Area12
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2 years ago
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on: Colleges face gambling addiction among students as sports betting spreads
YouTube keeps showing me ads for online casinos even though I have marked Gambling as a "don't show me this" category in my profile. There doesn't not appear to be any straight-forward way to report this to YouTube. Perhaps they find the complaints too inconvenient.
Area12
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2 years ago
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on: A chimpanzee brought Xerox to the masses
I'm old enough to remember that commercial. A true classic, that one.
Area12
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3 years ago
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on: Ask HN: How do you find the weird parts of the web?
Area12
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3 years ago
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on: Giant gas field in Algeria found to be leaking methane for decades
It would be very interesting to see that map for the rest of the world.
Area12
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4 years ago
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on: The terrifyingly prescient ‘Serial Experiments Lain,’ 20 years later (2018)
Psycho-Pass. Finish season one, which tells a complete story. There was a drop in quality in season two.
Psycho-Pass is about two layers of futuristic police, "inspectors" with full citizen rights, and "enforcers" who are treated as "latent criminals". A brain scan from the end of a cop's weapon, which takes a second to complete, may determine your fate. The lead female character is initially very keen and eager to be an inspector, but soon questions the system and society. It's fast-paced and a great show.
Area12
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5 years ago
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on: Seismic waves reveal giant structures deep beneath Earth's surface
I'm a doctor, not a bricklayer!
Area12
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6 years ago
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on: Japan's PM to ask all schools to temporarily close
Convenient for me? No, I either stand there forever or leave with semi-wet hands. Paper towels work much faster and more effective, but the decision is made by facilities.
Area12
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7 years ago
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on: Cathay Pacific flags data breach affecting 9.4M passengers
Area12
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7 years ago
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on: Americans Renouncing Citizenship Hits New Record; Tax Bill Won't Change That
Does being clever with your money include a retirement fund that is considered absolutely vanilla in the country you are living in? Because the USA assumes that all financial services in the world provide exactly the same format of financial reporting that US services do. So retirement funds that are the foreign equivalent of an ordinary 401K have high compliance costs if you need to file with the USA.
Area12
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7 years ago
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on: Why Static Websites Need HTTPS
I've had a quick look at the paper you reference, but my immediate question is ... this was written around 2009. If the costs and likelihood of getting hacked or phished have increased significantly, some of the conclusions of the paper may now be misleading, at least in detail. Has anyone done an update in the last year?
I still like the paper for one good reason ... it challenges IT people to ask the question: what risk am I mitigating with this rule on the users, and is it worth everyone's effort that will go into it? If yes, see if you can impose the rule. If no ... just be sure you didn't get the numbers wrong.
Area12
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7 years ago
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on: Gerald M. Weinberg has died
So much of The Psychology of Computer Programming is still relevant, and still worth reading. The title might put you off ... but this is really a great book that covers some practical topics regarding the human side of programming.
Area12
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7 years ago
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on: Why are libraries destroying books? (2002)
Free books are never 100% free ... because bookcases cost money and even if you pile books up on the floor, that is expensive real estate you now can't easily use for another purpose. Hoarders forget that the opportunity cost of storage drives most of their possessions into negative net worth. Source: I have hoarder tendencies.
Area12
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7 years ago
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on: How Israel, in Dark of Night, Torched Its Way to Iran’s Nuclear Secrets
Given that there will be people insisting that the main objective of the program was nuclear power, not weapons, a show like that would be risky. Does Netflix want their shows accused of glorifying murder? I'm aware that there is the argument, perhaps with evidence, that Israel was halting weapons research aimed at them, but Netflix may not want to take the risk that the debate goes against them.
Area12
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7 years ago
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on: Saving the ‘god of ugly things’: NZ battles to restore its rodent-sized insects
True story. Years ago, I was driving with my wife, and I was wearing an oilskin rain hat. I felt a tickle, took the hat off and looked. Dropped the hat on the floor. My wife asked what startled me. I said "let me stop first". Parked the car. She was very worried by now. Said "weta in the hat". She ejected out of her car door like 2001: Space Odyssey airlock scene. Good times.
Area12
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7 years ago
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on: Oracle’s Aggressive Sales Tactics Are Backfiring with Customers
Does anybody remember when a default install of Oracle RDBMS also installed ask.com? It was at that point that I realised that a significant part of Oracle Corporation no longer cared about how disreputable they appeared. I can't even imagine that they got all that much money from ask.com, on the scale of their total revenue.
Area12
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7 years ago
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on: Up to 270 women may have died from breast cancer due to computer glitch
Is this now the most costly software error in history, measured in human lives lost?
Imagine if the UK Parliament or the EU decides that the best response is enact laws mandating a particular software testing approach, or mandates extensive regression testing on production systems after all changes?
Area12
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7 years ago
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on: The False Allure of Hashing for Anonymization
I am not a crypto expert, but I thought that the idea was to produce a new more or less random salt for EACH password, store the salt with the hashed password, hashing using an expensive algorithm.
Yes the hacker steals the salt with the hash, but now has to go to the trouble of brute forcing that ONE password with its UNIQUE (or almost unique) salt.
In other words, the hacker can crack it, but the process is so expensive for ONE password that cracking an entire database of passwords is a nightmare.
Of course, the hacker just focuses on the most privileged accounts I guess, but the idea is to make the hackers life as unpleasant as possible, and to catch the hacker while they are coming back in. Am I missing the point? I do see that if the hacker wants one password, they can do with effort even with unique salts.
Area12
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8 years ago
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on: Tesla Was Kicked Off Fatal Crash Probe by NTSB
Don't miss the point here. Tesla doesn't require that you be a licensed air pilot before you buy the car. It doesn't matter what pilots know about autopilots, it's about what the general public believes when they hear "autopilot". I wouldn't be surprised if 50% of the world believes that an autopilot allows both pilots to leave the cockpit for five or ten minutes. So the word "autopilot" misleads them, even if a pilot would know the limitations.
Area12
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8 years ago
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on: Firefox updates its iOS web browser to turn Tracking Protection on by default
The default setting, because 95% of the world will never change it. If Safari and Chrome and Android followed suit, the ripple effect would change a lot of things on the web. I'm not sure what the final result would be ... greedy people get to innovate too.
Area12
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8 years ago
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on: Birds can see Earth's magnetic fields because of cryptochromes in their eyes
So does morality/ethics boil down to numbers/metrics? I'm not being sarcastic; I don't know the answer myself ... and I'm not entirely sure that I would want to "know".
Humans have gained great powers of number calculation, but I suspect that our greatest power and obsession has always been story-telling. We tell stories to each other and ourselves, and those stories form the basis of our ethics and morality.
Which is why I think utilitarianism always feels cold and unsatisfying; it doesn't play well as a story.
