Hacker News Reader

catch23on Anatomy of a cheap USB-to-Ethernet adapter

Good article. It reminds me of the stories Wozniak would tell about his chip reduction techniques back when microchips were really expensive.

catch23on New App Lets You ‘Assassinate’ People in Real Life

I guess it depends on the game. Starcraft 1 "Broodwars" is pretty cheap, but only super-serious gamers play it.

catch23on Meta unveils next version of augmented reality glasses for $3k

Wow, that's already a huge endorsement.

catch23on Controling power outlets via Bluetooth

Probably because it leverages the security built into bluetooth.

catch23on Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL

Heroku is great for clients though. When I was a freelancer, I built these apps for other companies that assumed that I would do the admin & hosting. Heroku is great way to just "tack on a fee" for doing the hosting. If they want a cheaper option, they can always do it themselves. Most clients don't care about the savings on hosting..

catch23on How PayPal is being revolutionized by Node.js and Lean UX

Paypal is ancient. It's likely they developed their web framework before any open source java web frameworks became popular. Paypal existed around 1998, Java Struts 1.0 came out in 1999. Struts 1.0 is probably one of the big reasons many people flocked to PHP.

They probably made their own web framework because nothing good existed at the time.

catch23on Surfly - Surf together on the web

This reminds me of a blog post I wrote a year ago about proxy technology:

http://www.deanmao.com/2012/08/28/modify-a-site-you-dont-own...

I did it the same way -- parse & rewrite js code, and have a server that stores the same cookies that your browser would. The browser js code also contains the same js rewriter so that it can handle stuff like eval(). It also had to do lots of header manipulation since there are lots of headers that have domain-name based security, like CORS for example. The one I wrote works great with js-heavy sites like gmail or facebook.

catch23on FlyKly Smart Wheel

The copenhagen wheel looks pretty cool. Too bad nobody can buy it. I guess those copenhagen people can put whatever they want on their press release since they will probably never turn it into an actual product.

catch23on Ruby Association: ruby-lang.org Design Contest

Seems like it's a good pre-filter. The designers who do know Jekyll are likely to be pretty good and well rounded. If they only required HTML, you might end up with a bunch of guys that think they know design because they're great in Dreamweaver.

Designers these days have to do more than picking the right font and background color. They have to consider different devices, proper i18n, and accessibility. Back in 2002, only knowing html was good enough.

catch23on Tessel: The end of web development as we know it

Right, but libraries consist of many other things, including ORM or testing suites. There aren't many great ORM libraries written in C, and you need the test suite to work in lua because you're testing lua code. In general, the world of lua is pretty small, probably smaller than languages like Clojure or OCaml.

catch23on Tessel: The end of web development as we know it

having written a fair amount of lua code, there aren't many libraries out there. Their npm equivalent is called 'luarocks'. To give you an idea of how old the libraries are: many of them mention the perl package it was translated from.

catch23on Why OpenHeatMap is banned from Github

hopefully there is a documented process so that one doesn't have to make a blog article to post on HN to get this stuff resolved.

catch23on Wine 1.6 Released With 10,000 Changes

Similar experience here as well, but it's eons better than linux on laptops. Just getting linux to support your laptop's video card for multi-monitor displays is a complicated beast already. I would rather deal with crappy package management than deal with driver level problems.

catch23on Send money with Gmail

Nice. Can you send me $1 so I can be accelerated into the beta? :-)

catch23on How to run an Arduino clone on a 9V battery for weeks or even months

If you want to extract the most out of your batteries, wouldn't you use a boosting reg so can extract every last bit? I think for most projects, the uC uses far less power than the auxiliary components around it, like a LED. If you boost the voltage you can use higher logic levels. There are many examples boosting a "dead" 0.5V AA battery to 3V at a lower current.

If you use a buck regulator, you could use starting voltages beyond the chip's max voltage limit and burn the power past a typical dead cell's voltage levels -- start with a 12V battery using 1.8V logic and burn the battery down to 2V -- probably around 98% used.

