Hacker News Reader

nohaton The Panic Over Fukushima

I'm not sure what you mean. My point was that challenging him to move to Fukushima doesn't show his hypocrisy or anything. He has very good reasons not to move to Fukushima that have nothing to do with the threat of radiation.

nohaton The Panic Over Fukushima

He should leave his tenured position at a major university to demonstrate his conviction? That's not a meaningful point or challenge.

nohaton Wikipedia Redefined

I think the basic principle of visual simplicity is going to stick around. I do think there's some faddish elements to the adoption though. I like dropping 3d. Embracing the two dimensional property of the screen seems well founded. I doubt the monochrome is permanent: we can simply convey more information with color. I'm conflicted on the lack of labels. They are undoubtedly useful, but do visually clutter the screen. To speculate I suspect that if eye tracking come into wide usage tooltip like extra contextual information on the focus of attention could take over almost completely.

nohaton Amazon Quietly Closes Security Hole After Journalist’s Devastating Hack

If you can change the email or password by phone, then nothing is solved. Adding the credit card was, as I understand, simply because amazon required a credit card number on the account (possibly last four digits).

nohaton NSA Careers for DEF CON Attendees

I seriously doubt that the nsa is worried about hiring mathematicians with psychological control under mental duress. That's more like cia agent training.

nohaton Dropbox investigating possible security breach

I recommend encfs.

nohaton America is wooing foreign tourists for the first time

Charging a fee for entry is definitely not conducive for tourism, but how is it a subsidy to Florida? The article I read says it will be used to advertise, and pay for administrative costs.

nohaton John Carmack "not all that excited" by next-gen hardware

He addressed that in a video here http://www.pcgamer.com/2012/06/06/john-carmack-is-making-a-v...

nohaton Rockstar condemns Max Payne 3 cheaters to play only against each other

I made blaster rifles that shot destructions, but never realized you could shoot map features. That sounds like the potential for interesting fps: remake the map as you go.

nohaton CWI cryptanalist discovers new cryptographic attack in Flame spy malware

This increases the likely-hood that flame is state sponsored. It still seems surprising that in the wild malware would use a novel crypto result. The risk of publicly releasing the technique is fairly high. Perhaps with md5 being phased out, the technique was losing value quickly regardless. If info warfare becomes more widespread I wonder if mining malware for crypto analysis results could be a valuable research technique.

nohaton 6.5 Million LinkedIn Password Hashes Leaked

Perhaps the worst part is that they either didn't know about the breach (likely), or didn't tell anyone (hopefully not).

nohaton Why I stopped working on the Bongard Problems

Yes, I'm wondering if is satirical. It keeps on approaching serious points only to jump into a strangely particular and extreme aspect of them.

nohaton Why I stopped working on the Bongard Problems

> “So where does the air vehicle called the Predator [i.e., a flying robot] fit? It is unmanned, and impressive. In 2002, in Yemen, one run by the CIA came up behind an SUV full of al-Qaeda leaders and successfully fired a Hellfire missile, leaving a large smoking crater where the vehicle used to be.”

> Yes, just as you read it: a number of human beings were turned to smoke and smithereens, and this pathetic journalist, whoever he is, speaking with the mentality of a 10-year-old who blows up his toy soldiers, reports in cold blood how people were turned to ashes by his favorite (“impressive”, yeah) military toys. Of course, for overgrown pre-teens like him, the SUV was not full of human beings, but of “al-Qaeda leaders” (as if he knew their ranks), of terrorists, sub-humans who aren’t worthy of living, who don’t have mothers to be devastated by their loss. Thinking of the enemy as subhuman scum to be obliterated without second thoughts was a typical attitude displayed by Nazis against Jews (and others) in World War II.

That's... quite a string of logic. He seems to know an awful lot about the mental process of that journalist.

