Hacker News Reader

stonemetalon Tesla Plans to Open Car Doors to All Hackers This Summer

But if we are going over a very short distance like NFC does then their amplifier is going to have to be close to the key. If my NFC key only works when it is within two inches of the door lock, your amplifier is going to have to be within two inches of my pocket to pickup the signal to amplify it.

stonemetalon Tesla Plans to Open Car Doors to All Hackers This Summer

You can't think about this like internet security. Normal encryption doesn't care how long the network cord is. Opening your car door does. This attack lengthens the cord between client and server without touching the data on the cord so that you are genuinely logged in from an encryption standpoint, but from a world standpoint you are sitting at your office desk unable to see your car.

stonemetalon The Unclear CP vs. CA Case in CAP

Probably because there isn't much use to it, as with , such as an eventual consistency data store not being CA, CP, or AP. there is nothing to argue with. He makes the assertion but offers no reasoning to support his claim.

For an existence proof of things he claims doesn't exist consider Cassandra. It is eventually consistent, and you can configure it to be each of those things he says can't happen by tuning the read, write consistency. For CA choose all, CP choose quorum, for AP choose one. QED.

stonemetalon “Cheating teachers go to jail. Cheating Wall Streeters don’t. What’s up?”

It is kind of like the prisoners dilemma. If a regulator defects(doesn't do his job) he gets a high paying bank job. If he doesn't defect (does his job right) then he is stuck as a government employee with shrinking budgets.

stonemetalon C# 7 Work List of Features

It started with "weird ML syntax" but they developed a new syntax and migrated to it. It hasn't used the original syntax for a while now.

stonemetalon Ask HN: How would you do this in Haskell?

There is a problem with your premise. Why do you need to log in the middle of that function? In a procedural language you need to log right then to make sure state hasn't changed on you. In Haskell you could do it before or after the function and not be able to tell the difference because state can't change on you.

stonemetalon Elon Musk Had a Deal to Sell Tesla to Google in 2013

While I disagree with the cars are basically software at this point. bit I am pretty sure 9,000 of those 10,000 moving parts is controlled by software.

stonemetalon Ask HN: Worked for one company for more than 5 years? What kept you there?

>What did the company do that made you want to stay?

I liked my co-workers, and was not exposed to petty power games or big egos.

>What would have kept you around longer?

Kill off the petty power games and big egos that came along later. Money and respect, when I left they still had me listed as a new grad with <2 years experience along with the associated shit pay. The company wasn't really growing so there wasn't room to advance or build new products.

stonemetalon On software popularity

I think you are correct, I don't think he means popular ideas are likely to be wrong. Just more likely to be misused or misapplied. As in the linked article, they received a lot of advice to use rails not because it was the right tool for the job but because it was the popular tool for a vaguely similar job. Also no one had the knowledge to comment on their selected tool because it wasn't the popular tool.

stonemetalon Videogame Publishers: No Preserving Abandoned Games Because “Hacking” Is Illegal

Have you never seen or heard of the Wii virtual console or any of the Sega\Actvision\whoever classics collections? Just because they don't sell them right now or expect to make money on them in the next 20 mins doesn't mean there is no money expected from them in the future. With the current copyright law the future is for fucking ever, and who knows when the next round of nostalgic resurgence is?

Just like the Disney vault BS, absence makes the heart grow fonder.

stonemetalon How Google Hires

Who cares how well it does at predicting general intelligence? If we wanted to give people a test to figure out their intelligence we would give intelligence tests. If we are going to use it for college admissions it should predict how well one would do in college. It fails mightily at that job(correlation coefficient of .2 when compared against first year grades).

http://www.fairtest.org/sat-i-faulty-instrument-predicting-c...

stonemetalon HN Cheaters: Catch me if you can

You get to steer the content of the website, and put your ideas\agenda in front of several thousand people.

stonemetalon How to Sell Excellence

The who uses OCaml page is pretty impressive. https://ocaml.org/learn/companies.html

Looks like it is mostly used for compilers, cryptography, and risk assessment.

stonemetalon California Imposes First-Ever Water Restrictions to Deal with Drought

If they build desalinization plants wouldn't they just pipe the water into existing infrastructure? At worst that would mean piping it over to the other side of the state where they usually get their water from snow pack and what not, no need to completely duplicate their water distribution system just because they have a new source of water.

stonemetalon California Imposes First-Ever Water Restrictions to Deal with Drought

mostly uphill for millions of miles.

Not quite that far. San Francisco to New York is less than 3K miles. Maybe tens to hundreds of miles.

stonemetalon How a robot pharmacist wound up giving an overdose

Unfortunately medical software is enterprise software, because Hospitals are large, risk adverse institutions with high price tags and purchasing is done by management not users. Like most enterprise class software UX is a complete after thought.

stonemetalon Announcing the Surface 3

If I am not mistaken what they give you is a huge MP3. You need to download it, import it to iTunes, and put it on your phone just like you would any other MP3.

stonemetalon The Rent Hypothesis

There will always be a need for skilled labor to maintain and update robots.

