Hacker News Reader

mmaroon 24 year old student lights match: Europe versus Facebook

Watch Moxie's "New threats to privacy" from BlackHat 2010 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qzldtKV1PY

Essentially, the problem is that these voluntary relationships become not-so-voluntary as the privacy-compromising tools become more necessary to participate in society.

mmaroon As more hackers start to die, when do we finally do something about it?

That's a reasonable concern, but at this meta level there are two things going in cryonics' favor: there's a good chance you're overconfident about its non-utility[1], and there's a chance that your reanimation comes much earlier than expected, so the cumulative risks don't add up to much.

And FWIW, Alcor and Cryonics Institute don't require power for storage; they require deliveries of liquid nitrogen. I don't think either facility has much earthquake/tsunami risk, either.

[1] Personally, I would want to be > 99% sure about this before completely giving up on cryonics.

mmaroon As more hackers start to die, when do we finally do something about it?

This is a false dichotomy. You can strive to achieve as much as possible today, as well as attempt a second chance at life through cryonics.

mmaroon As more hackers start to die, when do we finally do something about it?

Anyone remotely interested in cryonics should go read about it on LessWrong[1], instead of reading the same ol' ambivalent/pro-death comments. The only good reasons (that I can think of right now) not to sign up are if (1) you can't afford the ~$50/month or whatever your life insurance premiums + member dues would be, or (2) you rely on the financial support of people who are strongly anti-cryonics.

Keep in mind that after you suffer your serious accident/illness, you won't have the time/money/energy to sign up for cryonics, and you'll have more trouble convincing your next of kin to support you. And you probably won't be able to get any life insurance to pay for it, obviously.

[1] http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Cryonics

mmaroon I was once a Facebook fool

Please consider my comment retracted (I can't delete it); Andrew did a much better job than I remembered.

mmaroon I was once a Facebook fool

http://ifile.it/mdk43ht - this link will probably be dead in a week or two

(BTW, if you save everything you find interesting, you realize just how much disappears from the Internet. The half-life of the average link is about 4.5 years.)

mmaroon I was once a Facebook fool

It's been a while since I've watched it, but I didn't get the impression that Blank lost it. As I remember, Andrew just made a big deal out of his minor misstep and focused on the misstep rather than getting the interview back on track. I think most interviewees, not just Blank, would find this annoying.

mmaroon I was once a Facebook fool

He also replaced 'iLike' with 'the "competitor"' and 'Sean Parker and Mark Zuckerberg' with 'senior Facebook executives'

mmaroon TrueCrypt 7.1 w/ [OS X 64-bit support]

If you don't trust Apple's FDE solution to not have a backdoor, you probably shouldn't use their operating system at all, as it has access to all of your data.

mmaroon TrueCrypt 7.1 w/ [OS X 64-bit support]

Would there be any reason to use it over Lion's full disk encryption?

mmaroon How dead is dead?

There's no way your probability is close to 0.1%.

Exhibit A: http://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/pdf/Death_by_Age_2007-a.pd...

Exhibit B: life insurance companies collect a lot of data from you, and no company will price a 21 year old anywhere near 0.1%.

mmaroon How dead is dead?

http://www.alcor.org/cryomyths.html#myth2

(Also, just in case any young people on HN think they have no chance of dying, add up a decade of 'Death probability' on http://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html )

mmaroon Google Fiber: 151Mbps down / 92Mbps up

Ping measures the round-trip time, so it would really be twice that.

mmaroon Fukushima Robot Operator Writes Tell-All Blog

Paste http://sh-blog.at.webry.info/rss/index.rdf into Google Reader's 'Add a Subscription'; it has all the posts since Jan 7.

