TrueCrypt added system disk encryption in version 5.0 in 2008.

* He slips up and says he used AES encryption; this is noticed in the comments and he edits it out (I assume).

mmaroon Google's CEO: 'The Laws Are Written by Lobbyists'

There's a big difference between being a subject and being owned. Only a really dysfunctional government would act as if they owned their citizens. Some ways to determine whether you're owned: do you-the-asset-itself appear on a balance sheet? Is your tax rate 100%? Might you get sold to a new owner?

Some heuristics to determine China's shareholders: who receives the government's income in cash or cash equivalents? Who decides who belongs in the politburo?

mmaroon Google's CEO: 'The Laws Are Written by Lobbyists'

Schmidt compares China to a business but then shies away and says he doesn't mean it literally. This analogy/truth is far more important than he admits. Anyone interested might enjoy:

http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/08/rotary-... (what a corporation would be like if run like the U.S. government)

http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/08/landsca... (follow-up)

mmaroon Google's CEO: 'The Laws Are Written by Lobbyists'

> democracy is the worst possible system for running a country, except for all the others.

This is one of those chants that everyone keeps repeating for fear of looking at the alternatives, or to excuse the horrors. Keep repeating the chant, and you don't have to take a close look at the problem.

mmaroon U.S. apologizes for syphilis experiment in Guatemala

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

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=14...

I wish most of the incidents linked to primary sources, but assume X% are lies and it's still awful.

mmaroon CIA used 'illegal, inaccurate code to target kill drones'

I'm pretty sure I stole that interpretation from this guy: http://moldbuggery.blogspot.com/ - I spent a while looking for the exact article, but didn't find it. Most of them are very interesting anyway. He's a fascinating character, and even if you don't like him, he refers to great primary sources. But do watch out for three of his big biases: 1) assuming everyone is as smart as he is; 2) growing up as a "Brahmin" (his neologism); 3) preferring that the U.S. solve its own problems somehow (patriotic but very difficult).

mmaroon CIA used 'illegal, inaccurate code to target kill drones'

It's important to remember that neither Bush nor Obama are king of the U.S. government. Our newspapers, universities, and civil servants turned on Bush because of his entry to Iraq, acting out of step with the rest of the government (which includes a lot more than people think). Anything they said to reduce Bush's power was fair game. You, like me, probably fell for it. People in the government generally don't have a problem with the government's power and actions. They did pull off a great trick though, assigning everything bad to Bush for six years.

mmaroon The Legend of Mark Zuckerberg

Things I have learned from this and past articles (only slightly exaggerated):

1. Greenspan is unlucky and unhappy. If you have even a remote chance of success, make sure you never even have a conversation with him. If you do, you might suffer his wrath (including possible lawsuits, and your conversations being made public).

2. Losing the opportunity to be part of Facebook is the greatest loss anyone can have. Everything else is trivial in comparison.

3. If he did get the opportunity to co-found Facebook, he would have provided no value anyway: "maintaining even a weak friendship with me would have cost Mark a few billion dollars in future paper earnings"

mmaroon Ask HN: Holy Crap I need an Idea

http://www.halfbakery.com/

mmaroon Stephen Wolfram Uses This

A keylogger, recording all keystrokes.

mmaroon Problem Solving using Graph Traversals

pdf: http://s3.amazonaws.com/ppt-download/atti-ps-graphs-10072510...

mmaroon The Acceleration of Addictiveness

Nearly all institutions are run primarily for their own benefit. We often forget this when we receive their products/information/services. Sometimes, we're lucky enough to receive correct information or things that don't harm us. Trusting an expert is a good idea as you say, but trusting an expert whose opinion has been normalized by an institution is quite dangerous. It's less dangerous if you fully understand the motives of the institution, but with today's treacherous institutions, even most people in the institution are unaware of the motives and their consequences.

mmaroon Superfreakonomics: Superplug for Intellectual Ventures

They have succeeded in securing "superplugs" before; see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=181392

mmaroon Ask HN: Lack of self-discipline driving me hopeless. Tips?

Read P.J. Eby's "Thinking Things Done". It's unfinished, but chapters 1-7 are very good. You have to sign up for his mailing list to receive them. I found out about this from http://lesswrong.com/lw/21r/pain_and_gain_motivation/

Consider spending a lot of time alone, or at least outside any institution for a while. Hell is other people. It's hard for me to think clearly when other people's thoughts are an important part of my day.

Consider meditating. (See the recently posted "Mindfulness in Plain English"). I just started, but I'm already getting the same euphoric level of concentration that I get from programming.