Hacker News Reader

offbytwoon Google will allow only apps from verified developers to be installed on Android

Nobody will do anything about it and things will continue to get worse.

offbytwoon Warren Buffett Sees Most Newspapers as ‘Toast’ After Ad Decline

> It could be done with a new separate branch of government.

Ah, yes. Maybe we could call it The Ministry of Thought.

offbytwoon New tungsten alloy has potential for nuclear fusion – The Engineer The Engineer

> cannot be used to infer any sort of near-time

It's not meant to, it's meant to dispel the common notion that no progress is being made in this area of research.

And the total power output doesn't need to remain exponential for fusion to be viable, we just need a way to sustain fusion reactions for a long enough period of time (china recently set a record with 101 seconds).

Seriously look into all the work being done on this currently by Government projects and private companies. I'm not saying it'll happen soon but significant progress has indeed been happening for a long time, and is only picking up pace as time goes on. As I said, this is likely the most difficult thing humans have ever attempted.

https://www.iter.org/sci/BeyondITER

offbytwoon New tungsten alloy has potential for nuclear fusion – The Engineer The Engineer

Unfortunately people are actively trying to ban nuclear, the safest and cleanest form of energy[1] ever devised.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/what-is-the-safest-form-of-energy

offbytwoon New tungsten alloy has potential for nuclear fusion – The Engineer The Engineer

Before anyone comments "fusion is always 10 years away" I'll just say that we've made significant progress in the last 40 years (energy generated by fusion is on par with moore's law) and it is simultaneously the single hardest and the most rewarding engineering problem ever attempted by humans. Any news on this front is good news.

offbytwoon 26/43 freelancers chose “plaintext” to store passwords

What's the industry 'standard' nowadays? I assume SHA-256 would be decent but I don't really keep up with that stuff.

offbytwoon The Plot Against George Soros

buzzfeed lol

offbytwoon Teenager builds his own Lego prosthetic arms

Forgot no humor allowed here

offbytwoon Wyden Introduces S. 420 to Legalize Cannabis

Marijuana taxes are obscene and immoral. I pay 30-40% on a plant that has medicinal properties in Colorado. The whole "sin" tax on marijuana makes no sense. God forbid this gets set at a Federal level.

offbytwoon Teenager builds his own Lego prosthetic arms

how does one build arms without arms?

offbytwoon Comparing Rust and JavaScript Ergonomics with a Simple Linked List

>Rust is pretty

>Of course, you might feel differently, but one of my biggest takeaways from all of this side-by-side code is that Rust is clear, expressive

As someone who doesn't use either of these languages, I couldn't disagree more. The Javascript was intuitive and immediately made sense, while the Rust code gave me a headache.

offbytwoon Tails – simplified installation method

> My only hope is that this isn't so successful that they neglect the installer because nobody is using it anymore :-)

Wouldn't that be a good thing? I mean, you'd have a tough time finding a computer for sale in 2019 that even has a CD drive, why care about it so much?

offbytwoon GNU Wallpapers

Gonna start using this one (https://www.gnu.org/graphics/I_run_GNU_by_GNUlancer.png) on my Windows PC at work

offbytwoon Australians who won't unlock their phones could face ten years in jail

>I disagree that voting has become meaningless

You literally have better odds of winning the powerball than your vote having any effect on the outcome of a general election. Even if it did, the people put in office are worried about themselves and the people they owe money to -- not your opinions.

offbytwoon A Mathematical Theory for Why People Hallucinate

> Is this 'hallucination' though? Or just some weird stuff happening in visual processing?

Is there a meaningful difference?

offbytwoon Conversations with a six-year-old on functional programming

Thanks for this!

offbytwoon Unroll.me to close to EU users saying it can’t comply with GDPR

> If I want to use Facebook to some extent but stop them from selling all my data to everyone

This is an unrealistic expectation. You signed a legal contract when you signed up for an account stating that you're a-okay with them using your data.

offbytwoon Facebook harvested 3.5B Instagram images without warning their owners

How can you harvest data from your own datacenter?

offbytwoon Unroll.me to close to EU users saying it can’t comply with GDPR

If you care about your privacy you shouldn't be using facebook. Kind of insane that people need the government to make these decisions for them.

offbytwoon Incredible Portrait Made Entirely with HTML and CSS

Try this out on the portrait page:

r = {}; za = {}; fda = {}; intv = {}; function setH(div){za[div]=Math.floor(Math.random()100);fda[div]=((za[div]>50)?-1:1);i = setInterval(function(){ za[div] += fda[div]; div.style.height = za[div]+"%" ; if(za[div]==100||za[div]==0){fda[div]=-fda[div];}},Math.floor(Math.random() 540) + 60); intv[div] = i; return i}; function setR(div){r[div]=Math.floor(Math.random()100);i = setInterval(function(e){ ++r[div]; div.style.transform = "rotate("+r[div]+"deg)"; if(r[div]==360){r[div]=0;}},Math.floor(Math.random() 540) + 60); intv[div] = i; return i}; function killall(){for (k in intv){clearInterval(intv[k]);}}; setTimeout(function f(){setR(document.querySelector(".eye"));},100); setTimeout(function f(){setH(document.querySelector(".mouth"));},200); setTimeout(function f(){setR(document.querySelector(".rightarm"));},300); setTimeout(function f(){setR(document.querySelector(".face"));},400); setTimeout(function f(){setH(document.querySelector(".body"));},100);

offbytwoon A Lengthy, Pedantic Review of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver)

> It's still hands-down the best OS out there if you just want a stable, usable computer that respects you, and I still feel really grateful for it every time I boot up my computer to get actual work done.

Anecdotal, but I just recently installed Ubuntu 17.10 on one of my drives because I got tired of windows' shenanigans (was in a forced-update, boot-failure, version-reset loop) and wanted to get work done. I'm no noob to linux (have used it on and off as my main OS for the last 6 years), so I definitely didn't expect it to be a cakewalk, but after installing and 5 minutes of installing software all user input just stopped working completely. It happens about 10 minutes in every boot now. I'm sure there's a fix, but God damn it that's not something I should have to fix (or even think about). Linux on the desktop (much less laptop) has a very, very long way to go. Complexity and options are not always virtuous.

offbytwoon The Ocean Cleanup's Machine Is About to Set Sail

If your taking the 'protect wildlife' route, then it doesn't make sense to argue against taking trash out of the ocean which directly kills a god-awful lot of animals as it stands.

offbytwoon The Ocean Cleanup's Machine Is About to Set Sail

I would say a serious attempt at cleaning any amount of the ocean is better than no attempt.

offbytwoon The Ocean Cleanup's Machine Is About to Set Sail

The device is made from recyclable plastic.

offbytwoon The Ocean Cleanup's Machine Is About to Set Sail

So your argument is essentially: "cleaning the ocean is hard, so we shouldn't attempt it"

offbytwoon I was Zuckerberg’s speechwriter

Facebook does not force you to use their service.

offbytwoon Brutalist Design Is the Bad Influence We All Need

> https://danielegrattarola.github.io/metaverse/

These are really cool, did you come up with that function for the mandelbrot set? Do you have an explaination of how it works??

offbytwoon Fuchsia Web Demo