Hacker News Reader

sspenceron The neuroinvasive potential of SARS-CoV2

> It may also be expected that the symptoms of the patients infected via facal-oral or conjunctival route will be lighter than those infected intranasally.

That seems like the hypothesis they suggest. Interesting implications.

sspenceron Belgian programmer solves MIT’s 20-year-old time capsule cryptographic puzzle

It completely makes my day that the solver is on HN.

sspenceron Fooling surveillance cameras: adversarial patches to attack person detection

William Gibson had something like this in one of his later books. Spook Country maybe? As I recall it was simply called the Ugly Shirt.

sspenceron WireGuard for iOS

I just ran through this - works flawlessly. One peculiarity that might help someone else in my shoes: I was connecting to my VPN node through Terminal (with Solarized Dark) on OS X and generating the QR code with the suggested command but the result was a little 'off' somehow and didn't read as a QR code to my phone. By replacing 'ansiutf8' with simply 'ansi' I was able to get a smoother, readable QR code. Just a heads up in case someone else follows this excellent guide and gets the same issue - I fully blame Solarized ;)

sspenceron Infinite procedurally-generated city with the Wave Function Collapse algorithm

Someone skin this to mimic 'Dark City'! Complete with signs to Shell Beach...

sspenceron Kids’ Apps Are Crammed With Ads

Somewhere (possibly Reddit?) I learned about the unlabeled mute button for gas station TV ads. For certain pumps there are two rows of five or six unlabeled white buttons on the left and right of the screen - pressing the second button from the top on the right hand side of the screen mutes the blaring advertisement for me about 50% of the time. The times it works is pure bliss. YMMV but it's worth a try.

sspenceron The Turk

> John Gaughan, an American manufacturer of equipment for magicians based in Los Angeles, spent $120,000 building his own version of Kempelen's machine over a five-year period from 1984.[62] The machine uses the original chessboard, which was stored separately from the original Turk and was not destroyed in the fire. The first public display of Gaughan's Turk was in November 1989 at a history of magic conference. The machine was presented much as Kempelen presented the original, except that the opponent was replaced by a computer running a chess program.[63]

That is a wonderful detail. I like the irony.

sspenceron The iPhone SE was the best phone Apple ever made, and now it’s dead

I bought an iPhone SE when it came out. It's the perfect phone in my opinion. I am fully prepared to use it until it falls apart and it's so well built I think it may take a while.

Nothing they released after it makes sense to me. Too big and they deleted features I want while adding nothing useful to me. I wasn't expecting an SE2 so I wasn't disappointed when it failed to appear.

This iPhone and my MacBook Pro 2015 are the last Apple products I'll expect I'll ever own. Not out of spite but because they no longer make things I need, or even want.

sspenceron Magic Leap One Teardown

Wow! Anyone else reminded of the gargoyle rig from Snow Crash?

I went from "probably vaporware" to "I should look into buying one of these" just from looking through this teardown.

sspenceron Taskbook: Like Trello but for the Terminal

This is very cool but unfortunately it looks a bit rough in Solarized Dark since some of the output defaults to black text.

Suggestion: configurable text colors. You already have a config file. I may try to hack it together myself later - if I get it working I'll make a PR.

Overall though this is a cool idea and looks very well executed. Nice work!

sspenceron MoviePass couldn’t afford to pay for movie tickets on Thursday

I would love to see the terms for that emergency 5 million in cash. Probably eye-watering interest rates.

sspenceron A Short Introduction to the Art of Programming (1971) [pdf]

> Hell, even major freelance marketplaces try to track your every billed second by taking screenshots of your desktop or webcam "just to make sure you're working".

Well that's some dystopian nightmare stuff I had no idea was happening.

EDIT: refine quote and add italics

sspenceron Who Can Save the Grand Canyon?

