News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

gigq

Re:The limited value of a computer science education on Monday June 20, 2016 @11:21PM (#11943256)
I also agree with the article author to give them a take home project to work on. Just saying that a computer science degree and a 10 min chalk board test are a pretty terrible way to make new hires.
Re:The limited value of a computer science education on Monday June 20, 2016 @11:07PM (#11943210)
As someone with a computer science degree I can say I've never questioned it being on my companies job postings. But when I think about it I'd rather see a candidate with an excellent github account than a degree.
Re:The limited value of a computer science education on Monday June 20, 2016 @11:00PM (#11943186)
"I hope to see the industry improve in this respect, but in the meantime I'm happy to exploit this imbalance as a competitive advantage."

I wonder how much of requiring a computer science degree is simply because the people hiring have computer science degrees. Seems like a self perpetuating insiders club.

Re:Your iPhone just got less secure. Blame the FBI on Wednesday March 30, 2016 @10:39AM (#11389571)
This is the company the FBI supposedly contracted (http://www.cellebrite.com/Pages/cellebrite-solution-for-lock...), if that's the case it's just older devices that don't have the secure enclave which is not surprising.
Re:iPhone SE on Wednesday March 23, 2016 @11:34AM (#11345373)
This bummed me out as well, but it's worth noting if you have an Apple Watch that has a barometer in it.
Most retail accept them through companies like coinbase or bitpay but they immediately convert them to USD so their exposure to a bitcoin hack is minimal.

The reason they do this has more to do with the fluctuating price though as they can't risk the value dropping after they sell something.

SHA256 is used for mining but that would only expose new coins that are being generated. If there was a vulnerability there the community would switch to a new mining algorithm to secure new blocks.

Addresses are protected by hashing a public key to the bitcoin address (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Technical_background_of_version_1...). If you've always sent coins to new addresses like the hierarchical deterministic wallets do then your public key is only exposed after you spend the coins, so you are not susceptible to a cracking attempt on the public key.

Re:A woman getting murdered as a project image? on Tuesday February 23, 2016 @12:08AM (#11156717)
Yeah, I just pulled the title from the github issue.

I got it and liked the image for the project, I just think it's a little crazy this is a controversial issue and wanted to see what hacker news thought.

Re:Headphone and Amp Impedance (2011) on Sunday January 24, 2016 @02:15AM (#10961800)
That's a pretty good comparison. In both cases you are adding warmth to a source one via software and the other via an amp.
Re:Headphone and Amp Impedance (2011) on Saturday January 23, 2016 @09:05PM (#10961132)
A counter argument I'd give is has anyone ever described a TV as being too harsh, as in they can't watch it for an hour without experiencing "fatigue" that causes them to need to stop. Of course with a TV this sounds ridiculous we just want the most life like picture possible so these measurements are a great way to accomplish that.

With headphones though while something may sound more accurate it might not be enjoyable to listen to. It can be too harsh to our ears and cause listening fatigue. While the Sennheiser HD800 are a great pair of headphones I find them very difficult to listen to on a neutral amp for long periods of time. The only way I could really enjoy them was to get a warmer tube amp. In the end I replaced them with the Audeze LCD-3 which I would argue are less accurate headphones but are far more enjoyable.

Re:How the Pomodoro Technique changed my workday on Tuesday November 17, 2015 @06:01PM (#10584650)
In pomodoro if you get interrupted to the point where you need to stop what you are working on you are supposed to stop the timer and start over when you can.

It forces you to make sure interruptions are actually worth dealing with vs putting them off till after the timer is up.

Re:Plex on the New Apple TV on Monday November 02, 2015 @07:52PM (#10496600)
Plex has a feature called Direct Stream that supports this use case:

https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/200250387-Streamin...

Re:Amazon Aurora on Thursday July 30, 2015 @02:29PM (#9976974)
I haven't used it but I did attend the talk on it at the AWS conference when it was announced.

It is not using DynamoDB under the covers. It basically uses a fork of MySQL for the front end and their own storage layer built from scratch on the backend. It does use concepts from the Dynamo white paper for redundantly storing the data to disk which removes the need for MySQL style replication. But it's not using the DynamoDB service currently offered from Amazon.

This would only make sense if when you moved bitcoins into coinbase they immediately converted them to USD. In that case, sure they would need to have USD on hand to cover your funds.

In the case where you are storing the bitcoins with coinbase and not converting it they just need to make sure they have the bitcoins on hand. Forcing coinbase to both hold bitcoin and USD to cover the value of those bitcoins makes no sense.

Re:Inconvenient Truths About the Apple Watch on Monday April 13, 2015 @02:02PM (#9369246)
I'm sure he took it with an iPhone 6 cause that's the phone he has but it also looks like higher than usual ISO probably due to bad lighting.

