eck

12 ms·

61.
by eck 13y ago
If someone is willing to divulge inside knowledge of his last employer you have to assume that in the future he will be willing to divulge your inside knowledge.
62.
by eck 13y ago
Question for someone who understands BTC better than I: This seems to be the first case where a massive number of BTC were seized by police. Since BTC is a consensus algorithm, what would happen if 51% of BTC users wanted to take those BTC
63.
by eck 13y ago
Not much. A fraction of Americans have negative net worths. If you have no debts and a nickel in your pocket, you're worth more than all of them put together. It's an oft-used misleading statistic.
64.
by eck 13y ago
You pair them randomly so as two co-conspirators can't arrange to work together. You make sure the ones who are paired don't trust each other. You tell them that they are expected to report any suspicious behavior -- like some
65.
by eck 13y ago
I know the author is a long-hellbanned hn user, possibly with some kind of mental illness. But just out of curiosity, I downloaded the 24MB ISO from the website and loaded it up in a VMWare instance. It does boot... It's an odd curs
66.
by eck 13y ago
Another interesting story about precious metals in bank vaults: During the Manhattan project they needed to build something with a ridiculous amount of copper coils, and copper was scarce due to the war. So they used silver instead. Who
67.
by eck 13y ago
What I would vastly prefer over this is if laptop manufacturers would just make it so the power input could be switched into max-power-point-tracker mode. Almost all the electronics necessary to plug a solar panel into a laptop are already
68.
by eck 13y ago
> How long before some unstable government seeking to wreck havoc on its world’s communications infrastructure starts shooting down Loon balloons overhead? I suspect that the surface-to-air missiles capable of striking targets at that al
69.
by eck 14y ago
If a cell phone company really had balls, they'd make a website where you can see realtime and historical location data for every cellphone owned by every elected official and federal judge. They have "no privacy interest", after all, so I
70.
by eck 14y ago
Let's be clear. This guy operates at 52Hz, but he probably has more spatial resolution than cobra dane.
71.
by eck 14y ago
obligatory xkcd link: http://xkcd.com/482/
72.
by eck 14y ago
The title (and the first comment on the link) makes it sound like it's a perpetual motion machine, but as far as I can tell it's more like a tiny heat-pump: energy is conserved, entropy increases. Still kind of neat though.
73.
by eck 14y ago
Uh, super. Are you missing the fact that if these are flying over your city they are paid for by your taxes and the police will just buy another one, probably a bigger and more expensive one, justifying it by saying that "criminals are s
74.
by eck 14y ago
I'm reminded of Henry Kissinger's quip on the Iran-Iraq war: "It's too bad they both can't lose."
75.
by eck 14y ago
Old trick. Go search for [postscript snowflake] sometime. Great fun for drawing psychedelic images and/or crashing network printers. (It turns out that .ps is actually an archaic programming language and not just a page description langu
76.
by eck 14y ago
SparkFun is lucky that the subpoena was for one of their products being used in a credit card skimmer and not an improvised cruise missile. Also, protip for criminals: make your own circuit boards without identifying marks.
77.
by eck 14y ago
Thanks, codeflo. I calculated similar numbers and only gave a very crude approximation but I will take your word for it. Obviously, with the thermal distribution according to altitude it's a poorly defined problem. Most intuitively, this
78.
by eck 14y ago
Another interesting perspective: Earth's atmosphere is about five miles thick. Yes, it trails off exponentially and airplanes can fly and people can breathe (sort of) at 30,000 feet. However, were it uniformly as dense as it is at sea lev
79.
by eck 14y ago
That's not how the math works. It's 2/3 * 435 = 290, so they're still 42 votes short.
80.
by eck 14y ago
That is because yahoo has its own servers and yahoo.com is the only website at that IP. For mere mortals like me with a dreamhost account or something, there's probably dozens of sites on the same IP, so your computer has to first connec
81.
by eck 15y ago
Victims of piracy have better lobbyists than the victims of identity theft.
82.
by eck 15y ago
Fishy but not unexpected. Online publications always switch off comments when they see a huge traffic bump and realize they have made fools of themselves and are being told as much in the comments. For example, a few weeks ago the NYTimes
83.
by eck 15y ago
Isn't this one of the things TPMs are designed to defend you against? The TPM only releases the encryption key after the right password is entered, some number of wrong passwords cause a reset, and perhaps a single duress code instantly ca
84.
by eck 15y ago
I am sort of surprised that pg chose movies rather than music. Movies are hard . You need a lot of things to make a movie. I liked Avatar. You can't do that kind of thing on the cheap. Actors, sites, makeup, lighting, special effects,
85.
by eck 15y ago
The webmaster wanted you to see it. If browsers didn't show the content of a 404, webmasters would just send you the same "not found" page but with a 200 code, which would be even worse.
86.
by eck 15y ago
Suppose you are injured or are having chest pains and need medical attention urgently. Then what is the link between having a cell phone and surviving? I would wager that effect is several orders of magnitude greater than any cancer effec
87.
by eck 15y ago
TLDR: Netflix raises subscription cost 60%. The comments on the post are vicious. They are duplicitous. DVD by mail is not a separate product. It is a workaround for the fact that they have failed to license their entire library for stre
88.
by eck 15y ago
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway." http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Andrew_S._Tanenbaum
89.
by eck 15y ago
I can't wait until Anonymous starts sending infringement notices in bulk. Cutting off people's Internet access based on a few random threats is a pretty obvious denial of service vulnerability.
90.
by eck 15y ago
It always annoys me when people throw around numbers like 14g and start comparing themselves to fighter jets. If you jump a few inches into the air and land on a hard surface with your knees locked, the momentary acceleration would be pret

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