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morley

1,909 karma · joined October 17, 2012

morley.at.hn

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/morley; my proof: https://keybase.io/morley/sigs/gL8cyWXpY-b60_zqVqP_PinHETRrCZEERgG8N_Cf5Rs ]

submissionscomments
morley··on Which American accent do you have? (2007)
When I clicked on the link, I got an alert from my AV about the site having a JS Miner. I was able to reproduce it 3/3 times. Fair warning!
morley··on Academic turns city into a social experiment (2004)
The title of this article really doesn't do it justice. (And honestly, the article itself really buries the lede.) Some interesting passages:

  He launched a “Night for Women” and asked the city’s men to
  stay home in the evening and care for the children; 
  700,000 women went out on the first of three nights that 
  Mockus dedicated to them.

  Another Mockus inspiration was to ask people to call his 
  office if they found a kind and honest taxi driver; 150 
  people called and the mayor organized a meeting with all 
  those good taxi drivers, who advised him about how to 
  improve the behavior of mean taxi drivers.

  Initially 20 professional mimes shadowed pedestrians who 
  didn’t follow crossing rules: A pedestrian running across  
  the road would be tracked by a mime who mocked his every 
  move. Mimes also poked fun at reckless drivers. 
It really strikes me how the "academic" in question, Antanas Mockus, was able to inject some whimsy and levity into the dour field of politics / civil service. Other politicians are so obsessed with how they come across that they sand off anything resembling humor.
morley··on I wanted to like this book
I've seen this divorce story posted, flagged, and taken down from the front page maybe 3-4 times now. And rightly so: it's a private matter that seems out of place on an aggregator for tech news. The level of discourse in those flagged submissions never rose above the level of a TMZ gossip column.

Dragging this submission out and using it as a pretext to discuss the divorce just seems perverse.

morley··on The Feds Cracked El Chapo's Encrypted Comms Network by Flipping His System Admin
I'm curious about this encrypted VoIP network. I've never heard of an off-the-shelf product like that, so was it custom-written? What was the interface like?

The source NYT article has some more details, but not enough to answer these questions:

  One of Mr. Guzmán’s Colombian suppliers, Jorge Cifuentes, 
  who introduced the kingpin to the I.T. expert, testified 
  last month that Mr. Rodriguez had promised to arrange 
  secure communications for what amounted to the entire 
  cartel’s leadership. His system operated on VoiP, or voice 
  over internet protocol, Mr. Marston said on Tuesday, and 
  was accessible only to those within the network. According 
  to Mr. Cifuentes, Mr. Guzmán was able to sign in through 
  Wi-Fi even from his hide-outs in the Sierra Madre 
  mountains.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/08/nyregion/el-chapo-trial.h...
morley··on The Cube Rule of Food Identification (2017)
It's been a long time since I've been in Prague, but don't the vendors in Wenceslas Square sell normal hot-dog type buns?

http://czechoutchannel.blogspot.com/2007/05/wenceslas-square...

I remember getting American-style buns and the rolls that you're referring to. I prefer the American-style buns because when you take a bite from the roll version, the excess sauce drips out the other side, whereas you can maneuver an American-style bun such that it doesn't drip.

morley··on The cult of Stanley Kubrick
I recommend anyone interested in Kubrick as a person check out the documentary Filmworker on Netflix, about his personal assistant Leon Vitali. (Warning that if you have a very black-and-white hero worship of Stanley, the film might disabuse some of your notions.)

Ian Watson, who was one of the writers who worked on AI, also wrote a bemused article about his experience working with Stanley:

https://www.ianwatson.info/plumbing-stanley-kubrick/

morley··on Google will shut down Google+ four months early after second data leak
FWIW, also from the blog post:

> We discovered this bug as part of our standard and ongoing testing procedures and fixed it within a week of it being introduced. No third party compromised our systems, and we have no evidence that the app developers that inadvertently had this access for six days were aware of it or misused it in any way.

morley··on The Game Engine Black Book: Doom
It's huge, especially considering how much pushback Apple gets for charging app developers "only" 30%. Really shows how little leverage book publishers have today.
morley··on Hacker News Highlights, August to November 2018
I really like the concept of this article and would love to see this quarterly, bi-monthly, or monthly!

I also would prefer if the comment text were rendered in actual text instead of screenshots, as the low resolution is really obvious. Hope true text makes it into the next one of these.

morley··on Project Fi Is Now Google Fi
FWIW I have a T-Mobile prepaid plan, and it's 10GB for $50/month. (Obviously T-Mobile's coverage is not as good as, say, Verizon's.)
morley··on iPhones are allergic to helium
The article says that Apple's user guide mentions phones not working around helium:

Exposing iPhone to environments having high concentrations of industrial chemicals, including near evaporating liquified gasses such as helium, may damage or impair iPhone functionality.

morley··on How one-sided objects like a Mobius strip work
A particularly infamous example of this is Thalidomide, a drug for pregnant women whose mirror can cause birth defects.

https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/molecule-of-the-week/arch...

morley··on Using Dark Mode in CSS with MacOS Mojave
My argument is that CSS doesn't achieve the same result; it forces one particular mode on you instead of allowing a choice.
morley··on Using Dark Mode in CSS with MacOS Mojave
I didn't know about that, thanks for that!
morley··on Using Dark Mode in CSS with MacOS Mojave
This is why I think they should focus on exposing the dark mode setting in Javascript instead of CSS.