As a critique of his general point: good general AI is dangerous (and useful) in so many ways I don't see why he focuses so narrowly on humanoid carriers of weapons of mass destruction - hell we already have those.

nohaton Why I stopped working on the Bongard Problems

Workplace policies are what make something nsfw, not any ridiculously extrapolated failings as a human.

nohaton Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism

The large number of people willing to take Brian Hamacheck's word (without response or evidence) on the "who's here" versus "who's near me" dispute seems relevant to me. The number of people offering to donate is even more disturbing.

nohaton Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism

A community is going through exactly what he was warning about? That's not irony.

nohaton Results from the Heinlein score game (1739 questionnaires returned)

Actually the instructions allowed for being confident you could do it without further training. I agree that far too many people are confident in their ability to die gallantly, however.

nohaton Results from the Heinlein score game (1739 questionnaires returned)

My impression is that people are overconfident in their ability to plan an invasion and under-confident in their ability to pitch manure. There are other examples, but in general there seems to be much less variation in results than there should be. Some of the things listed are very easy, some are very hard.

nohaton Mustafa's Space Drive: An Egyptian Student's Quantum Physics Invention

I predict with very high confidence that this does not work.

nohaton If money doesn't make you happy, you probably aren't spending it right [pdf]

I suspect that one cause of this is that super wealthy people are often owners of a business. Their money is tied up in what made them wealthy emotionally as well as politically. For instance Buffet was wealthy in Berkshire-Hathaway shares. He recently started contributing significant portions of his wealth to charity because he no longer felt that he needed those shares to retain control. On another point, while Gates Foundation is not nearly as visionary as I would like they are not a traditional charity either from what I have seen. They tried to identify the best place to save lives (in the short term) with money, and started there. They have a good statistical grounding.

nohaton "Tap the spacebar with your phone." - Bump unveils new photo uploader

Bump actually does need the location, because it's important to filtering all the requests they get. It could certainly be abused, but unlike most other apps that ask your location bump actually needs it.

nohaton From MIT, a cure for all viruses?

Good rule of thumb: if the title is a question, the answer is no.

nohaton Google flushes heat from data center with toilet water

It occurs to me that one way to save power would be to specifically design your servers to operate at significantly higher temperature, that way cooling is much cheaper and less power intensive.

nohaton Xcode, GCC, and Homebrew

First: Yep, there's not much available about compiling gfortran for osx. The link does show an example of gfortran requiring glibc - which is the point you were disagreeing with.

Second: just another example (by descending order of googleableness) of the main gcc requiring glibc.

Quite possibly there is an osx (or other bsd) specific c library that can substitute for glibc, but I did not find it, and gfortran will complain without it.

'what is it that makes you think using glibc would solve a glibc problem?' Eh? I used glibc to solve a 'missing glibc' problem. I then had other problems with glibc which I attempted to solve.

nohaton Xcode, GCC, and Homebrew

http://old.nabble.com/GLIBC-and-executable-builds-on-Gfortra...

'I have been attempting unsuccessfully to try the latest gfortran snapshot executables...The reason for the problem is that they require the bleeding-edge version of GLIBC to run:'

http://www-zeuthen.desy.de/linear_collider/cernlib/cernlib_2...

key excerpt being: 'One problem is that the functions csqrt, csqrtf, csqrtl of libm (glibc) which are used by gcc4 are still buggy for x86_64 architectures...'

nohaton Xcode, GCC, and Homebrew

gfortran requires glibc.

nohaton Xcode, GCC, and Homebrew

Sure, the problem was installing gfortran, which (as I recall) requires the real gcc. I suspect (though I never did figure out what exactly was wrong) that some sort of a library conflict with xcode's gcc was responsible. As this package is still not the real gcc (they don't want gpl v3 I believe) anyone who wants eg. gfortran will still need a separate installation.

nohaton Xcode, GCC, and Homebrew

I needed it for my gcc and gfortran install. I am not sure whether osx uses glibc for xcode. Somehow despite removing and replacing everything related to glibc, it was still broken. Never did figure it out.

nohaton Xcode, GCC, and Homebrew

I remember a terrible experience trying to get gfortran working on osx. I ended up permanently borking my glibc. If this doesn't use the real gcc I imagine similar experiences may await. Nonetheless that is much better than downloading xcode just for GCC.

nohaton How To Crash A Party

This is written with the rhythmic style and aggressively varied typography of ad copy.