Hacker News Reader

Lagged2Deathon What Facebook Did to American Democracy

For how long will Americans blame FB for the rise of Trump?

The subject of the article is accurately summarized by the headline, and this isn't it.

The information systems that people use to process news have been rerouted through Facebook, and in the process, mostly broken and hidden from view ... The truth is that while many reporters knew some things that were going on on Facebook, no one knew everything that was going on on Facebook, not even Facebook.

Lagged2Deathon Wind Energy Is One of the Cheapest, and It's Getting Cheaper

With traditional (coal, gas, nuclear) electrical power generation, one unit of energy is delivered to your wall socket by dumping about two units of heat directly into the environment somewhere else.

Lagged2Deathon The Legion Lonely

I'll try, I guess.

Respectfully suggest you consider the root comment here with these guidelines ("name-calling") in mind.

Lagged2Deathon About This Googler's Manifesto

It has little to do with intelligence. It has mostly to do with not having the first clue how to tell the difference between a legitimate attempt at dialog and ideologically-motivated rhetoric.

Hm.

Lagged2Deathon The Legion Lonely

"Patriarchy is a model whose name alone..." is ad hominem. Tone policing ("...you're really going above and beyond with the contempt...") is ad hominem. In the sense that both shift focus to the speaker rather than the subject.

Pointing out that neither of those things are valid arguments is not ad hominem.

I haven't insulted you; pointing out that you're ignorant and inexperienced is giving you the benefit of the doubt. Those things are curable.

Lagged2Deathon The Legion Lonely

...there's a lot of history and context around the form of argument from patriarchy in spaces where men are discussing the issues that affect us.

There is not. This is a shortcoming born of inexperience and youth. Your context is too small, you're not perceiving things at any scale much beyond your own few personal experiences.

I have to say you're really going above and beyond with the contempt you add to it. What are you trying to accomplish, this way?

You pretend to be so reasonable, but this is tone policing, a logical fallacy, a thought-terminating cliche.

Your position is contemptible and no one owes you good manners over it. Do better. Step up your game. Make an actual argument to persuade me - to persuade anyone - that you actually have a clue what you're talking about.

Lagged2Deathon The Legion Lonely

Patriarchy is a model whose name alone...

Hearing the name doesn't make you an expert. The world isn't so systematic; history and context matter. There's quite a lot of study and learning to absorb if you're inclined, but this is a stunning demonstration of arrogance from ignorance, and I can't understand why anyone would want to demonstrate that. "Boi."

Lagged2Deathon A ghostly radio station that no one claims to run

What a dreadful noise! I wonder if there's a good reason so much cold-war detritus is so ominous, so foreboding, and so nerve-wracking in its design, character and presence.

Maybe there are practical reasons in this case; maybe the sound is memorable, or recognizable even with marginal reception, etc.

Lagged2Deathon A ghostly radio station that no one claims to run

The name "shortwave" is ill-considered and misleading but there's no changing it now.

Lagged2Deathon Mint 18.2: Still the best Linux desktop

Mint 18.2 ran like a champ on my work desktop. This is an older Dell XPS 8300. It has a 3.4GHz quad-core Intel Core i7 processor, 8GBs of RAM, and an AMD/ATI Radeon HD 5770 graphics card.

This fellow has a very different idea of what an "older" computer is than I do.

Lagged2Deathon Ad blocking is under attack

I don't see how this would work when the URL lists are full of regexps etc.

If you could make it work, you'd would wind up with some sort of source file of domains, parsed at build time to generate list of hashes that actually ship with your plugin. That source file would belong in a repo, and would still be DMCA-able in this way.

Also, this would make ad-blockers even more CPU intensive than they are.

We shouldn't have to pursue a technical solution. It's my computer, it's my internet connection. If I'm not allowed to control my own property, then the concept of property becomes meaningless.

Lagged2Deathon Our Broken Economy, in One Simple Chart

...the top 20% of earners shoulder 84% of the tax burden of the federal government[1]. Where does that number need to be in order to silence the socialist rabble-rousers? 90%? 95%?

"Percent of income tax burden landing on top 20% of income earners" isn't a figure anyone is particularly interested in engineering or specifying for it's own sake. Where do you think it "should" be, and how can you justify it?

This is an emotional, not a rational appeal: "Won't someone think of the well-looked-after?"