Sites that support dark mode should (and will almost always) have a toggle for it. It'd be better if this setting helped _inform_ the default initial state rather than _forcing_ a choice on you. To me, that's a lot easier done with a Javascript API than CSS.

morley··on Announcing the GNU Kind Communication Guidelines
I don't think any one action is going to completely fix what's wrong with society. But I do think these guidelines are likely make society _better_ and and unlikely to make them worse. This definitely should not be the last action taken to make society better, and I look forward to more actions along these same lines.
morley··on Intel 9th Gen Review
Are there any games nowadays that are CPU bound to the extent that you'd see a big performance improvement by using a high-end processor?
morley··on Helm: Personal Email Server
I don't understand why you're so upset about this. If you don't think the product is a good value for your time and money, that's fine: don't purchase it.

I think Helm comes with some obvious trade-offs, but the product looks nice and I think (judging from other HN comments) there's a market for it. I don't know if it's a large market for this to be a success, but it seems interesting at least, and at first blush the product looks well-made.

I don't think this product is exactly for me as my main email, but it could be interesting as a side email service, or one for really sensitive emails. Depending on the price point, I'd consider purchasing. If the price point is too high or the maintenance costs are too large, then I won't. What's the big deal? That trade-off not working for you or me doesn't mean the product shouldn't exist.

morley··on Portal from Facebook: Voice Enabled Hands-Free Video Calling
I can't speak for consumer demand, but I've worked at a place that spent a fortune on Cisco VTC devices, which are basically larger, less user-friendly versions of this.
morley··on Mmm, Pi-hole
I'm on the latest version of the browser, and there's a "Payments" tab in Settings where you can add funds with BTC / ETH / BAT / LTC, set monthly budgets, and see what your percentage is. So I'm not sure where you saw that they discontinued that feature or sell ads.
morley··on Mmm, Pi-hole
I'm surprised no one's mentioned the Brave browser, which operates exactly on the model you describe:

https://brave.com/

morley··on Apple says it’s tracking your calls and emails to ‘prevent fraud’
I agree with you. FWIW, the article is talking about assigning each user a fraud score for iTunes purchases. I'm guessing it's so that people can't use new iTunes accounts to game apps, or to use in-app purchases to test stolen credit cards.

Having said that, Apple should definitely be more aggressive about blocking spam numbers. My perception is that it does absolutely nothing about them. Does Android do a better job here?

morley··on The foot soldiers behind psychology’s replication crisis
Is there a list of well-known studies that have been overturned because they haven't been reproducible? I'm wondering how much "common knowledge" that has come from those studies is actually true or not.
morley··on Preventing Muscle Loss as We Age
I've used StrongLifts for 2+ years and second the recommendation.

HOWEVER.

Because it's just an app with videos, it's really up to you to learn proper form and execute it each time. Additionally, the app doesn't know your limitations, so take your pain seriously.

I hurt my knees squatting a couple years ago, and recently hurt my lower back deadlifting. It sucks, and I'm crossing my fingers that there's no permanent damage.

If I were to go back in time, I'd force myself to book yearly or twice-yearly sessions with a physical trainer who can check you on your form, particularly when I first got started.

morley··on Riot Games Approach to Anti-Cheat
I'm not sure Blizzard does ban-waves for press. From what I've heard, they (and many other developers) ban in waves so it's harder for cheaters to establish causality. "I did this thing and got banned, therefore avoid doing this thing."
morley··on Cinematography in User Experience Design
There are a lot of very specific examples of filmmaking techniques for increasing clarity in movies. One that comes to mind is how George Miller uses center-framing to make it easier for audiences to follow the action in Mad Max Fury Road:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CR7ejkmf8Y4

The unique feature of cinema is the cut. While the web has "page transitions", they're used a lot less frequently, if at all. But maybe someone works on a project that involves a lot of page transitions and can steal something from George Miller.

morley··on North American vs. Japanese zoning
I find these types of articles invigorating and demoralizing at the same time. I think the reason why, and something I've thought about a lot lately, is: what would it actually take to do something like this? It'd probably involve a series of steps like this to do _exactly_ this:

* Decide to run for office

* Raise an enormous amount of money, somehow without indebting yourself to private interests

* Convince a large amount of people to vote you into office

* Bring to bear an enormous amount of political capital to convince other people to enact these changes

That involves no small amount of luck and personal charisma. I probably have none of these things, so that leaves me out.

There are other methods that are potentially easier (the one that comes to mind is effectively paying off an incumbent politician), but I'd roughly guess that there's only a 40-60% chance to get the outcome you want. Even easier actions, like calling your representatives, I'd peg at 2-5% expected value. Voting is <0.1%.

Are these really our only options? Am I thinking about this problem wrong? Is this just the great struggle of human governance we've been trying to solve for millenia?

morley··on How Twitter Became Home to the Teen Status Update
Maybe I misread the article, but I only see tweets commenting on (read: making fun of) local Twitter. I don't actually see any examples of it besides two or three quotes from people who are allegedly "on local Twitter." And there's no indication of the size of this audience, or that it's larger than a similar audience on Facebook or Instagram, which I'd imagine to be more popular.

What an odd article.

morley··on In Memory of Jesse Helms and the Condom on His House (2008)
What a great story. I really like the use of humor to defang. To me, that feels a lot more effective than wrath or spite.
morley··on Blockchain: A technical primer
Not to mention that the industries that could be most transformed by adopting blockchains -- banking being the obvious one -- are among the most slow-moving and change-averse.
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