HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

barkbro

116 karma · joined March 30, 2016

submissionscomments
barkbro··on WTF Am I Looking At? How Not to Send a Mail
Just FYI, the credit/debit card company is often stylized as "VISA", and the travel document is a "visa".
barkbro··on Congressman calls for probe into Valeant’s pricing of lead poisoning drug
Keep in mind that the requirements for an IV drug are much higher than those of nootropic enthusiasts. All compontents have to be within a narrow concentration range (consistently, across batches) and very low levels of byproducts are allowed.

I'm not saying it's as expensive as Valeant claims, but it might be more expensive than you think.

barkbro··on Angular 1.x Banned from Firefox Addons
What's the rationale for disclosing vulnerabilities to for example Google before going public (unless the bug is in Google's software)?
barkbro··on Security bug lifetime
After reading it twice I'm still not sure what the horizontal axis represents. Is it time in days?

I know this is probably meant to be read by people who know more about the subject than me, but adding some axis labels wouldn't hurt.

barkbro··on Shame on Y Combinator
Those polls don't necessarily mean that people aren't choosing the lesser of two evils. Those questions aren't asked in a vacuum. Most of the polls ask about people's opinion of the candidates in a Clinton vs Trump context. Even if that wasn't the case, people might still feel that they have to support one candidate over the other.

It's hard to make people throw away their biases and ask themselves why they really support something.

barkbro··on GitHub censored my research data
> It won't resolve everything but it's a lot nicer than naming&shaming businesses who have effectively done nothing wrong.

They are putting their users at risk through negligence. Many would argue that's wrong.

barkbro··on GitHub censored my research data
According to the article, the stores were running malicious javascript which grabs people's credit card info. This obviously means they are vulnerable in some kind of way, but I fail to see how this is reasonably likely to be exploited. Even if it was, you also have to consider the benefit of warning the users.

I am not a security expert though, and I might be missing out on something.

barkbro··on Color Genomics raises $45M to provide genetic tests that detect cancer risk
The human genome and body are extremely complex. Concluding that something is caused by environmental factors just because a few genetic markers can't be found, would be a massive over-simplification.
barkbro··on U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians
Isn't this correct though? That the probability of picking only four asians (if you chose at random) is just over one in a hundred million
barkbro··on Why companies make their products worse
There might be a good reason why they use glass ceramics instead of for example stone. Maybe because it's harder to manufacture consistently (ferromagnetic impurities?), has a larger coefficient of expansion or because it's harder to implement touch controls for them. It might just be more expensive.
barkbro··on Sweden Wants to Fight Disposable Culture with Tax Breaks for Repairing Old Stuff
Bamboo is made of cellulose, which is not what you would want to use for making plastics.

The problem with cellulose is that, because it is fibrous, there aren't really any efficient ways of breaking it down.

barkbro··on Playpen: The Story of the FBI’s Unprecedented and Illegal Hacking Operation
> First, they showed that the police here, got from some US organizations, access to some kind of realtime NSA style spying tools, they showed on tv that their software show realtime torrent data transfer worldwide, with pips popping up on a map in the entire planet!

Were they monitoring a single torrent file? Multiple? An entire tracker? Most BT traffic in the world?

Trackers will happily disclose the list of peers who are downloading, so it's not hard to monitor a list of torrents. That's how BT works. A lot of anti-piracy companies do it. Unless they were monitoring a massive amount of torrent traffic, I don't see why an intelligence agency has to be involved.

barkbro··on Facebook Collaborating with Israeli Government on What Should Be Censored
> Posts that call for illegal actions (such as stabbing civilians) should be removed

What about a post that calls for women to vote? Or for black people to sit in the front of the bus?

That sounds like a recipe for abuse. It would be more reasonable to only ban enticing violence, for example.

barkbro··on Adblock Plus now sells ads
You could argue that Google is directly saving money by not paying people to train its ML algorithms (which I'm assuming they have a plan to monetize).
barkbro··on How the Sugar Industry Shifted Blame to Fat
Diesel engines produces less CO2 by being slightly more efficient.

Pretrol engines produce less nitrogen oxides and particulate matter.