The top 20% of earners earn more than half of the earned income that exists to be taxed. You could increase taxes on the rest quite a lot without actually collecting much.

Honestly I thought my household was in the top 20%. I was going to write that sometimes our financial situation feels tight, but that taxes aren't really the reason. But it turns out I was wrong; in 2015 we were probably third quintile. Should make it to fourth quintile this year.

I suspect a lot of people think they're higher on the ladder than they are. It's hard to percieve just how high the ladder goes.

http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/statistics/household-income-q...

Lagged2Deathon About This Googler's Manifesto

The "Hollywood Ten" screenwriters who were blacklisted by the film industry (private employers making employment decisions!) were, in fact, members of the Communist Party USA...

Yes, but 1) that was just the tip of the iceberg labelled "McCarthyism," and 2) even at the time, the issue wasn't that they had joined a political party, the issue was what that party proposed to achieve.

In the case of the Google's manifesto, I don't see anyone upset that the author holds an unpopular opinion or that he publicized his unpopular opinion; it's the content of the opinion itself that's at issue.

Both McCarthy himself and the Googler in question here tried to harm other people's careers by spreading untruths in a self-aggrandizing way. That seems like the most natural parallel to me.

Lagged2Deathon About This Googler's Manifesto

The question in my mind is: Does an opinion suddenly become a "thought crime" if expressing it publicly might get you fired from a non-governmental employer? The consequences don't include incarceration or even necessarily the end of a career. This is, in principle, "crime?" Really?

You've jumped straight into name calling without engaging that question.

Couldn't we characterize the manifesto scandal as, in part, an apalling lack of judgement? Should your response lend me (or anyone) any confidence in your judgement? Yet here you are, charging right in with a judgement call.

Consider the possibility that you have read the manifesto but you haven't understood the context. That other people, who claim to see something else there, really are seeing it, they're not making it up. Consider the possibility that some of them have had experiences you have not. That some of them are just smarter than you. That people who disagree with you aren't insane or lazy.

Lagged2Deathon About This Googler's Manifesto

I don't know that much about McCarthyism but I think it's safe to guess that you know less. It was considered a witch hunt because nobody cared about facts or evidence, the spectacle was the point. Victims we're persecuted because they were juicy, suceptible targets, not because of anything they did or didn't do.

The situation we're discussing here is pretty different.

Lagged2Deathon About This Googler's Manifesto

But this guy might lose his job. His career. All for voicing his opinion.

This has always been true and I can't understand how you would imagine it was ever otherwise.

Lagged2Deathon About This Googler's Manifesto

Textbook thoughtcrime punishment.

People are fired for exhibiting corrosive, counterproductive, or otherwise bad attitudes every day. Are they all victims of "textbook thoughtcrime punishment?"

Lagged2Deathon A Candle Loses Nothing by Lighting Another Candle

I'm established now. I own a great company. I love my work and have happy customers and supportive people in my life. So I can see straight through the resentment for what it is...

It's likely enough the author is observing something real in at least some cases, but it's laughable to imagine that perspective and deep insights into the minds of others (i.e., empathy) comes with success and comfort. All evidence is that the opposite is true. It's not farfetched to suppose that he sometimes reads something else (like frustration) as resentment.

Lagged2Deathon Why Apple and other tech companies are fighting to keep devices hard to repair

...at a certain point, the tech industry’s chemical suppliers were enlisting family members to pay for IEEE memberships to help vote down new environmental measures.

Nothing to see here, just the free market regulating itself. Good job!

Lagged2Deathon Plastic Micro-Particle Patch Bigger Than Mexico Found in Pacific

"Micro-particles" might also be misleading. The article spells it out:

The pieces of plastic are not necessarily floating bottles, bags, and buoys, but teeny-tiny pieces of plastic resembling confetti, making them almost impossible to clean up.

Lagged2Deathon The Lethality of Loneliness

I wish more commenters would read the article.

It's not about garden-variety, dictionary-definition, transient, intermittent, universially-felt-at-some-point sort of "loneliness" many of you assume it is.

It's about chronic loneliness, the loneliness of an orphan, the loneliness of a closeted homosexual, the loneliness of a retiree whose friends are all dead.

It's about loneliness as a force powerful enough to change the sufferer's genetic expression. It's really something.

Lagged2Deathon [dead]

You just can't keep up with the craziness.