I think you'll find that most projects out there use a voltage regulator because you can use up "more" of the battery this way.

catch23on How to run an Arduino clone on a 9V battery for weeks or even months

I think the core argument of the blog post is to use a voltage regulator with a low quiescent current. It doesn't really matter what uC you're using since it's only turned on every few seconds with the watchdog timer, however if you used common voltage regulators like the 7805, lm317, or lm1117, you'll use up the battery in short order.

catch23on Bay Lights Project turns SF Bay Bridge into a ‘big-ass display’

is it a permanent install?

catch23on Why the Latest Rails Exploit Is Indicative of a Bigger Problem

weren't some of the security holes found in the json & yaml libraries? Those weren't rails specific and could have just as easily happened in a Sinatra-like framework too.

catch23on For 40 Years, This Russian Family Was Cut Off From All Human Contact

The daughters spoke a language distorted by a lifetime of isolation. "When the sisters talked to each other, it sounded like a slow, blurred cooing."

It's interesting how isolation does to a spoken language in only one generation. I'm guessing they had nobody but themselves to talk to, so any mispronunciation would be greatly exaggerated.

catch23on CircuitHub (YC W12) Aims To Be A One-Stop Shop For Electrical Parts

It looks like it's trying to be a better datasheetarchive.com, which is definitely nice to have because those sites are utter crap. However, I guess these guys will have to play catch up getting google to index all their datasheets, so when I google "lm1117t", I actually get the relevant power regulator datasheet.

At the moment, they appear to be relatively empty. I tried searching for anything beginning with "LM" or "2N" and got basically nothing. Would be nice to have a few of the basic components in there!

catch23on Aaron Swartz commits suicide

this was posted an hour ago, pg is probably in bed already.

catch23on Aaron Swartz commits suicide

did he have a history of depression? perhaps it was simply due to stress or pressure? The thought of spending the next 35 years in prison for downloading documents can be pretty painful... probably as bad as someone who was wrongfully tried for murder.

catch23on Coffee Joulies

This feels like spam, but anyway I actually have these. They don't work as advertised sadly. I put a temp sensor on the cup and the temperature curve didn't look any different than without the joulies.

catch23on Hacker Fair 3

Yeah, unlike reddit with their "catchy" titles. This place tries hard not to be another reddit. Your post titles would get edits by a moderator if it seems a little "too" catchy.

catch23on This $200 device will Rickroll anyone who comes within six feet of it

I think you can get one of those sonar sensors for $6 on amazon. They're cheap. I don't think the obvious solution is to use a general purpose computing machine...

catch23on This $200 device will Rickroll anyone who comes within six feet of it

why isn't icsp cheap? can't you just make a usbtiny with $10 in parts? my icsp consists of 1 tiny85 chip, 3 resistors, 2 diodes, and 1 usb cable.

catch23on Rant: Backbone, Angular, Meteor, Derby

Ember-Data isn't easy, and I'm sure when your frustration is running high it's easy to just say screw it and jump to backbone, but you'll be paying for it later if your frontend has more than 5 deeply connected models.

catch23on Rant: Backbone, Angular, Meteor, Derby

Ember data docs are pretty sparse, but once you get up and going, the learning curve is pretty flat. Backbone is pretty easy to get going, but the code complexity gets exponential when you have lots of collections and references that need to be updated.

It's easy to get frustrated with ember & ember-data and just jump ship to backbone, but you'll be paying for it later when your data model expands beyond 5 interconnected models.

The best advice is to tough it out with ember even if the docs are weak and tutorials are sparse.

catch23on Will Scientists Ever Move to Python 3?

So maybe the best way to encourage adoption is to convince a researcher in the field to implement their new math algorithms in python 3. Anyone who wishes to use these new algorithms would be forced to upgrade.

catch23on The ARM vs x86 Wars Have Begun: Power Analysis of Atom, Krait, and Cortex A15

I doubt a manufacturer will switch chips because it has better power consumption. There are lots of other power hungry components in a mobile phone. I'm guessing the CPU might only use up 15% of the total power consumption, so a CPU with half the power consumption would really only increase battery life by 7%.