Hacker News Reader

Includes Southwest Airlines flights!

at the top places, two-thirds of the students come from the top quartile and only 5 percent come from the bottom quartile

Whenever I see a statistic like that, the first question I want answered is: what is the trend over time? Maybe this is actually a big change with only 1% coming from the bottom quartile 10 years ago, indicating the future situation, etc.

RKon Going Paper-Free for $220

Has anyone (successfully) attempted a full paperless solution like this with Ubuntu (or other Linux)?

RKon The three-day weekend: a dream deferred

In contrast, the US federal government observes 10 holidays, and most businesses probably only close for 5 - 7 of those.

http://www.opm.gov/operating_status_schedules/fedhol/2011.as...

When you're an American in Europe for an extended period of time, you feel like everything is always closed (short business hours plus so many holidays). I hear that business hours have been expanding, though.

RKon Caring for Pets Left Behind by the Rapture

This is essentially a variation on the "post-rapture post office service", like this one, also run by a non-believer:

http://www.postrapturepost.com/about.html

There are several others.

RKon BitCoin will be made illegal, but cryptocash is here to stay

There is at least one person selling gift cards for bitcoins, including Walmart and Amazon giftcards. Also there is at least one site selling food directly (http://www.bitmunchies.com).

So you wouldn't strictly starve...

RKon Democracy Distribution of the World

Theocracy?

RKon Dropbox Lied to Users about Data Security, Complaint to FTC Alleges

Dropbox should just make a "Lockbox" folder feature that is fully encrypted. Many people happy (nice new feature), maybe fewer complaints.

RKon Interview and Article about NLTK and Text Processing

Direct link: http://szamitogepesnyelveszet.blogspot.com/2011/04/on-nltk-a...

RKon Electron Band Structure In Germanium, My Ass

Which country is this? Surely not the US.

RKon Ruby or Python? Well, it depends...

When languages are as close as Ruby and Python (or C# and Java), frameworks/ecosystem/community matters a ton more.

This is exactly why I use Python over Ruby: scipy, numpy, matplotlib, etc.

The right language + ecosystem will obviously be very domain dependent.

RKon SMS from Chrome, fully sync'd with your Android phone

Does this service still incur normal SMS fees from your carrier?

RKon Computer glitch leads to supermarket free-for-all

I think this shows the promise of fully automated shops (the honor system + technology?).

RKon Information Physics: The New Frontier

I'm surprised that something titled "Information Physics" was not submitted to quant-ph, which is where all of the quantum information papers go.

The arXiv is strongly based on the category a paper is placed in. (Tons of controversy when submissions are recategorized.)

RKon Githits

Seems that the majority of people I follow do not list their location, so view these lists with that in mind.

RKon Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies

My dad had a similar experience. His very obscure, self-published, out-of-print book was showing up for something like $1000, while at the same time he was mailing out free copies to people who emailed (plus shipping), just to make more room in the garage.

RKon Multi-drug resistant staph in 1 of 4 supermarket meat samples

Probably not enough cobalt-60 to do that on the necessary scale and accelerators probably can't give you the dose rates necessary for 10kGy x-ray irradiation.

RKon Dropbox Hits 25 Millions Users, 200 Million Files Per Day

Maybe I should send an unsolicited job application to Dropbox for a (sexy) data scientist position. 25 million users is pretty crazy.

RKon Fukushima: Radiation Detection Using Artifacts in CCCD Image?

I think the problem with trying to determine radiation fluence is that a lot of the dots appearing are likely due to damage to the detector elements, rather than instantaneous detections.

I've seen CCTV used to monitor high radiation areas and the images are always riddled with artifacts from damaged sensor elements, even when no radiation is present. They have to replace the cameras on a regular basis.

RKon Fukushima: Radiation Detection Using Artifacts in CCCD Image?

The (American) meaning I associate with "punting" is to defer the responsibility to someone else.

RKon Cutting that cord

As a Linux user I have to cringe at the thought of Apple buying Dropbox. My favorite candidate for acquiring Dropbox would probably be Amazon, assuming they just let them do their own thing.

RKon Cheating and the Honor System

Wouldn't suspension lead to failing as well? (assuming you're not allowed to withdraw from your courses)

I believe where I did my bachelor's, the standard punishment for willful cheating was failing the course, one semester's suspension, and a permanent note in your academic record.

RKon Show HN: Let's end the Programmer Salary Taboo

or phone.

RKon The Programmer Salary Taboo

I was recently came across a list of the salaries of everyone employed by my university, including students. It was an interesting read. I seems I make just about the average for graduate research assistants in science/engineering, though I'm still trying to extract the data to make nice plots.

More interesting was to see the relative salaries of professors and administrators. Some professors are clearly able to demand much higher than average salaries, but nothing like head sports coaches...

RKon World’s 2nd deadliest poison, in an aquarium store near you

The advice I always see online about handling zoanthids is "always wear gloves". I've always done so, but seen plenty of people who don't.

On the other hand, there are plenty of other (often hidden) things in your average reef aquarium that can potentially injure you and leave your local emergency department at a loss. People don't normally get stung by fireworms (or whatever) 5000 miles away from the tropical ocean.

RKon Angry Nerds

My personal experience is that plants die when I try to keep them. But I can't decide if that's me beating them or them beating me...

RKon AIDS vaccine in final testing

Bone marrow is generally harvested from living people.

Some links here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bone_marrow#Harvesting

RKon 'Cree.py' Social Engineering Tool Pinpoints A Person's Physical Location

Unrelated, but I've been noticing that sites like whitepages.com and LookupAnyone.com seem to be showing up higher in Google and many have people's home addresses displayed for free. I saw one that seemed to list almost all of the 12 or so addresses I've lived at in the last 15 years, plus a map with a pin at my current address, and a list of all of my immediate family members. This is all data (theoretically) gathered from publicly available records.

If anyone wants to stop by, just call first. I'm sure my number is on those sites as well. :) Makes me feel like signing up for Facebook.

RKon Why Engineers Don't Write Recipe Books

This sounds a lot more like a chemist than an engineer. (OK, maybe a chemical engineer.)