Hacker News Reader

blaincateon IBM sues Airbnb for patent royalties

famous fat line patent !

https://www.forbes.com/asap/2002/0624/044.html

>>> The chief blue suit orchestrated the presentation of the seven patents IBM claimed were infringed, the most prominent of which was IBM's notorious "fat lines" patent: To turn a thin line on a computer screen into a broad line, you go up and down an equal distance from the ends of the thin line and then connect the four points. You probably learned this technique for turning a line into a rectangle in seventh-grade geometry, and, doubtless, you believe it was devised by Euclid or some such 3,000-year-old thinker. Not according to the examiners of the USPTO, who awarded IBM a patent on the process.

Read the whole story and you will see how IBM makes money !

blaincateon Fingerprints could be stolen from V sign selfies (2017)

Hitchhikers guide to galaxy : (I remembered something along this lines)

https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/92738/what-is-the-...

    [Ford] slowly drew out from the wallet a single and insanely exciting piece of plastic that was nestling amongst a bunch of receipts.

    It wasn’t insanely exciting to look at. It was rather dull in fact. It was smaller and a little thicker than a credit card and semi-transparent. If you held it up to the light you could see a lot of holographically encoded information and images buried pseudo-inches deep beneath its surface.

    It was an Ident-i-Eeze, and was a very naughty and silly thing for Harl to have lying around in his wallet, though it was perfectly understandable. There were so many different ways in which you were required to provide absolute proof of your identity these days that life could easily become extremely tiresome just from that factor alone, never mind the deeper existential problems of trying to function as a coherent consciousness in an epistemologically ambiguous physical universe. Just look at cash point machines, for instance. Queues of people standing around waiting to have their fingerprints read, their retinas scanned, bits of skin scraped from the nape of the neck and undergoing instant (or nearly instant - a good six or seven seconds in tedious reality) genetic analysis, then having to answer trick questions about members of their family they didn’t even remember they had, and about their recorded preferences for tablecloth colours. And that was just to get a bit of spare cash for the weekend. If you were trying to raise a loan for a jetcar, sign a missile treaty or pay an entire restaurant bill things could get really trying.

    Hence the Ident-i-Eeze. This encoded every single piece of information about you, your body and your life into one all-purpose machine-readable card that you could then carry around in your wallet, and therefore represented technology’s greatest triumph to date over both itself and plain common sense.

blaincateon I recommend against using biometric identification

Just Realized : Face recognition unlock : Biggest Security Scare

- Case 1 : Imagine crossing security check or border crossing. Guards just take your phone and point it to you : UNLOCKED . No need to resis to give passwd

- Case 2 : drug the activist and point unconscious victim ! Voila !

- Case 3 : Steal the phone, and change the cover and flash it in front of the real owner !

could go on and on ...

blaincateon iPhone X

Just Realized : Face recognition unlock : Biggest Security Scare

- Case 1 : Imagine crossing security check or border crossing. Guards just take your phone and point it to you : UNLOCKED . No need to resis to give passwd

- Case 2 : drug the activist and point unconscious victim ! Voila !

- Case 3 : Steal the phone, and change the cover and flash it in front of the real owner !

could go on and on ...

blaincateon Theranos Secretly Bought Outside Lab Gear, Ran Fake Tests: Court Filings

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

a legit company will only go to certain extent to defend. They can still survive.

An illegit company will go all / full lengths to attack and defend. illegit company life depends on this !

blaincateon Uber Freight

There is a fundamental problem with uber freight : availability of trucks. In case of the uber taxi, most of US population owns the car and drivers working for uber already had a license.

for uber frieght : trucks are owned by companies, who will not work with uber, u need a special license to drive truck: these drivers will not work with uber.

who will work for uber freight?

blaincateon New drug dispenser may turn human beings into weapons against mosquitos

In srilanka, an innovative way to fight malaria, was print newspapers with mosquito repellant mixed.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/the-newspaper-t...

worth a read!

blaincateon Rhizome Awarded $600k by the Mellon Foundation to Build Webrecorder

it is not a bug! it is a feature!

blaincateon The most disruptive technology of the last century was home appliances

I was in india till 2001 and very few people in urban areas has cellular phone. Even in US during studies, very few students had cell phones (2001-2002).

The advent of cellphone is definitely from 2000 (not before). atleast my experience.

a found a link to support my observation: http://www.cartesian.com/the-rise-of-mobile-phones-20-years-...

blaincateon A man who fought a duel in his sleep

how do you know if he was asleep!

blaincateon Ailing Whole Foods to lay off 1,500 workers

the whole other angle I see that grocery business is very low margin and whole foods enjoyed the high margin for organic.

but go to Costco or Wal Mart, the organic section is way in front.

I suspect lot of whole food customers are Coscto members, so definitely there is a pressure on Whole foods

blaincateon 142857

you forgot

14285 + 7 = 14292; 1+4+2+9+2 = 18; 1+8 = 9

blaincateon App Engine for Go Now in General Availability

- I have to search for oAUTH and use it . And having used django user authentication, something similar would be really useful.

