Hacker News Reader

pjbruneton Wu-Tang Clan Offered $5M for New Album Only Available as One Copy

"Onyx tape, $3.99 my friend, come buy from me ... no no!"

pjbruneton My website was stolen by a hacker and I got it back

Welcome to 1999. This reminds me of when sex.com was stolen with fake stationary. I see the "unauthorized transfer" in the blog post but I wonder if she forgot to renew the domain? Happens to good people all the time. I'm not a lawyer, but in that case, unless she's incorporated as "ramshackleglam" there's no cybersquatting argument. That's why it's helpful to use your real name--then a thief has no leg to stand on.

pjbruneton OkCupid urges users to abandon Firefox

Do you have any theological credentials to back up these accusations?

pjbruneton ASCII Delimited Text – Not CSV or TAB delimited text

I just tried in Debian, works! Very handy.

pjbruneton ASCII Delimited Text – Not CSV or TAB delimited text

Back in the day with a numeric keypad you could type Alt-(number) to get any ASCII character, but not sure if that still works. In Firefox apparently Alt-1 takes you to the first tab, Alt-2 second tab...

pjbruneton Some young adults disconnecting with 'dumbphones'

Funny last night found my Walmart "dumbphone" (rebranded blackberry?) has a Java version of Google Maps that's actually useful.

pjbruneton Some young adults disconnecting with 'dumbphones'

Depends on the dumbphone.

With a smartphone you have to turn it on, swipe your password and/or unlock it somehow, then tap the camera app and then tap/press something to take a picture. And you might get an error message, "Battery too low to use flash."

My dumbphone you press-hold camera button and that's it.

pjbruneton Some young adults disconnecting with 'dumbphones'

I went back to a dumbphone and those rare times I need a map (unfamiliar city) I either write down directions before I leave or just flip open the laptop.

pjbruneton Facebook Refused No-Poaching Agreement With Google

That bothered me too.

pjbruneton Zuckerberg, Musk Invest in Artificial-Intelligence Company Vicarious

Try a dictionary. Look at the latin root. That's the original meaning of intelligence.

pjbruneton Zuckerberg, Musk Invest in Artificial-Intelligence Company Vicarious

"Sign up for a lobotomy"

Correlation does not imply causation. If I unplug your LCD, that doesn't imply the application failed. If I pull out your CPU, doesn't imply the cloud app is not still functioning. Possible examples of this, people who are "brain dead" that have reached out to grab a scalpel (organs about to be harvested) or have come back to life after brain death or pronounced dead but can quote a conversation that happened in the room while brain dead, etc.

pjbruneton Zuckerberg, Musk Invest in Artificial-Intelligence Company Vicarious

Call it what it is, an expert system, market research, a database of decisions/observations. Real "artificial intelligence" only exists in science fiction, in the minds of children playing with toys. Your computer (doll) won't ever love you back or have any awareness or understanding no matter how bad you want it to. It's a cool sounding buzzword for marketing, but if there's any intelligence here it's coming from a few developers hiding behind their tricky algorithms.

A computer will never have intelligence, no matter how many factors and randomizations you code in to give the illusion of intelligence. Calling a collection of observations "intelligence" is an insult and severe underestimation of what intelligence is. If you believe artificial intelligence is possible, you're missing out on what life has to offer--or you would never think a box of switches could come alive.

There's no hint of evidence you = your brain. It's safe to say the brain processes information literally. But we have no idea where intelligence originates. Sadly, some people never get beyond a literal interpretation of things.

pjbruneton Invoice Ninja

"100% FREE, ALWAYS" What's the catch? How are they going to make money? Harvest invoice data? Really the only reason I use Freshbooks is for the 50-cent Paypal invoices but I first create an actual PDF invoice in OpenOffice.

pjbruneton End of Windows XP support puts 95% of world's ATMs at risk

Upvoted for OS/2. That was OS/2's claim to fame back when I interned there. And OS/2 could run Windows apps, so you could be using OS/2 without knowing.

pjbruneton Are Malls Over?

I find "indoor" malls are great for working on code. Even in bad weather you can take a break and stretch your legs, do some window shopping and then get back down to work. It's nice to have a predictable environment like that. Also malls tend to have high, airy ceilings. I'm no architect but I find large open spaces to be pleasant, for lack of a better word, especially for cerebral work. IKEA is a great place to work on code too. Free coffee.

pjbruneton The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

Do you have data to back up the CPU claim? With Linode, it really depends who you're sharing a server with. I don't have as much experience with D.O. However, dollar for dollar, I think D.O. is slightly faster.

pjbruneton The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

Ok I got way off topic. I don't understand why Amazon.com is so intuitive but Mechanical Turk and AWS are so "bizarre".

pjbruneton The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

It's easy to get started with D.O. but Linode's interface is much easier if you need to upgrade. Last I checked, D.O. doesn't even have an option to add more disk space. With Linode it's just a few clicks to resize.