Or this link to the feed in Reader might work: https://www.google.com/reader/view/#stream/feed%2Fhttp%3A%2F...

mmaroon Father of Cryonics Dies at 92, Frozen in Cryonics Institute

CPR brings people back from the dead; before the 60s, they generally stayed dead.

mmaroon Father of Cryonics Dies at 92, Frozen in Cryonics Institute

Well, as long as we're considering all sorts of hypothetical scenarios, consider this one:

1. You die in a year or two from terminal illness or an accident.

2. You purchased a life insurance policy when you were healthy, so cryonics is very cheap.

3. Unforeseen advances in AI/nanotech/medicine allow you to be revived in just 15-20 years.

4. You are back from the dead and find subsistence (let alone wealth) in the near future superior to your old life.

mmaroon Tresor Runs Encryption Securely Outside RAM

Computers get stolen, but they're usually already off, or turned off during the theft. But let me get this straight: you're worried about an attacker reading out everything on your hard drive, but not worried about them reading out all the unencrypted stuff in RAM? I'm not against disk encryption, I just don't see the point of this specific protection.

Edit: now that I think of it, if a company laptop with customer data had full disk encryption and was stolen, do you still have to notify everyone? Does it matter whether it was off or on/suspended? Maybe people will be relieved when they find out that "8GB of data was probably not stolen" (with AES-in-CPU-only) instead of "300GB of data was probably not stolen".

mmaroon Tresor Runs Encryption Securely Outside RAM

If the attacker has enough physical access to pull out your memory, I doubt they'll be very disappointed by AES-in-CPU-only protection. They're still getting 8-32GB of other private data (passwords, everything in your page cache, etc). The real solution is to physically protect your computer.

mmaroon Dramatic escalation in Japan (Fukushima Nuke Plant)

Reposting piguy314's [dead] reply:

It's instructive that we've already engineered ways of preventing the problems TEPCO is experiencing at their Fukushima. Many newer reactor designs have a passive residual heat removal system that removes decay heat even without electrical power to run cooling pumps.

http://www.ap1000.westinghousenuclear.com/ap1000_psrs_pccs.h...

mmaroon Pay Teachers More

Ah, right. I made a very stupid mistake in thinking they teach students for ~7 hours/day. I was also biased by my (probably) above-average experiences with teachers.

mmaroon Pay Teachers More

Teachers do not work less than 40 hours per week. A ton of time is spent on grading, prep, helping slow students, school meetings, complying with NCLB requirements, etc.

mmaroon Don't touch me, I'm British

The information that the smooth touchy people deduced automatically: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Edh2GQHZmtI (in case this link dies, it's Lance Mason's "How To Kino")

mmaroon Dubai on Empty

Most of these are well-justified in his essays; obviously a condensed summary will not be very convincing.

mmaroon Dubai on Empty

The U.S. has two main political parties: the left-wing one in perpetual power, and an incompetent left-wing one that still thinks they can get the outcomes they want through elections (they can't; progressive civil servants run the show).

Some introductory reading: "Politics: Comtemporary" in http://moldbuggery.blogspot.com/2009/03/collected-writings-o...

mmaroon Ask HN: Do you have trouble reading long documents online?

NoScript and AdBlock Plus may help with that. Even if the page is using a META refresh, NoScript has an option to kill those.

mmaroon Ask HN: Do you have trouble reading long documents online?

Yes. I paste long documents into Microsoft Word, adjust the line spacing, print to a laser printer, then use a mechanical staple gun (see PaperPro).

mmaroon Ask HN: Best book you read in 2010 and briefly why

Gokhale's 8 Steps to a Pain-Free Back, via http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1739607 (thanks, HN). It's not the best presentation or the best science, but it has ended my back pain and given me awareness of my body. Anyone who sits with a curved back or occasionally lifts heavy objects should read it.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0979303605/

mmaroon Stratford 727, Yale 9: Keeping Score on DHS "Best & Brightest" Program

They are (USCIS is part of DHS). The INS was dissolved in 2003.

mmaroon Tell HN: Even Windows 7 is a horror show

The initial setup is a horror show, but it isn't bad after you get it set up.

FWIW: (un)installers that say you must restart are usually lying. And when they're not, you can often avoid it by killing a lot of processes first.