Hacker News Reader

aneeshon Apple Now A $50+ Billion Company — Major New Product This Week

Annualizing Q1 revenues is probably a bad idea -- Q1 includes the all-important holiday season

Yeah, this is their version of "get 'em while they're young". There's also http://dreamspark.com which gives out free copies of Microsoft's developer tools (Visual Studio, SQL Server, etc) to students.

aneeshon Australia website black out

It would be cool if their script could blackout the participating sites only for visitors from Australia. I wouldn't do this to all my visitors, but I might do it for the small fraction of Aussie visitors.

aneeshon Ask HN: Idea Management App

If you're co-located, a whiteboard does wonders. I haven't seen a webapp that even comes close.

aneeshon Biggest grossing Bollywood film about engineering geeks

Why is this on Wired? (or HN, for that matter)

It is nothing more than a plot summary, copied word-for-word from Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3_Idiots)

aneeshon The college admissions scam

"But while these are overt ways to provide advantages for the wealthy, there are far more insidious and subtle methods of skewing the admissions process. Take early admissions. Early admissions account for 35 percent of the incoming class at Duke this year, 20 percent at Brown, 50 percent at Yale and 40 percent at Stanford."

While he makes a good point, the author doesn't note that both Harvard and Princeton recently (~2006) ended their early applications programs completely, to much fanfare. We can hope that other schools will follow their lead soon.

aneeshon Ask HN: What are you working on?

I'm working on my cricket blog Against the Spin (http://againstthespin.com), trying to apply sabermetric-style analyses to cricket.

aneeshon The most under-hyped, but most important, technology since seat belts

What worries me about this technology are the corner cases. If it's 99.9% effective, eliminating the need for manual braking, the 0.1% of the time where it doesn't work, the user won't be ready to brake, which is dangerous.

aneeshon Balsamiq Makes 1.6 Million with 70% Profit in 2009

I've found facebook to be better for interaction with users. I have ~800 Facebook fans, and ~150 twitter followers, and I get much more than 6x the page views/comments/etc from Facebook fans than from Twitter followers.

With Twitter, your tweets easily get lost in the sea of tweets, whereas Facebook stories persist in the fans' News Feeds for a while, and then show up even more if their friends interacted with it.

aneeshon 2010 Google Trends for python, ruby, and php

http://www.google.com/insights/search/#cat=31&q=python%2... -- In python, "hashes" are called dictionaries

aneeshon Harvard study: Computers don't save hospitals money

I can access my dental records online. But you're right, that's probably not a common scenario.

Since you have some experience in this field, could you imagine this situation changing in the next several years, so that there is a meaningful ecosystem?

aneeshon Harvard study: Computers don't save hospitals money

There are positive externalities from the use of EHRs, though. The whole health ecosystem benefits (including patients, other providers, insurers, etc), not just hospitals, so it's misleading to consider the hospital's bottom line as the overall impact of EHRs.

aneeshon Tell HN: Four (hopefully) unique and useful start-up tips

True story I heard from some Amazon engineers.

Amazon doesn't (directly) monitor whether their servers are up. They just look at the revenue graph in real-time, and if there's a noticeable dip, something's wrong.

aneeshon Morgan Stanley’s $9 Billion Check

> "The payment was supposed to be wired electronically, but because it needed to be made on an emergency basis on a holiday, Mitsubishi cut a physical check"

So, on a holiday, the electronic systems were "closed", but the paper check could be deposited normally? Irony abounds.

aneeshon At peak, Spain gets 53% of its energy from wind

This, while impressive, is not a routine occurrence. It was due to abnormally high winds. Consider the following quotes from the Guardian article:

"High winds over the weekend supplied 53% of Spain's electricity"

"Experts estimate that by the end of the year, Spain will have provided a quarter of its energy needs with renewables, with wind leading the way ..."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/nov/09/spain-nati...

aneeshon Ask HN: What do you use to monitor your websites?

http://mon.itor.us/

It sends you an email when a site goes down. The free version pings every 20 minutes or so.

aneeshon HN Meetup in Cambridge: Oct 11th @ 8pm

I'll probably attend.

aneeshon Dark Stalking on Facebook

> "I didn't expect it to share info when people had declined those events."

Just to clarify, does this mean events you replied "No" to, or events where you clicked "Remove from My Events"? If an API call surfaces the the latter, that would indeed be worrying.

aneeshon The List of N Things

While we're picking nits here, n/2 is not an equation. It's an expression. An equation has an equal sign.

aneeshon [dead]

The funniest part is that its not just 43 flights. They're visiting 43 cities, and taking 90 flights!

aneeshon Harvard, Wharton to accept GRE - is GMAT monopoly in Danger?

If you're curious how scores from the two exams compare, here's a table (released by ETS - the folks that run the GRE) that converts GRE scores to GMAT scores, and vice versa:

http://www.ets.org/gre/2008/9934/tool.html (Excel Sheet)

aneeshon Facebook Acquires FriendFeed

My understanding is that usually a significant part of the payout is in stock, which will vest over a couple years.

aneeshon Is 23,148,855,308,184,500 a magic number, or sheer chance?

Props to the guy that figured it out on StackOverflow! I still wonder about how that transaction got through without triggering a fraud alert.

aneeshon Anybots is for real: Check out Trevor's robots on the Surrogates trailer

Trevor comes on at about 1:10 in that video clip, if you want to skip forward.

aneeshon Ask YC: Recurring billing: 1. Paying resellers, 2. Switching gateway vendors

That's true for everything except credit card data. If you have to ask, storing users' credit card data is almost always a bad idea. The information is very sensitive, and any compromise is very serious. That's why if you store payment information, you generally have to implement a number of best practices to achieve "PCI compliance". This costs you time & money, as well as additional policies and regulations at your company. Unless your revenue is reasonably significant (say, over a million per year), it's probably not worth the hassle. Outsource your payment processing.

aneeshon College: An Overpriced Monopoly (by Kent Pitman)

I'm not trying to say that's the only reason you should go to college -- meeting smart people is simply one of many reasons. There are a lot of valuable payoffs that come with minimal risk, like the degree itself. And there are plenty of good colleges you can go to that don't cost 100k.

If going to college was truly not worth it, then you'd see a lot more people not doing it. The fact that going to college is a such a common course of action says that people actually find value in it (or there's a giant inefficiency in the market -- which is the argument of this article, but I think it's worth considering the alternative as well).

And I don't think the lottery analogy works. Regardless of what you (legally) do, you can't influence the chance that a single lottery ticket of yours wins. But you can improve the chance that certain low-probability events happen to you (like founding a successful startup) by your actions. And I think going to a good college can be one of those actions for many people.

aneeshon College: An Overpriced Monopoly (by Kent Pitman)

For many people, probably not. But there is a huge variance. How much more money did Steve Ballmer make in his career because he met Bill Gates at Harvard? Nobody knows, obviously, but the odds on anyone becoming a multi-billionaire (like he is) are incredibly slim. I'm not saying his story is at all typical, just that the decision can pay off in completely unexpected ways.

aneeshon RSS Subscribers or Twitter Followers: Which Are Worth More?

My anecdotal evidence definitely agrees with these conclusions. My Twitter click-through rates are pretty low. In fact, the best clickthrough rate I get is from people who subscribe to my blog via email.

aneeshon PythonTurtle - the most low-threshold way for learning/teaching Python

This reminds me of Karel, another beginner language that lets you move a robot.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karel_%28programming_language%2...

aneeshon 6000 Chess Players Take Part in a "Beauty Contest"

This is basically a Keynesian Beauty Contest: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest