Hacker News Reader

nutmegon The Age of Mass Surveillance Will Not Last Forever

I have had multiple conversations with family and friends, both technical and non, where they express the concern about their phone or Facebook listening to conversations. They may not use the work "surveillance", but people are definitely concerned.

A bill for "my phone is not allowed to eavesdrop" would have wide public support, and would open up the conversation on all the ways that surveillance takes place that does not include listening to conversations.

nutmegon Simplifying Board Games

Seconding The Magic Labyrinth. The kids really enjoy moving the pieces, and it does takes some memorization to figure out the path.

nutmegon My Life After a Heart Attack at 38

Term life insurance helped me deal with this fear. Take care of yourself and know that there is no guarantee on tomorrow.

nutmegon Fraudsters Jailed for £37m Copycat Website Scam

There are a couple of Reply All episodes that talk about almost this exact same scam. Fake taxi service lost and found sites, fake DMV sites etc.

https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/76-lost-in-a-cab

https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/78-very-quickly-to-the...

nutmegon California’s deadly hepatitis A outbreak could last years, official says

From the article you reference:

  But during an outreach trip by two Alpha Project workers on Wednesday, most of the homeless people the team encountered said they hadn’t noticed much of a change in behavior in terms of bag use.

  Dr. Wilma Wooten, the county’s public health officer, said plastic bags haven’t come up as an issue during her team’s investigation of the outbreak.

nutmegon Is Facebook eavesdropping on phone conversations?

Another anecdotal-data-of-sample-size-one, my wife was at a bar and struck up a conversation with another person to whom she had no connections. After she left, Facebook suggested this person as a friend.

The other person may have searched for her on Facebook, causing her to be listed as a possible friend. Or perhaps Facebook uses location data to group people that are in the same location for an extended period of time.

It would be interesting if someone at Facebook could provide some insight into this.

nutmegon Feds announce final e-cigarette rule that nearly bans them

A perfect example of regulating your competitors out of business.

nutmegon Truecaller puts a face to inbound unknown phone numbers

Truecaller appears to be built into my Cyanogenmod OS. I certainly appreciate it since ~90% of my phone calls that are not immediate family seem to be spam.

nutmegon The Fourth Facebook Goldrush Just Started

I think he is more on the mark about streaming video than conversational commerce / bots. If you are a regular Facebook user, you can get an idea of where they are headed with the notifications that get greater priority and what is more likely to appear in your feed.

I have noticed greater visibility of Events and Live Video streaming. When a friend starts a live stream, I get a notification that shows up on my lock screen.

I'd put my money on Facebook going into video in a big way. Maybe they will be the one streaming sports games around the world.

nutmegon Chinese exports plunge 25% in February

I am not familiar with any of this, but could a lower SCSI be caused by more shipping supply being available as opposed to fewer containers being shipped? Is there an index that tracks the number of containers shipped?

nutmegon The Mir Space Station

Just started reading Dragonfly: NASA And The Crisis Aboard Mir [http://www.amazon.com/Dragonfly-NASA-And-Crisis-Aboard/dp/08...]. It seems to be an interesting story about problems that plagued NASA and Russia in the 90s.

nutmegon Without affordable housing, Vancouver risks becoming an economic ghost town

Why have taxes at all if rich people always find a way around these things? Or laws, for that matter?

nutmegon EU proposal to clamp down on Bitcoin curb terrorism funding

"It was difficult to transact legitimate business with cash in the Sprawl; in Japan, it was already illegal."

nutmegon Reducing workplace burnout: the benefits of exercise

In a documentary about Studio Ghibli, they show every couple hours where everyone gets up from their desk and does calisthenics, even Miyazaki.

I don't know if this is common in Japan or just a Studio Ghibli practice, but I was impressed with the idea of it.

nutmegon Create Google Deep Dream-style images in your browser

For those wanting to create Deep Dream images without the setup hassle, I had a good experience using the Docker image from https://github.com/ryankennedyio/deep-dream-generator

Gives you the IPython notebook so you can install different training sets, try different parameters, etc.

nutmegon How much do indie PC devs make, anyways? (Part 7)

Itch.io is great! Thanks for creating something so good!

nutmegon Node.js Tools for Visual Studio [video]

I use the VS node tools most every day. Thank you for work!

nutmegon Chord progressions of 25,000 songs

For some reason this is the first explanation of Roman numerals used in chord progression that made sense to me. Thank you!

nutmegon Lessons in Electric Circuits

Which one to start with?

nutmegon Ask HN: Which book are you reading these days?

- Mort, Terry Pratchett

The first Pratchett book I've read, and I can't believe I've waited so long to read his work. Humorous in a Douglas Adams sort of way.

- Arabian Nights, Haddawy translation

This is a great read. The translation is modern and clear, and the stories are exciting. I can understand why these stories have been around for centuries.

nutmegon The arrival of man-made earthquakes

As someone who has lived in OK for 30+ years, this is absolutely false.

Here is a chart of the largest recorded earthquakes in Oklahoma. Only two have been greater than 5.0.

http://www.okgeosurvey1.gov/pages/earthquakes/information.ph...

Also note how many have occurred in the past 5 years.

nutmegon Microsoft has been making quality assurance mistakes lately

My favorite change lately is the one where they increased the version number on System.Web.Mvc in the GAC, thereby breaking almost all old ASP.NET MVC builds.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/webdev/archive/2014/10/16/microsoft-...

The comments on this article have some great vitriol.

nutmegon Evolutionary couplings between files reveal poor software design choices

The first two times I read this headline I thought it was about fruit fly evolution.

nutmegon Show HN: Building a Game with a 6-Year-Old

If you are using Phaser, you can use PhysicsEditor (https://www.codeandweb.com/physicseditor) with the P2 physics to auto-trace a picture into a polygon and load it into Phaser. It is easy and only takes a few minutes.

nutmegon How the Brain Uses Glucose to Fuel Self-Control

Perhaps you are also less likely to talk trash with a lollipop in your mouth. Clever hack.

nutmegon Lessons learned while starting an online business

The article stated the total cost for the goods and shipping to Australia was $8000 and that they needed to sell 500-600 items to be profitable.

$8000 / 600 = $13.33 profit per item

At the end of the article they stated that they sold about 2700, which would be a profit of

2700 * $13.33 - $8000 = $28000

nutmegon 23andMe UK

Is there an easy way (or introductory guide) for someone not familiar with bioinformatics tools?

nutmegon Ask HN: What (side) projects are you working on?

http://stationgenius.com/

Find local radio stations and talk radio programs using your phone.

A friend who travels for work quite a bit likes to listen to local radio stations for weather and other information. So we built this to easily find stations wherever you are.

- Using Flask, Postgres+PostGIS, jQuery, and Bootstrap

- Still at a very early stage. Appreciate any and all feedback. Thanks!

nutmegon Show HN: Wobble Wockets – Mobile Friendly HTML5 Game Built with Phaser.io

If you are interesteed, there are people using CocoonJS and/or Cordova to package up Phaser games as native apps. It was a bit complicated last time I checked. There is a ton of info on http://www.html5gamedevs.com/forum/14-phaser/