For a good perspective on this see Ken Burns' documentary series about the creation of the national parks. It will open your eyes to the constant battle the parks face from commercial enterprises, and explains why the parks are such a unique system that should be protected at all costs.

sspenceron For More Pianos, Last Note Is Thud in the Dump

Looks like plenty of opportunities for more installation pieces like this: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/28/us/28piano.html

sspenceron Loopt acquired by payment card provider for $43.3m in cash

I had a very similar experience. I heard about Loopt on here when they first launched. It seemed really interesting and I wanted to sign up but it was only for Boost Mobile at the time, which neither I nor any of my friends used.

I just shrugged and closed the tab.

sspenceron A Sister’s Eulogy for Steve Jobs

She's never explicitly named; the only thing that gives her away is a single phrase: "chiseled spam"

I love literary Easter eggs like that.

sspenceron Siri meets Eliza

Anyone tried a Turing test on Siri yet? She'd fail the first time she tried to call someone or do a web search, but if you could head her off before she can try to do anything but answer it might be quite convincing.

sspenceron John McCarthy Has Died

Long live the first Knight of the Lambda Calculus!

sspenceron Algorithmic Trading is Not High Frequency Trading

For one who works with HFT systems, an extremely refreshing clarification.

Though I do get a chuckle out of the extremely bombastic stories ("MAN OBSOLETE? COMPUTERS TAKING OVER!!!"), it's nice to see the record set straight. Sadly this will get 1/10000th of the page views of the garbage articles it dissects.

sspenceron Nerdy Day Trips

Seconded, this is truly awful. Navigating the map instantly becomes a chore.

sspenceron What People Don't Get About My Job: From A(rmy Soldier) to Z(ookeeper)

Anecdotal rebuttal:

The soldiers I've met and interacted with are among the most varied group of people I can imagine that all do the same basic job. They show more inherent variance than any other profession I've ever seen. I concur completely with the Atlantic's letter, and sincerely doubt it was a PR plant.

Just my .02.

sspenceron Obituary for Michael Stern Hart, Project Gutenberg Founder

I saw a wonderful talk at HOPE 6 concerning Project Gutenberg, and can only assume it was Michael Hart speaking. It made me donate on the spot.

As a staunch supporter of paper books I don't often read eBooks, but I can completely understand and appreciate what an immense resource they are to those less fortunate (and picky about their medium!) than I am. Rest in Peace, Mr. Hart. Your legacy will live for years and years to come.

sspenceron GlobalSign SSL Certs also hacked

Serious question: After this rash of hacks, is there a cert issuer people still trust? And if so, why?

sspenceron Packets in Packets: Orson Welles’ In-Band Signaling Attacks for Modern Radios

Cryptography for which the attacker has no key is a much greater impediment to remote PIP injection than it is to a local eavesdropper. This is because the attacker needs to know both the cryptographic key and the counter or nonce. In the case of a known key and nonce, an attacker could conceivably work backward to product a block which, once encrypted, contains a PIP. The exact procedure for doing so depends upon the presence of numerous cryptographic mistakes by the vector protocol and is beyond the scope of this paper

This is amazing. I'd love to see someone pull this off.

sspenceron Diginotar and Comodo hacker the same guy and claims to have owned 4 other CAs

What do you suppose is the street value of the keys to 4 CAs?

sspenceron Minecraft released for android.

Unless you are making a point I can't understand, I think you mean "posterity" instead of "prosperity."

sspenceron A pound of flesh: how Cisco's "unmitigated gall" derailed one man's life

I'm not at all advocating Cisco's behavior (it's very unethical and likely criminal as well) but I think suggesting someone murder a Cisco exec over this is, um, a tad harsh.

sspenceron Forged Subway Passes - Boston

Got it in 1. MBTA is 8 billion dollars in debt. They are the MA poster child for "too big too fail."

sspenceron Why F1 Steering Wheels Have Over 20 Buttons - And What They All Do

Just be glad you don't work on high-frequency trading systems if "tenths of a second" seems like a frustratingly small gain. Our office erupts into cheers when we shave a microsecond or even 500 nanoseconds off our loop times. :)

sspenceron Ask HN: Who do you eat lunch with?

The whole company still fits in one conference room, so we all eat together. Unless something is broken, in which case people tend to scurry back to their desks after the food shows up.