With D.O. there's an ambiguous list of things you need to do to upgrade to a new plan. For example, after shutting down to upgrade, I heard you need to backup your disk image to multiple datacenters because sometimes an image can get deleted by accident. One night I spent several hours trying to (safely) upgrade and support was slow to respond, eventually I gave up. With Linode it's just a few clicks and you can see the progress of the migration in the dashboard, it's very easy.

I use both Linode and D.O. but for personal projects, Linode is my choice because their tech support team is very responsive 24/7. I am not a heavy user of tech support but when I do need help I need it fast!

pjbruneton If you were building a startup today, what would you use?

Well, I voted twice on the same IP so maybe the results are meaningless. But considering HTML5 > native, iOS is more like 1/4th of the pie.

Objective-C is not a language option, but maybe because it's not a backend language? If iOS/Objective-C people voted for C++, they only have 3% now. So ~25% people want a fantasy iOS app but only 3% know native iOS = Objective-C?

16% of people think Javascript is a backend language? Hope those are votes for Node.js?

pjbruneton America Online to Buy Internet Chat Service for $287 Million (1998)

Assuming Google/Apple maintain respective strangleholds, continue to share the wealth, etc. The "app store" craze could fizzle out, nobody knows for sure.

pjbruneton Wozniak: “Actually, the movie was largely a lie about me”

http://www.stevenlevy.com/index.php/books/hackers

Not sure how much it has changed (revisions) but my old copy has a few chapters on Woz.

pjbruneton Wozniak: “Actually, the movie was largely a lie about me”

I agree about the iPod, before that Apple was a sad story. They just rebranded the Diamond PMP for the Napster crowd, which was pretty smart. Nobody knew what an MP3 player was till Napster came along:

Diamond Rio MP3 player - 1998

Napster - 1999

iPod - 2001

After that, everything they made was a minimal white box with rounded corners and the rest is history. LOL.

pjbruneton Wozniak: “Actually, the movie was largely a lie about me”

Not a movie but there's more about Woz in here than anyone else...

http://www.stevenlevy.com/index.php/books/hackers

pjbruneton Bitcoin 2.0 explained

Or "Building on the Bitcoin Blockchain" ;-)

I agree, they tricked me too!

pjbruneton Bitcoin 2.0 explained

But none of that is new. A market for what? You mean an altcoin exchange? There's already websites where you can buy your own white-label exchange.

Mastercoin was supposed to be an application platform/protocol layer on top of the Bitcoin blockchain. Just one of the applications was supposed to be online gambling. Sounds like a red flag to me.

Anyone can create their own vanity altcoin--that part is not surprising to me. To build an application layer on top of the Bitcoin blockchain, in your spare time? Yes, sounds comical to me unless you're some Bill Gates superstar.

pjbruneton Bitcoin 2.0 explained

If you set up 10 Digital Ocean accounts ($50 / month) and mined some scrypt-based coin (optimized for CPU mining) and pointed all ten at a pool, that's only ~30khash/s. Your desktop PC probably has more than 30khash/s mining potential. D.O. is one of the few hosts that doesn't block mining and we'll see if that lasts. So 30khash/s is maybe 20 cents worth of altcoins/day minus fees to convert that into dollars. So you're already losing $44/month, hurting everyone on your hypervisor and difficulty is rising. And I think Litecoin was an attempt to make CPU mining more lucrative ;-)

pjbruneton Bitcoin 2.0 explained

Last I heard, Mastercoin is just a specification. It's too early to pretend it's going to work. I heard an interview w/ the author and it sounds like lots of talk and big dreams w/ no real technology to back it up. When asked how long it will take to release a working prototype, I think he said two weeks if he gets enough donations to quit his job. OK suuuure. You can find the interview on YouTube. It's almost comical.

As far as "Colored Coins" looks like the same scenario--just an idea for a protocol? Their video is vague, doesn't really explain anything. Bitcoins backed by car titles? Let me guess, a decentralized vault full of luxury cars nobody can drive? LOL. http://coloredcoins.org/about/our-team/

pjbruneton Termcoin – A Bitcoin wallet for your terminal

If you have some kind of email list, please add me "pj at pjbrunet.com"

pjbruneton Termcoin – A Bitcoin wallet for your terminal

Assuming you trust your hosting company (maybe that's another discussion?) I don't think it's possible to leak memory contents VPS-to-VPS but I could be wrong.

In any case, if I had a pile of Bitcoin (unfortunately I do not) I wouldn't put it all in one wallet on one server. From what I've heard, paper wallets are the safest.

That said, maybe "zero out" your wallet before switching VPS providers, changing plans, etc.

This is from 2012 but probably still relevant as we saw with the recent Digital Ocean outrage. http://www.contextis.com/research/blog/dirty-disks-raise-new...

"It is worth noting that the data was not live, in that it was not due to sharing of disk contents between running instances of virtual servers. It is understood that the data is due to disk and swap data not being zeroed after use."

pjbruneton Termcoin – A Bitcoin wallet for your terminal

Wish this was elaborated: "Ideally I wanted this to have all the capabilities of a full wallet, but that would require, for example, linking to to berkeley db to parse the wallet.dat. I wanted to write this entirely in node."

So it still makes a wallet.dat file but different wallet encryption? I'm a little confused.