Hacker News Reader

westbyweston Can ARM Kill Intel?

Also, considering the sheer inertia in the economics of the larger fabs like TSMC's and Intel's (and by "large" I'm including both quality of product and production capacity), having an excellent silicon design in no way guarantees you market leverage. Having an excellent design and optimized arrangements to fab it quickly in large numbers do.

westbyweston National Opt-Out Day

I do agree there is plenty of counter-productive hype against the scanners, as I am certain not each and every TSA employees will maintain their own personal stash of images of scanned passengers (as such hype would have us believe).

Still, the effort and money going into operating these scanners, along with TSA's not especially subtle opinion that the scanners should be made legally compulsory (whether the law support them or not), prompts me ask whether this circus would just motivate would-be terrorists to find alternate attack vectors.

As of yet, I've not read any news suggesting that anything meaningful is being done to improve security on air cargo, or even to better guard against bombing attacks at the airport security checkpoints themselves. Indeed, the scanners and the controversy they're stirring seem to make the latter an even greater risk.

westbyweston Nobody Understands Probability

This may arguably be one of the few probabilities in the natural world which does == 0.

westbyweston Why Email Isn't Dead

I'm still waiting for the foretold deaths of print, vinyl LPs, and CDs. Somehow, I believe print will manage to outlive all of these.

westbyweston Eric Schmidt on the Verizon Deal (et al)

The most elegant, protocol-agnostic solution I've seen for doing this is 1st to throttle individual clients to their allocated BW (i.e. so that one client doesn't gobble up an entire shared link), and 2nd to simply kill any long-term (12hrs+) TCP/IP connections that are not over a recognized/allowed L7 protocol. The 2nd is very effective at starving unwanted bit torrent usage.

This method is in use right now by the guys who hang 5.8GHz antennas on grain silos, i.e. rural WISPs.

westbyweston American Nations: An attempt to hack (i.e., fix) American political gridlock

I promise, it's easier than starting a company, and it's a drastically lower time commitment.

This, unfortunately, will depend on where you live. Urban cores plagued with massive municipal debt (like where I live) tend to see their local representation rendered quite ineffective by corruption and cronyism.

In my city, it's actually considered easier to run for office in the state legislature than to navigate the local political scene, since latter has decayed into rampant trading of favors. Unfortunately, the time commitment for the state legislature makes it such that few people can muster the time and resources to campaign and then serve office.

westbyweston How Perl Saved the Human Genome Project

Many moons ago, I worked on an FPGA-based platform that was among several research projects targeted at the Genome Project. The general idea was to offload BLAST-style sequence alignment to purpose-compiled FPGAs, such that sequencing across the entire dataset could be performed in order of magnitude less time. It really wasn't all that complex (I just implemented Smith-Waterman directly, as a demonstration), only intended to perform fuzzy matches at Gbps speeds to winnow the working dataset down to a size more palatable to a desktop workstation.

My understanding is that all these projects (mine included) were cast adrift when the funding for them evaporated in the post-9/11 climate. In the intervening years, I was aware that Perl was being picked rapidly at the Genomics labs in the nearby university hospital (i.e. since we never delivered them the FPGA platform), and I'm happy to read Perl has risen to fill this niche.

westbyweston Starfish Prime, outer space nuclear test

"Seven satellites were destroyed as radiation knocked out their solar arrays or electronics, including the first commercial relay communication satellite ever, Telstar."

Such an explosion today would probably cripple global communications for a month. The device used in this test had a 1.4 Megaton yield, and present speculation paints Israel as the sole, non-NNPT signatory that may possess megaton devices, which is not to imply Israel has any obvious motivation for doing something like this in the near future.

However, as the number non-NNPT signatories grow in number and in yield stockpiled, so does the risk of someone (again) triggering such an explosion intentionally.

westbyweston Intelligent people have 'unnatural' preferences and values

This is perhaps misleading, and not just because IQ tests have known social/cultural biases.The same data will likely show similar disparities in IQ between other complimentary groups, e.g. between children with well-educated and less-educated parents or even between boys and girls.

westbyweston Things I Learned Eating On $1 A Day For A Month

I am curious what percentage of the food acquired in this manner was packaged, e.g. canned, jarred, or wrapped in plastic, and from major brands. Any preserved/processed food from major brands can usually be found at discount if you look hard enough, since it has a long shelf life (from the processing), and there's usually lots of it in stock (from the large brand).