The bigger issue is think about how close you would have to hold the watch up to your face to make it that big in real life. If you did that you'd be able to see the pixels but you wouldn't hold it that close.

http://www.hodinkee.com/blog/hodinkee-apple-watch-review has much better real life shots that mirror what I saw at the Apple store.

Re:First impressions of the Apple Watch on Friday April 10, 2015 @02:27PM (#9356181)
Now that it's in stores to try out (they have units on the table you can use the UI on in addition to the try on appointments) people should just go check it out for themselves.

I got the same sense from reading reviews, most seemed negative on it, like it was unfinished and not ready for primetime (wait till version 2 or 3 most would say).

I can tell you after going into the store and trying it out I left thinking it was a great product. The fit and finish is top notch and the UI is smooth and responsive. I couldn't test watch kit apps out so that might be an issue, but that'll be resolved once Apple releases a separate SDK for running on the watch which they said they would do later this year.

I'd say if you were previously worried by the reviews go check it out in person and you might be surprised.

It's kinda buried in all the announcements today but before this AWS Lambda could only be used for asynchronous calls. So if you were developing a mobile backend you could only process events asynchronously and had no way other than out of band push notifications to send data back to the client.

Now with Synchronous Invoke you can have a backend for a mobile app live fully on AWS Lambda. The benefit being you pay by the millisecond for compute time used vs having to keep EC2 nodes up and paying for underutilized instances.

Re:Stripe: Bitcoin on Thursday February 19, 2015 @03:40PM (#9076863)
I don't know the answer to this but given the user is the one who didn't complete the transaction in 10 minutes they are probably held responsible. I would guess if it was underpaid they would have to send more to the address (the same as if they only paid half the bill). If it's overpaid they probably send the overpaid amount back as a refund to the address it was sent from (or keep it).
Re:Doge 4 Water on Sunday March 16, 2014 @12:12PM (#7409946)
To put this in perspective here is some napkin calculations on how much power dogecoin currently uses:

Assuming an average kh/watt of 2.333 [1] and the total network hashrate of 68 GH/s [2] we can see the network uses about 30 Megawatts of electricity. As a comparison Microsoft uses 250 Megawatts to power for their datacenters [3]. So it is wasteful, yes, but who's to say it's any worse than running datacenters so I can play battlefield 4 with my friends on xbox live which also provides no benefit for charity.

[1]: most ATI cards use this much per kh (https://litecoin.info/Mining_hardware_comparison), this ignores the newer ASIC hardware that is orders of magnitude more efficient

[2]: http://bitinfocharts.com/dogecoin/

[3]: http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/161772-microsoft-now-has-...

Re:Gox.com Domain Name Acquired by Mt. Gox Parent Company on Monday February 24, 2014 @11:28PM (#7295568)
Considering the term goxxed is a staple of bitcoin vernacular I wonder why they decided to use it as their rebranding.
Re:Dogecoin market manipulation? on Sunday January 26, 2014 @03:57PM (#7126867)
I'm not sure if people think crypto currency market manipulation is new but this was going on far before Dogecoin came out.

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/12/05/in-the-murky-world-of...

https://twitter.com/Fontase

Re:TigerDirect.com Now Accepts Bitcoin Payments on Thursday January 23, 2014 @08:04PM (#7112721)
Lost in the news that they accept bitcoin is the "Coming Soon" under Butterfly Labs hardware mentioned on that landing page. First I've heard of a mainstream electronics store selling ASIC mining hardware.
Re:TigerDirect.com Now Accepts Bitcoin Payments on Thursday January 23, 2014 @07:59PM (#7112700)
Nobody GPU mines for bitcoin anymore (ASICs killed that long ago). My 2 year old ATI card makes $4/day mining litecoin or even $8/day mining dogecoin. If you want bitcoin you simply send the alt currency to an exchange and trade for bitcoin.
Re:Overstock.com Is Now Accepting Bitcoins on Thursday January 09, 2014 @07:09PM (#7034159)
Re:Overstock.com Is Now Accepting Bitcoins on Thursday January 09, 2014 @07:03PM (#7034136)
I wonder why this is. One of the benefits of bitcoin is that once you send it it's gone so there if you wait for enough confirmations there is no chance of charge back fraud. I'm not sure what they are worried about happening with international orders. Stolen bitcoin?
Re:Overstock.com Is Now Accepting Bitcoins on Thursday January 09, 2014 @06:57PM (#7034110)
Except you can use any bitcoin wallet so they accept bitcoin not coinbase. As absurd as it sounds when snapCard (a site that orders from other sites for you) first started they would only work with Coinbase. Enough customers complained that they had to offer a second option to accept bitcoin payments from anywhere.
Re:Bit gold (2005) on Thursday December 26, 2013 @02:51AM (#6965575)
"If you believe the deflationary attribute of bitcoin will cause it to be hoarded instead of used as a tool of commerce"

I don't believe that, I think we can see that people are willing to sell it when there is something they want.

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