Hacker News Reader

JackRabbitSlimon With no brand license, Blackberry Mobile fades to black

Unfortunately for Mr Lazaridis at least one thing was workable on an OG iPhone with EDGE; Email.

JackRabbitSlimon Your New Medical Credit Score Could Deny You Care

Government run care is different in one massive way: It's not a profit seeking entity.

Private insurance, even those run as non-profit, still turn a profit. Does the head of the DHS make 15 Million dollars in year? No? That's the average compensation for private insurance CEOs. Bernard Tyson CEO of non-profit Kaiser Permanente made 16 Million in 2017.[0]

Is that really "all the same"?

[0]https://medium.com/@kaiserkeepthrivealive/this-analysis-look...

JackRabbitSlimon The Shadow Inc. app that failed in Iowa last night

I'm all about Hanlon's razor but naming the ticking time-bomb of a voting software startup "Shadow Inc." seems a bit too on the nose to be pure stupidity.

Everything about this reeks of a publicity stunt to "ruin" electronic voting in the public eye.

JackRabbitSlimon AMD Threadripper 3990X 64-Core beats dual Xeon Platinum 8280 in benchmark leak

If there is a show stopping bug I can throw VMWare under the bus.

If Xen has a show stopping bug I get to patch it myself.

Oh you mean technical reasons? None.

JackRabbitSlimon Bosch Smart glasses: A tiny laser array paints images directly onto your retina

https://spectrum.ieee.org/biomedical/imaging/in-the-eye-of-t...

IEEE's coverage way back in 2003 and even by then a prototype existed as far back as 91.

I've been waiting for people to circle back around to this type of display for about a 2 decades now. I suspect the biggest barrier/reason is aversion to liability and safety of beaming lasers directly into customer eyes.

JackRabbitSlimon Health-records software pushed opioids to doctors in secret deal with drugmaker

You're premise is likely incorrect. As a non-American there is a very good chance there is an opiate available over the counter with no prescription in the form of codine.

https://www.oecd.org/health/health-systems/opioids.htm

It's not an American problem, its a "First World" problem.

JackRabbitSlimon Sovereign: Ansible playbooks to build and maintain your own private cloud

You should check out Saltstack if you haven't already. It's actually not far from what your doing now...

JackRabbitSlimon Illinois governor signs law capping insulin costs at $100 per month

Except they can't. You have to get FDA approval and jump through regulatory capture hoops. Even for drugs already approved on on the market. See Martin Skrelli's case of a generic medication easily made in science class. Sure it was cheap and easy to make but only his company had the FDA approval to sell it and the cost for a competitor to get approval was significantly higher than any potential profit.

People will die, that's the system we have. The only question is do we relent and give in to what amounts to terrorist demands?

JackRabbitSlimon Congrats! Web scraping is legal! (US precedent)

https://www.eff.org/cases/hiq-v-linkedin

LinkedIn aint the victim here...

JackRabbitSlimon Bitcoin Gold hit by 51% attacks, $72K in cryptocurrency double-spent

Source?

I mean, real technical capabilities not just mention of facilities in Texas or whatever.

JackRabbitSlimon Gravity: We might have been getting it wrong

GR is no more or less wrong than Newtonian physics.

JackRabbitSlimon Yes Silver Bullet (2019)

I would argue that a good chunk programming tools don't reduce complexity at all. Just shifts it to well understood "accidental" complexity.

Your program needs a way to store and retrieve key:value pairs. It's an inherent complexity your program requires. You solve it by using an industry standard product like Redis. Now your code doesn't contain any key:value logic itself! complexity avoided right? Nope just shifted and doubled or trippled in size to boot. No KV logic but now you have to have db libraries, parameter parsers and sanitizers, sockets between services, etc, etc, so on, and so forth.

It's well trod ground, your IDE will generate 90% of that type of code for you. you throw a library or template or whatever at it and go about your day.

Software isn't just your code. Now your application that needed K:V storage has the entire bug and exploit surface area of your code and Redis. Do this 20, 30, 100 times with other libraries and packages. Each time your code gets a little smaller, a little slicker looking and the actual running software is an unholy monster spread across an entire server cluster. Oh well, your code is clean and tidy.

JackRabbitSlimon 82nd Airborne unit told to use Signal or Wickr on government cell phones

You would think that the constitution would have included a passage about peoples right to keep and bare armaments being necessary to ensure the country stayed free...

