Hacker News Reader

sssbcon Email Self-Defense – a guide to fighting surveillance with GnuPG

ok, get info-raped by any and all then.

sssbcon Eyeball: CLI utility for color-cycling terminal output based on time interval

Beauty!

I'd love it more if there were a "kinda figure out the normal pace of output and change color when it varies by %" mode. This would make it a time derivative color changer, perhaps. Use case: are we in the lunch rush yet, or just poking along at our usual lazy morning pace. It could also mark out delays in expected periodic output that sometimes misses a beat (showing a bug in real time software that isn't, quite)

sssbcon How libraries decide which books to keep

Interesting - Regarding an article with a huge subtext of "cherish the past", you toss out crap from the 60's.

For shame.

sssbcon The Drone That’s Saving Ottawa From Poop

yes (bird police), and no (birds have adverse possession rights? - hahaha).

sssbcon Lyft Plus

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puffery its real, deal.

sssbcon Head injury causes savant syndrome

Is that the same Jason Surace who got his PhD from University of Hawaii befor Y2K? If so, small world, few Jason Surace's.

sssbcon How Rare Are Anti-Gay-Marriage Donations in Silicon Valley?

So, I've got a pitchfork with Intel's name on it. Need someone with a torch, similarly labeled. Preferably dozens. Anyone with me?

(crickets...)

OkStupid, I can count on you, right? Surely you can tell AMD vs. Intel inside with your cool-o web tech, data analysis, ...

(yeah, go ahead and down vote me, doesn't make me wrong).

sssbcon U.S. requires new cars to have backup cameras

So each year ~5M new cars hit the streets, at an extra $140 each, so the cost is ~$700M/yr.

There are 210 deaths/yr by backing over, assume these prevent all 210 (they won't, certainly not until most of the old cars are off the road), this means each life is worth $3.3M, minimum.

Cool.

But is there a way to invest $700M/yr that will save more than 210 lives/year?

sssbcon OkCupid urges users to abandon Firefox

Hmm, maybe Firefox should blacklist OKcupid. Turnabout is fair...

sssbcon Apple Pursuit of Samsung Starts Bordering On Farce

I agree - if some tiny % of Apple's 80k employees are poking Samsung in the eye via lawyers, no way the other ~80k employees are somehow useless or starved for attention or money. Especially since the $160B cash hoard implies each employee could have ~$2M at their disposal - without using any credit.

Seriously, even small companies can do more than one thing at a time - why can't a big company.

sssbcon When, not if: how do San Franciscans live with the threat of the next quake?

So lets disrupt a bit: 1. Identify companies with liquidity, significant exposure to earthquake damage (down to the liquification zone offices) 2. short their stock 3. Wait for the 99.7% chance of earthquake by 2038 (more math to follow) 4. profit! Warren Buffet might be interested, since he's taken up betting against idiots. YC application, here I come!

sssbcon GNU ease.js

Thanks for this - looks like its well thought out and executed.

sssbcon The problem with using or advocating Linux

So I'm typing this on a name brand Windows Machine, certainly "over the hill" in both hardware and software.

Its sound worked when it was new, then stopped working. Booting Linux (Suse of a certain older vintage), and sound just works. I'm sure I could spend more time futzing about about with it and it would work, but I've given up after about a day.

Pleas, please, please I am begging the Windows community as a whole and the HP community in particular; get your act together. Really, this is embarrassing.

sssbcon 1 in 4 Americans Don't Know Earth Orbits the Sun. Yes, Really.

So?

Even if title quote is true, what percentage of the population needs to know this (to live better, work better, act in some different fashion)? 5%? 1%? less?

In other words, it is knowledge of trivia for most people. Perfectly fine, if you go in for that sort of thing (and I do), but why look down your nose at those who don't?

Of course, knowing the scientific method can change how you act, but so can understanding lots of things. Finite time and attention. Or be a hater.

sssbcon Show HN: RiffBank – A reverse guitar tab search engine

Works! Well done tech. Get your marketing department to sanitize for prudes, if you care for the prude market.

sssbcon TrueVault – HIPAA compliant data storage

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infection_control#Surveillance_...

and

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infection_control#Isolation

especially if "terrorists" are anywhere within the many small-networks lurking in all that data (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small-world_networks)