Hacker News Reader

nsnson Google, please fix Android's slow, bloated share UI

There's a certain common expectation one has from any UI. This doesn't exist for me with anything Google - be it search, Youtube, Android, etc. - my first thought is always 'I'll need to fight it to get the results I'm looking for.' That's how they roll.

nsnson FLAC Support in Firefox 51

Firstly, on a personal note, I must say getting heavily downvoted on a factual statement and not an opinion is a new and confusing experience for me.

My comparisons were made several years ago using LAME 320 CBR, LAME VBR, OGG, lossless (WAV) 16bit 44.1kHz and lossless (WAV) 16bit 48kHz. I believe at least most professional musicians and sound engineers would be able to identify the difference between all of these; while they might not always be "worse", their sonic character is certainly different.

nsnson FLAC Support in Firefox 51

It all depends on how sensitive you are to these things, I've done such blind tests, and to my ears the fall in quality was significant, even painful.

nsnson Think You Bought Red Snapper? Don’t Be So Sure

Doesn't work anymore. At least not outside the US.

nsnson Twitter Is Finally Starting to Wake Up to Reality and Consider Selling Itself

Perhaps we could, by adopting the way Firefox, Wikipedia, Internet Archive et al. operate.

nsnson FreeSense: Indoor Human Identification with WiFi Signals

Unless, of course, they are aware of it and try to subvert it by consciously modifying "their body shape characteristics and motion patterns".

nsnson How connected car tech is eroding personal privacy

    I have a taste for the secret, 
    it clearly has to do with not-belonging; 
    I have an impulse or fear or terror in the 
    face of a political space, for example, 
    a public space that makes no room for the secret. 
    For me, the demand that everything be paraded in 
    the public square and that there be no internal 
    forum is a glaring sign of the totalitarianization 
    of democracy. [. . .] if a right to the secret is 
    not maintained, we are in a totalitarian space.

(Jacques Derrida, in Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan & Co., II, p. 599.)

nsnson The mystery of the 'legal name fraud' billboards

Well, I think there's something deeper going on here; the strength of the nation as a juridical entity has been seriously weakened; rich multinationals - corporations and individuals alike - are no longer bound by it, refugees are an obvious exception to it, and since the neo-liberal revolution, legislation also tends to be mostly global-minded; which leaves the normal citizen - now a "prisoner" of his or her place of birth - with few options. It seems only natural that new forms of existence in a post-national world would slowly come into being (instead of a naive populist, nostalgic ultra-nationalist turn).

nsnson An Archive of Fugitive Slave Ads Sheds New Light on Lost Histories

Farm animals

nsnson Pfizer blocks drugs from being used in lethal injections

Slightly OT: out of curiosity, anyone knows what's being used for legal Euthanasia, e.g. in the Netherlands?

nsnson Pfizer blocks drugs from being used in lethal injections

You could call it the "Sunday effect".

nsnson Curious Link Between the Fly-By Anomaly and the “Impossible” EmDrive Thruster

From the Reddit comment linked by rybosome below:

>Some have questioned why no companies such as Boeing, Lockheed Martin, or SpaceX have attempted to investigate the device, but regardless of how likely these companies find the results so far, the largest reason is almost surely that the devices are both patented by their inventors.

nsnson Understanding the ginormous Philippines data breach

Aren't votes supposed to be anonymous?

nsnson Bobby Fischer: from prodigy to pariah (2011)

I've learned there's always a(n associative) trail of comments (sometimes from more than on thread) leading to such apparently random posts.

nsnson The Panama Papers: Here’s What We Know

But what if the common folk in each nation finally realizes its national leaders have become, in essence, multinationals, just like Google and Amazon, with all that this entails regarding their actual agendas and worldview?

nsnson The Panama Papers: how the world’s rich and famous hide their money offshore

I think all this talk about the legality of using such services misses the point. It's about legitimacy, especially that of state leaders. While the western media might try to use it to delegitimize some non-western leaders, the leak actually works both ways.

Any country leader who'd make a speech to tell her (or his) people she doesn't care about them or their country, would do nothing illegal, but would probably loose her power. It's the same here - the leak serves as proof that the national Elite in many countries is no longer "loyal" to its imagined community (aka nation).

nsnson Panama Papers: Mossack Fonseca leak reveals elite's tax havens

Strange, nothing about it on NYT.

nsnson Erdogan’s Attempt to Suppress German Satire Has the Opposite Effect

    In the end, it still takes a single election to take him and his party down, 
    I have faith in Turkish people, 
    they did it before to others, they will do it to him as well.

But didn't this just happen? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_general_election,_June... )

nsnson Your iPhone just got less secure. Blame the FBI

I.e. new mutations of an older modern phenomena - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company

nsnson Mass surveillance silences minority opinions, according to study

Well, a community needs certain borders to become one; these may be implicit, but they certainly exist here. What's special in this forum, imo, is the level of discussion and the willingness to listen carefully and to react thoughtfully, and not its realization of some utopian ideal freedom (which probably would have destroyed it as a community).

Yet again, an online community is obviously not a nation-state: one has chosen voluntarily and consciously to participate in it, and could always decide to leave and go elsewhere.

nsnson Thank you for ad blocking

Well, you could say that advertising companies are actually in the business of tempting their clients into advertising by promising them the ability to tempt the general public into buying their products.

The problem imo is that, ever since Google has paved the way, monetizing an online product has become fixed on a single, double-edged strategy: either show ads or sell your users' data to advertisers.

nsnson New Photoshop UI has become a major problem on the official feedback forum

Seems like software design needs a concept similar to the English highbrow/lowbrow distinction (professional vs. amateur?); this change seems to introduce lowbrow UI design into an highbrow product; like if the NYT suddenly started using the tabloid format.

nsnson The Sadness and Beauty of Watching Google’s AI Play Go

Right, just as the sadness of seeing a notepad and pen beat human memory.

nsnson MIT Media Lab’s Journal of Design and Science Is a New Kind of Publication

This sometimes has more to do with the day of the week and the time of day in which a piece is posted, as well as the "competition" at the given time from other viable stories.

nsnson Stem Cells Regenerate Human Lens After Cataract Surgery, Restoring Vision

If I understand correctly, this is quite different, as such IOLs offer no accommodation, but only different areas with varied optical powers, which isn't as convenient (ever seen an elderly man trying to read a menu hanged on the wall?).

nsnson AlphaGo beats the world champion Lee Sedol in first of five matches

Indeed... Apologies to parent.

nsnson AlphaGo beats the world champion Lee Sedol in first of five matches

...it was the last stand of homo sapiens in the man vs machine...

But who made that machine?

I'd say a more precise evaluation would be that the ability to program a machine to assist in playing chess outdid the ability to play chess without such assistance.

nsnson Energy revolution? Grabat introduces its graphene batteries

No idea about the veracity of these news - but I found some interesting past announcements here -

http://www.graphene-info.com/revolutionary-graphene-polymer-... (2014)

http://www.graphene-info.com/graphenano-announces-launch-man... (2015)

http://www.graphene-info.com/graphenano-and-grabat-launch-gr... (02.2016)

nsnson You advocate a [blank] approach to calendar reform

Right, but note that almost anywhere outside the (christian) west uses (at least) two concurrent systems without much trouble (e.g. India: Western/Shaka calendar, Israel: Western/Jewish Lunar calendar, etc.).

nsnson The Unbearable Asymmetry of Bullshit

Instead of a sisyphean refutation of every attack, wouldn't a better strategy be to research and prove the attacker's conflict of interests (and thus discredit them)?