What's "greener" is just a matter of your definition of it.

barkbro··on Australian traffic button pushes beautiful design
In many places (in Europe at least, I don't know much about the rest of the world), cars are prioritised on roads with larger amounts of traffic (pedestrians have to "ask premission to cross" or wait) and pedestrians are prioritised on roads with less traffic (they can just cross, and the cars have to stop). This is a reasonable compromise in my opinion.

There are some places where you as a pedestrian feel like a second-class citizen though. Lack of pedestrian crossings, heavy traffic in city centers, police who think jaywalking when there is no traffic is a problem etc.

barkbro··on How Google obliterated my 4 year old Chrome extension featuring 24k+ users
I don't see how an add-on posted on the Chrome store is subject to Facebook's ToS. It might be aiding people in breaking the ToS, but is there really a law against that?
barkbro··on It’s time EU laws caught up with technology
> Did you know making a meme technically isn't allowed in many parts of the EU?

Does Mozilla also think that a meme is an image macro or am I misunderstanding here?

barkbro··on July was the hottest month ever recorded, according to Nasa
The problem is that wind and solar are only a supplementary to nuclear power at the moment. It won't be able to replace nuclear until we find a better way to store energy.
barkbro··on These toxins in our food almost certainly shouldn’t be there
The article is mostly about food fraud. The only references to "toxins" are arsenic in rice and formaldehyde used as a preservative in milk (which apparently is a problem in Brazil).
barkbro··on Why an F1 car is more energy efficient than an electric car
The comparison in the article is pretty odd, but it's still amazing to see how much effort goes into engineering F1 cars. I wonder what they could produce if they were allowed to run free and didn't have to deal with F1 regulations.
barkbro··on My open-source, do-it-yourself cellphone (2013)
Maybe I was just looking in the wrong place, but I cound't find much info about the baseband processor. Is it open or proprietary?
barkbro··on RIAA to .ORG Registry: Take down ThePirateBay
They are mad becuase it isn't making them enough money.

You can have a look at this, which was posted a couple days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11836291

barkbro··on Blocklist of all Facebook domains
The problem with blocking all google doains is the amount of sites it would break. Youtube, gmail, googleapis for js libraries, google's blog platform, maps based on google maps and more would break.
barkbro··on Canary Watch, One Year Later
What I found interesting is that Pinterest likeley got one (or more) NSLs. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought pinterest was a place where people posted pictures of their food and house, not terror plans and execution videos. I wonder if it was (mis)used for a different type of investigation or if it was a matter of national security, assuming they got an NSL in the first place.
barkbro··on Android Instant Apps: Android apps to run instantly without installation
>But with a native micro-app, it can just start a payment intent that accepts whatever the user has already saved to their OS (through Google Pay). Basically two taps and you're done, as opposed to a bunch of taps and filling some forms.

That sounds like it could become a new vector for fraud if not implemented correctly.

barkbro··on Terms and conditions word by word
>1. Cut back on the obvious

Would this work when there are different laws for different jurisdictions and there is no way to tell for sure where the user acutally is located? I thought the reason behind the obviousness was to cover everything.

>2. Write so that people understand

>3. Keep it short and concise

That probably wouldn't be beneficial for all the companies using the user-as-the-product model. "Terms of Service: We retain the right to track your location, read your text messages, listen to the microphone and read your thoughts"

barkbro··on Why do we have allergies?
This would explain contact alleries to for example nickel and various chemicals, which are usually quite harmful, but I don't see how this would explain pollen and animal allergies. A lot of the pollens that cause allergy in some people are coming from harmless plants. And with pollen spreading in the wind, it would be an annoyance without necessarily protecting people much against coming in contact with the plants. Would avoiding contact with certain animals be beneficial? Other than avoiding pathogens, I don't see a lot of reasons to do so.

Anyway, I wouldn't be surprised if allergy, like many things in biology, are caused by multiple factors instead of just one.

barkbro··on My time with Rails is up
styles-bluegreen.css seems to be the problem, firefox preforms fine if you block it.
barkbro··on Bitcoin's $137k Jackpot
The author(s) theory is that the mistake was made by a bitcoin laundering script.
Page 1 of 2Next →