Hacker News Reader

dfeojm-zlibon The iPhone is no longer Apple’s most important product

Apple products are no longer durable, well-made or a good value, so their "services" are now required to keep them operable, which explains why said "services" revenue is now more important than purchase price. Think of Apple products as American-made Mercedes rather than a Volvo.

dfeojm-zlibon Known packings of equal circles in a circle

Newtonian packing of circles, e.g., Hungarians packing a Subaru for a summer road trip. :)

dfeojm-zlibon Ugly Gerry – Font created from congressional districts

Here's a sample

https://is.gd/KAduzx (.jpg)

dfeojm-zlibon Disabling server-side logging of Siri requests

Without subpoenaing Apple, it seems like blind trust to me.

dfeojm-zlibon Disabling server-side logging of Siri requests

How to make your own:

https://www.idropnews.com/how-to/heres-how-to-stop-sharing-y...

It should look something like this (you'll have to remove a bunch of other unnecessary settings from the file to make it look list this):

    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
    <!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
    <plist version="1.0">
    <dict>
     <key>PayloadContent</key>
     <array>
      <dict>
       <key>PayloadDescription</key>
       <string>Configures restrictions</string>
       <key>PayloadDisplayName</key>
       <string>Restrictions</string>
       <key>PayloadIdentifier</key>
       <string>com.apple.applicationaccess.masked</string>
       <key>PayloadType</key>
       <string>com.apple.applicationaccess</string>
       <key>PayloadUUID</key>
       <string>masked</string>
       <key>PayloadVersion</key>
       <integer>1</integer>
       <key>allowSiriServerLogging</key>
       <false/>
      </dict>
     </array>
     <key>PayloadDisplayName</key>
     <string>Prevent Siri from Logging Me</string>
     <key>PayloadIdentifier</key>
     <string>masked</string>
     <key>PayloadRemovalDisallowed</key>
     <false/>
     <key>PayloadType</key>
     <string>Configuration</string>
     <key>PayloadUUID</key>
     <string>masked</string>
     <key>PayloadVersion</key>
     <integer>1</integer>
    </dict>
    </plist>

dfeojm-zlibon Lyoluminescence – light from dissolving γ-irradiated solids in liquid solvents

Lyoluminescence intensity can be increased by performing the dissolution of the solid in a solution containing conventionally chemiluminescent compounds such as luminol. These are thus called lyoluminescence sensitizers.

Hey @AppliedScience[0], please make vijeos. ;))

0. https://www.youtube.com/AppliedScience

Also, it might be fun to play with Luminol and Bluestar (an improve chemiluminescent) plus blood vs. cleaners

- sodium hypochlorite (bleach)

- sodium percarbonate (OxyClean)

- hydrogen peroxide

- hydrochloric acid (Muriatic acid)

- dilute acetic acid (vinegar)

- Iron OUT https://summitbrands.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Iron-OUT...

- Baking soda + lemon juice

dfeojm-zlibon The Library Card Project: The Ease of Forming Anonymous Companies in the U.S.

    SELECT * FROM PRIVATE_PERSONS WHERE CHECKOUT_BOOK IS LIKE "%Anarchist Cookbook%"

dfeojm-zlibon The Library Card Project: The Ease of Forming Anonymous Companies in the U.S.

For the FBI, CIA, NSA and local police to investigate terrorism and other crimes (also to conduct parallel construction and CIA/NSA/FBI feed no-warrant intelligence gathering under "national security" and "terrorism" banners).

dfeojm-zlibon The Library Card Project: The Ease of Forming Anonymous Companies in the U.S.

Here's an example of what you need for a Delaware C-corp:

https://www.incnow.com/delaware-corporation/

- Name of the corporation

- Name and address of the Registered Agent of the corporation (usually a mail forwarding service)

- Statement of the type of business that the corporation will engage in

- Number of shares of authorized stock that the corporation will issue

- Par value of each share

- Name and signature of the incorporator

- Indemnification clause for breaches of Duty of Care

- Allowance for Director Amended Bylaws

----------------------------

Library card, i.e., Mountain View, California:

https://library.mountainview.gov/selfreg

- (photo identification)

- (address verification)

- Last Name: *

- First Name:*

- Middle Name:

- Street Address:*

- City, State, & Zip:*

- Phone number:* (XXX-XXX-XXXX)

- Birthdate:* (MM-DD-YYYY)

- Email address:

* Required

----------------------------

Required by: Sections 214-216 PATRIOT Act of 2001

http://www.ala.org/advocacy/advleg/federallegislation/theusa...

https://www.congress.gov/bill/107th-congress/house-bill/0316...

dfeojm-zlibon Europe embraces rent controls, a policy that never works

Rent controls work if and only if there's sufficient authority and incentives to motivate developers to grow housing inventory vertically (skyscrapers) and/or horizontally (sprawl + public transport) just enough to not have a glut while aiming to approximate the desired rent-controlled price(s) such that there's less arbitrage, gaming, property owner loss and/or exploitation. (In effect, rent-controlling with structural market policies, while providing rent controls as a secondary guaranty layer to protect renters, especially vulnerable populations.) Housing is one of the more inelastic markets because everyone needs it, and so even minor constraints in supply can rapidly lead to price spikes.

dfeojm-zlibon Ask HN: What are good hosting providers?

