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conaniteon Can you disappear in surveillance Britain?

In 3 or 6 months his wife has a small baby to deal with. As far as I can tell (I'm not the right gender), babies are easier to deal with while they're still inside.

conaniteon Can you disappear in surveillance Britain?

I accept your point about the cameras. The movie in question also covers other kinds of privacy leaks.

Another way to research a documentary about privacy, or lack thereof, would be to go do a bunch of interviews with detectives, police, and DB admins at Tesco. Yawn. This guy chose to live the experience of trying to hide - he's not pretending to be a spy, he's pretending to be spied on. As another commenter said, this is his job, it's how he supports him family.

conaniteon Can you disappear in surveillance Britain?

Why ridiculous? It's the story of a guy who hires two detectives to track him down, his attempts to evade them, and their techniques for catching him. It's an interesting experiment, well worth documenting. He comes across as a bit paranoid, perhaps, but making privacy issues more public is a worthy endeavour, no?

conaniteon Ask HN: Which is highest up-voted submission on Hacker News?

Currently, A New Approach To China, 1125 points. See http://top.searchyc.com/submissions_by_points

conaniteon Stop Words as Social Signals (a result that goes against IR common knowledge)

I wonder would James Chartrand have been found out ... http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=994284 [Why James Chartrand Wears Women’s Underpants]

conaniteon Stop Words as Social Signals (a result that goes against IR common knowledge)

Amazing that [to, to, on, my, to, on, be, on, to, to ... etc] can reveal so much. One of the linked articles ( http://homepage.psy.utexas.edu/homepage/faculty/pennebaker/r... ) describes how the relative frequency of the use of "I" in communication is a powerful indicator of status (less "I" => higher status).

conaniteon [dead]

The video in the article shows him in various postures, but never moving. I wonder why this is so.

The video mentions (4'18") that the same team studied another guy, mechanical engineer Mr Manek, who survives only on boiled water: "They conclusively proved that Mr Manek did indeed survive on nothing but water and cosmic energy". I wonder how they did the cosmic energy bit?

conaniteon Why the iPad isn't for me

It doesn't scare me as a user - it scares me that yet another device encouraging passive consumerism may become immensely popular. It's sad to become used to hearing "I can't cook/sing/draw/dance/code/whatever" - I would rather live in a world where everyone is a producer of some sort, in a way that content and culture are not monopolised by Big Industry.

Maybe 'scary' was a bit strong - I'm not exactly trembling under my bed ... yet.

conaniteon US government finally admits most piracy estimates are bogus

Will somebody please forward this to the ACTA negotiators?

conaniteon Why the iPad isn't for me

This is a media consumption device. I'm trying too hard to create things on it

This is the bit that scares me.

conaniteon How I got sued by Facebook

It would seem fair to argue that "rwxrwxrwx" is explicit permission to read your files!

conaniteon Facebook Threatens Greasemonkey Script Writer

While siculars makes a reasonable comment about authoritarian creep, I would argue that the discussion hasn't reached the required length for Godwin's law to kick in, and the comment might have better been kept for a little later. It's also true, as maukdaddy elegantly puts it, that supressing fb-purity is quite a long way from genocide.

conaniteon Ask HN: What makes Lisp hard to learn?

For me, coming from java, macros and closures were the two concepts that were completely alien and made a huge difference. Java provides a lot of structure (packages, classes, interfaces) that result in a lot of reassuring boilerplate code. If you're using lisp for conciseness, there is no boilerplate to comfort you, to signal where you are and what you should be doing at this point in the code.

conaniteon "Piracy" sounds too sexy, say rightsholders

Whatever new word they come up with, it will eventually sound sexy, too, assuming it sticks.

Rebelling against self-destructive authoritarianism == sexy, no matter what you call it.

conaniteon Celebrate Your Freedom to Read: Banned books on Google

More detail on why and where classic novels were banned here:

http://www.ala.org/ala/issuesadvocacy/banned/frequentlychall...

Hailing from the Emerald Isle, I find it embarrassing how many of these books were banned in Ireland.

conaniteon I Had Downtime Today. Here’s What I’m Doing About It.

When I visited London and saw notices with "There is currently a Good Service on All Lines", my immediate reaction was "why is this news?" By announcing their successes it seemed to underscore their users' low expectations of the system.

conaniteon Automatically followed by abusive ex-husband (and his friends) on Google Buzz

The author seems like a competent internet user. I wonder though what happens to the intersection of people with her privacy needs and the people who don't know how to login to facebook?

conaniteon Insurgents Hack U.S. Drones

the U.S. military found pirated drone video feeds on other militant laptops

What is the meaning of "pirated" here? Are they going to sue militants for copyright infringement?

conaniteon Ask HN: Refund cost of iPhone app for user x if you sell 2x?

