Hacker News Reader

BearOfNHon A Decade Later, Intel’s Itanium Chip Makes a Profit

I agree opportunity cost is a better metric, but there's yet more to it. In another 10 years, Itanium might surpass x86 as the old architecture hits the wall and the new continues to speed up (if in fact it does).

It's almost a matter of insurance -- Intel can't afford to be stuck at ~3.1416 GHz :-) while competing architectures continue to improve. If in fact they can.

BearOfNHon [dead]

I applaud the $12M effort -- we need more transparency. "Sunlight is the best disinfectant", and apparently the most expensive, too.

Does anybody else think this is an isolated example? I kind of think most US government projects are awash with similar odd expenditures. Well, ad hoc operations anyway.

BearOfNHon Tk ugly? It looks fine to me

Does anybody know how to change that "Tk" in the upper left corner? I find it garish, and a distraction from the content.

Using matplotlib for Python 2.5 on XP. I don't think there's any way to get the window handle to send it a WM_SETICON and besides, it would be best to use a native Tk call.

BearOfNHon The Next Engine Yard Programming Contest is Live

Pass.

Sounds like they've been reading too many Google interview questions.

BearOfNHon What My Five-Year-Old Son Taught Me About Marketing

I know several parents of small children, and all of them have trouble getting their kids to eat.

Likewise. My hypothesis is that the kids didn't like to eat food that was hard to chew. Hot dogs: yes, steak: no. Beets: yes, carrot sticks: no.

The standard joke was that children would eat any food that had been "nuggetized". All we need now is a home nuggetizer to test that hypothesis.

BearOfNHon Refusing Flu Shots? Maybe You're A 'Denialist'

The article is about more than just a bunch of vaccine-phobes. It's about many different superstitions people embrace irrationally.

E.g., FTA: Famine remains a serious blight on humanity, yet the leaders of more than one African nation, urged on by rich Europeans who have never missed a meal, have decided it would be better to let their citizens starve than to import genetically modified grains that could feed them.

BearOfNHon Tell HN: PG's Trends List from BOS 2009

Does the term Government encompass the U.S. "Defense" industry? How about "Health Care"? Ignore the current health care bill(s) debate -- there's plenty of opportunity just getting medical records online securely.

Whether there are startup opportunities therein is another question.

Not being there, I couldn't tell if pg was addressing startup opportunities, or general business opportunities. Or if there's any difference between the two.

BearOfNHon Damn Cool Algorithms: Spatial indexing with Quadtrees and Hilbert Curves

FTA: the next part of our position is 1, and the square we should consult next is the third one.

Doesn't he mean the second one (again)?

This is a good article, but he really should have added an 8x8 illustration and/or mentioned his coordinates start at (0,0) in the upper left. And maybe picked a different point so the example doesn't end up going from the first square to the second to (I believe incorrectly) the third.

BearOfNHon Ask HN: Worlds Best Checkout experiences / pages?

One principle to bear in mind: give customers multiple payment opportunities, even if it's just a money-order alternative.

Sometimes for PayPal-based payment there seems to be no way to pay without first signing up for PayPal. Not always -- many times I can give PayPal a credit card and say "No thanks" to a sign-up invitation. But sometimes that option just isn't there.

There's nothing for sale that's so valuable as to make me join PayPal. Lacking alternatives (i.e., not even a damn money order), I just won't buy.

(We can discuss PayPal in some other thread, not here).

BearOfNHon MacHeist is giving away my Mac app ShoveBox and $154 of other apps

Just reading the headline I couldn't tell if the poster was proud of having been included, or annoyed at piracy of his app. The name MacHeist actually suggests the latter, and their website only says they supply licenses -- not saying what they are doing is legal.

Now that the comments indicate everything is above board, I wonder if MacHeist plans on having an "Android Annex", or will leave that to another company...

BearOfNHon Credit Karma Raises $2.5 Million To Take The Mystery Out Of Credit Scores

FTA: CEO Kenneth Lin says that the site doesn’t ever sell user information, but instead shows users offers ...

I'm sure Mr. Lin is sincere about this but I don't see how anyone can trust him. If the site is a success, who knows but that (e.g.) Equifax might buy the site and implement a new, scummier policy?

Not to mention loss of privacy due to poor site data security (MySpace/Facebook, anyone?) or simple employee theft...

BearOfNHon Comcast Internet throttling is up and running

Maybe I missed it, but how does somebody know how much data they've pulled/pushed in a month? And is CC counting just payload bytes, or do they include packet overhead? What about retransmissions?

BearOfNHon Ask HN: Why not make people pay using karma points for each submission to HN?

This would certainly cut down on the number of poll responses, and those pesky "Vote up if you like chocolate" comments.

BearOfNHon Ask HN : Do you use a timesheet app?

I use OpenAir because my employer requires it. Not for billing or salary but rather to see how much time is spent on each project. Most importantly to distinguish development time from maintenance time.

BearOfNHon Second chance for Large Hadron Collider to deliver universe's secrets

there's a 9/10 chance they'll find the Higgs

Are there any such wagers available in London? If so, what odds do they quote?

Does Lloyd's of London sell insurance against a black hole event? :-)

BearOfNHon [dead]

FTA: "...All you need is the determination and the rest will work itself out."

Hmmm...he left out the "and funding", which is often helpful in getting through the tough times.

BearOfNHon The Valley of My Dreams: Why Silicon Valley Left Boston’s Route 128 In The Dust

128 benefited mightily from Tip O'Neill when he was speaker of the house. Much of this coincided with the Reagan defense build-up. O'Neill made sure his state got more than its share of those dollars.