I have used these in production:

0. https://www.bytemark.co.uk/prices/#cloud-prices

1. https://www.pair.com/solutions/shared/ (FreeBSD-based)

2. https://www.linode.com/pricing

3. https://aws.amazon.com/free (Free Tier is awesome, for a little while)

Others I would evaluate:

4. https://www.digitalocean.com

5. https://www.orangewebsite.com (Iceland-based)

6. https://www.bahnhof.net (Sweden-based)

7. https://tranquillity.se (Sweden-based, green-powered and straightforward billing)

8. https://advania.com (Sweden-, Iceland-, Norway- and Finland-based)

dfeojm-zlibon Neil Armstrong’s Death, and a Stormy, Secret $6M Settlement

A similar situation happened to my grandfather: a hospital's medical error caused pneumonia and wrecked his lungs. He could've lived another 10-15 years because he was relatively healthy. He wasn't Neil Armstrong and that side of the family wasn't astute enough to sue, at least to hold them accountable for their actions. :(

dfeojm-zlibon Stanford CS Education Library (2001)

There oughta be a visual/conceptual explanation textbook for Rust borrowing, traits and types because some of it is confusing and/or ambiguous.

dfeojm-zlibon Budget Subwoofer

Also, remember the SVS (SVSound)?

- SB-1000 - $500 / 300 W https://www.svsound.com/products/sb-1000

- SB16-Ultra - $2000 / 1.5 kW / can damage residential structures in certain situations https://www.svsound.com/products/sb16-ultra

dfeojm-zlibon A software engineering manager guide to measuring an engineer’s performance

I think of software developers having multiple qualities:

- coolness (cooperation, proactiveness, professionalism)

- carefulness

- integrity (ethics)

- morale

- cadence (speed) of work

- skills competencies (matrix)

- grit (badassery)

- estimated time to completion multiplier

dfeojm-zlibon A software engineering manager guide to measuring an engineer’s performance

Heck, you should try to give interviewees real bugs so they're solving real problems (not to exploit them but to see how they think and work) instead of theoretical chalkboard problems or standard brainteasters.

Certainly, guide them towards easy-ish bugs rather than complicated ones right away, because there is something to risk management of new people attacking gradually-increasingly critical code / difficult bugs. Of course you probably wouldn't give a random interviewee root access to a credit card processing system, but you should ratchet-up the level of trust incrementally as fast and as frequent as a staff member has proven themselves (treat people as adults, not kids).

dfeojm-zlibon Robo-Van Startup Will Handle Walmart's 'Middle Mile'

There are many (too many?) AI vehicle manufacturers on the road. Are they alpha-testing with everyone's lives? How rigorous and periodic are testing and certification? They should be strenuously tested on a track with a battery of real emergency situations and safety checks before being allowed anywhere near public roads, and then completely retested before every release. Furthermore, as Boeing and corporate capture have proven, self-regulation is a non-starter, this must be done by an independent, competent regulatory body.

dfeojm-zlibon Robo-Van Startup Will Handle Walmart's 'Middle Mile'

https://outline.com/YPdtfs

dfeojm-zlibon The floppy disk orphaned by Linux

Not removed, just quasi-deprecated and no maintainer.

dfeojm-zlibon Asm-declaration – Embed assembly language code within a C++ program (2017)

Ah yes. And Borland Pascal. Mode X VGA hackery in unreal mode. Later, when I worked for a software store in high school, I acquired Borland C++ 3.1, the physically-largest and heaviest (27 lbs / 12.2 kg) retail software package that I know of. It was a small software shop, they gave us crazy discounts, vendors gave us NFRs and they let us borrow anything on the shelf (trusty-dusty shrinkwrap machine). The profiler, debugger, and assembler were also good as there were protected-mode variants that could sometimes keep the machine from crashing.

dfeojm-zlibon A cure for cancer, Alzheimer’s, depression? FDA smacks down wild CBD claims

CBD is great... as long as you can trust/verify what you're getting.

Personally, I buy 100% CBD isolate from a reputable mfgr that proves their product's purity with a mass spec plot. Then, I add it to a high oleic food-grade oil to make a sublingual tincture of known dosage. Rubbing a tiny amount of CBD on the skin is purely placebo effect, and such products should be banned because they're fraudulent.

dfeojm-zlibon First Successful Starhopper Hop

Observation: Although the Starhopper is a purposefully-unspaceworthy tech demonstrator, it still does resemble a comic book alien rocket from the 1950s.

dfeojm-zlibon Why the S-400 and the F-35 Can’t Get Along

The bigger problem is NATINADS: how do you integrate NATO equipment (IFF especially) with Russan SAMs?