It feels like he's trying to distract the TV news from something.

Lagged2Deathon Passwords Evolved: Authentication Guidance for the Modern Era

As far as I can tell, we're talking here about reversing a cryptographic hash and sifting the one true master password out from the much more numerous hash collisions. Do you really expect that level of effort to be common in a divorce?

Lagged2Deathon Passwords Evolved: Authentication Guidance for the Modern Era

I'm not super familiar with the Honan story but I recall (and quick skimming seems to confirm) that it was more about lax security policies at Apple et al, the interconnectedness of social media accounts, and social engineering than it was about reversing a computed hash or human "hashing" scheme.

Did those attackers guess or compute even one password at all?

Lagged2Deathon Employees Line Up to Get Microchipped in Wisconsin

"...there is no GPS tracking ability to it. It is really the same thing as the chip that is in your credit card."

I had an RFID credit card years ago, but that turned out to be really insecure[1], and the issuer discontinued the program.

The contact-based chips in modern cards are not the same. At all.

I wonder what would happen if some miscreant super-glued a few dozen RFID chips to the reader, or to a location close to the reader?

[1] http://hackaday.com/2013/11/03/rfid-reader-snoops-cards-from...

Lagged2Deathon Passwords Evolved: Authentication Guidance for the Modern Era

...an attacker can use the knowledge of your password on site A to bruteforce your master password offline.

This might be a concern if you're the victim of a state-level targeted attack. That's not a threat most of us have to deal with. Hackers aren't likely to spend a lot of effort cracking John Doe's password list; they want to steal a few million password hashes and sift out a few thousand easy or re-used ones.

Your other points about the weaknesses of the scheme stand. Still, if we could get more users to use not-terrible, not-duplicated passwords, even with a flawed scheme like this, overall internet security would improve immeasurably.

Lagged2Deathon Passwords Evolved: Authentication Guidance for the Modern Era

I have a default password that is very simple ... that I use for most logins ... Unless you're vitally important to my life...

That's all fine if you're a perfect robot. It will turn out that you aren't, though.

You could let one of your important passwords slip to a compromised dumb-password site by mistake; you could fail to appreciate how important a dumb-password site had become to you until it was too late; you could just make a human goof and set up PayPal (or what have you) with your dumb password.

But your personal ability or inability to get this stuff perfectly correct forever is kind of beside the point when you're setting policy. In a population of dozens, mistakes will be made. In a population of millions, mistakes will be legion.

If more organizations followed this guidance, it would make password systems easier to implement, easier to use, and more secure for everyone who did care. It wouldn't effect your practice in the slightest.

Lagged2Deathon ITER fusion energy pushed back beyond 2050

"a hundred miles square" means 100 x 100 miles, 10,000 square miles. The linked article makes this clear.

At $250 per square meter, 10,000 square miles of panels would come to $6.4 trillion.

I think we should be heading in this direction anyway. But it's not so small, it's not so cheap, it will take time. No surprise; the system we need to replace is not small or cheap, and it took time, too.

Lagged2Deathon Jeff Sessions Announces Justice Department Will Increase Asset Forfeiture

I know I had my fair share of hissy-fits...

"Hissy fit" is a gendered insult. You're suggesting that anyone who admits that Sessions has bad intentions is acting like a menstruating woman. It's really offensive. Maybe English isn't your first language, maybe you didn't understand this. You aren't elevating the level of discourse here.

...the idea that some group of people are inherently evil cannot be logically argued...

We're talking about one person in this case, and he's had a long career which makes the argument (that he acts with malice aforethought, that he's chosen to do the more-evil option over and over again) more strongly than any "logic" anyone's likely to construct for a message board post.

Lagged2Deathon Jeff Sessions Announces Justice Department Will Increase Asset Forfeiture

The war on drugs failed decades ago...

If you subscribe to the view that the war on drugs is/was chiefly motivated by white supremacy and the preservation of a minority right-wing establishment (as Ehrlichman apparently did [1]), it's arguably been a success.

The administration is supported by a minority of the electorate, the administration is a right-wing regime filled with unrepentant bigots, the administration wants the war on drugs to be maintained and intensified. These things fit together in a very unsurprising way, once one can get over the shock of just how petty and vile the fabulously wealthy elites running the government turn out to be.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ehrlichman#War_on_drugs