This also held true, to a lesser extent, for the late Ted Kennedy. But now that Tip and Ted are both gone the 128 area has had to compete on its own. Hence Si valley's growing lead.

To some extent it's a matter of following the money.

BearOfNHon The Hallmarks of Crackpottery, Part 1: Two Comments

When I first saw the rationals placed in 1-1 correspondence with the integers I pointed out there were lots of mappings that don't work, e.g., mapping every integer to itself, thereby not having any integers left over for nontrivial fractions. The instructor didn't have the right answer handy, and many of us were confused. Sometimes Z and Q had the same cardinality, sometimes they didn't?

Here's one answer: it's like saying you can get from New York to Boston, then producing a map that demonstrates the route. There are many other routes that don't take you to Boston, but so what? All you need do is demonstrate A map that gets you there -- you don't care about all the wrong ways to do something.

I wish the instructor had hit me over the head with that at the time. Perhaps we were too busy dodging Velociraptors and chasing those cute Neanderthal girls...

BearOfNHon Verizon Droid vs. iPhone 3GS: in-depth feature comparison

Is that $150/month the only plan available for Droid? Verizon has a number of (pay less/get less) plans for their more vanilla phones.

Maybe it's a matter of waiting until next year. Been doing a lot of that lately...

BearOfNHon 1 - 2 + 3 - 4 + 5 - 6 + ... made easy

It's a neat example, but surely you know you can't rearrange terms of an infinite sum unless it is absolutely convergent. That's not the case here.

BearOfNHon Ask HN: do you feel Google search result quality has gone down?

I've been using duckduckgo; very nice. One UI comment: when I click on "More Links" I'd like some kind of cue -- say, a horizontal line -- so I know where to start looking when the results come back. I frequently click for "More" then while that's loading I go look at another tab. When I return to Ducky it's sometimes difficult to separate the new results from ones I've looked at (but not clicked on) before.

You might try to track page age; some of the results I get are from 5 years ago and as noted by others, aren't always useful today. But that's a harder problem for another time.

BearOfNHon High Anxiety (raganwald on Go and learning new things)

When I was an undergraduate living in a dorm, I and several friends all learned Go together. Nobody knew what they were doing, and so no one was particularly nervous. Even keeping score was an exercise in passing around examples from the instruction book.

Not the most efficient way to learn, but among the least stressful -- if you're patient enough with one another.

BearOfNHon Iceland looks to serve the world.

Not to mention sabotage and blackmail. "Pay me millions or I'll chop your cables". Hmmm, new meaning for the term "Hacker"...

BearOfNHon What is the gambler’s equivalent of Amdahl’s Law?

For financial markets, Portfolio Management Formulas by Ralph Vince develops a similar strategy. It too is based on the Kelly Criterion. But it assumes you already have a profitable strategy as opposed to saying "do this system".

I'm not in any way related to the above authors, nor their books.

BearOfNHon MBA vs Startup: Which should I choose?

I think it's a mistake to go for the startup with the idea that the MBA is some sort of "backup plan". When the going gets rough -- and PG assures us it will -- that "backup plan" suddenly starts to look attractive and you end up in the worst possible situation, torn between two paths.

BearOfNHon This Is a Photoshop and It Blew My Mind - Photosketch

The one that isn't a PDF.

BearOfNHon Is the express line really faster?

In response to In response to cash is faster than debit, it never happens that way here in New England. I watch as the register total increments. Every $20 I pull another $20 out of my wallet so when I'm done I just hand the wad of cash to the cashier.

Compare that to someone with a debit card who always has to wait for the cashier to do something (I dunno what it is) then tell the customer to swipe their card and enter their PIN, except the swipe often needs to be repeated, and then there's the wait for approval.

Not only is the cash-pay mean time lower than the debit-pay method, by my observation, the debit-pay time has a huge variance depending on equipment reliability, account status, the occasional desire for extra cash and other technical issues I've encountered only once:

Many years ago I tried a debit transaction but was denied, so I paid cash with my "emergency" $100 bill. Later that month the store charge showed up on my statement, but of course by then I had no evidence I had already paid the bill in cash. Of course this would never happen to anybody else, and it sure as hell isn't happening to me again.

BearOfNHon Is there such a thing as too much freedom?

Read The Sovereign Individual published 1997. Don't like your current location? Pick up your capital and move. (In the book, ultimately big government loses as the rich people move away and there's nobody left to rob.)

A dozen years later we've got a prime example. Yep, being rich is definitely better than not being rich.

BearOfNHon U.S. Proposes Ban on ‘Flash’ Trading on Wall Street

Finally, why shouldn't the stock market be glacially slow?

If Alice wants to buy and Bob wants to sell, and they've agreed on a price, what right do you have to demand they wait?

If I want to buy GOOG with a stop-loss under last week's low, you have no right (legal OR moral) to prevent me from doing that. You may call that an "undesirable short-term trade", but I'm not gaming the system, I'm limiting my losses.

If you get your way and trading becomes severely restricted, just watch how fast capital moves offshore to more user-friendly exchanges. That would not be good for the USA.

BearOfNHon China alarmed by US money printing

no one knows how to fight [deflation] once it's become entrenched.

Personally I agree with this, but remember FED Chairman "Helicopter Ben" Bernanke's oft-repeated quip that the FED has (metaphorically) a printing press and can whip up however many dollars are needed to prevent deflation. So in theory, the US has the right man in the right place for this very problem.

I don't see a whole lot of success yet. With all the layoffs and offshoring it's not clear additional dollars are the right approach -- wait, I take that back. It would be a great help if there were more early-stage Googles to employ people to make others more productive. If only there were some way to encourage talented people to start new companies...the US needs a Startup Czar!