Hacker News Reader

noonespecialon Some Blizzard employees are dreading BlizzCon

Blizzard was, in fact, consistently following their core principles the entire time. We just got an education on what those principles actually were.

noonespecialon Why Palladium Is Suddenly a More Precious Metal

Pollution concerns aside, your valves are timed and the manifold ports are shaped to work with the back pressure provided by a working cat.

If you didn't compensate for this during the modification you've likely cut the working life of you head(s) by half.

noonespecialon Economists are now admitting that they were wrong about globalization

You adjust the system, however obfuscated and difficult it seems, so that they work to better themselves instead of for you. Because at the very bottom layer, that's what's happening.

noonespecialon Teaching Rats to Drive Tiny Cars

Forget that. I'd pay to see rat drone racing. Especially if it turned out that practiced rats flying local could often beat humans flying remote.

noonespecialon Omniviolence Is Coming and the World Isn’t Ready

I'm actually quite a bit more worried about some dumbass tossing things off the overpass at my car. Rocks are free.

noonespecialon Omniviolence Is Coming and the World Isn’t Ready

“A very, very small quadcopter, one inch in diameter can carry a one-or two-gram shaped charge,” he says. “You can order them from a drone manufacturer in China. You can program the code...

Or you could start a meme about sneaking up on people and punching them in the head to try to knock them out, styling it as some sort of game.

Guess which one I'm more worried about.

noonespecialon Lessons from the first fully automated hotel

It will then no longer be referred to as a "robot" or "AI", will look nothing at all like how it started (probably just a big box), and people will call it "the dishwasher" as they wonder why AI and Robots are always 10 years away.

noonespecialon Disney+ streaming uses draconian DRM

When a bad outcome is assured (piracy from their perspective) the only rational course of action is that which will prevent the blame from falling on you:

"Yes it was pirated, but we spent maximum cash on the very best DRM... what else could we have done?"

noonespecialon The Audio Revolution

I'm pretty sure it goes back way farther than that.

"$NewThing changes $allthestuff in $notsogood ways, so we should go back to $oldthings from $previousbettertimes."

Is a perennial journalism favorite.

noonespecialon The US nuclear forces’ messaging system finally got rid of its floppy disks

Indeed. "Move fast and break things" might not be the best idea in this particular case.

noonespecialon Zappos 2012 data breach settlement

Think of how much more the victims would have if they just put the $1.6M in a mutual fund in 2012.

noonespecialon Zappos 2012 data breach settlement

All the victims should opt out and class sue the law firm for crummy representation. Surely all my data is worth at least a whole penny!

noonespecialon Which Way Do You Run?

I don't suspect that his "dark" feeling came from prescience about the impending dotcom crash. Locking a fledgeling business into a $30M lease should feel dark in any economy.

noonespecialon Baltimore Blew Off Ransomware Demand Only to Find Data Had Never Been Backed Up

All the worst jobs I've ever had shared one common characteristic.

Knowing exactly how to fix a problem, having the skills to do so, and being absolutely forbidden from actually doing it.

This sounds like one of those "opportunities".

noonespecialon Flash Memory Wear Killing Older Teslas Due to Excessive Data Logging: Report

I once drove my '76 300D for more than a week with no electricity whatsoever. No generator, no battery. Hill started it or borrowed a fresh battery when I needed to start it and let it run until I was done with it.

Electricity was strictly optional on those cars.

noonespecialon By Quitting Social Media You Could Read 200 Books a Year

Skimming social feeds is a very different kind of reading than book reading. If you spent all that time sprinting could you could also run 300 miles per week?

noonespecialon Broken

Indeed. I recommend a Butlerian Jihad followed by rigorous reliance on Mentats.

It's a joke but sometimes I really do wonder.

noonespecialon D-Link Home Routers Open to Remote Takeover Will Remain Unpatched

GL.iNet does the same. I use many of their offerings at home and for various projects.

https://www.gl-inet.com/

noonespecialon D-Link Home Routers Open to Remote Takeover Will Remain Unpatched

I've worked in quite a few hospitals. I've got some really, really bad news for you.

noonespecialon Compact Disc Structure

>How pricey are they?

Hopefully not very. I used to work at a CD duplication place and we had 100's of them in giant robotic duplicator towers. They were the drive of choice for exactly these sorts of capabilities.

When we closed down I pitched them all into the dumpster because at the time I couldn't even get $5 each for them on ebay. It would hurt to discover that they are now a rare and expensive find!

noonespecialon macOS no longer allows changing wifi mac address

The most immediate value is that once the mango knows it can see the internet, it routes everything behind it over openVPN out through my colo server neatly sidestepping any dns chicanery or malicious mitm attempts and instantly connects all of my devices straight through to my internal network.

Did I have any trouble at all with pandora on my phone or netflix on my ipad while I was in Europe or Australia? Nope. Never even gave it a second thought.

noonespecialon Chinese farmer 'studies law for 16 years' to defeat dumping of hazardous waste

Or, you know, ship a lobster in the wrong kind of container.

https://www.nacdl.org/Document/OvercriminalizationVictimAbne...

noonespecialon Robots Are Catching Up to Humans in the Jobs Race

Exactly. When people sputter breathlessly that basic minimum income is unsustainable because the people who receive it will just sit at home watching TV and taking drugs I just laugh and tell them we already do that. We just call it social security.

We don't need a new system. We just need to slowly expand the one we have a little further each year. Lowering the retirement age is a great place to start.

noonespecialon macOS no longer allows changing wifi mac address

Normally captive portals are just keyed on MAC and done through DNS redirect. In this case, just using a browser though the Mango in NAT Lan->Wifi works fine. This is nice because your Mango can then share that authenticated connection amongst many local devices (like my phone).

In rare cases where broadcast is required or even more diabolical network asshattery is afoot, I create a bridge on the Mango Lan<->Wifi with brctl. Of course, then your laptops ethernet MAC is exposed to the Wifi on the other side of your Mango. Even then, I've got a pretty snazzy etables filter to keep that hot mess under control.

noonespecialon Stack Overflow Inc. Fiasco: Timeline

I think the opposite. Instead of polite consideration for others, we filled the airspace with dictatorial edicts and draconian overreactions. The backlash will be such that any hint of it in the future will be vigorously put down. A shame all the way around.

noonespecialon macOS no longer allows changing wifi mac address

I carry a GL.iNet GL-MT300N-V2 (Mango) with my own build of openWRT on it. Allows for all sorts of network hackery. Powers right from the usb port on my laptop. I never connect "bare" to a public network without it.

I'd give up a considerable amount of battery capacity to have it built in to the laptop.

noonespecialon Oppenheimer and the Gita (2014)

My Commodore Amiga used to give it a shot now and again.

noonespecialon We are on the cusp of a disruption in food and agricultural production

I don't even care if they're wrong. It's just good to hear people starting to say hopeful things again.

noonespecialon Global groundwater extraction a “ticking time bomb”

I'm always a bit dubious when claims are made that this or that "requires" a certain amount of water to do. What kind of water, and what happens to it afterwards? It doesn't just vanish.

Water is just moved from a useful (to humans) state to a less useful state. The bottom of which is seawater. Seawater is still useful, it just takes more energy to do it. There's an unlimited supply of less useful water.

All that to say that once we use the easy water, that cotton shirt is just going to cost a lot more.

noonespecialon Attorney General will ask Zuckerberg to halt plans for end-to-end encryption

In the current political environment, allowing the government (just about any nation's) in via eliminating end-to-end encryption is a reduction to user safety.