You mean the nth user gets a refund when the (2n)th user buys? As n approaches +inf.0, the incentive approaches zero. So it's likely to encourage early adopters, and not latecomers. But usually (I believe) the early adopters need no extra motivation. So the question is whether (sales/2) in this scenario is greater than (sales) in the usual scenario.

Would it be considered gambling?

For the buyer, or the seller? :) It sounds a bit closer to MLM than to gambling ...

conaniteon Why it is Important that Software Projects Fail

I agree, the point about employment was nitpicking. I should have made that clearer. I liked the essay overall.

conaniteon Why it is Important that Software Projects Fail

The author argues that failed software projects are nonetheless beneficial:

Their development employs many bureaucrats, consultants and contractors and their expenditure supports an even larger number of people throughout society.

... by the same argument I should stroll around the city and burn some cars, thereby offering employment to many firefighters, car producers, actuaries and all their suppliers.

The point about ever-expanding bureaucracies is well noted however. Perhaps it is our duty to design really bad programming languages and methodologies, to sell them to government organisations and similar bureaucracies in order to drive their likelihood of success even lower. Reminds me of the true purpose of Ada ... http://home.pipeline.com/~hbaker1/sigplannotices/gigo-1997-0...

conaniteon Why TV, not Facebook or Twitter, is still revolutionizing the world

... soap characters are typically well-educated and have few children. And they prove to be extraordinarily powerful role models: Simply giving a village access to cable TV [...] has the same effect on fertility rates as increasing by five years the length of time girls stay in school.

Oscar Wilde claimed "life follows art". I guess he wasn't thinking of the transformative power it could have over millions of lives, and might have debated whether soaps are "Art".

Who wants to watch soaps about pious mothers-of-8? Our choice of role-models is about who we want to become, and perhaps one of the success factors for TV is that it offers poor people a vision of The American Lifestyle ... something to aspire to (at least from their perspective). On the other hand, I've never figured out why anybody watches Coronation Street, a half-hour banging my head on the wall would be better spent.

A soap character who's beautiful, charming, popular, wealthy, witty, racist, xenophobic, homophibic, antisemitic could be a very dangerous thing indeed. If TV becomes a tool for manipulating culture, it could get nasty in the wrong hands.

conaniteon A Tour Of A “Pay to Download Firefox” Site

The law unfortunately is our best effort at drawing a clear line (i said, "best effort") between acceptable and unacceptable behaviour. I'm not sure there is any hypothetical legal system that could eliminate every one of these scam businesses. And I'm not sure there's a hypothetical education system that can prepare those who would be fools, enough to put the scammers out of business.

And I would be scared of a business ethics committee deciding which companies are allowed to run. It would be worse than the App Store.

conaniteon The Fun Theory: Fun as a way to Change People's Behavior

I remember seeing a urinal with a miniature propeller-like device attached to the grill at the bottom. Using a suitable jet of water, a visitor could make the propeller spin at great speed.

Apparently, these things almost eliminate spillage. The Urinal Fly is a similar concept, much simpler, but not so much fun imo.

I think there's no end to the amount of fun humans can invent. One day, every large company will have a VP of Fun.

  "Our aim is to keep this bathroom clean. Your aim would be appreciated"
  - notice in my grandmother's bathroom.

conaniteon Are App Stores Evil?

Isn't there a huge hole in the market where there should be a quality mobile device running a completely open platform? Such a device would blow the iphone appstore away, I think.

conaniteon Head-On Crash Test of 2009 and 1959 Cars (video)

It would be interesting to see a video of two 1959 cars crashing compared to a video of two 2009 cars crashing. It's nice to have a tank, but if everyone has tanks, maybe I'm not better off.

conaniteon Ask HN: Any European HNers want to get a (free) drink?

paris. conan,conandalton dot net

conaniteon We're more likely to behave ethically when we see rivals behaving badly

Either of my children is more likely to behave well when the other is behaving badly. It looks like we humans don't grow up. In the case of children though, it's probably motivated by competition for parental attention. I'm not sure what the motivation might be for Carnegie-Mellon students.

conaniteon It’s Time We Stopped Rewarding Projects with Crappy Documentation

I would bet that any popular open-source project became popular before it had any decent documentation (assuming it has any now). The biggest block, for me, when writing documentation, is that I'm writing for a mystery audience, I don't know what their problems will be, or what questions they will ask. But once your project is used widely, documentation is just a matter of refactoring the mailing lists. And that's an itch some developers are willing to scratch - nobody wants to answer the same questions over and over.

conaniteon Great place for hacker recipes

It's the Pirate Bay for food.