Hacker News Reader

picklefishon Once a somebody, now a nobody: Starcraft 2 has destroyed my life

This sounds so fake :/ There are certainly video game addicts out there, it's a serious problem in korea and china, but I think this is a troll and/or pathological liar.

picklefishon How an app with 200,000 downloads led to developer homelessness

Not only that, but I thought this was a crappy no-name blogpost until I took a second look. I thought the Penny Arcade column was supposed to be some a well-researched column, with a higher standard than most game journalism out there. This is not that.

picklefishon Sexual Harassment at DefCon (and Other Hacker Cons)

Does red get you kicked out of the con or something? If not, this would turn into a game of who can collect the most harassment cards. If so, then people could simple kick out people they don't like.

picklefishon Uber Boston Has Been Served

For anyone wondering what uber is: https://www.uber.com/cities#

picklefishon Kaspersky Lab Discovers 'Gauss'

This was a better read for me: https://www.securelist.com/en/blog?weblogid=208193767 saw it on slashdot

picklefishon Gmail in personal search results

Or anyone shoulder surfing (family, co-worker, etc) while you work on something together or look up movie times or anything will see contents of your gmail.

picklefishon Craigslist Suing Padmapper

Why is craigslist going after people who bring them traffic? Is it because they don't bring in much money themselves so they have to sell licenses? I've never really thought about craigslists business model. I assume it's almost entirely ad based / premium placement of your ad on their site based.

picklefishon Portal 2 LEGO set enters final review stage

If this goes through I await the inevitable set of blue/red TF2 class minifigs!

picklefishon At 36.7M Frames Per Second, STEAM Camera Is A Powerful Cancer-Detecting Machine

“The biggest problem in detection of such cells is that these cells are extremely rare- one in a billion blood cells,” says Goda.

According to Goda, the cutting edge device now harbors an unprecedented false-positive rate of one cell in a million.

For anyone who has forgotten statistics like me and was thrown off by this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_I_and_type_II_errors#Fals...

The false positive rate is the proportion of absent events that yield positive test outcomes, i.e., the conditional probability of a positive test result given an absent event.

picklefishon Kim Dotcom Will Go to the US in Exchange for Legal Funds

When I saw that the extradition was postponed to March 2013 I figured it was another move by the US to draw this saga out as long as possible.

It makes sense for Kim and his team to respond "screw that we're coming over now and you hurry this shit up so we can win our case and start our business back up." His lawyers must believe without a doubt that they have this case in the bag.

It seems fairly obvious that from the beginning this case was designed to take a long time in court, in order to keep megaupload down as long as possible. By keeping their assets frozen and postponing court dates the US is continuing to "win" this battle.

picklefishon SecondLife Didn't Fail

"$700 million transacted" double(triple, etc) counts most of the money. I trade you $1 you trade someone else that $1, that's $2 transacted.

picklefishon Android 4.1 Jelly Bean is now available

For anyone wondering when it's coming to ICS phones.

"Google: Android 4.1 Jelly Bean coming to Samsung Galaxy Nexus, Nexus S and Motorola Xoom mid-July"

from: http://www.engadget.com/2012/06/27/google-android-4-1-jelly-...

picklefishon Facebook Changed Everyone's Email to Facebook.com; Here's How to Fix It

I believe this is the non-dramatized version of events.

picklefishon Dropbox' Public/ folders will be phased out soon

My Honor's thesis has been in my Public folder for several years now and is even referenced in a paper. While I realize this probably isn't the most ideal location, it's served me well. If I understand this correctly I'm grandfathered in and won't lose this functionality, correct?

I also use the public folder daily for sharing screenshots and other files. It really has solved the filesharing problem for me and I'm disappointed they are adding to the complexity to such an easy and great filesharing method.

EDIT: Also the only reason I'm still with dropbox is the public folder, I moved all my other data to Google Drive when it was released...

picklefishon Reddit bans The Atlantic, Businessweek, others in major anti-spam move

It's temporary.

picklefishon The new way to land a job at Facebook

"The challenge is to recommend missing links in a social network. Participants will be presented with an anonymized, directed social graph from which some edges have been deleted, and asked to make ranked predictions for each user in the test set of which other users they would want to follow."

When has this kind of data ever been successfully anonymized?

From Netflix's attempt: http://www.securityfocus.com/news/11497 (First link I googled, but has the gist)

picklefishon A VC-funded startup called WhosHere is trying to steal my social network

This is what bothered me about the whole post. He never once said how old the other company is. A critical (purposeful?) omission.

picklefishon SpaceX/ISS fly-under, coverage starts at 11:30 pm PDT

Exactly what I wanted to know. Much appreciated.

picklefishon SpaceX/ISS fly-under, coverage starts at 11:30 pm PDT

Could someone explain the steps until docking? What exactly is the fly under / first burn / second burn?

picklefishon A Tale of Two Pwnies (Part 1)

I'd love to see a writeup from Pinkie Pie on the steps and tools he used to find these bugs. Reversing write-ups are always entertaining to read.

picklefishon Please don't let gaming consume your life

It's silly to associate this with gaming only. You can say the same thing about getting sucked into anything. I'm sure quite a few people here have coded non-stop for a few days, or pulled some all nighters to meet a deadline. Everything should be done in moderation, not just video games.

picklefishon Coursera/Stanford online algorithms I course – a retrospective

Great point. The quizzes and exams should not be hard, they should re-affirm your knowledge and let you move on. Making at test difficult for the sake of being difficult is not productive. People are learning this material to better themselves. If one wants difficulty one should dive deeper into the material elsewhere. Maybe Algorithms 2, or maybe a more advanced book altogether.

picklefishon Obama Administration Threatens To Veto CISPA

If CISPA were to pass, what would stop someone from hacking into your local ISP and dumping a database on the web so all your friends can check out your surfing habits? If ISPs are required to start logging data like that there is no way it's going to be safe.

Granted I'm sure a lot of them already log data like that already.

picklefishon How to build fast HTML5 mobile apps using backbone.js, zepto.js and trigger.io

Does anyone know what the Trigger.io logo looks like on the splashscreen?

picklefishon Use Facebook and LinkedIn to find an airline seatmate goes live: KLM Meet & Seat

I bet people could use this to break into houses. Given the right person with lax privacy settings. One public facebook event with your address or something and someone who knows you'll be flying.