Hacker News Reader

captainobviouson Try before you buy? Zuckerberg has a public Twitter account?

But how about an excellent mobile browser that actually works?

captainobviouson Try before you buy? Zuckerberg has a public Twitter account?

Reminds me of some thoughts I had on how Bill Gates is the richest man in the world, and yet you or I can use an iPhone, while he, despite his wealth, is stuck with clunky Windows Mobile.

captainobviouson Should you go to graduate school in a recession?

Weird, surely you noticed the TAs during undergrad? Did you think they were grading papers for fun? =P

captainobviouson Some Indie Facebook Developers Pulling In Over $700,000 A Month

Some burger joints do the same, but I think I'll stick to not starting my own burger joint.

captainobviouson New wing invented in Belarus. Look for the pictures.

No wing-tip vortices.

captainobviouson Imminent Death of the Net Predicted due to RCF3484

An RFC isn't an international standard, and this particular RFC was drafted by MS Research.

captainobviouson Imminent Death of the Net Predicted due to RCF3484

Also, it is important to mention that RCF3484 was drafted by MS Research.

captainobviouson WebMynd (YC W08) Makes Your Search Engine Smarter With New Browser Plugin

>We've de-emphasized the history part though have kept it in the product

I would default it to off, otherwise, pretty evil.

captainobviouson "Francisco's Money Speech" by Ayn Rand

Externalities ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality ), positive or negative, don't seem to get much consideration throughout.

captainobviouson One Thing You Don't Need To Be An Entrepreneur: A College Degree

Sorry, but sending men to the Moon to drive around in a little car is a better example of wasteful entertainment than any of the three web companies you named.

captainobviouson Have you seen the front page of Pirate Bay?

Since under his utopia those session players will be basically out of work, they would be a lot cheaper and you could still make your album.

captainobviouson Last.fm: "Techcrunch are full of shit"

Arrington hired him and could fire him.

captainobviouson How To: Hackintosh a Dell Mini 9 Into the Ultimate OS X Netbook

>People seem perfectly happy to make these compromises to install OS X, but they will whine and whine if it's Linux. What's the difference?

Lets see some evidence for this. There are many more Linux users than Hackintosh users, so (using a similarly flawed naive analysis to your own) it seems that Linux users are more willing to put up with compromises.

captainobviouson On Hacking - Richard Stallman

Is the parent post supposed to be self-referential?

captainobviouson Starbucks instant coffee reviewed, almost nauseating

If you google "coffee tea bag" the first link explains why not: "Unlike tea leaves, coffee grains release little flavor unless they come into contact with water that is not only hot but also agitated. The water may simply flow through a sock filled with ground coffee, or it may be thrust up through a percolator, but it must be moving. This limitation has traditionally made brewing coffee by the cup messy and inefficient."

captainobviouson Starbucks instant coffee reviewed, almost nauseating

If anyone wants great instant coffee try cold-brew, you can buy it in refrigerated condensed liquid form, just search Amazon for N.O. Brew, I used to swear by this stuff. It was also great for making cold coffee drinks.

captainobviouson Obama Gives Keynes His First Real-World Test

Those same racketeering statutes also do things like say prevent unions from making secondary-strikes, which is why unions in americahave been all but completely neutered for the last 100+ years.

captainobviouson I was driven mad by the Chinese education system

> I'm just wondering if they lost a few who could be Nobels along the way.

I don't think studying for an olympiad impedes this. Terrence Tao (Australian, to be clear), dominated math olympiads, went on to make fundamental contributions to math and won a Fields medal.

captainobviouson I was driven mad by the Chinese education system

>who won? China, as usual.

I'll need to hear more details than that; China is the largest country in the world.

captainobviouson A4 vs US Letter

    Can anyone explain the relationship between 4:3 and 16:9?  I know 16:9 is each number in 4:3 squared, but is there a geometric reason/interpretation for this choice?

captainobviouson Mindfuck Movies

For its time, sure, but the problem is the hype hasn't stopped. It is great if you are a film buff, but not so great if you just like films.

captainobviouson Trying to Live on 500K in New York City

The 500k limit is only on executives of banks that receive future extraordinary assistance from the government--the execs are free to find jobs elsewhere if they don't want the restrictions. The banks are free to not take the assistance if they can maintain a healthy capital level without it. With fractional-reserve banking that is the condition they implicitly agreed to in exchange for the ability to conjure money from the (almost) ether.

captainobviouson Why you shouldn't copy us or anyone else

I thought the link would point here:

http://huddlechat.appspot.com/

With the implied answer to the headline being: because we'll bust your knees if you even think about trying it.

captainobviouson Professor makes his mark, but it costs him his job

The grievances were:

* Experimenting with eliminating grades.

This was the issue at hand anyway.

* Altering a course curriculum with student input.

Every teacher does this to some extent; there aren't enough details to judge (i.e. did he make a class on physics into one on cooking?).

* Criticism of his peers for paternalistic teaching methods.

Not enough details, but it sounds like it was restricted to emails and was therefore just words..

* Held a popular course on activism that the university cancelled the next year.

Can't fully judge from this; maybe this class was popular cause it was one where he was experimenting with giving free A's. Or maybe it was popular because it was good.

* "[...] [M]ade headlines after 10-year-old twins registered for his course with their mother – and he supported the filing of a human-rights complaint claiming ageism when the university said they couldn't stay."

Supporting their filing shouldn't be grounds for dismissal; sounds like he was just going through the appropriate channels. He didn't e.g. let them come into the class in defiance of the rule, he just supported their appeal.

* Doesn't shy away from expressing his view that Isreal commits military aggression

If expressing the opposing view can't make you lose tenure, expressing this one shouldn't either. Unless they want an Orwellian culture.

captainobviouson Carly Fiorina: Government shouldn't decide executive pay

That's going to take a change to the way the whole mutual fund system works. People that buy into mutual funds (typically because it is their only choice in their work 401k's) don't vote. Fund managers do. There is a whole good 'ol boys network between fund managers and corporation managers that has perverse incentive written all over it.

captainobviouson The Great College Hoax

Shrink your browser window, or increase the font size.

captainobviouson The Great College Hoax

>A law program loses accreditation if less than 50% of its students fail the bar exam.

Guess a crummy school where more than 50% fail the bar wouldn't have any problems then.

captainobviouson I opened a charming neighborhood coffee shop. Then it destroyed my life.

I think you may have missed the point. Playing a wedding or bar mitzvah is custom work on contract with a single client who to some extent directly dictates your set list, etc. Playing a giant stadium concert is you putting out your product and thousands of individuals autonomously buying in.

captainobviouson Obama Gives Keynes His First Real-World Test

Looking back? GM made a bad bet in the 70's/80's. Many annuity companies made the same mistake. That doesn't mean that current workers are making 100K. All of these articles about paying current workers 100K are totally disingenuous.

They also all focus on how American workers at Japanese owned plants make so much less. They never mention that American-auto company executives make orders of magnitude more than their Japanese counterparts.

captainobviouson Obama Gives Keynes His First Real-World Test

The average auto worker doesn't make 100k. Including health care costs and future pension benefits, they make 42k. That 100k number was thrown about and included pensions being paid to retired workers, but distributed that cost only to current workers. It made no sense. If the company evenly pays out $100 to 10 current workers and 5 retirees, you can't say the current workers each made $10. They made $6.67.