And, removing Turkey from the F-35 program is both political retribution and to stymie intellectual property from finding its way to Russia/China. In the past, it would've been unthinkable to sour relations with Turkey because of its geostrategic importance for NATO/US land-based missiles and airbases.. but sub-launched ICBMs and other countries more than/almost make up the difference. It's sad Turkey-US relations are souring at present.

dfeojm-zlibon Amazon Accidentally Sold $13k Camera Gear for $100 on Prime Day

IANAL. Any U.S.-based lawyers out here?

I believe a listed price is an "invitation to treat" which means a retailer can charge whatever they like regardless of listed price (whether in a physical or online store), but at what point can't an online retailer cancel/back-out of a transaction? Let's say the merchant and buyer are both California-based for simplicity. Would it be legally similar to "theft by discovery" (e.g., taking money falling out from an overturned armored truck) for accepting goods sold at an excessive, erroneous discount? Or would it require proving intent on part of the buyer that the price was a serious mistake they deliberately acted in bad-faith to exploit?

Let's say the (over-simplified) phases of a transaction are:

1. Agreed - Buyer clicks "Buy".

2. Paid - Payment is posted.

3. Shipped out - The product leaves the custody of the merchant.

4. Received - Customer receives the product.

dfeojm-zlibon Ask HN: How to handle a boss/owner who has ADD task focus?

Adopt strict GTD task stacks available for others to see:

- Current task(s)

- Immediate next queue (priority adjustments, new items can be added by boss)

- Deferred items

- Delegated items

- Medium-term items

- Long-term items

Some task app(s) can help with this. If you want people to know you're working on real stuff, ask for a big cheap monitor and cheap tiny PC/RPi to present your "dashboard."

To handle the OP's exact example:

X: current task

Y: proposed new task

"Do you want X done first, or do you want me to pause X and switch to Y?"

GTD -> https://gettingthingsdone.com

At times, people with ADD need a linear, focused "turtle" to counterbalance nonlinear, "rabbit" task-hopping.

Disclaimer: I take clonidine and strattera.

dfeojm-zlibon SanDisk 1TB MicroSD Card Review

I think we're headed to a future where fast, permanent storage is mostly in a small slot (similar to MicroSD) form-factor, just like scifi/future movies of old. The slots will get smaller, hopefully there will be more than one on tablets and whatever passes for laptops/desktops. And I'm sure they'll figure out a way to converge these slots and USB-C into something else new to make everyone buy all new dongles and adapters "USB-D."

dfeojm-zlibon OpenSSH taking minutes to become available, booting takes half an hour (2018)

1. /etc/ssh/sshd_config: UseDNS no

2. If haveged isn't perfect enough, setup a hw TRNG (i.e., EntropyKey, BitBabbler, InfiniteNoise) and EGD or EntropyBroker.

https://everipedia.org/wiki/lang_en/Comparison_of_hardware_r...

http://egd.sourceforge.net

https://www.vanheusden.com/entropybroker

3. It maybe something else.

dfeojm-zlibon Practical Earley Parsing (2002) [pdf]

Neat. Has anyone seen Parsing with Derivatives (2011) ?

https://youtu.be/WPde6DDLtXg

http://matt.might.net/papers/might2011derivatives.pdf

https://blog.klipse.tech/clojure/2016/10/02/parsing-with-der...

https://elfsternberg.com/2018/01/24/parsing-derivatives-naiv...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11976769 (2016)

https://arxiv.org/abs/1604.04695 (2016)

dfeojm-zlibon To Save a Neighborhood, Ban a Dollar Store?

I would bet money this sort of FUD is promulgated by big name brand PR firms through blogger "journalists." And I wonder what Aaron Maté, Chris Hedges, Jesse Ventura or Jimmy Dore would have to say about this.

What the heck is wrong with them? They're awesome for many miscellaneous items. If there aren't grocery stores, that's on the local municipality to attract/incentivize the type of businesses they want in their area. Most dollar stores aren't grocery stores anyhow, nor should they be forced to be anything, they're more like bric-a-brac American drug/discount stores mixed with convenience stores. It's a strawman/red herring to blame dollar stores for people's health... that's their municipality's and personal responsibility to have farmer's markets, grocery stores, health food stores, fresh food stands. They are what they are.. vote with your feet, or tell the muncipalities to also bring other type of stores. And if they don't like Walmartification, keep them zoned out.

dfeojm-zlibon Unprecedented North Pole Heat Wave in Progress

The North Pole doesn't have any land, and a blue water summer in the Arctic ocean is likely within 4-10 years. And, high Arctic lands also DO NOT NEED MORE TREES BECAUSE THAT WOULD HASTEN TUNDRA COLLAPSE. A Russian scientist proposed deforesting Siberia to convert it to grassland tundra using large herds of hybrid mammoth-elephants in order to eliminate trees that keep arboreal tundra from hard freezing in the winter which hastens its destruction in the summer. https://pleistocenepark.ru/

A better solution would include many overlapping approaches for a holistic strategy, including iron fertilization of the oceans and bio-energy with carbon capture and sequestration (BeCSS).

Furthermore, the best anti-desertification solutions must include extremely large, managed herds of browsing animals like goats to restore soil health. There was a TED talk on this. https://www.ted.com/talks/allan_savory_how_to_green_the_worl...