The picture from the original lifehacker story shows lots of major corporate brands, e.g Kellogg, Mission, Skippy, Quaker Oats, Place, Wheat Thins, and Kraft. http://lifehacker.com/5560305/eat-well-on-just-1-a-day

While it's great the author was able to include some fresh produce in his diet, since accomplishing that on an ultra-low budget is quite admirable, it still looks like this feat was pulled off thanks to the quantity of waste typical to mass-produced, processed food.

westbyweston Hacker (possibly) behind the AT&T Ipad breach has been arrested. And it's weev.

The drugs/sex/rock+roll spectacle always draws attention, without fail. If the man in this story instead consumed alcohol (a narcotic of similar potency) in a conspicuous fashion, the spectacle would be less.

westbyweston The Politically Incorrect Guide to Ending Poverty

I will admit my inability to carry through with such a debate on an informed basis. This is my last response on this thread.

There are clearly contrasting points of view about the benefits colonization of Africa. Those POVs which I've found insightful, as opposed to dogmatic or culturally biased, point out the assumption that modernization should be desirable to lesser developed nations is only an assumption, and not always one shared mutually.

cf. http://www.africaeconomicanalysis.org/articles/gen/neocoloni...

westbyweston The Politically Incorrect Guide to Ending Poverty

But the people who are ruling the poor nations have a vested interest in the status quo, which is why the region is poor, and those organizations that pour "aid" resources in without changing the cause of the poverty also have a vested interest in not solving the problems.

Likewise, wealthy nations also have vested interests in certain poor nations staying that way, since that arrangement yields very cheap labor, coltan, electronics recycling, diamonds, etc. Globalization has seen to it that poverty often doesn't exist in a vacuum any more.

Indeed, since the article already drops the term 'neo-colonial,' I don't see how the economic approach described should be considered anything but that. At least, it's a bit disingenuous to label this approach 'revolutionary.'

westbyweston Square credit card app forbids purchase of "occult materials" in EULA

I like how a commenter points out this precludes the sale of one's soul via smartphone.

westbyweston Some Notes to Congress on the Economy

I'm uncertain about the ability of independent start-ups to gain much traction in the petroleum industry. Much of that has to do with owning/having access to fleets of ships that are capable of bring you and your equipment to/from the right location on time.

That said, the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has indeed shown some light on potential niche fields that could be accessible to start-ups, e.g. Kevin Costner's Ocean Therapy device.

westbyweston Do programmers need a union?

I would agree with you on the potential benefit of a lightweight union that existed only for specific purposes, e.g. negotiating health care or lobbying on my behalf. A traditional labor union would, IMO, entail too much bureaucratic inertia to be of much utility to anyone in the field.

Besides that, I have to ask how long this collective experience of programmers enjoying happy lives will last. My general observation is that the accepted value of that labor is cheapening rapidly, whether from scarcity of jobs, glut of available talent, or the general difficulties in remaining competitive when the skillset is often globally portable.

My friend who basically left his engineering field to make more money cleaning pools strikes me as a demonstrative example.

westbyweston 558,000 small businesses. Why we should thank the recession.

While it's great that people can be resourceful and ingenuous in times of duress, it's a bit off to praise the duress for that.

westbyweston Become a morning person. How to end insomnia for $520.99

I can definitely sympathize with the lack of self-discipline as well. It's difficult to discipline yourself when the animus to do so is faltering.

Besides that, I've found myself growing ever more sensitive to lighting, natural or otherwise. The 'fluorescent sunshine' from the overhead fixtures typical to most office environments is a definite demotivator. Likewise, I usually remove those ubiquitous, vinyl miniblinds from any new apartment and replace them with Chinese-style roll-up blinds with opaque fabric to allow in natural light.

westbyweston Obviously, HP Thinks We Are Stupid

People are stupid. That's been empirically proven, and the fact continues to demonstrate itself on a regular basis. This has more to do with the definition of 'stupid' being quite unrelenting w.r.t. to human nature.

That said, a comment to the original article, purportedly from an HP insider, described Carly Fiorina's zeal over profiting from HP's inkjet division, and how it caused some medical research being done by that division (cancer research?) to be axed because of insufficient profit potential.

The expectation that medical research should be profitable is an entirely different kind of stupid.

westbyweston Be a Visiting Fellow at the Singularity Institute

Industrial food production is quite fragile, and the world basically has yet to experience that production in any sort of "failure mode," e.g. global blight due to excessive monocultures.

