Hacker News Reader

Clauduson Tim Cook tells Congress why Apple won’t move $100 billion back home

Reading about this issue, it seems like the mentality of the Senators is that the money belongs to them, and Apple is keeping it away from them.

This mentality is also common among thieves, who rationalize their thefts by believing they are taking things that they are somehow owed.

Clauduson Vircurex Bitcoin Exchange Compromised

Text from the site:

The systems Vircurex.com and Cryptostocks.com have been taken offline over the weekend

Please do not deposit any further coins to your Vircurex accounts. We must assume that the wallet has been compromised.

Clauduson Working Alone, Together

I've been working remotely (alone) for the past year, it's great, I'm productive and focused, and I have tons of freedom to do what I want when I want.

While it's true, I do need social interaction, I don't need to be "around people" in order to work, in fact I work more efficiently when I'm alone.

Instead of the effort and lost efficiency of a "workplace", it's much easier to participate in clubs and organizations outside of work to get socialization.

Clauduson Super Mario Bros Coin Sound (1985)

The "white noise" sfx doesn't sound correct to me.

This does: http://soundfxcenter.com/download-sound/super-mario-bros-coi...

Clauduson The Secret Files

Cache of the Russian site hosting hacked celebrity information.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/11/celebrities-hacked_...

Clauduson Hacker News Parody Thread

Rats, top comments will be impossible to beat. I can probably piggy-back off a top comment, though, those comment threads aren't long yet...

Clauduson Dictionary + algorithm + PoD t-shirt printer + meme = rape t-shirts on Amazon

Did you read my comment?

Several of them include the #NotBuyingIt hashtag, a hashtag specifically related to sexism against women.

I really hesitated to respond to you again, at this point it seems you are doing nothing more than post hoc rationalization of your original inaccurate assertion.

Clauduson Dictionary + algorithm + PoD t-shirt printer + meme = rape t-shirts on Amazon

Anyone who is informed is making that assumption, hopefully that now includes you.

http://www.missrepresentation.org/not-buying-it/

People worldwide are using hashtag #NotBuyingIt to call-out sexism in the media.

Let the media know: sexism won’t sell. Use #NotBuyingIt on Twitter to challenge the misrepresentation of women and girls.

Clauduson Dictionary + algorithm + PoD t-shirt printer + meme = rape t-shirts on Amazon

The irony here, is that the outrage over these generated t-shirts is increasing their visibility and promoting something that no one had ever heard of or cared about before.

The sadness here is that disparaging boys is much more acceptable, and people immediately assume that these shirts are referring to raping women, completely overlooking the fact that men can be victims of rape as well.

Clauduson Is speed reading really possible?

When I was younger I took a reading test and scored just over 1,000 words per minute with 100% retention.

I remember reading an article that there were 3 types of readers.

Readers who sub-vocalize the words

Readers who "hear" the words

Readers who "see" words

Not sure if that's an accurate assessment, but I definitely don't sub-vocalize. If I sub-vocalized, I think would at least some general idea how to pronounce unusual character names from fantasy novels. I couldn't have even tried to pronounce most of the character names in Lord of the Rings, immediately after reading it but I could recognize the name patterns if I saw them.

Clauduson Why Developing Serious Relationships in Your 20s Matters

I have done these things for myself.

Clauduson Why Developing Serious Relationships in Your 20s Matters

I guess this article is good advice for the people who have frequent opportunities to develop meaningful romantic relationships and decide to pass on them.

Unfortunately, I'm not one of those people.

Clauduson Why Developing Serious Relationships in Your 20s Matters

I find this article a little condescending and trite, most of the things you "need to learn" are skills you develop from interacting with people in general, not just in personal romantic relationships.

Clauduson Why Developing Serious Relationships in Your 20s Matters

I've pursued many women in my life, and failed. I'm not especially tall, good looking, or rich, but I am smart, somewhat charismatic, and have a solid character.

Everything I've done in my adult life has been motivated by my desire to be attractive to women that I'm interested in; studying hard to get good grades, going to grad school, pursuing good employment, developing my personal and social skills, working out, everything. I'm getting better all the time, and I see my successes, but now in my 30s I'm not sure what the message is here.

Should I have just grabbed any woman that would have me, even if I'm not interested in them for the sole purpose of "developing a serious relationship"?

Clauduson The Net Is a Waste of Time (1996)

Well, here's an actual quote: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/William_Gibson

"On the most basic level, computers in my books are simply a metaphor for human memory: I'm interested in the hows and whys of memory, the ways it defines who and what we are, in how easily memory is subject to revision. When I was writing Neuromancer, it was wonderful to be able to tie a lot of these interests into the computer metaphor. It wasn't until I could finally afford a computer of my own that I found out there's a drive mechanism inside — this little thing that spins around. I'd been expecting an exotic crystalline thing, a cyberspace deck or something, and what I got was a little piece of a Victorian engine that made noises like a scratchy old record player. That noise took away some of the mystique for me; it made computers less sexy. My ignorance had allowed me to romanticize them."

Clauduson The Net Is a Waste of Time (1996)

William Gibson is a strange person. I remember him making a comment at a convention once where he said he was shocked at what computers looked like on the inside, he expected them to be weird crystalline contraptions.

Clauduson Sexism is not funny, let's stop laughing

I agree, can you really do sexy without sexism?

Is using sex inherently bad?

Clauduson Sexism is not funny, let's stop laughing

Reading this post, I probably had the typical 'guy' reaction, which was negative towards the post. Why? Because I've been in situations like the ones described, and I wasn't offended and I feel like I'm being attacked for being in these situations that are outside of my control, and don't bother me personally, and that makes me defensive.

I'm not going to disagree that what she's describing is probably sexist, I'm also not going to disagree that she's right when she says this type of thing gets attention.

But I am going to disagree that people think "sexism is entertainment". These types of things are done for the "sex" or "shock" value, not for the "sexism".

What does that mean?

1) Feel free to fight sexism, but stop trying to end it, it will never happen. Instead, punish it.

2) Stop blaming everyone who happens to be in proximity, it's not my fault, I'm not offended, and honestly I don't care that you are (maybe I'm a jerk, but I'm also not a sexist). Instead, call out the specific offenders, I might actually take your side I didn't feel like I was targeted.

Clauduson Gender Bias 101 For Mathematicians

I've worked with a lot of programmers. Some of them have character flaws that make them unpleasant to work with. These character flaws do not affect their ability to "get the job done", but I'd rather not work with them and take steps to avoid doing so when possible.

From a link in the article:

Renowned conductors have asserted that female musicians have "smaller techniques," are more temperamental and are simply unsuitable for orchestras

I think that "simply unsuitable for orchestras" is vague and unquantifiable, but "smaller techniques" and "more temperamental" seem like assertions that could be challenged.

I have a general concept of what "smaller technique" means, is this something that is difficult to measure in a standard audition? Do female musicians in fact have "smaller technique" in general?

Are female musicians "more temperamental" than male musicians in general? Is there a male equivalent of a "diva", if not does that support the assertion that female musicians are more temperamental? Can you determine how temperamental someone is from a blind audition? Is temperament a valid reason to not hire someone?

To me, these senior conductors, scientists, etc. are asserting that, in general, women differ from men in certain dimensions that factor into hiring decisions but are not detectable in initial screening process.

If you really want to end sexism, I feel like these sorts of questions need to be asked and answered. My observation of the subject is that many people have an intuition, gut feeling, opinion formed from personal experience, etc. that men and women in general have innate differences that make men (or women) more suitable for certain functions.

The ONLY way that gender bias will ever end is to challenge these ideas and in fact show that these innate differences do not exist.

On the other hand, if gender differences do exist, then fighting gender bias is an eternal struggle that will never end. It is human nature to min / max and game the system.

Clauduson We should only work 25 hours a week, argues professor

I left my job a year ago, and started doing remote work for a small company. Since then, I've worked between 15 to 25 hours a week. As a result:

- I'm more rested and stress free

- I get a lot more exercise and I eat healthier

- I'm much more efficient and motivated in my work

- My creativity and exploration into new fields has bloomed

I used to put almost all of my effort into my work, with not enough time devoted to maintaining and improving myself.

Clauduson A Short Rant About Working Remotely

I work remotely as a programmer / designer, it's the best job I've had, and I'm far more productive than I've ever been, with a lost less time spent.

I'm sure collaborating in person is necessary for some people, but if you're working with people who can visualize what you're talking about with words it seems pretty great to me.

Not everyone is suited for working remotely, but for those who are, I think it suits us very well.

Clauduson Writing is hard, so do it

Two bits of advice I've found helpful.

1) Don't write the whole book before you write it, just focus on small steps, pick up a pen, find some paper, etc.

2) Practice, push yourself, like lifting weights, or anything else, you'll get better at it.

Clauduson How Newegg crushed the “shopping cart” patent and saved online retail

Really glad to see this, these costs to pay patent trolls would have been passed along to the consumer in some way.

Good job, Newegg!

Clauduson And The Crowd Goes Wild

"The lower shoe is almost perpendicular to the camera. It measures 149-151px from heel to toe. (I measured 149.91 pixels and added slop for inexact measurements.)"

Interesting article, but could have benefited from some basic trigonometry.

1) The shoe is not "almost perpendicular", if you view the larger image, you can draw a selection box of roughly 50px in width by 150px in height (his shoe is tilted more than 18 degrees), so his shoe length is closer to around 158px. That puts his shoe "size" around 10.3".

2) His toe extends several pixels beyond where the "sole" ends, I don't know how that factors into shoe measurements.

3) The author always refers to shoe size in inches, then comments that, "Since shoes don't come in quarter fractions, this is likely a 9.5" shoe". I assume he is referring to US Men's Shoe Sizes, but a size 9 1/2 shoe is not 9.5", it's 10.5" (inches), and a size 10 shoe is 10.69", a 0.19 inch difference. (http://shoes.about.com/od/fitcomfort/a/men_inches.htm)

Since the original problem was "an associate of mine who asked if I could identify a person's shoe size from a photo", assuming the other math is right, 158 pixels would be make the correct answer closer to a size 8 1/2 or 9 (in US Men's Shoe sizes).

Of course, I could be completely off base here, since I only spent about 3 or 4 minutes thinking about this and didn't write an entire blog entry.

Clauduson Anonymous threatens Justice Department over hacktivist death

Wow, CNN, the opposite of Hacker News. What an ignorant comment:

The "warhead" names appeared as links, most leading to 404 error messages of pages not found, but some leading to pages of raw programming code.

Clauduson Will Your College Go Out of Business Before You Graduate?

List of Colleges and Universities that have Closed, Merged, or Changed their Names

http://www2.westminster-mo.edu/wc_users/homepages/staff/brow...

Clauduson Credit Card Fees Take Effect Sunday

For me, credit cards are a tool that gives me a 1% discount on purchases, and protects me from fraud.

I've made over $1,000 in cash back rewards and was refunded $250 in charges from 2 different purchases that turned out to be fraudulent.

I always pay my balance down to $0 at least once a month.

Clauduson United States Sentencing Commission website hacked

Yeah it seems strange to me too, it's possible the server I was downloading from had incomplete files... it seems like Kennedy.Warhead1, Roberts.Warhead1, and Sotomayor.Warhead1 should be 150 MB... those are the file sizes reported by the server though.

Clauduson United States Sentencing Commission website hacked

Here's the introduction from "Anonymous Operation Last Resort 101"

*1. Welcome to #OpLastResort-TwitterStorm!

You have been selected to assist this important Operation because we're pretty sure you know how to cut and paste. #OpLastResort is a long-term Op devoted to honoring the memory of Aaron Swartz and continuing his important work. Anonymous has prepared content that they would like shared with the world, and it's up to us to make sure it goes everywhere. Other Operatives will be spreading the news to major MSM outlets, YouTube, Facebook, and other websites while you participate in the push to bypass the bias and get the word out directly to the people via Twitter."

(Further details: http://pastebin.com/d2nvt263)

Clauduson United States Sentencing Commission website hacked

https://twitter.com/aestetix/status/295121141805223937

Based on http://66.153.19.162/clarity1.txt through clarity3.txt, it looks like NIH docs.