Why? Surely we will come up with maintenance robots that will maintain the other ones, including other instances of the maintenance robot.

In my experience automation tends to have very mechanical edges, so the very act of automating something brings about a system that is easier to automate further.

stonemetalon Reminder: Oh, Won't You Please Shut Up? (2011)

How does it weaken the argument? No one has put forth the idea that it is ok to talk to good cops. Don't talk to cops good, bad, or indifferent in nature.

stonemetalon Fake Amazon Tech Book Reviews Are Hurting My Book

Isn't that why they have a did you find this review helpful button? That way bad reviews can be user flagged and given less weight. Of course that can be abused by spammers as well, so who knows how helpful it really is.

I wonder if Amazon has enough info to create a Googlesque filter bubble, so reviews are per user weighted to account for reviewer\user interest overlap.

stonemetalon “Sierra… well, it was the poor victim of a hostile takeover by criminals”

According to his wikipedia page he retired in 1998. He also worked on a couple of small things that seem to have mostly fallen through.

stonemetalon Adopting Microservices at Netflix

Sounds exactly like Github's policy that got them in trouble. Hopefully it works out better for you but somehow I doubt it.

stonemetalon Wikimedia v. NSA: Wikimedia Foundation files suit against NSA

1) I see nothing in the constitution that requires all court business to be done in public. The sixth grants a person the right to a public trial. As far as I know the secret court has never held trials, they have only granted warrants and other bits of due process that are not required to be public.

2) Seems to be a clear violation of the sixth amendment to me.

3) You seem to be a little to black and white to me. It is possible to think that they have done the wrong thing in some cases and need to be brought back in to line but not think that we need to completely destroy the government's ability to function.

stonemetalon Unreal Engine 4 is now available to everyone for free

>When you ship a game or application, you pay a 5% royalty on gross revenue after the first $3,000 per product, per quarter.

Not only does it reset per quarter, it is per product as well.

stonemetalon Ask HN: Why do we accept gore in movies/games but not nudity/sex in sitcoms?

The two aren't equivalent. Plenty of movies contain nudity\sex as well as violence and gore. Movies have ratings and are somewhat protected( ticket sales to R rated movies are restricted to 18+ in the US) therefore they have greater latitude in what they are allowed to do. Also the FCC has a number of decency rules that broadcast channels have to follow. That is why most TV shows with any "stronger" content is on a cable channel, and all the shows with movie levels of sex and violence end up on HBO, showtime, etc. HBO, etc. doesn't do sitcoms therefore no overly sexual sitcoms. Though there is still plenty of stuff on those channels like sex and the city.

stonemetalon Proving that Android’s, Java’s and Python’s sorting algorithm is broken

True, I more meant their method required O(n) effort since they had to write pre\post conditions and invariant for the tool. Whereas something like codeSonar or PVS Studio requires O(1) effort, just point it at your build and press go. The bug they found was an implementation defect, something I believe the low effort tools would have caught. Where their tool should shine would be in detecting something the low effort analysis tools miss.

stonemetalon Proving that Android’s, Java’s and Python’s sorting algorithm is broken

Only if you use a secure random, otherwise you are just obscuring the problem and are still vulnerable.

stonemetalon Proving that Android’s, Java’s and Python’s sorting algorithm is broken

I would say both are correct. From a psychological\SE standpoint know your faults and develop defenses for them. That could be use a language that doesn't allow them to even be thought in the first place, or develop defensive coding standards that prevent them. But that answer is more stochastic, it helps but anything short of formal proof is just raising the likely hood of success not a guarantee.

I also wonder if a static analysis tool would have caught the bug. Are there any good static analysis tools for Java or Python that might have caught the bug without the overhead of writing the formal proof?

stonemetalon Radio Shack lost its way when it ditched its hobbyist customers

But Radio Shack was the only place I could think of to buy one.

Homedepot is where I got my last soldering iron. While I agree with the conclusion that

Radio Shack didn't just miss the boat, they sank their own ship when they switched from being the only place where strange electronic parts were sold, to being another cell phone shop.

I disagree with what that boat would be, they should have been more best buy\fry's than following hobbyist electronics in to the super niche that it is today. What I don't get is why they started to sell computers\ electronics then pivoted to brookstone crap gizmos and cell phones.

stonemetalon Ross Ulbricht Convicted of Running Silk Road as Dread Pirate Roberts

Consecutive is the default if the judge doesn't specify. Some laws require consecutive. Other than that it is up to the judge to specify.

http://criminal.lawyers.com/criminal-law-basics/how-do-multi...

>If a judge wants to order the sentences to run consecutively or concurrently, she must state so specifically in the sentencing order, which is the court document that sets a defendant's sentences. If she doesn't do so, the sentences will run consecutively automatically.