The probability of such a global failure occurring within the next 100 years strikes me as near 1.0, and thus possibly more pressing than any of the events listed above.

westbyweston People Start Noticing That The Web Competes With iPad Apps

Reminds me of when Sony Records sued the MP3 portal Launch.com earlier this decade, even though Sony had been a part owner of Launch.com for more than a year at that point. I wonder when a similar folding-onto-itself might occur here.

westbyweston Update on Voyager 2 status

It's interesting to note that although the Voyager probes are sometimes depicted as small (compared to satellites like the Hubble, where images of it next to shuttle astronauts are common place), they're not. The diameter of the main dish, 3.7m, is nearly twice the height of an average adult, and height of the magnometer boom is comparable to that of a 3-storey house.

Even despite this size, the article mentions the current transmission rate, a measly 1.2kbs, despite what is probably the most ideal antenna size & placement feasible, both on Earth and on the probe. Doesn't this suggest there are pragmatic limits to the operational range of 2-way radio transmission throughout the solar system?

I am curious if future such deep-space science missions would be more effective if they instead launched swarms of micro-probes, where the probes arranged themselves radially around a center-point to effect a very large antenna, possibly up to 1km in diameter.

Also, having so many micro-satellite could allow for a substantial degree of redundancy to tolerate more rad damage, and ideally have less of the mission control acrobatics described in this article. (Which is not to discount the scientists' effort in any way, for it is amazing.)

westbyweston Safest Seat on a Plane

It's unclear to me what use this information has to anyone, not mention the potential ethical concerns of trying to promote this kind of research under the guise of airline safety awareness.

Sure, I can believe that seats toward the rear of an aircraft tend to fair better in crashes. It's actually rather obvious, hence the decision to place the data recorders in the tail.

However, what use is this research to the vast majority of travelers who have limited choice in where they may sit on a flight? Doesn't this sort of research suggest telling such travelers, "well it sucks to be you, doesn't it?" And what about the airlines' need to fill as many seats as possible meet their bottom lines?

westbyweston Flash is a CPU hog?

I would be curious to see how the same benchmarks pan out for running flash on some of the popular Linux distros, e.g. Debian, Ubuntu, Red Hat. I write from the assumption that Adobe sees little incentive in ever releasing decent flash support for Open Source OS's, but a quantitative comparison would at least be informative.

westbyweston Time Warner Cable, Cablevision Sink as the FCC Goes ’Nuclear’

I'm not sure anyone wants broadband that can't throttle its bittorrent users a little.

I comment in agreement with the need to maintain QoS for reasons of network health, especially if you need to maintain minimum guaranteed bandwidth in the presence of misbehaving clients (e.g. botnets, ping floods, not just abusive torrenters).

However, the carriers in questions have often not been using QoS for reasons of improving service, but rather to penalize the percentage of broadband users who actually use a large portion of the bandwidth they're paying for.

For example, say you buy 1.5Mbit DSL and then carefully set up your torrent client to use a consistent 1.0Mbit during nighttime. A month later you get a disconnect notice from your ISP claiming that you were hogging bandwidth, probably leaving you SOL since that's the only viable ISP in your area.

This is the sort of business practice the FCC is trying to address.

westbyweston Schneier on Times Square

True, but the current state of security theater involves repeating the same mistakes over and over. Perhaps through tiresome repetition some of these ideas will finally sink into the brains at DHS, police departments, etc.

westbyweston Nikola Tesla predicted mobile phones in 1909

Although this article is understandably scant on details, I gather from the blurb "millions of such instruments from a single station," that Tesla did anticipate some sort of transmission stations to relay the traffic of the wireless handsets.

Still, a big difference between this forecast and the present state of mobile wireless is that Tesla probably expected the subscribers' handset to draw power from the microwave transmissions themselves, rather than from batteries.

westbyweston Croatian teenager wakes from coma speaking fluent German

I'm a bit wary about the claim "able to communicate perfectly in German."

The brain can indeed abstract speech patterns away from the actual language spoken, and multi-linguists do this routinely (being one myself). However, I don't see how the girl could have been exposed to enough vocabulary before (or even during) the coma sufficient to speak "fluently."

Nevertheless, the article does suggest the girl was quite avid about the new language (absorbing TV and books outside of class), so perhaps the coma served as something of an incubation period for word retention and language skills that weren't quite together when the coma set in.

Recht merkwuerdig.

westbyweston MSNBC Blocking Searches for "Wikileaks"

Searching for "Wikileaks" on MSNBC yields this error: "We are unable to display search results at this time. Please accept our apologies for the inconvenience and try your request again."

Searching for "Tiger Woods" yields the results you'd expect.

westbyweston Man arrested at Large Hadron Collider claims he's from the future

To quote the traveler: "The discovery of the Higgs boson led to limitless power, the elimination of poverty and Kit-Kats for everyone. It is a communist chocolate hellhole and I'm here to stop it ever happening."

It's an odd dystopia the future is preparing for us.