- mail : send email on behalf of app users : not supported. Need to integrate with sendgrid or third party libray . native support would be good.

- Image : I could use the blob earlier, but now blobs are deprecated, and need to use google cloud.

I am not regular web developer, so other people may have valid points.

blaincateon App Engine for Go Now in General Availability

I have been a python appengine user for last 2-3 years. It is really useful to get a prototype out fast.

But MAJOR MAJOR MAJOR Painpoints are:

- User : only google account supported

- email : only can use <appid>@appspotmail.com

- Image upload support

otherwise very nifty to get a site out in less than a day!

blaincateon OrderAhead claiming business listings on Google

need to be raised to google

blaincateon Ask HN: I have $25,000 to invest

it is what i think I can afford to invest keeping my nest egg safe!

I was thinking of investing as partner, financially + hard work!

blaincateon Ex-Apple executive jailed and fined for selling secrets

You can assume, any internet activity you do on enterprise network is scanned.

blaincateon Microsoft Near Deal to Buy Minecraft Maker Mojang

looks like a low ballpark figure ; $2 billion .

blaincateon How We Work on Queries at GitHub

from : http://ghtorrent.org/downloads.html

atleast :

   4,151,457 repos   

   2,480,478 users

popular repos :

twbs/bootstrap 40662

jquery/jquery 34633

joyent/node 34522

mbostock/d3 30247

h5bp/html5-boilerplate 28736

popular users:

visionmedia 10712

torvalds 9984

paulirish 5885

schacon 4431

mattt 4053

pjhyett 3732

src code: https://github.com/akuchlous/githublike

blaincateon Zillow Said to Be Seeking to Buy Rival Real-Estate Site Trulia

which areas are you hunting? i wrote a aggregator for some cities at http://twikstik.com, and can add cities for you.

blaincateon Zillow Said to Be Seeking to Buy Rival Real-Estate Site Trulia

The way it works is : seller pay 5%-6% of commission to his agent. Seller agent then posts what the buyer agent will get. Buyer agent will get equal or more, as he to do more legwork.

now interesting part:

a buyer can negotiate with his agent to get some of the commission a buyer agent gets in range of 1.5%-2%. But buyer has to work with smaller agents, not affiliated with big firms : century 21. There is glut of agents, and you can get the deal. (me and some of my friends have)

needless to say : you have to do lot of legwork : finding house urself, and just the agent to do the paperwork.

Same goes with seller : he has to give 3% for buyer agent, but for his agent (seller agent) he can negotiate to 1% - 1.5% (know of that happening too)

while looking for a next house, I just made a aggregator to scrape multiple sites and let me know when new house is available in bay area. (http://www.twikstik.com/ : running on appengine)

blaincateon NYC taxi visualization

:-) i thought that was no market for it : i wrote the heat map for specifically that purpose :

Where People Are in NYC ? Look at places where taxi pick up their passengers :

Guide To Uber Drivers : Where to get passengers at given time of day

https://github.com/akuchlous/NYC_CAB_ANALYTICS

blaincateon NYC taxi visualization

it hit bloomberg news

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-07-14/let-me-out-here-one...

blaincateon NYC taxi visualization

:-) this data is equal path as measured by odometer : I was lazy and did not use longitude/latitude for distance. The data itself has miles travelled.

though a bit surprising : 45% of rides are single person rides. But then I wonder : what's surprising : is it low or is it high?

blaincateon NYC taxi visualization

looking at heat maps :

jul 2 : 2013

people are in hurry at around 8:30 AM : http://akuchlous.github.io/NYC_CAB_ANALYTICS/July/1/51.html

that at : 10:40 AM http://akuchlous.github.io/NYC_CAB_ANALYTICS/July/1/64.html

blaincateon NYC taxi visualization

https://github.com/akuchlous/NYC_CAB_ANALYTICS/blob/gh-pages...

data from chriswong : 22% rides are less 1 mile long

blaincateon NYC taxi visualization

I was making a heatmap for taxi data : published for first 5 days for july

http://akuchlous.github.io/NYC_CAB_ANALYTICS/

maybe can help Uber / Taxi drivers figure out where to get most taxifare pickups are!

hosting on github.io

pushing to github.io is awesome. make maps, save and push!

blaincateon NYC Taxi Trips Data from 2013

was playing around with google maps and data : you can see the heatmap for taxi pick up by the day for first 6 days of july. Also could be useful as where uber drivers can find passengers based on last year data

passenger pick up for 4th july : http://akuchlous.github.io/NYC_CAB_ANALYTICS/July/4/

passenger pick code : https://github.com/akuchlous/NYC_CAB_ANALYTICS

blaincateon Discover a startup every time you open a new tab

AHA! There is a big problem for my usability. I press the tab in chrome to get view my bookmarks and use them. now they are gone ! uninstall !

blaincateon Discover a startup every time you open a new tab

I get this on chrome :

Google has disabled use of the Maps API for this application. The provided key is not a valid Google API Key, or it is not authorized for the Google Maps Javascript API v3 on this site. If you are the owner of this application, you can learn about obtaining a valid key here: https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/...