Nah. Lets redefine "arms" to mean "guns", assume for some reason the constitution needed to give the government freedom from itself, and ignore the whole thing as archaic and outdated.

JackRabbitSlimon Fortran.io – a Fortran Web Framework

That's how python's Flask framework started too

https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2010/4/3/april-1st-post-mortem/

JackRabbitSlimon Turkey buys Delphi licenses for an estimated one million students

In going from zero to programmer those aren't bad things, they are a simplified learning model.

Would you advocate pilots stop learning to fly in single engine prop planes and instead jump right into the cockpit of an Airbus because that's what they will encounter in the workforce?

Any why are doctors practicing on dead people when clearly they can't possibly help them or cure anything that way...

JackRabbitSlimon Climate threats now dominate long-term risks, survey of global leaders finds

I'd rather have unanswerable questions then unquestionable answers; Climate science has become far too unquestionable.

There is always room for debate, especially in the face of consensus. Without it astronomers burn and science dies.

JackRabbitSlimon The military is building long-range facial recognition that works in the dark

Generalized systems search massive databases, these systems can have much narrower data sets. "Who is X?" and "Is this X?" are very different computationally.

Also; "fail early, kill innocents" is a great paradigm for staying in power.

The beatings will continue until moral improves.

JackRabbitSlimon New study: The advertising industry is systematically breaking EU law

That's a failure of the tools, not the regulations.

JackRabbitSlimon New study: The advertising industry is systematically breaking EU law

Of course they don't record and listen, that would be slow and take huge stores of data. They save transcripts and read/parse it instead. Much faster and less data to store.

JackRabbitSlimon Patch Critical Cryptographic Vulnerability in Microsoft Windows [pdf]

X509 as a whole is fine and this isn't so much arbitrary MITM of any web server. It's specific to ECC public keys(not specifically X509 certs) that validate from cryptoAPI which is a fairly limited but devastating scope. EG Code signing.

Firefox uses its own NSS libraries not cryptoAPI to verify certs and is completely unaffected. I assume every major browser uses NSS or their own APIs as well. And of course RSA and AES certificates remain unaffected.

JackRabbitSlimon A billionaire retailer whose shops had no stock

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service_Merchandise

Not exactly. Again, not saying she wasn't clever or didn't bust her ass but it wasn't an entirely unique concept and luck/connections count for a lot.

JackRabbitSlimon _NSAKEY

"we lost the backdoor key and its in the wild" constitutes the NSA "discovering" and "informing" MS.

JackRabbitSlimon Cryptic Rumblings Ahead of First 2020 Patch Tuesday

The NSA prepping PR damage control already?

"Finally removed all totally inactive and harmless old _NSAKEY references."

I wouldn't bet against something along those lines.

JackRabbitSlimon Healthy habits add up to 10 disease-free years to your life, study reveals

It's pretty conclusively bad for brain health; alcoholics hands aren't shaking from weak liver function...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S147148920...

JackRabbitSlimon Dev says game started selling 400% better on Steam after releasing torrent

Reminds me of the Hotline Miami dev who posted bug fixes for folks on Pirate Bay

https://www.polygon.com/2012/10/30/3577726/hotline-miami-dev...

JackRabbitSlimon India’s about to hand people data Americans can only dream of

This smells like a big wooden horse. Also are we not mentioning the very icky bits about citizenship shenanigans happening right now[0]? The invalidating larger bank notes just a few years prior[1], no doubt to facilitate these very shenanigans?

[0] https://qz.com/india/1781692/in-photos-india-refuses-to-stay...

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-india-modi-corruption-idU...

JackRabbitSlimon A surprising new source of attention in the brain

They discovered a new area of the brain that controls attention to specific visual areas that wasn't previously found because they weren't paying attention to specific areas.

It's like recursive irony.

JackRabbitSlimon Ring fired employees for watching customer videos

Why would end-to-end help when it's the other end that's watching?

JackRabbitSlimon Decreasing human body temperature in the U.S. since the industrial revolution

How do you think a thermometer works? You expect it will measure less heat because your vascular system is dilated and shedding more heat?

Core body temp != single point-in-time measurement.

JackRabbitSlimon Corundum: Open-source, high performance, FPGA-based NIC

TDMA in a data center environment, anyone else have some heavy deja vu?